fic: Come on, fur fag, we've got a world to save (J2 AU - PG-13) for j2_everafter
Can't say I found SPN 4.20 all that interesting. Sorry, Castiel. Sorry Show. Sorry fangirls.
Anyway. FIC!
title: Come on, fur fag, we've got a world to save
pairing/characters: J2, with added CMM, Kristen Bell, and Kripke
rating: PG-13 (for language)
word count: 8400
notes: written for j2_everafter, loosely based on Hocus Pocus. I didn't think I was going to get this done at all, so please forgive any errors you might find. Featuring furry jokes, pussy jokes, and Chad.
I'm fairly sure this is up there as the worst things I've ever written. But I guess it's funny, so who cares!
summary: Honestly, Jared’s just trying to do this one simple thing. He’s pledging a frat and his Big Brother wants him to go get some old book from some old doctor’s house up at the old TB ward off campus. Fine. No big. Jared’s down with that. Except then he meets the talking cat and things get completely out of hand.
It’s a lovely spring day, and Jared knows Kristen thinks he’s an idiot of the first water. He’s strangely okay with it.
“I hate you,” she says as they walk into Sam’s Deli. He holds the door open for her and for the first time in their long friendship, she doesn’t thank him. She gives him a dirty look and raises her chin.
“You do not,” he tells her, following her to get in line. “You think I’m fantastic. You’re grateful to the point of embarrassment that you know me. I make your life worth living.”
“You really, really don’t,” she replies, grinning. “Get away from me, frat boy. I can still smell the pervasive odor of douchebag on you. I bet it never totally washes off, too. You’re going to smell like asshole forever.”
He scratches the back of his neck. “Well-”
“Please,” she says, wincing and turning away from the menu board to frown at him, “whatever homo thing you’re about to say? Keep it in. I know you swallow.”
“You usually want to hear all about it, doll,” he says with a lazy smile. “What gives?”
She scowls and makes a big production of pulling out her iPhone and checking the time. “I have an exam in… sixteen hours,” she says. “I do not have time to be hauling ass all over wherever just because your dickface Big and his merry band of sublimated psycho popped-collar jerkoffs decided to haze you and the rest of the pledges.”
Kristen has a thing against Greek life, though he’s not completely sure why. Her life must have seriously sucked before he was in it, is all Jared can think.
“Trust me, this isn’t hazing. Hazing is what the fucktards in Phi Gam did last semester that almost wrecked my knee,” he says. “This is fun.”
“This is the scavenger hunt from Hell,” she says. She tucks her sunglasses up on top her head and smoothes her hair back. “Harry Potter had an easier time finding the Horcruxes.”
He lets out a whoop of laughter. “Aw, Kiki, I love it when you talk nerdy to me. In fact, I love you more than anything in the world. Including cake. That’s serious commitment. I love me some motherfucking cake.”
“Right,” she says. She’s about to say more, but the kid in front of them in line moves and it’s her turn to order. “Am I getting this, or do you actually have money for once?”
The girl behind the counter snorts. Jared thinks she looks familiar, probably from one of his classes. Townies wouldn’t be caught dead working in the restaurants along Front Street, associating with students. He didn’t get that, either. This Podunk little town would be nothing without the university, so why the Townies think they can treat the students like complete shit is beyond him.
“Jesus, I’m sorry I asked for your help,” he says, holding up his hands.
Kristen sighs. “I’m not mad, Jared. I’m just annoyed that you expect me to just drop everything in my life to help you and that cockrifle find some piece of apocrypha out at the old Kripke house.” She turns back to the girl at the counter and tries to smile. “Sorry about that. I’ll have a ‘Ham and Front-ina’ on sourdough, toasted, with an apple for the side. What do you want, Jared?”
“Turkey reuben, no kraut,” he says, giving counter girl a bright smile. She blushes.
“Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of getting a reuben?” Kristen says, wrinkling her nose at him. “Like, ooh, turkey on rye with some thousand island smeared on top! You rebel.”
“What the fuck ever,” he says.
“What would you like for your side?” counter girl asks, pointing at a laminated paper on the front of the cash register. “Apple, cole slaw, chips?”
“You have salt ‘n vinegar?” Counter girl nods. “Sweet. Er, sour? Salty and vinegary? Shutting up now.”
“Anything else?”
Kristen makes another face. “I do not understand how you can eat that at all,” she says. “We’ll have two medium fountain drinks, too, Gen. Thanks.”
The girl behind the counter smiles. “You ready for Kring’s test tomorrow?” she asks. That would explain why she looks familiar; she’s in the same honors English program as Kristen.
“Spent all weekend with my face in the books,” Kristen says as she hands over her debit card.
“What?” Jared perks up, straightening to his full height and frowning at her. “If you’ve already studied, why can’t you help me and Chad?”
“Because it’s Chad,” she says simply.
“Aw, now why you gotta be hating, K-Bell?” They both turn around to find Chad, Jared’s Big Brother, coming up behind them. He slings an arm around Kristen’s shoulders and punches Jared on the arm.
She gingerly grabs his wrist and disentangles herself. “Because you make the baby Jesus weep just by coming around,” she says dispassionately. “And what have I said about you touching me?”
“I have all my shots,” he says, shrugging. “I don’t know why you’re so averse.”
“Maybe because you’re a disgusting human being?” she suggests.
“Hey, we’re still the same species, baby,’ Chad replies, still unruffled. Jared wonders if it’s wrong that he finds the whole thing hilarious.
The counter girl clears her throat. “Uh… order up?” she says awkwardly.
--
Kripke House is on the grounds of the old TB sanatorium not too far from campus. It’s where the head administrator lived when the facility was still in operation, named for the family who built it. It’s been vacant for years, boarded up and chained off and patrolled by the campus police since the property belongs to the university. It’s pretty much the most broken-into building in the whole county, with hundreds of college students slipping in over the years for various pranks.
It looks like every other big old Queen Anne house in town, with the curving porch and Victorian architecture, and in fact, it doesn’t even look like your typical haunted house. Jared was disappointed the first time he saw the place in person and connected it with the ghost stories the tour guides tell prospective freshmen. It’s well-kept for an abandoned building, fresh paint every year and new landscaping.
Most of the stories involve a disembodied voice that can be heard inside the house. Apparently, the voice usually says rude things, and Jared can’t wait for it to try that shit on him.
The spring flowers are just coming up. Jared crushes a bunch of hyacinths while trying to get to the basement window Chad just disappeared through.
“This is a terrible idea,” Kristen says behind him. He can hear her pacing. “This area is way too well-lit. There is a streetlight right here, for fuck’s sake. Oh my god. We’re going to get caught, and we’re going to get arrested, and I’m going to get kicked out of the Honors College, and I’ll never get into grad school. What am I going to do with a degree in English if I don’t get into grad school, Jared? Be a prostitute?”
“You could probably drive a cab,” he says. He squats down to investigate the opening and estimate the best way to shimmy through. It’s really not a very big opening and he’s a large dude. He’s going to injure himself.
“Have you met some cab drivers?” she asks a little hysterically. “These men were doctors and stuff in their home countries. I won’t even be educated enough to drive a cab! Oh, my god. I need to sit down.”
Jared hears a rustling sound over to the left, but when he looks toward the source, all he sees is a big, light-colored cat creeping around to the other side of the house. Kristen jumps and wraps her arms around herself.
“Calm down,” he says.
“I am calm,” she growls.
Chad pokes his head through the window. “Are you two coming or what? This place is a god-damn palace.”
Jared shoves him away and slips through the window gracefully enough. Chad scrambles out of the way to avoid being crushed. Jared turns immediately and helps Kristen through, which is harder since she decided that wearing a skirt would be a good idea.
Once she’s on her feet and looking around the basement room with wide eyes, Jared dusts his hands off on his jeans and takes a gander around. The room’s about twenty feet by twenty-five, walls sheetrocked and painted beige, and packed with retired office furniture going back to the founding of the university by the look of some of it. It smells like mothballs and musty old fabric, and everything is coated in a layer of dust that shimmers a little in the light coming in through the windows.
Chad wanders over toward the door. “Come on, Padawan,” he says. “My sources tell me it’s on the second floor in an old office, from when the school was thinking about making this place into a museum.”
Kristen glares at them both and follows him. Jared takes one last look around at the collection of old furniture and then he goes, too.
The hallway outside has clearly been subject to much less care and upkeep, and it smells damp and dirty like a basement should. Most of the doorways branching off of it don’t even have doors, but there is one boasting a door that looks older and much more ornate than should belong. Jared doesn’t have the chance to go and investigate, though, because Chad and Kristen are already at the stairs at the other end of the hallway. And he has to hurry to catch up to them.
--
The basement staircase is sturdy and well-maintained, and it leads to a gutted, sad-looking kitchen. There’s an old refrigerator humming in the corner, and some more stacked old furniture, but all the cabinets and other appliances have been removed, leaving scars on the walls.
“Students,” a voice says, sounding disappointed. “Grrrreat.”
The three of them freeze. Kristen turns her head and glares at Jared like it’s his fault.
“I mean, breaking into Kripke House? How is this still a popular prank?” the voice continues quite derisively. The words are oddly pronounced, with some of the syllables swallowed and others harsh and malformed. Other than that, though, it’s a nice voice, deep and scratchy. “Your grandparents did this kind of thing for kicks. Don’t you have videogames and laptops for fun?”
“Who’s there?” Chad calls out.
There’s a pause, then, “Oh, Jesus Christ,” the voice swears. “Chad Murray, get out of here before you set something on fire. Seriously.”
Jared can’t help it. He starts to laugh. Kristen meeps and smacks him on the arm, and Chad glares. “What?” Jared wheezes. “Even ghosts think you suck.”
“I’m not a ghost,” the voice says. “But carry on.” There’s a rustle of paper. The three of them stand there for a few more minutes, but the voice doesn’t say anything else.
They tromp through the downstairs, down a long hall of old offices that still have names painted on the doors, to the grand central staircase. Kristen keeps swearing, and Chad looks pissed.
“This is the worst hazing prank ever,” Kristen says, socking Chad in the arm. He grunts and scowls at her.
“It wasn’t my idea!” he protests.
“Oh, I have no doubt about that,” Kristen snaps back. “That basement window took some planning and brains, and it’s not like either of those is a trait you’ve got in spades, so-”
Jared doesn’t really feel like listening to them fight, so he continues on ahead of them. He gets halfway up the staircase when he sees something move at the top. He walks a little faster, taking the rest of the stairs two at a time, but by the time he gets to the landing, there’s nothing there.
