rps advent fic!
Coming in WELL AHEAD of the wire, with massive thanks to buffyx for last minute "I promise this isn't retarded" beta, crimsonclad and helpwess for constant cheerleading and continued support, and jascott, because we would not be a cabal without her.
For the rps_advent prompt "Turning into a Mythical Beast" for crackfic week.
Crack!fic, obviously.
Jared Padalecki and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Hair Day
Although the day was the furthest thing from bright, Jared had arrived to their first morning back on set wearing mirrored sunglasses.
"Suave," Jensen cackles, flicking the bill of Jared's baseball cap, "I hope you haven't been picking up bad habits from Chad over the hiatus," and then reminds Jared that Vancouver isn't exactly known for its cutthroat paparazzi. This earns Jensen what would be a petrifying glare, except for the fact that the sunglasses ruin the effect entirely.
Which, actually, is kind of the point.
**
Taking off the cap and glasses causes him further trouble. He lies and tells Amy that he's developed a condition that makes him sensitive to light, and she coos as she sponges the orangey makeup across his t-zone.
"Poor baby," she says, then she turns around to sort through her concealers. "Just keep your eyes shut, then, while I find something that will cover that zit."
"Happy to do it," Jared grits, and keeps his eyes closed for the duration.
"Jesus Christ, Jared, where did you go on vacation?" Karen the hairstylist remarks a half hour later as she runs a comb through the snarls that were once Jared's hair, "Jamaica?"
"Greece," he answers, wincing. She was tugging HARD. "Can't we just do a wig or something?"
"We might have to," Karen replies and moves the comb to the front where he can see it. Eight of its teeth are broken.
The door of the trailer bangs open and they both turn. It's Jensen.
"Kripke says you'd better get your ass and stupid hair out here before we lose the light." He flashes a brilliant, Dean-like smile at Karen and Amy before he leaves, and Jared feels his throat tighten.
"My hair's not stupid," Jared yells over his shoulder as the door slams closed. "Just unmanageable!"
**
Kripke won't let them write the new style into the script like they did Jared's cast.
"I can't believe it. You leave for three months and come back with dreadlocks. This is a breach of your contract."
Jared doesn't respond, just tries to look hangdog and remorseful, which he has always been told is a good look on him. He knows that despite the huff in his voice, Kripke won't report him, and he's right. They work out that in today's scenes Sam's wearing a baseball cap that covers most of the damage, and by tomorrow hair and makeup will have a passable wig ready for him.
Jared touches the hair at the nape of his neck, which Karen had finally freed after an hour of fussing and two broken combs, just so it would look decent in the cap.
Even without a mirror, the tips of Jared's fingers can tell - the hair has begun to curl around itself, already bunching back together, and by tonight, he knows, it will be as it had been before.
He'd tried it a dozen times already, and it always ended in the same way.
**
He manages to make it through the first hour of the shoot without looking Jensen in the eyes, which causes more than a few problems. Kim yells at him from the director's chair, then pulls him aside to ask if he's sick, if he and Jensen had a fight, if he lost his acting mojo over the hiatus and if so he'd better get it back damn quickly.
"That's one way of looking at it," Jared says to his feet.
"Next time, try to CONNECT with your brother. Remember, people don't watch this show for the well-crafted plots." Kim slaps Jared on the back, pushing him towards the cameras.
He does the next take, holding his breath while he looks at Jensen.
He doesn't feel anything out of the ordinary when their eyes meet. Not the first time or the second time or the third time, so he stops holding his breath and wonders if it has passed.
**
But his hair still won't unsnarl.
**
"Whoa, whoa, whoa. Don't tell me you learned to read Greek on your vacation," Jensen pushes a chair to Jared's side and straddles it. Jared can feel him breathing on his neck as he flips the pages.
"It's ancient Greek, actually," Jared confesses, slipping the sunglasses back over his eyes. He looks at Jensen's open face and unspools. "Jen, I think -" he stammers, trying to figure out the best way of confessing "no, I know - something weird -"
He doesn't get any further, because that's when Christine, the most gossipy P.A. on crew, barges into craft services. "Oh my god, have you heard? Chad Michael Murray didn't show up on the One Tree Hill set today and no one has seen him for over a WEEK!" She positively glows, and Jared has to work to hold down his sandwich and four oatmeal cookies. "I'm totally e-mailing a tip to PopSugar."
She squeals and runs out of the tent, probably to annoy someone else.
Jensen's mouth presses into a serious line, which is always a bad sign. "Dude, so what's up with Chad? Is he being treated for his latest STD? I know you were in Greece - were there goats involved?"
At Jensen's words Jared's chest heats up and his eyes begin to water. He panics, picks up the text he'd been consulting, and runs back to his trailer with his eyes pinned to the ground. It's only after he's safely locked inside that he realizes he forgot to finish his last two oatmeal cookies.
**
"I turned Chad into stone while we were in Greece," Jared speaks aloud to the mirror in his locked trailer. Even as he's saying the words he realizes how utterly dumb they sound. "I didn't mean for it to happen, but it did."