The second floor is a little crappier than the lower level, a little less well-kept. The hallway is choked with more stacked boxes, these ones labeled “BURSAR” in big blue letters, but the house itself hasn’t been remodeled up here. The wallpaper is peeling away from the wall up near the ceiling, and the light fixture above the landing is coming detached from the ceiling.
It smells old and closed off.
“So what are you looking for?” the voice asks, somewhere to Jared’s right. He whirls, but there’s just another stack of boxes leaning against the doorjamb. There is no door, just empty hinges and a dark room.
“Why should I tell a disembodied voice?” Jared says, turning away from the room and looking down the long hallway stretching away from it.
“Because the disembodied voice-and I do have a body, thank you very much, and why the hell am I talking in the third-person? Jesus, I hate students-because I know everything there is to know about this place,” the voice says, sounding proud and very put-upon at the same time.
Jared leans down to examine a pile of boxes on the other side of the stairwell and rolls his eyes. “That’s fabulous, but I think I’ll just have a look around for myself.”
“Are you looking for the journal?” the voice asks. It sounds closer.
“What?” Jared stands up straight and looks around again, eyes wide.
The voice sighs. “Everyone’s always looking for the journal,” it says. “God only knows why.”
“Because it’s a fascinating piece of history,” Jared says.
“Jared! Are you up there?”
Jared peers over the stairwell railing to find Kristen halfway up the steps, looking even more panicked than before. Chad’s two steps below her, eyes wide and face pale. “Yeah, just conversing with the ghost. He’s really fuckin’ helpful.”
“Oh, he wounds me with sarcasm,” the voice mutters, somewhere to the left and moving away.
“Bullshit,” Chad says, shoving past Kristen and stomping up the stairs. “This place gives me the fuckin’ creeps, but it is not haunted.”
Kristen makes an angry noise and storms up after him. “And exactly what did we hear downstairs in the-the kitchen, huh? It insulted us, like all the stories say. It’s the ghost!”
“Oh, and do the stories say whose ghost it is?” Chad asks, raising his eyebrows.
She wraps her arms around herself and squeaks angrily for a second. Her eye makeup is all smudged and her eyes are unnaturally wide, a little dilated. Jared wants to hug her.
“Come on, guys,” Jared says. “We’re on the second floor. Didn’t your… source say the journal was in one of the offices up here?”
Chad nods, looking around warily. “My source is Misha, you asshole. Does he ever go into detail about anything, or does he just stand there with that creepy head-tilt-and-smirk thing and tell you to figure it out for yourself?”
Jared thinks the hollow feeling in his chest that blooms in his chest must be his heart sinking. “Well, fuck,” he says.
Kristen makes some kind of unhappy grunting sound and flails her arms. “You know what? Let’s just look around. Faster we establish that we’ve been had, sooner we can get out of here and I can get back to studying, right?” And then she takes off down the hallway, dodging around precariously leaning stacks of old boxes.
“What in the hell?” Chad says, staring after her. He throws his hands up in the air and stomps after her, muttering about women and inconsistent characterization. Jared shakes his head and watches them go. He’s just about to follow them when he catches movement out of the corner of his eye.
It’s a cat, possibly the same one he saw outside earlier. It’s a big, rangy cat with long fur, green eyes, and ears that don’t sit quite right on its head. It’s mostly white, with big patches of caramel-color. It’s sitting there with its front feet planted politely in front of it like cats do, fluffy tail swishing back and forth across he carpet while it looks up at Jared with the most judgmental look he’s ever gotten in his life.
“What?” he says to the cat. The cat blinks, then it loses interest in staring at him and starts lazily washing its shoulder.
Jared throws his own hands in the air and glares at the cat. “Oh, no, Fluffy, you don’t get to look at me like ‘bitch, please’ and then pretend nothing happened.”
The cat looks up at him again and its eyes narrow a degree. Its tail goes still.
“Oh, my god, I’m having an argument with a cat,” Jared says, running both hands through his hair and wanting to beat himself with a stack of old financial records. He glares one last time at the cat, which has gone back to licking itself, and then heads off after his friends.
--
The second to last office on the right side of the hallway is locked. Kristen stands there glaring at everything in her vicinity, especially Chad, who doesn’t seem even a little bit bothered by the whole thing. Jared rattles the door handle again.
“So… now what?” he says to Chad.
Chad shrugs. “Bust this shit down?” he suggests.
“Awesome! Vandalism on top of breaking and entering! Just what I need on my record!” Kristen squeaks. She leans against the opposite wall and pouts some more. Jared’s about to say something useless and platitude-ish when she crouches down and starts wiggling her fingers and clicking her tongue. “Hi, kitty! What are you doing here?”
Jared and Chad turn, and sure enough, there’s the cat padding down the hallway towards them, tail bobbing in the air. The cat still isn’t the most attractive specimen Jared’s ever seen, but it looks a little better when it’s in motion. It looks less goofy and put together poorly and a little more like a cat ought to, graceful and shit. It stops about a foot from Kristen’s outstretched hand and looks up at them.
“Great. Spy cat come to spy on us,” Chad says, glaring at the cat and then turning back to the locked door.
“No, smart cat,” Kristen says. The cat comes a little closer to her and she scratches her fingers under its chin, which clearly delights and distracts the cat enough that it stops glowering distrustfully at them and arches into her hand. Then Kristen stands up and holds something out to Jared. “Key?” she says.
Jared looks down at her hand, and sure enough, there’s one of those elaborate skeleton keys you always see in movies, like, obviously, that’s the key that’s going to open the inconveniently locked door the hero has to go through in order to, like, save the world or whatever.
“Key,” he says.
Chad snorts and grabs the key. “Come on, bitch, let’s get this show on the road,” he says. He jams the business end of the key into the lock on the door and turns, the old tumblers squealing with effort. Then the lock clicks and the door eases open with a groan of hinges that haven’t even smelled oil in ages.
The three of them peer around the doorjamb into the room, which is roughly the side of Jared’s dorm room, with a big window overlooking the valley below. The room has clearly been restored to look much like it probably did a hundred years earlier, when the sanatorium was at its peak operation and Dr. Kripke lived in the house. Everything is covered in about half an inch of dust, though.
The cat weaves between their legs, brushing against Jared in particular, and trots into the room. It stops in the middle of the dusty Oriental rug and looks back at them, then it leaps up onto the desk and sits next to the lamp. That fluffy tail dangles over the edge of the desk, the very tip twitching.
“That cat is seriously freaking me out,” Chad says, taking a few steps into the room and squinting around. The only light is coming from the streetlamps outside, which makes the cat’s eyes gleam gold with reflected light. Jared ignores the cat and looks around himself. The walls are paneled with some kind of rich-looking wood, and the furniture is constructed of wood two or three shades darker in color. The bookcases along the one wall are stuffed with crumbly looking leather-bound books, and there’s a globe of a world that looks nothing like that now sitting on the sideboard in front of the window.
“Okay, puss,” he says to the cat, “want to help us out a little more?”
Kristen walks up to the desk and scratches behind the cat’s ears while she examines the things set out on the desktop. “Well, it looks like this really was Dr. Kripke’s office,” she says. “There’s an old photograph here of him with his head nurse and some other guy in a white coat, standing on the porch of this house.”
Everyone at the university knows what Dr. Kripke looked like, a slight, balding man with slightly manic-looking eyes, because one of the buildings at the medical school is named after him, and there’s a huge portrait of him on the third floor of the student union.
“Well, then the journal’s got to be here somewhere, right?” Chad says.
--
An hour and a half later, Kristen is full-on whining about her exam, Jared is tired of sneezing from all the dust, and they have found zero small books that look like they might be journals. The cat hasn’t moved from its spot on the desk, though it has turned its head to track their movements. It has also bathed itself head to the tips of its toes twice.
Chad gives up first.
“Fuck this. Why am I even here, anyway? You’re the pledge, Padalecki, not me,” he says with a groan, leaning back against a bare stretch of wall and wiping his sleeve across his forehead.
“But you’re the best Big in the whole wide world,” Jared coos, batting his eyelashes at him. There’s a snorting sound from somewhere in the room, which Jared finds rather insulting. “Dude, Kristen, shut up.”
“Excuse me?” she snaps, standing up and giving the box she’d been digging through a hearty kick. “Which one of us is here out of the goodness of her heart? Oh, that’s right. Me!”
She kicks the box one more time and stomps out into the hallway.
“I’ll handle this,” Chad says, leering at Jared, who rolls his eyes and takes another look around the room. He’s missed something, he knows he has, he just has to think for a minute.
He sits on the edge of the desk and runs his hand down the cat’s back. “What am I missing here, Fluffy?” he says.
“I would really appreciate if you would stop calling me Fluffy,” a deep, rather gravelly voice replies. It’s the same disembodied voice from earlier, except it appears to be coming from the cat.
Jared jumps to his feet and looks around. He knocks a little metal device off of the desk, and it hits the floor with a crunch. Some kind of black goo oozes out of it, quickly soaking into the carpet. “What the fuck?”
The voice sighs. “Look at the cat, Padalecki,” it says. Jared looks. The cat is giving him a deeply patronizing look. “Oh, look, a talking cat!” it says.
Jared squeaks. “I’m losing my mind,” he says. “And how do you know my name?”
The cat sighs again and laps at one of its front paws, a thoroughly bored look on its face. “One of your friends just used the name, and I am not a moron,” the cat says. “I would just like to request that you cease referring to me as Fluffy. I have a name, you know.”
“Is it Asshole? Because if you were my cat, I would totally call you Asshole,” Jared says, but he’s relaxing enough that he sits back down on the desk.
“Clever,” the cat deadpans. “Name’s Jensen, if you must refer to me,” it adds.
“What the fuck kind of name for a cat is that?” Jared wants to know.
“I’m talking,” the cat says very slowly. “I’m a talking cat and you take issue with my name? How are you in college with a big brain like that, I wonder.”
“Yeah, I’m going to keep calling you Asshole, I think,” Jared says conversationally.
“Are you… talking to the cat?” Jared looks up to find Chad and Kristen both standing in the doorway, looking at him oddly. Chad looks particularly disturbed. “No, seriously,” he continues, “the cat?”
Jared rolls his eyes. “The cat talks,” he says.
Kristen smiles sympathetically at him. “Aw, sweetie, I know you’re under a lot of stress here, with the whole pledging thing, but that’s no reason to be hallucinating that the cat is talking to you,” she says. She cross the room and puts her arms around Jared’s shoulders. “Come on, let’s just get out of here.”
“That cat talks,” Jared repeats, glaring at it. “Come on, show them.”
The cat stares up at him impassively.
“Riiiiight,” Chad says. “Yeah, I think we should probably think about going, then, before the crazy gets contagious.”
“I’m not crazy!” Jared squawks, disentangling himself from Kristen and rounding on the cat. He picks it up with his hands around its rib cage and brings it to eye level. “Come on, you bastard, show them!”
The cat hisses at him without a lot of feeling, but it doesn’t fight the hold. Its back legs just dangle rather uselessly.
“Jared, put the cat down,” Kristen says.
“No!” Jared says, shaking the cat a little for emphasis. “Come on, show them what you’ve got, Fluffy!”
“My name is not Fluffy!” the cat growls, then it blinks and realizes what it’s said. “Oh, damn.”
Jared grins triumphantly at Kristen and Chad, who are both staring agog at the cat. “Ha!”
“Wait,” Kristen says, “make it say something else.”
“I have free will, you know,” the cat says irritably, craning its head to look at her. Its ears are back against its head. “I just happen to be wearing a catsuit at the moment.”
Chad’s eyes are unnaturally wide, his mouth open in a perfect O. Kristen narrows her eyes and leans down to look the cat in the face.
“You’re the snotty ghost, aren’t you?” she says accusingly.
“Yes,” the cat says. It looks up at Jared. “Okay, seriously, you can put me down now. Your point has been made. Hooray! They don’t think you’re crazy! The cat, however, would like his dignity back if you don’t mind.”
“Oh, fine, “ Jared says, setting him back down on the desk with a thump. The cat takes a moment to shake himself and then smooth out a few patches of mussed fur with his tongue.
“Honestly,” the cat mutters, licking furiously at a spot on his right shoulder blade.
“You’re kind of prissy,” Jared observes, poking him in the side.
“Cat,” the cat says, sounding unconcerned. He shakes himself one more time and looks up at them. “Well, since I’ve blown my cover, I suppose we could discuss why exactly you’re trespassing in Kripke House in actual words.”
“We already had this conversation,” Jared says. “In the hallway earlier, before they came upstairs.” He turns to Kristen. “I was talking to the cat earlier.” She nods distractedly, still looking at the cat with something like awe on her face.
“Padalecki, everyone who breaks in here is looking for Kripke’s journal, and a lot of them have way less compelling reasons than needing it for a fraternity prank,” the cat says. “Also, remember the name. Jensen.”
“I’m Jared,” he says. “Nice to, uh, meet you.” He gives him an awkward little wave. He’s not sure if it would be considered proper to take one of his paws and shake. That doesn’t seem like a big cat action.
The cat sighs again. “You’re still going to call me Fluffy, aren’t you?”
“Damn straight,” Chad says suddenly. “So how about you show us where this journal is so we can get our of your, uh, fur?”
--
“So have you always been a cat, or are you something else?” Chad asks as they head back to the basement.
Jensen is in the lead, tail held high and bobbing with each step he takes, with Kristen at his heels. Chad is behind her, pausing every so often to admire her ass, and Jared is bringing up the rear.
“I was born human, if that’s what you’re asking,” he says shortly. “Anyway, it’s not important how I became a cat, just that I am one now.”
“Somebody’s got sand in his pussy,” Chad says. He pauses for effect, then crows, “Oh, snap!”
Jensen stops and gives him one of those infinitely patient looks. “You know, I feel like I shouldn’t have to point this out, but my presence here is more than an excuse for you to make pussy jokes.”
“No, it’s really not,” Chad says breezily. “Come on, Fluffy, keep walking.”
“I could piss on your shoes,” Jensen threatens. It’s kind of cute, actually.
“Cat piss glows under a black light,” Jared says conversationally. The whole group stops and looks back at him. “What? I’m trying to change the topic from pussy.”
They troop back down the basement stairs and Jensen beelines for the ornate door at the other end of the hallway.
“Ha! I knew that door had to be something special!” Jared says, elbowing Kristen in the side. She rolls her eyes.
“The key from Kripke’s office should open this, too, if I remember correctly,” Jensen says, standing up on his hind legs and putting his front paws on the door. He’s a big enough cat that his nose just reaches the doorknob, and he gives it s thorough sniff.
Chad holds up the key and frowns. “I still can’t believe a talking cat is helping us. I have clearly dropped way too much acid in my time here on earth.” He sounds legitimately disappointed.
“I’ve never done drugs in my life!” Kristen says, smacking him in the gut and snatching the key away. She puts it in the lock, and this one turns much more easily than the office lock.
The room beyond looks something like what Jared imagines a mad scientist’s lair might, like a dungeon full of Victorian-looking metal apparatuses and a big workbench of scrubbed, stained wood. To the side of the bench, between something that looks like a Tesla coil and a coat rack is a podium, and on the podium is a small black book.
Jensen pads into the room and hops up onto the table. “Don’t touch anything,” he warns. “Who knows what might happen. Kripke got up to some pretty… appalling things near the end.” He looks kind of sad.
Kristen picks up the little book and carefully opens it, thumbing through the delicate pages. Jared can see spidery, old-fashioned handwriting filling each page.
"Okay, so what then?" he says, turning to Chad. "We just snatch it and head out?"
Chad nods. "Yeah. You just have to show it to the exec board at Chapter tomorrow night. And I have to vouch that yes, it did come from Kripke house, and that it is indeed the doctor's journal."
"Sounds easy enough," Jared says, nodding. "Then what?"
"You bring it back," Jensen says sternly.
"Excuse me?" Jared says, giving him a horrified look.
"It belongs here, not out in the world. It's dangerous," Jensen says, darting a look at Kristen, whose face has gone a bit pale as the pages through the book.
"Guys," she says, glancing up, "some of this is kind of... disturbing."
Jensen grimaces. "That would be what I've been trying to get through to you," he says.
"I am not coming back here!" Jared says.
"Then you're not taking the journal," Jensen says simply.
"And who's going to stop me?" Jared challenges. "A cat that weighs six pounds? Come on, Fluffy, you're not so tough."
"I am one hundred and twenty-eight years old," the cat says in a low, dangerous tone. "I assure you, I am quite 'tough' when I need to be."
Jared's about to scoop him up and shake him again when there's the sound of creaking floorboards overhead. They all freeze and look up.
"What the hell is that?" Chad whispers.
Jensen's ears, which are fluffy, too, go absolutely flat against his skull and he hisses at the ceiling. "A very bad sign," he growls. He turns to Jared and adds urgently, "You knocked that ink pot off the desk, didn't you? The little pewter one with the glass pot?"
Jared nods slowly. "Maybe?"
"You idiot! We need to get out of here," Jensen says, hopping down from the table and marching to the doorway. "Faster!"
The creaking footsteps above them seem to be approaching the basement stairs, and the three humans scramble for the door and across the hall to the furniture graveyard. Jared is the last one out, and he remembers to pull the door shut behind him. Kristen thwacks him in the chest with the journal and shimmies out the window they came in through. Chad goes next, Jared giving him a bit of a boost. Jared grabs Jensen in one hand and tucks the journal into the waistband of his pants with the other, and then he's climbing up through the window himself.
He thinks he might hear someone coming down the stairs, but then he closes the window behind him and follows his friends racing across the lawn, Jensen still tucked under one arm.
--
They get back to Jared's dorm in pretty much record time. They're all panting heavily by the time they stumble into the room and lock it behind them. Kristen throws herself on Jared's futon, groaning and cursing all of them, their family pets, their ancestors, and possibly their ancestors' family pets. Chad sits on the edge of Jared's bed and holds his head in his hands. Jared sets Jensen on the desk and sits down in his chair to watch the cat immediately start grooming.
"Let's never do that again, okay?" he says.
"What the hell happened back there?" Jared asks. If he buries his fingers in the soft fur on Jensen's back and strokes, he doesn't think anyone's judging him. He's having a traumatic night, and everybody knows petting a cat has a therapeutic effect.
"Something very bad," Jensen says, arching his spine a little.
"Yeah, but what?" Chad wants to know. "I mean, it was probably just a security guard on rounds."
"Chad, the university doesn't have security patrolling main campus. Why would they patrol the old TB ward?" Kristen says, sitting up and crossing her arms over her chest.
"Then what was it?" Chad demands, rounding on the cat.
Jensen shoves back against Jared's hand, and Jared gets the feeling he would dearly love to be purring from the attention. Chad clears his throat, though, and Jensen jerks away, giving him a put-out look.
"It was Dr. Kripke, of course," Jensen says in a very sensible tone.
They sit there in silence for a few seconds, then Jared and Chad snort in unison.
"Seriously?" Chad says, at the same time Jared says, "Yeah, riiiight."
Jensen swipes his paw at Jared's hand, which was inching closer to him again, claws grazing skin just hard enough to startle him. "I'm serious," he says. "Do you know why I'm serious? Because I am a goddamn cat, if you failed to notice. I've been a cat for more than a century. Do you know why I've been a cat for that long?"
They all stare at him. "Magic?" Kristen suggests, then she makes a face when she realizes she said it out loud. Chad snorts, and she chucks a shoe at his head. He ducks, and it hits the poster of David Beckham in Armani briefs Jared has tacked to the wall over his bed.
Jared sets the journal on the desk with a thwap, just barely missing Jensen's big, fluffy tail. He idly notices that the tail is mostly caramel-colored, with a tufty white tip. It really is quite a nice tail.
Jensen glares at him, then busies himself with washing his front paws while they all sit there in anticipation.
"Dr. Kripke was something of a... mad scientist, I guess you might say," he says finally, looking for all the world much more interested in straightening his fur. His voice is remarkably clear, though, especially considering cats aren't exactly designed to make human vocal sounds.
"A mad scientist?" Chad says dubiously.
"Consumption-tuberculosis-was one of the biggest causes of death in those days," Jensen says rather sadly. He takes a second to bite a tangle out of his flank. "By the time you ended up at a sanatorium, you were just trying to stay comfortable before the inevitable. Kripke figured there wasn't any harm in running... experiments on the patients at the hospital. After all, they were going to die anyway, right?" His voice takes on a mocking tone. "Why waste the resource?"
"So what does that mean?" Jared asks, leaning foward and resting his elbows on his knees.
"He was trying to figure out eternal life," Jensen says ominously.
"By using TB patients?" Kristen asks skeptically.