He doubts his heartfelt remorse will be any consolation to the CW executives, who will be busy a) firing him and b) looking for a new blonde douchebag that isn't made of marble.
He shuffles through his drawers until he finds the electric clippers behind the toothpaste and Preparation H (For my eyes! he'd had to insist more than once when Mike had found it. He doubted Mike had heard him over his own laughter.)
Jared squares his jaw and takes a deep breath before he starts in on a sideburn. When he reaches his hairline, he screams at the top of his lungs and passes out.
**
"Where am I?" His tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth.
He squints, opening his eyes and Jen's above him, dangling a key in his face. "Was coming to see if you're okay. Heard you scream. Remember, you gave it to me for emergencies."
The kind of 'emergencies' that ended with Jared's pants around his ankles, Jensen's mouth stretched around his cock.
"Your head's bleeding," Jensen says, and touches Jared's temple tenderly.
"Not my head, my hair," Jared mumbles before passing out again.
**
This is how it had happened with Chad: Jared had gotten pissed off that all Chad wanted to do was ride mopeds and see the nightlife.
Or, wait, no. At first, Jared hadn't minded the mopeds and the nightlife, even though his knees came up to the handlebars on his first rental and Chad had taken a picture with his digital camera and put it on his flickr with a caption reading "Jared's first tricycle." What Jared HAD minded, however, was the fact that that was all Chad wanted to do. It was Jared's first time in Greece, and he had hoped to see sights other than the insides of bars that played bad Greek disco music.
So one morning, while Chad slept off his fourth hangover in three days, Jared hopped on his now-exchanged-for-a-better size moped and gone to some of the ancient ruins in the town that bordered the village where they had rented a cottage. The ruins weren't the Parthenon or the Acropolis, just a small village that was currently being excavated by a team of American and British archaeologists. Jared wouldn't have even known the site had existed - it wasn't in any of the guide books - if Chad hadn't picked up one of the graduate students on the expedition team at the bar two nights before.
The site was quiet and dusty, with only five people crouched over a foundation with brushes and sifters. Jared stood on the outskirts and watched for a moment, careful not to step in any of the areas that had been gridded off by string, before a short woman wearing a bandana kerchief style over her blonde hair smiled and waved him over.
"Jared!" she said with obvious delight as she scrubbed her hands down the front of her jeans. Her palms left dusty streaks on the denim. "Is Chad with you?"
"Sorry, Simone," Jared smiled and pretended not to notice the girl's grin waver. "But I'd love to see your work here."
Jared hadn't expected the dig to be all that exciting, and if he's going to be honest, it wasn't. But Simone's clear enthusiasm quickly transferred, and soon he was carefully stepping around the foundations of buildings with almost supernatural energy and excitement.
"Now this," she said, walking to the edge of what had once been a particularly large building, "is the temple. We don't know whom it was devoted to exactly, but we have found a large number of engravings in the village proper that support the idea that this was once a religious community. There's also evidence of an unusually high number of stone statues inside and around the houses. Strangely, none of the statues seem to depict a diety that we've been able to identify. All we've been able to recover are bits and pieces that defy recognition, although when I say they're everywhere, I mean they're everywhere. With more research, hopefully our team will be able to come to a conclusion. We still have to excavate most of the temple as well. As you can see, we've only exposed the very tops of the foundation."
"Huh," Jared had said, and ran his fingers over the edges of the hard stone wall. It felt old. Older than the Alamo in San Antonio, which he had been to seven times, six of them on school trips. The rock seemed to shoot sparks of history up his arm as he touched it.
"Pretty amazing, huh?" Simone had said with a wide smile, and she didn't notice at all when Jared picked up an oddly shaped rock from next to the ruin and shoved it in his pocket.
//
It had just been a rock, he rationalized once he was back at the cottage that afternoon, but Jared still felt a pang of guilt. He had taken it without a thought from a national historic site, and he didn't even know why. It was like the rock had called to him or something, which is probably the stupidest thing he has ever heard outside a of a script for his show.
Jared removed the stone from his pocket for the first time and ran his fingers over it. It was heavy with dark sinuous lines shot through it. The markings made the stone appear to resemble a snake coiled around itself. He traced the line of what could have once been a head and it sent the same sparks up Jared's arm as the temple wall had.
In fact, here in the hotel room, now that he had a chance to examine it, it looked less like a rock and more like a piece of one of the statues that Simone had described. The rock flickered in his vision - snake, rock. Rock, snake. He blinked and it looked like a rock again, not even a statue. Just a rock.
Jared shook it off, chalked the hallucination up to dehydration, drank two bottles of blue Gatorade, and laid down to take a nap.
//
This is how it had happened with Chad, really: Jared had woken up to hear Chad walking in the door, alone for once. Chad laid down behind Jared, smelling of beer and olive oil and lemons, and buried his head in Jared's neck. Jared heard Chad unzip, felt the hand rubbing up and down his back, snaking a path down and around and over Jared's stomach. He popped open the button on Jared's jeans before Jared rolled out of his reach.