"I wasn't always a cat, you know," Jensen says. He scratches under his chin with one of his hind feet. "I was a medical student at the college. And now I'm a cat, and you've smashed the ink and Kripke's back to do who knows what. It's rather a disaster, I'd say."
Kristen squeaks and wraps her arms around her knees. "I hate you," she says to Chad.
"What? How is this my fault?" he says, all affronted. "It's clearly Pada-something's klutzy ass that smashed the ink bottle. Don't yell at me!"
"It's always your fault in the end!" she snaps.
"Can we not fight about fault, please?" Jared interrupts before they can really get going. Sometimes they remind him of his parents, and if that isn't a bit of a mindfuck he doesn't know what is. Then again, there's a talking cat sitting on his desk, so maybe he previously had no idea what a mindfuck was. He thinks he has an idea now, though.
Jensen lays down and looks agitated. His left ear is twitching. There's a dust bunny caught in his whiskers, and Jared plucks it away without thinking, startling a hiss out of him.
"So what," Chad says suddenly, looking at Jensen with interest, "did you piss him off and he turned you into a cat forever and ever?"
"Pretty much," Jensen says sadly, resting his chin on his paws. One paw is white, the other brown.
"So he figured out eternal life, then?" Kristen asks, sitting up a bit straighter.
Jensen sighs, his whole little body shaking with the effort. "Near enough. I have a lot less mass as a cat, I'd imagine, so maybe the procedure was easier." He shakes his head. "It doesn't matter. This was a punishment."
Jared rests a hand on his back and squeezes his fingers over his ribcage, a comforting gesture. "What did you do?"
"Like I said, I was a medical student at the college. I was doing an apprenticeship up at the sanatorium, and I walked in on Kripke and his head nurse, Miss Gamble, doing a procedure on-- on a patient that didn't look ethical. I complained, and Miss Gamble chloroformed me." He sits up, knocking Jared's hand away, and looks around fiercely. "I woke up on that worktable in the basement of the house, being stuck with needles, then everything went fuzzy, and my skin peeled off. And then I passed out again. When I woke up, I was a cat."
"And then what?" Chad says, rapt attention and all. Jared suddenly gets how Chad manages to not only flunk out of school but actually excel as a math major, because the only other time he's ever seen Chad look so intense involves calculus. He doesn't talk about it, but Chad's actually in the math honors fraternity as well as the social one.
Jensen opens his mouth to answer, but then the fire alarm goes off, blaring its three-note caucauphony and drowning out anything Jensen might have said.
"Fuck!" Jared says. He looks consideringly at the cat, which is kind of illegal in the dorms, even if he really is a hundred-some-year-old medical student in a cat's body, and then he grabs a hoodie from the hook on the back of his closet door. "I'm sorry, this is nothing personal," he says, wrapping Jensen up in the hoodie and holding him close to his chest. Jensen doesn't put his claws out or anything, so Jared figures the outraged mewl he makes is mostly just posturing. He grabs the journal on his way out of the room.
The three of them make their way down the stairwell, joining a large crowd of sleepy-looking students, most of whom are loudly protesting the alarm. Jared's RA is wearing a bathrobe and a scowl, shouting at them to move quickly and quietly to the nearest exits.
"And don't think I didn't see the cat, Padalecki!" he calls after them, but they're already a floor and a half below so Jared can't reply. Kristen puts a hand on his back and shakes her head.
Once they get outside, they can see that there isn't any smoke billowing out of the building. Everyone fills the lawn outside, hugging themselves from the chill and grumbling. A few of the stoners from Jared's floor have brought their guitars and are already sitting in a circle in the grass and strumming "Stairway to Heaven."
"This is not a coincidence," Jensen says, voice a little muffled by the sweatshirt. "In case you were wondering."
"Yeah," Jared says. "I kind of figured that."
"Just making sure."
A fire truck pulls up and the firemen head into the building, masks and gear and all. Jared threads his way through the crowd, trying to find Kristen and Chad in the chaos, but they don’t seem to be anywhere.
“So now what?” he asks Jensen. He hunches his shoulders and tries to blend in with the crowd.
--
Ten minutes later, the fire department gives the all clear to head back into the building, but Jared doesn’t go inside immediately. He hangs back, still hugging the cat tightly, an then he notices something on the ground near the row of bushes separating the green in front of the dorm with a shady little alley that runs behind the nearby dining hall. He goes to investigate and realizes that it’s Kristen’s flip-flop.
“Bad sign?” he says to Jensen.
“Very bad sign,” the cat agrees. “Now we have to go back to Kripke House.”
--
It’s not a far walk, and Jared has very long legs. He keeps holding onto the cat, though. It’s easier, even if he thinks he must look like a crazy person carrying a bundled up hoodie in his arms.
There’s a light on in the basement when they reach the grounds of the old sanatorium, dim and coming from a room beyond the storage room where they enter. Once they slip through the window, Jared realizes it’s coming from the laboratory.
He lets Jensen leap to the floor and he shrugs the hoodie on, not relishing cobwebs or whatever brushing across his bare skin. It’s too small and stops way before his wrists, but he figures that’s a small price to pay. There’s some long golden cat hairs stuck to the front.
“Shh,” Jensen whispers, slinking ahead on silent feet and peering around the corner.
“This has been a fortuitous night indeed,” a man says, voice rather high-pitched and gleeful. “First someone breaks my inkwell, bringing me partway back, and then I find you delectable morsels to finish the conversion. I was hoping to catch that tall one, but I can’t fault you.”
“You’re insane!” Kristen says, voice wavering.
“Maybe so,” the man says, sounding untroubled, “but I believe you’re the one strapped to the table while I’m pulling the strings.”
“Can we not have the creepy evil puppetmaster metaphor?” Chad asks, sounding weary and a little woozy. “I mean, isn’t that an evil villain standard line? Is there no originality these days?”
Jared rounds the corner to find his two best friends lying side-by-side on the work bench, strapped down with brown leather belts with scary-looking metal buckles. He looks down at Jensen. “So, any ideas?”
“You have to burn the journal,” Jensen says urgently.
“What? After everything we went though to get it? Fuck that,” Jared says. Jensen gives him another patronizing look. “Oh, fine,” Jared grumbles. He fumbles around in his pants for a lighter, but comes up empty. “I don’t smoke, though.”
“Check the pocket of your jacket,” Jensen says.
Sure enough, Chad’s Zippo is in one of the pockets, gleaming in the light coming from the lab. Jared looks closer at the hoodie and realizes that it’s definitely Chad’s. It even smells like weed.
“Score!” he says.
He must have said it too loudly, because Dr. Kripke appears in the doorway to the lab, looking like Christmas has come early. “Tall one! And Jensen! What a pleasant surprise!” he says, beaming at them. He starts walking toward them. Jensen crouches low to the ground and hisses.
Jared yelps and scrambles to pull the journal out of the back of his jeans. He flicks open the lighter and holds it to the edge of the book.
“No!” Kripke shrieks, but it’s too late. The book goes up in flames. Jared has to drop it to keep from burning his fingers, but it’s done. He watches in morbid fascination as Kripke fades, then disappears with a loud crack and a, “Nooooooooo!”
He rushes into the lab to unstrap his friends.
“Are you okay?” he asks, holding Kristen’s head in both of his hands and tipping it back and forth to check for any injuries.
“Fine,” she says, sounding remarkably so. She’s staring at something over his shoulder. “Oh!”
“I’m fine too,” Chad adds irritably, hopping off the table. “Thanks for ask-”
“What?” Jared asks, turning around to see what the fuss is.
There’s a man sitting out in the corridor, leaning his back against the wall and clutching his chest like he can’t breathe. He’s wearing dark-colored pants and no shirt, and as far as Jared can tell, he’s absolutely gorgeous.
“Oh, my god,” he breathes. He lets go of Kristen and walks quickly out into the hallway and kneels before the man. “Are you-”
“I’m fine,” the man said through gritted teeth, and then he looked up and Jared felt something in his chest flop over. “Been awhile since I was this… big?”
It’s quite obviously Jensen sitting there. He still looks pretty much exactly like the cat he’d been, which it pretty weird if Jared stops to really think about it. He’s obviously a man, and a pretty fucking awesome-looking one at that, with wide green eyes, a strong jaw, and a mouth that Jared wants to taste pretty much immediately.
“How is this-how are you-” Jared says inarticulately.
Jensen grins at him, showing a flash of white teeth that are maybe just a little pointy. “Destroying the journal must have broken the-fixed me, I guess,” he says.
“You know what this means?” Chad says somewhere behind them.
“Tequila?” Kristen asks.
Jared nods vigorously “Tequila.”
--
They head back to Jared’s dorm. Jared gives Jensen the hoodie to cover up with, because it’s not like it’s normal to walk around shirtless in the middle of the night, no matter how nicely muscled your chest and back might be. Apparently all that exercise he got as a cat translated back to his human body. Jared is very appreciative, and judging by the shy looks Jensen keeps shooting him, he’s not the only one.
“I need to get laid,” Chad says conversationally. He turns and leers at Kristen, who’s sitting next to him on Jared’s futon and pouring tequila into shot glasses lined up on the milk crate passing as a coffee table.
“Every time you open your mouth, God kills a puppy,” she replies cheerfully. She passes the shots out to everyone, although Jensen looks at it like he isn’t quite sure what to do with it. “Bottoms up!” she says, and then she tosses hers back.
“She loves me,” Chad says, smiling at Jared and Jensen, who are sitting side by side on the edge of Jared’s bed, which is opposite the futon. Jared can feel Jensen warm and solid next to him.
“She really, really doesn’t,” Jared says. He catches Jensen’s eye and demonstrates how to knock back the shot. Jensen nods and concentrates, taking his drink. He sputters for a few seconds after he swallows.
“That is absolutely vile,” he says. He pauses. “I’m almost certain I will need another.”
“That can be arranged,” Kristen says, handing over the bottle.
They sit there and drink for a long time. Chad turns on the TV and sets it to ESPN to catch the end of SportsCenter. As Kristen gets drunker, she leans more heavily against Chad’s side.
“You know,” Jared says, shaking his head to try to clear away some of the alcoholic haze. He’s leaning back against the wall and Jensen is tucked against his side, head on his chest. “This is nice and all, but I kind of miss the cat.”
“That’s weird, man,” Chad says.
Jared makes a sound of protest. “Fuck you. Maybe I like the feel of soft fur on my skin! Did you think of that?”
Kristen snorts. “Um, I don’t think we can be friends anymore. Please don’t start wearing a tail in public.”
THE END.
Anyway. FIC!
title: Come on, fur fag, we've got a world to save
pairing/characters: J2, with added CMM, Kristen Bell, and Kripke
rating: PG-13 (for language)
word count: 8400
notes: written for j2_everafter, loosely based on Hocus Pocus. I didn't think I was going to get this done at all, so please forgive any errors you might find. Featuring furry jokes, pussy jokes, and Chad.
I'm fairly sure this is up there as the worst things I've ever written. But I guess it's funny, so who cares!
summary: Honestly, Jared’s just trying to do this one simple thing. He’s pledging a frat and his Big Brother wants him to go get some old book from some old doctor’s house up at the old TB ward off campus. Fine. No big. Jared’s down with that. Except then he meets the talking cat and things get completely out of hand.
It’s a lovely spring day, and Jared knows Kristen thinks he’s an idiot of the first water. He’s strangely okay with it.
“I hate you,” she says as they walk into Sam’s Deli. He holds the door open for her and for the first time in their long friendship, she doesn’t thank him. She gives him a dirty look and raises her chin.
“You do not,” he tells her, following her to get in line. “You think I’m fantastic. You’re grateful to the point of embarrassment that you know me. I make your life worth living.”
“You really, really don’t,” she replies, grinning. “Get away from me, frat boy. I can still smell the pervasive odor of douchebag on you. I bet it never totally washes off, too. You’re going to smell like asshole forever.”
He scratches the back of his neck. “Well-”
“Please,” she says, wincing and turning away from the menu board to frown at him, “whatever homo thing you’re about to say? Keep it in. I know you swallow.”
“You usually want to hear all about it, doll,” he says with a lazy smile. “What gives?”
She scowls and makes a big production of pulling out her iPhone and checking the time. “I have an exam in… sixteen hours,” she says. “I do not have time to be hauling ass all over wherever just because your dickface Big and his merry band of sublimated psycho popped-collar jerkoffs decided to haze you and the rest of the pledges.”
Kristen has a thing against Greek life, though he’s not completely sure why. Her life must have seriously sucked before he was in it, is all Jared can think.
“Trust me, this isn’t hazing. Hazing is what the fucktards in Phi Gam did last semester that almost wrecked my knee,” he says. “This is fun.”
“This is the scavenger hunt from Hell,” she says. She tucks her sunglasses up on top her head and smoothes her hair back. “Harry Potter had an easier time finding the Horcruxes.”
He lets out a whoop of laughter. “Aw, Kiki, I love it when you talk nerdy to me. In fact, I love you more than anything in the world. Including cake. That’s serious commitment. I love me some motherfucking cake.”
“Right,” she says. She’s about to say more, but the kid in front of them in line moves and it’s her turn to order. “Am I getting this, or do you actually have money for once?”
The girl behind the counter snorts. Jared thinks she looks familiar, probably from one of his classes. Townies wouldn’t be caught dead working in the restaurants along Front Street, associating with students. He didn’t get that, either. This Podunk little town would be nothing without the university, so why the Townies think they can treat the students like complete shit is beyond him.
“Jesus, I’m sorry I asked for your help,” he says, holding up his hands.
Kristen sighs. “I’m not mad, Jared. I’m just annoyed that you expect me to just drop everything in my life to help you and that cockrifle find some piece of apocrypha out at the old Kripke house.” She turns back to the girl at the counter and tries to smile. “Sorry about that. I’ll have a ‘Ham and Front-ina’ on sourdough, toasted, with an apple for the side. What do you want, Jared?”
“Turkey reuben, no kraut,” he says, giving counter girl a bright smile. She blushes.
“Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of getting a reuben?” Kristen says, wrinkling her nose at him. “Like, ooh, turkey on rye with some thousand island smeared on top! You rebel.”
“What the fuck ever,” he says.
“What would you like for your side?” counter girl asks, pointing at a laminated paper on the front of the cash register. “Apple, cole slaw, chips?”
“You have salt ‘n vinegar?” Counter girl nods. “Sweet. Er, sour? Salty and vinegary? Shutting up now.”
“Anything else?”
Kristen makes another face. “I do not understand how you can eat that at all,” she says. “We’ll have two medium fountain drinks, too, Gen. Thanks.”
The girl behind the counter smiles. “You ready for Kring’s test tomorrow?” she asks. That would explain why she looks familiar; she’s in the same honors English program as Kristen.
“Spent all weekend with my face in the books,” Kristen says as she hands over her debit card.
“What?” Jared perks up, straightening to his full height and frowning at her. “If you’ve already studied, why can’t you help me and Chad?”
“Because it’s Chad,” she says simply.
“Aw, now why you gotta be hating, K-Bell?” They both turn around to find Chad, Jared’s Big Brother, coming up behind them. He slings an arm around Kristen’s shoulders and punches Jared on the arm.
She gingerly grabs his wrist and disentangles herself. “Because you make the baby Jesus weep just by coming around,” she says dispassionately. “And what have I said about you touching me?”
“I have all my shots,” he says, shrugging. “I don’t know why you’re so averse.”
“Maybe because you’re a disgusting human being?” she suggests.
“Hey, we’re still the same species, baby,’ Chad replies, still unruffled. Jared wonders if it’s wrong that he finds the whole thing hilarious.
The counter girl clears her throat. “Uh… order up?” she says awkwardly.
--
Kripke House is on the grounds of the old TB sanatorium not too far from campus. It’s where the head administrator lived when the facility was still in operation, named for the family who built it. It’s been vacant for years, boarded up and chained off and patrolled by the campus police since the property belongs to the university. It’s pretty much the most broken-into building in the whole county, with hundreds of college students slipping in over the years for various pranks.
It looks like every other big old Queen Anne house in town, with the curving porch and Victorian architecture, and in fact, it doesn’t even look like your typical haunted house. Jared was disappointed the first time he saw the place in person and connected it with the ghost stories the tour guides tell prospective freshmen. It’s well-kept for an abandoned building, fresh paint every year and new landscaping.
Most of the stories involve a disembodied voice that can be heard inside the house. Apparently, the voice usually says rude things, and Jared can’t wait for it to try that shit on him.
The spring flowers are just coming up. Jared crushes a bunch of hyacinths while trying to get to the basement window Chad just disappeared through.
“This is a terrible idea,” Kristen says behind him. He can hear her pacing. “This area is way too well-lit. There is a streetlight right here, for fuck’s sake. Oh my god. We’re going to get caught, and we’re going to get arrested, and I’m going to get kicked out of the Honors College, and I’ll never get into grad school. What am I going to do with a degree in English if I don’t get into grad school, Jared? Be a prostitute?”
“You could probably drive a cab,” he says. He squats down to investigate the opening and estimate the best way to shimmy through. It’s really not a very big opening and he’s a large dude. He’s going to injure himself.
“Have you met some cab drivers?” she asks a little hysterically. “These men were doctors and stuff in their home countries. I won’t even be educated enough to drive a cab! Oh, my god. I need to sit down.”
Jared hears a rustling sound over to the left, but when he looks toward the source, all he sees is a big, light-colored cat creeping around to the other side of the house. Kristen jumps and wraps her arms around herself.
“Calm down,” he says.
“I am calm,” she growls.
Chad pokes his head through the window. “Are you two coming or what? This place is a god-damn palace.”
Jared shoves him away and slips through the window gracefully enough. Chad scrambles out of the way to avoid being crushed. Jared turns immediately and helps Kristen through, which is harder since she decided that wearing a skirt would be a good idea.
Once she’s on her feet and looking around the basement room with wide eyes, Jared dusts his hands off on his jeans and takes a gander around. The room’s about twenty feet by twenty-five, walls sheetrocked and painted beige, and packed with retired office furniture going back to the founding of the university by the look of some of it. It smells like mothballs and musty old fabric, and everything is coated in a layer of dust that shimmers a little in the light coming in through the windows.
Chad wanders over toward the door. “Come on, Padawan,” he says. “My sources tell me it’s on the second floor in an old office, from when the school was thinking about making this place into a museum.”
Kristen glares at them both and follows him. Jared takes one last look around at the collection of old furniture and then he goes, too.
The hallway outside has clearly been subject to much less care and upkeep, and it smells damp and dirty like a basement should. Most of the doorways branching off of it don’t even have doors, but there is one boasting a door that looks older and much more ornate than should belong. Jared doesn’t have the chance to go and investigate, though, because Chad and Kristen are already at the stairs at the other end of the hallway. And he has to hurry to catch up to them.
--
The basement staircase is sturdy and well-maintained, and it leads to a gutted, sad-looking kitchen. There’s an old refrigerator humming in the corner, and some more stacked old furniture, but all the cabinets and other appliances have been removed, leaving scars on the walls.
“Students,” a voice says, sounding disappointed. “Grrrreat.”
The three of them freeze. Kristen turns her head and glares at Jared like it’s his fault.
“I mean, breaking into Kripke House? How is this still a popular prank?” the voice continues quite derisively. The words are oddly pronounced, with some of the syllables swallowed and others harsh and malformed. Other than that, though, it’s a nice voice, deep and scratchy. “Your grandparents did this kind of thing for kicks. Don’t you have videogames and laptops for fun?”
“Who’s there?” Chad calls out.
There’s a pause, then, “Oh, Jesus Christ,” the voice swears. “Chad Murray, get out of here before you set something on fire. Seriously.”
Jared can’t help it. He starts to laugh. Kristen meeps and smacks him on the arm, and Chad glares. “What?” Jared wheezes. “Even ghosts think you suck.”
“I’m not a ghost,” the voice says. “But carry on.” There’s a rustle of paper. The three of them stand there for a few more minutes, but the voice doesn’t say anything else.
They tromp through the downstairs, down a long hall of old offices that still have names painted on the doors, to the grand central staircase. Kristen keeps swearing, and Chad looks pissed.
“This is the worst hazing prank ever,” Kristen says, socking Chad in the arm. He grunts and scowls at her.
“It wasn’t my idea!” he protests.
“Oh, I have no doubt about that,” Kristen snaps back. “That basement window took some planning and brains, and it’s not like either of those is a trait you’ve got in spades, so-”
Jared doesn’t really feel like listening to them fight, so he continues on ahead of them. He gets halfway up the staircase when he sees something move at the top. He walks a little faster, taking the rest of the stairs two at a time, but by the time he gets to the landing, there’s nothing there.
The second floor is a little crappier than the lower level, a little less well-kept. The hallway is choked with more stacked boxes, these ones labeled “BURSAR” in big blue letters, but the house itself hasn’t been remodeled up here. The wallpaper is peeling away from the wall up near the ceiling, and the light fixture above the landing is coming detached from the ceiling.
It smells old and closed off.
“So what are you looking for?” the voice asks, somewhere to Jared’s right. He whirls, but there’s just another stack of boxes leaning against the doorjamb. There is no door, just empty hinges and a dark room.
“Why should I tell a disembodied voice?” Jared says, turning away from the room and looking down the long hallway stretching away from it.
“Because the disembodied voice-and I do have a body, thank you very much, and why the hell am I talking in the third-person? Jesus, I hate students-because I know everything there is to know about this place,” the voice says, sounding proud and very put-upon at the same time.
Jared leans down to examine a pile of boxes on the other side of the stairwell and rolls his eyes. “That’s fabulous, but I think I’ll just have a look around for myself.”
“Are you looking for the journal?” the voice asks. It sounds closer.
“What?” Jared stands up straight and looks around again, eyes wide.
The voice sighs. “Everyone’s always looking for the journal,” it says. “God only knows why.”
“Because it’s a fascinating piece of history,” Jared says.
“Jared! Are you up there?”
Jared peers over the stairwell railing to find Kristen halfway up the steps, looking even more panicked than before. Chad’s two steps below her, eyes wide and face pale. “Yeah, just conversing with the ghost. He’s really fuckin’ helpful.”
“Oh, he wounds me with sarcasm,” the voice mutters, somewhere to the left and moving away.
“Bullshit,” Chad says, shoving past Kristen and stomping up the stairs. “This place gives me the fuckin’ creeps, but it is not haunted.”
Kristen makes an angry noise and storms up after him. “And exactly what did we hear downstairs in the-the kitchen, huh? It insulted us, like all the stories say. It’s the ghost!”
“Oh, and do the stories say whose ghost it is?” Chad asks, raising his eyebrows.
She wraps her arms around herself and squeaks angrily for a second. Her eye makeup is all smudged and her eyes are unnaturally wide, a little dilated. Jared wants to hug her.
“Come on, guys,” Jared says. “We’re on the second floor. Didn’t your… source say the journal was in one of the offices up here?”
Chad nods, looking around warily. “My source is Misha, you asshole. Does he ever go into detail about anything, or does he just stand there with that creepy head-tilt-and-smirk thing and tell you to figure it out for yourself?”
Jared thinks the hollow feeling in his chest that blooms in his chest must be his heart sinking. “Well, fuck,” he says.
Kristen makes some kind of unhappy grunting sound and flails her arms. “You know what? Let’s just look around. Faster we establish that we’ve been had, sooner we can get out of here and I can get back to studying, right?” And then she takes off down the hallway, dodging around precariously leaning stacks of old boxes.
“What in the hell?” Chad says, staring after her. He throws his hands up in the air and stomps after her, muttering about women and inconsistent characterization. Jared shakes his head and watches them go. He’s just about to follow them when he catches movement out of the corner of his eye.
It’s a cat, possibly the same one he saw outside earlier. It’s a big, rangy cat with long fur, green eyes, and ears that don’t sit quite right on its head. It’s mostly white, with big patches of caramel-color. It’s sitting there with its front feet planted politely in front of it like cats do, fluffy tail swishing back and forth across he carpet while it looks up at Jared with the most judgmental look he’s ever gotten in his life.
“What?” he says to the cat. The cat blinks, then it loses interest in staring at him and starts lazily washing its shoulder.
Jared throws his own hands in the air and glares at the cat. “Oh, no, Fluffy, you don’t get to look at me like ‘bitch, please’ and then pretend nothing happened.”
The cat looks up at him again and its eyes narrow a degree. Its tail goes still.
“Oh, my god, I’m having an argument with a cat,” Jared says, running both hands through his hair and wanting to beat himself with a stack of old financial records. He glares one last time at the cat, which has gone back to licking itself, and then heads off after his friends.
--
The second to last office on the right side of the hallway is locked. Kristen stands there glaring at everything in her vicinity, especially Chad, who doesn’t seem even a little bit bothered by the whole thing. Jared rattles the door handle again.
“So… now what?” he says to Chad.
Chad shrugs. “Bust this shit down?” he suggests.
“Awesome! Vandalism on top of breaking and entering! Just what I need on my record!” Kristen squeaks. She leans against the opposite wall and pouts some more. Jared’s about to say something useless and platitude-ish when she crouches down and starts wiggling her fingers and clicking her tongue. “Hi, kitty! What are you doing here?”
Jared and Chad turn, and sure enough, there’s the cat padding down the hallway towards them, tail bobbing in the air. The cat still isn’t the most attractive specimen Jared’s ever seen, but it looks a little better when it’s in motion. It looks less goofy and put together poorly and a little more like a cat ought to, graceful and shit. It stops about a foot from Kristen’s outstretched hand and looks up at them.
“Great. Spy cat come to spy on us,” Chad says, glaring at the cat and then turning back to the locked door.
“No, smart cat,” Kristen says. The cat comes a little closer to her and she scratches her fingers under its chin, which clearly delights and distracts the cat enough that it stops glowering distrustfully at them and arches into her hand. Then Kristen stands up and holds something out to Jared. “Key?” she says.
Jared looks down at her hand, and sure enough, there’s one of those elaborate skeleton keys you always see in movies, like, obviously, that’s the key that’s going to open the inconveniently locked door the hero has to go through in order to, like, save the world or whatever.
“Key,” he says.
Chad snorts and grabs the key. “Come on, bitch, let’s get this show on the road,” he says. He jams the business end of the key into the lock on the door and turns, the old tumblers squealing with effort. Then the lock clicks and the door eases open with a groan of hinges that haven’t even smelled oil in ages.
The three of them peer around the doorjamb into the room, which is roughly the side of Jared’s dorm room, with a big window overlooking the valley below. The room has clearly been restored to look much like it probably did a hundred years earlier, when the sanatorium was at its peak operation and Dr. Kripke lived in the house. Everything is covered in about half an inch of dust, though.
The cat weaves between their legs, brushing against Jared in particular, and trots into the room. It stops in the middle of the dusty Oriental rug and looks back at them, then it leaps up onto the desk and sits next to the lamp. That fluffy tail dangles over the edge of the desk, the very tip twitching.
“That cat is seriously freaking me out,” Chad says, taking a few steps into the room and squinting around. The only light is coming from the streetlamps outside, which makes the cat’s eyes gleam gold with reflected light. Jared ignores the cat and looks around himself. The walls are paneled with some kind of rich-looking wood, and the furniture is constructed of wood two or three shades darker in color. The bookcases along the one wall are stuffed with crumbly looking leather-bound books, and there’s a globe of a world that looks nothing like that now sitting on the sideboard in front of the window.
“Okay, puss,” he says to the cat, “want to help us out a little more?”
Kristen walks up to the desk and scratches behind the cat’s ears while she examines the things set out on the desktop. “Well, it looks like this really was Dr. Kripke’s office,” she says. “There’s an old photograph here of him with his head nurse and some other guy in a white coat, standing on the porch of this house.”
Everyone at the university knows what Dr. Kripke looked like, a slight, balding man with slightly manic-looking eyes, because one of the buildings at the medical school is named after him, and there’s a huge portrait of him on the third floor of the student union.
“Well, then the journal’s got to be here somewhere, right?” Chad says.
--
An hour and a half later, Kristen is full-on whining about her exam, Jared is tired of sneezing from all the dust, and they have found zero small books that look like they might be journals. The cat hasn’t moved from its spot on the desk, though it has turned its head to track their movements. It has also bathed itself head to the tips of its toes twice.
Chad gives up first.
“Fuck this. Why am I even here, anyway? You’re the pledge, Padalecki, not me,” he says with a groan, leaning back against a bare stretch of wall and wiping his sleeve across his forehead.
“But you’re the best Big in the whole wide world,” Jared coos, batting his eyelashes at him. There’s a snorting sound from somewhere in the room, which Jared finds rather insulting. “Dude, Kristen, shut up.”
“Excuse me?” she snaps, standing up and giving the box she’d been digging through a hearty kick. “Which one of us is here out of the goodness of her heart? Oh, that’s right. Me!”
She kicks the box one more time and stomps out into the hallway.
“I’ll handle this,” Chad says, leering at Jared, who rolls his eyes and takes another look around the room. He’s missed something, he knows he has, he just has to think for a minute.
He sits on the edge of the desk and runs his hand down the cat’s back. “What am I missing here, Fluffy?” he says.
“I would really appreciate if you would stop calling me Fluffy,” a deep, rather gravelly voice replies. It’s the same disembodied voice from earlier, except it appears to be coming from the cat.
Jared jumps to his feet and looks around. He knocks a little metal device off of the desk, and it hits the floor with a crunch. Some kind of black goo oozes out of it, quickly soaking into the carpet. “What the fuck?”
The voice sighs. “Look at the cat, Padalecki,” it says. Jared looks. The cat is giving him a deeply patronizing look. “Oh, look, a talking cat!” it says.
Jared squeaks. “I’m losing my mind,” he says. “And how do you know my name?”
The cat sighs again and laps at one of its front paws, a thoroughly bored look on its face. “One of your friends just used the name, and I am not a moron,” the cat says. “I would just like to request that you cease referring to me as Fluffy. I have a name, you know.”
“Is it Asshole? Because if you were my cat, I would totally call you Asshole,” Jared says, but he’s relaxing enough that he sits back down on the desk.
“Clever,” the cat deadpans. “Name’s Jensen, if you must refer to me,” it adds.
“What the fuck kind of name for a cat is that?” Jared wants to know.
“I’m talking,” the cat says very slowly. “I’m a talking cat and you take issue with my name? How are you in college with a big brain like that, I wonder.”
“Yeah, I’m going to keep calling you Asshole, I think,” Jared says conversationally.
“Are you… talking to the cat?” Jared looks up to find Chad and Kristen both standing in the doorway, looking at him oddly. Chad looks particularly disturbed. “No, seriously,” he continues, “the cat?”
Jared rolls his eyes. “The cat talks,” he says.
Kristen smiles sympathetically at him. “Aw, sweetie, I know you’re under a lot of stress here, with the whole pledging thing, but that’s no reason to be hallucinating that the cat is talking to you,” she says. She cross the room and puts her arms around Jared’s shoulders. “Come on, let’s just get out of here.”
“That cat talks,” Jared repeats, glaring at it. “Come on, show them.”
The cat stares up at him impassively.
“Riiiiight,” Chad says. “Yeah, I think we should probably think about going, then, before the crazy gets contagious.”
“I’m not crazy!” Jared squawks, disentangling himself from Kristen and rounding on the cat. He picks it up with his hands around its rib cage and brings it to eye level. “Come on, you bastard, show them!”
The cat hisses at him without a lot of feeling, but it doesn’t fight the hold. Its back legs just dangle rather uselessly.
“Jared, put the cat down,” Kristen says.
“No!” Jared says, shaking the cat a little for emphasis. “Come on, show them what you’ve got, Fluffy!”
“My name is not Fluffy!” the cat growls, then it blinks and realizes what it’s said. “Oh, damn.”
Jared grins triumphantly at Kristen and Chad, who are both staring agog at the cat. “Ha!”
“Wait,” Kristen says, “make it say something else.”
“I have free will, you know,” the cat says irritably, craning its head to look at her. Its ears are back against its head. “I just happen to be wearing a catsuit at the moment.”
Chad’s eyes are unnaturally wide, his mouth open in a perfect O. Kristen narrows her eyes and leans down to look the cat in the face.
“You’re the snotty ghost, aren’t you?” she says accusingly.
“Yes,” the cat says. It looks up at Jared. “Okay, seriously, you can put me down now. Your point has been made. Hooray! They don’t think you’re crazy! The cat, however, would like his dignity back if you don’t mind.”
“Oh, fine, “ Jared says, setting him back down on the desk with a thump. The cat takes a moment to shake himself and then smooth out a few patches of mussed fur with his tongue.
“Honestly,” the cat mutters, licking furiously at a spot on his right shoulder blade.
“You’re kind of prissy,” Jared observes, poking him in the side.
“Cat,” the cat says, sounding unconcerned. He shakes himself one more time and looks up at them. “Well, since I’ve blown my cover, I suppose we could discuss why exactly you’re trespassing in Kripke House in actual words.”
“We already had this conversation,” Jared says. “In the hallway earlier, before they came upstairs.” He turns to Kristen. “I was talking to the cat earlier.” She nods distractedly, still looking at the cat with something like awe on her face.
“Padalecki, everyone who breaks in here is looking for Kripke’s journal, and a lot of them have way less compelling reasons than needing it for a fraternity prank,” the cat says. “Also, remember the name. Jensen.”
“I’m Jared,” he says. “Nice to, uh, meet you.” He gives him an awkward little wave. He’s not sure if it would be considered proper to take one of his paws and shake. That doesn’t seem like a big cat action.
The cat sighs again. “You’re still going to call me Fluffy, aren’t you?”
“Damn straight,” Chad says suddenly. “So how about you show us where this journal is so we can get our of your, uh, fur?”
--
“So have you always been a cat, or are you something else?” Chad asks as they head back to the basement.
Jensen is in the lead, tail held high and bobbing with each step he takes, with Kristen at his heels. Chad is behind her, pausing every so often to admire her ass, and Jared is bringing up the rear.
“I was born human, if that’s what you’re asking,” he says shortly. “Anyway, it’s not important how I became a cat, just that I am one now.”
“Somebody’s got sand in his pussy,” Chad says. He pauses for effect, then crows, “Oh, snap!”
Jensen stops and gives him one of those infinitely patient looks. “You know, I feel like I shouldn’t have to point this out, but my presence here is more than an excuse for you to make pussy jokes.”
“No, it’s really not,” Chad says breezily. “Come on, Fluffy, keep walking.”
“I could piss on your shoes,” Jensen threatens. It’s kind of cute, actually.
“Cat piss glows under a black light,” Jared says conversationally. The whole group stops and looks back at him. “What? I’m trying to change the topic from pussy.”
They troop back down the basement stairs and Jensen beelines for the ornate door at the other end of the hallway.
“Ha! I knew that door had to be something special!” Jared says, elbowing Kristen in the side. She rolls her eyes.
“The key from Kripke’s office should open this, too, if I remember correctly,” Jensen says, standing up on his hind legs and putting his front paws on the door. He’s a big enough cat that his nose just reaches the doorknob, and he gives it s thorough sniff.
Chad holds up the key and frowns. “I still can’t believe a talking cat is helping us. I have clearly dropped way too much acid in my time here on earth.” He sounds legitimately disappointed.
“I’ve never done drugs in my life!” Kristen says, smacking him in the gut and snatching the key away. She puts it in the lock, and this one turns much more easily than the office lock.
The room beyond looks something like what Jared imagines a mad scientist’s lair might, like a dungeon full of Victorian-looking metal apparatuses and a big workbench of scrubbed, stained wood. To the side of the bench, between something that looks like a Tesla coil and a coat rack is a podium, and on the podium is a small black book.
Jensen pads into the room and hops up onto the table. “Don’t touch anything,” he warns. “Who knows what might happen. Kripke got up to some pretty… appalling things near the end.” He looks kind of sad.
Kristen picks up the little book and carefully opens it, thumbing through the delicate pages. Jared can see spidery, old-fashioned handwriting filling each page.
"Okay, so what then?" he says, turning to Chad. "We just snatch it and head out?"
Chad nods. "Yeah. You just have to show it to the exec board at Chapter tomorrow night. And I have to vouch that yes, it did come from Kripke house, and that it is indeed the doctor's journal."
"Sounds easy enough," Jared says, nodding. "Then what?"
"You bring it back," Jensen says sternly.
"Excuse me?" Jared says, giving him a horrified look.
"It belongs here, not out in the world. It's dangerous," Jensen says, darting a look at Kristen, whose face has gone a bit pale as the pages through the book.
"Guys," she says, glancing up, "some of this is kind of... disturbing."
Jensen grimaces. "That would be what I've been trying to get through to you," he says.
"I am not coming back here!" Jared says.
"Then you're not taking the journal," Jensen says simply.
"And who's going to stop me?" Jared challenges. "A cat that weighs six pounds? Come on, Fluffy, you're not so tough."
"I am one hundred and twenty-eight years old," the cat says in a low, dangerous tone. "I assure you, I am quite 'tough' when I need to be."
Jared's about to scoop him up and shake him again when there's the sound of creaking floorboards overhead. They all freeze and look up.
"What the hell is that?" Chad whispers.
Jensen's ears, which are fluffy, too, go absolutely flat against his skull and he hisses at the ceiling. "A very bad sign," he growls. He turns to Jared and adds urgently, "You knocked that ink pot off the desk, didn't you? The little pewter one with the glass pot?"
Jared nods slowly. "Maybe?"
"You idiot! We need to get out of here," Jensen says, hopping down from the table and marching to the doorway. "Faster!"
The creaking footsteps above them seem to be approaching the basement stairs, and the three humans scramble for the door and across the hall to the furniture graveyard. Jared is the last one out, and he remembers to pull the door shut behind him. Kristen thwacks him in the chest with the journal and shimmies out the window they came in through. Chad goes next, Jared giving him a bit of a boost. Jared grabs Jensen in one hand and tucks the journal into the waistband of his pants with the other, and then he's climbing up through the window himself.
He thinks he might hear someone coming down the stairs, but then he closes the window behind him and follows his friends racing across the lawn, Jensen still tucked under one arm.
--
They get back to Jared's dorm in pretty much record time. They're all panting heavily by the time they stumble into the room and lock it behind them. Kristen throws herself on Jared's futon, groaning and cursing all of them, their family pets, their ancestors, and possibly their ancestors' family pets. Chad sits on the edge of Jared's bed and holds his head in his hands. Jared sets Jensen on the desk and sits down in his chair to watch the cat immediately start grooming.
"Let's never do that again, okay?" he says.
"What the hell happened back there?" Jared asks. If he buries his fingers in the soft fur on Jensen's back and strokes, he doesn't think anyone's judging him. He's having a traumatic night, and everybody knows petting a cat has a therapeutic effect.
"Something very bad," Jensen says, arching his spine a little.
"Yeah, but what?" Chad wants to know. "I mean, it was probably just a security guard on rounds."
"Chad, the university doesn't have security patrolling main campus. Why would they patrol the old TB ward?" Kristen says, sitting up and crossing her arms over her chest.
"Then what was it?" Chad demands, rounding on the cat.
Jensen shoves back against Jared's hand, and Jared gets the feeling he would dearly love to be purring from the attention. Chad clears his throat, though, and Jensen jerks away, giving him a put-out look.
"It was Dr. Kripke, of course," Jensen says in a very sensible tone.
They sit there in silence for a few seconds, then Jared and Chad snort in unison.
"Seriously?" Chad says, at the same time Jared says, "Yeah, riiiight."
Jensen swipes his paw at Jared's hand, which was inching closer to him again, claws grazing skin just hard enough to startle him. "I'm serious," he says. "Do you know why I'm serious? Because I am a goddamn cat, if you failed to notice. I've been a cat for more than a century. Do you know why I've been a cat for that long?"
They all stare at him. "Magic?" Kristen suggests, then she makes a face when she realizes she said it out loud. Chad snorts, and she chucks a shoe at his head. He ducks, and it hits the poster of David Beckham in Armani briefs Jared has tacked to the wall over his bed.
Jared sets the journal on the desk with a thwap, just barely missing Jensen's big, fluffy tail. He idly notices that the tail is mostly caramel-colored, with a tufty white tip. It really is quite a nice tail.
Jensen glares at him, then busies himself with washing his front paws while they all sit there in anticipation.
"Dr. Kripke was something of a... mad scientist, I guess you might say," he says finally, looking for all the world much more interested in straightening his fur. His voice is remarkably clear, though, especially considering cats aren't exactly designed to make human vocal sounds.
"A mad scientist?" Chad says dubiously.
"Consumption-tuberculosis-was one of the biggest causes of death in those days," Jensen says rather sadly. He takes a second to bite a tangle out of his flank. "By the time you ended up at a sanatorium, you were just trying to stay comfortable before the inevitable. Kripke figured there wasn't any harm in running... experiments on the patients at the hospital. After all, they were going to die anyway, right?" His voice takes on a mocking tone. "Why waste the resource?"
"So what does that mean?" Jared asks, leaning foward and resting his elbows on his knees.
"He was trying to figure out eternal life," Jensen says ominously.
"By using TB patients?" Kristen asks skeptically.
"I wasn't always a cat, you know," Jensen says. He scratches under his chin with one of his hind feet. "I was a medical student at the college. And now I'm a cat, and you've smashed the ink and Kripke's back to do who knows what. It's rather a disaster, I'd say."
Kristen squeaks and wraps her arms around her knees. "I hate you," she says to Chad.
"What? How is this my fault?" he says, all affronted. "It's clearly Pada-something's klutzy ass that smashed the ink bottle. Don't yell at me!"
"It's always your fault in the end!" she snaps.
"Can we not fight about fault, please?" Jared interrupts before they can really get going. Sometimes they remind him of his parents, and if that isn't a bit of a mindfuck he doesn't know what is. Then again, there's a talking cat sitting on his desk, so maybe he previously had no idea what a mindfuck was. He thinks he has an idea now, though.
Jensen lays down and looks agitated. His left ear is twitching. There's a dust bunny caught in his whiskers, and Jared plucks it away without thinking, startling a hiss out of him.
"So what," Chad says suddenly, looking at Jensen with interest, "did you piss him off and he turned you into a cat forever and ever?"
"Pretty much," Jensen says sadly, resting his chin on his paws. One paw is white, the other brown.
"So he figured out eternal life, then?" Kristen asks, sitting up a bit straighter.
Jensen sighs, his whole little body shaking with the effort. "Near enough. I have a lot less mass as a cat, I'd imagine, so maybe the procedure was easier." He shakes his head. "It doesn't matter. This was a punishment."
Jared rests a hand on his back and squeezes his fingers over his ribcage, a comforting gesture. "What did you do?"
"Like I said, I was a medical student at the college. I was doing an apprenticeship up at the sanatorium, and I walked in on Kripke and his head nurse, Miss Gamble, doing a procedure on-- on a patient that didn't look ethical. I complained, and Miss Gamble chloroformed me." He sits up, knocking Jared's hand away, and looks around fiercely. "I woke up on that worktable in the basement of the house, being stuck with needles, then everything went fuzzy, and my skin peeled off. And then I passed out again. When I woke up, I was a cat."
"And then what?" Chad says, rapt attention and all. Jared suddenly gets how Chad manages to not only flunk out of school but actually excel as a math major, because the only other time he's ever seen Chad look so intense involves calculus. He doesn't talk about it, but Chad's actually in the math honors fraternity as well as the social one.
Jensen opens his mouth to answer, but then the fire alarm goes off, blaring its three-note caucauphony and drowning out anything Jensen might have said.
"Fuck!" Jared says. He looks consideringly at the cat, which is kind of illegal in the dorms, even if he really is a hundred-some-year-old medical student in a cat's body, and then he grabs a hoodie from the hook on the back of his closet door. "I'm sorry, this is nothing personal," he says, wrapping Jensen up in the hoodie and holding him close to his chest. Jensen doesn't put his claws out or anything, so Jared figures the outraged mewl he makes is mostly just posturing. He grabs the journal on his way out of the room.
The three of them make their way down the stairwell, joining a large crowd of sleepy-looking students, most of whom are loudly protesting the alarm. Jared's RA is wearing a bathrobe and a scowl, shouting at them to move quickly and quietly to the nearest exits.
"And don't think I didn't see the cat, Padalecki!" he calls after them, but they're already a floor and a half below so Jared can't reply. Kristen puts a hand on his back and shakes her head.
Once they get outside, they can see that there isn't any smoke billowing out of the building. Everyone fills the lawn outside, hugging themselves from the chill and grumbling. A few of the stoners from Jared's floor have brought their guitars and are already sitting in a circle in the grass and strumming "Stairway to Heaven."
"This is not a coincidence," Jensen says, voice a little muffled by the sweatshirt. "In case you were wondering."
"Yeah," Jared says. "I kind of figured that."
"Just making sure."
A fire truck pulls up and the firemen head into the building, masks and gear and all. Jared threads his way through the crowd, trying to find Kristen and Chad in the chaos, but they don’t seem to be anywhere.
“So now what?” he asks Jensen. He hunches his shoulders and tries to blend in with the crowd.
--
Ten minutes later, the fire department gives the all clear to head back into the building, but Jared doesn’t go inside immediately. He hangs back, still hugging the cat tightly, an then he notices something on the ground near the row of bushes separating the green in front of the dorm with a shady little alley that runs behind the nearby dining hall. He goes to investigate and realizes that it’s Kristen’s flip-flop.
“Bad sign?” he says to Jensen.
“Very bad sign,” the cat agrees. “Now we have to go back to Kripke House.”
--
It’s not a far walk, and Jared has very long legs. He keeps holding onto the cat, though. It’s easier, even if he thinks he must look like a crazy person carrying a bundled up hoodie in his arms.
There’s a light on in the basement when they reach the grounds of the old sanatorium, dim and coming from a room beyond the storage room where they enter. Once they slip through the window, Jared realizes it’s coming from the laboratory.
He lets Jensen leap to the floor and he shrugs the hoodie on, not relishing cobwebs or whatever brushing across his bare skin. It’s too small and stops way before his wrists, but he figures that’s a small price to pay. There’s some long golden cat hairs stuck to the front.
“Shh,” Jensen whispers, slinking ahead on silent feet and peering around the corner.
“This has been a fortuitous night indeed,” a man says, voice rather high-pitched and gleeful. “First someone breaks my inkwell, bringing me partway back, and then I find you delectable morsels to finish the conversion. I was hoping to catch that tall one, but I can’t fault you.”
“You’re insane!” Kristen says, voice wavering.
“Maybe so,” the man says, sounding untroubled, “but I believe you’re the one strapped to the table while I’m pulling the strings.”
“Can we not have the creepy evil puppetmaster metaphor?” Chad asks, sounding weary and a little woozy. “I mean, isn’t that an evil villain standard line? Is there no originality these days?”
Jared rounds the corner to find his two best friends lying side-by-side on the work bench, strapped down with brown leather belts with scary-looking metal buckles. He looks down at Jensen. “So, any ideas?”
“You have to burn the journal,” Jensen says urgently.
“What? After everything we went though to get it? Fuck that,” Jared says. Jensen gives him another patronizing look. “Oh, fine,” Jared grumbles. He fumbles around in his pants for a lighter, but comes up empty. “I don’t smoke, though.”
“Check the pocket of your jacket,” Jensen says.
Sure enough, Chad’s Zippo is in one of the pockets, gleaming in the light coming from the lab. Jared looks closer at the hoodie and realizes that it’s definitely Chad’s. It even smells like weed.
“Score!” he says.
He must have said it too loudly, because Dr. Kripke appears in the doorway to the lab, looking like Christmas has come early. “Tall one! And Jensen! What a pleasant surprise!” he says, beaming at them. He starts walking toward them. Jensen crouches low to the ground and hisses.
Jared yelps and scrambles to pull the journal out of the back of his jeans. He flicks open the lighter and holds it to the edge of the book.
“No!” Kripke shrieks, but it’s too late. The book goes up in flames. Jared has to drop it to keep from burning his fingers, but it’s done. He watches in morbid fascination as Kripke fades, then disappears with a loud crack and a, “Nooooooooo!”
He rushes into the lab to unstrap his friends.
“Are you okay?” he asks, holding Kristen’s head in both of his hands and tipping it back and forth to check for any injuries.
“Fine,” she says, sounding remarkably so. She’s staring at something over his shoulder. “Oh!”
“I’m fine too,” Chad adds irritably, hopping off the table. “Thanks for ask-”
“What?” Jared asks, turning around to see what the fuss is.
There’s a man sitting out in the corridor, leaning his back against the wall and clutching his chest like he can’t breathe. He’s wearing dark-colored pants and no shirt, and as far as Jared can tell, he’s absolutely gorgeous.
“Oh, my god,” he breathes. He lets go of Kristen and walks quickly out into the hallway and kneels before the man. “Are you-”
“I’m fine,” the man said through gritted teeth, and then he looked up and Jared felt something in his chest flop over. “Been awhile since I was this… big?”
It’s quite obviously Jensen sitting there. He still looks pretty much exactly like the cat he’d been, which it pretty weird if Jared stops to really think about it. He’s obviously a man, and a pretty fucking awesome-looking one at that, with wide green eyes, a strong jaw, and a mouth that Jared wants to taste pretty much immediately.
“How is this-how are you-” Jared says inarticulately.
Jensen grins at him, showing a flash of white teeth that are maybe just a little pointy. “Destroying the journal must have broken the-fixed me, I guess,” he says.
“You know what this means?” Chad says somewhere behind them.
“Tequila?” Kristen asks.
Jared nods vigorously “Tequila.”
--
They head back to Jared’s dorm. Jared gives Jensen the hoodie to cover up with, because it’s not like it’s normal to walk around shirtless in the middle of the night, no matter how nicely muscled your chest and back might be. Apparently all that exercise he got as a cat translated back to his human body. Jared is very appreciative, and judging by the shy looks Jensen keeps shooting him, he’s not the only one.
“I need to get laid,” Chad says conversationally. He turns and leers at Kristen, who’s sitting next to him on Jared’s futon and pouring tequila into shot glasses lined up on the milk crate passing as a coffee table.
“Every time you open your mouth, God kills a puppy,” she replies cheerfully. She passes the shots out to everyone, although Jensen looks at it like he isn’t quite sure what to do with it. “Bottoms up!” she says, and then she tosses hers back.
“She loves me,” Chad says, smiling at Jared and Jensen, who are sitting side by side on the edge of Jared’s bed, which is opposite the futon. Jared can feel Jensen warm and solid next to him.
“She really, really doesn’t,” Jared says. He catches Jensen’s eye and demonstrates how to knock back the shot. Jensen nods and concentrates, taking his drink. He sputters for a few seconds after he swallows.
“That is absolutely vile,” he says. He pauses. “I’m almost certain I will need another.”
“That can be arranged,” Kristen says, handing over the bottle.
They sit there and drink for a long time. Chad turns on the TV and sets it to ESPN to catch the end of SportsCenter. As Kristen gets drunker, she leans more heavily against Chad’s side.
“You know,” Jared says, shaking his head to try to clear away some of the alcoholic haze. He’s leaning back against the wall and Jensen is tucked against his side, head on his chest. “This is nice and all, but I kind of miss the cat.”
“That’s weird, man,” Chad says.
Jared makes a sound of protest. “Fuck you. Maybe I like the feel of soft fur on my skin! Did you think of that?”
Kristen snorts. “Um, I don’t think we can be friends anymore. Please don’t start wearing a tail in public.”
THE END.