"Fuck, Chad, what are you doing?"
"Old time's sake," Chad muttered drunkenly and curled his finger at Jared. "Come on, neither of us are married."
"If I recall, that was the problem last time," Jared said, standing up without looking at Chad and rebuttoning his pants. "I've moved on."
"Yeah, to old Jenny A. Sounds to me like you've got a bad case of love the one you're with. Since you can't be with the one you love when you're all the way in Vancouver. Excuse me. I have to take a dump."
Chad stood up and walked into the adjacent bathroom before Jared could speak. His chest was hot and his eyes burned and he'd never had an urge to hit someone so much in his life. He'd let Chad take advantage of him for too long and he was going to give that fucker a piece of his mind, dump or not.
He kicked in the bathroom door; it had seemed appropriate at the time. Chad was on the toilet, surprised at first, then laughing, then giving Jared a lazy middle finger, and then, then - doing nothing at all.
**
"You turned Chad Michael Murray into stone?"
"Yep," Jared says miserably, taking another sip of his drink. Production had shut down for the day, what with his swooning like a little girl and giant head - or hair - wound. That is why he was at Jensen's at four in the afternoon, drinking. Heavily.
"On the toilet."
"Yep."
"While he was giving you the finger?"
"Yep."
Jensen laughed, then stifled it. "I'm sorry. That's just so - appropriate."
Jared stares mournfully into his martini and says, "When I was a kid, I always thought martinis would taste like olive juice. The fact that they don't still disappoints me."
"The sunglasses are making you into an emo Michael Jackson. I know you think you're a Medusa and that everything you touch - I mean, look at - will turn to stone, but it's been, what, a week? And no one has gone granite on you. I mean, you looked at me and it didn't hurt. You told me you left the magical snake rock in that house in Greece. Why can't you take them off already?"
And Jared, still mournfully, replies, "Why don't you take off your pants already?"
*
It was Jensen's fault. He had convinced Jared that the hair thing and the suddenly-understanding-ancient-Greek thing was only a weird side effect of the stone, and that there was no way that Jared's hair was turning into snakes like he insisted. To prove his point, he had threatened to get a mouse from the pet store and attempt to feed it to Jared's hair, which just made Jared feel all the more retarded for suggesting it in the first place.
He had convinced Jared that his clippers had malfunctioned and cut a giant gash into Jared's head, and that hair didn't have feeling at all, and the only reason Jared remembers it wrong is because he had fallen to the floor and concussed himself in the process.
He reminded Jared that he had been looking directly at his two galumphing dogs for days and days since they he had returned from Greece, and they were still giant and annoying and prone to slobbering all over Jensen's steel toed boots and not at all stone, and Jared's muscles relaxed for the first time in over a week.
He had even managed to convince Jared that by smashing rock-Chad into gravel with a sledgehammer and scattering him on the hillside he had done a service to the world.
Jared actually had found it hard to disagree with Jensen's points on the last one.
He had leaned over Jared's lap, removed his sunglasses and made him stare into his eyes for five minutes straight as they had sat on the couch together.
Nothing had happened, and that had made Jared complacent.
Jensen had taken of his pants, and they had gone into Jensen's room, laid on Jensen's bed, and Jared had thought the heat in his chest and the burning in his eyes was just lust, as it had been a thousand times before. He had run his lips up Jensen's bare chest, felt his heartbeat under the warm skin, so unlike marble. He had slid a hand around to Jensen's cock, they had looked into each other's eyes.
"I want to look at you while I come," Jensen had said, and Jared had gone hot, and emotion spilled out of him, and so did something else, and he slumped on Jensen's suddenly cold shoulder, and moved to kiss Jensen's soft mouth, but it was no longer soft.
"Jared," Jensen managed to croak out through cracking and stiffening lips, and that was the last thing he said, because then he was grey and he was gone.
**
Epilogue
The cottage in Greece is on a hill not far from the place where he and Chad had stayed on their vacation, and Jared has managed to find peace there. He had told the realtor that he was a monk, and he needed quiet in order to meditate. From the arched eyebrow he had been given he was sure that the realtor had not quite believed him, and he wasn't sure he would have either, with his mirrored sunglasses and worn green cotton jacket.
He isn't quite lying about being a monk. He has found that being ascetic helps his particular condition. He can even interact with people on occasion, though it helps that the town was mostly isolated and he can avoid others if necessary. Still, he takes visitors from time to time, as he gets lonely on the hill. He particularly enjoys discussing ancient Greek traditions with the archaeology teams that arrive in the area to excavate a small settlement a few miles away, near the bottom of the hill, and will listen to their stories about their finds intently as if cataloging the discoveries in his mind.
Most find him to be a friendly and genial young man, if a bit quiet, but he supposes they probably expect that from a monk. But all of the visitors at the cottage always take the time to remark upon the remarkable piece of marble sculpture that stands in the front entry, a splendid nude of a handsome young man with a large erection.
If Jared's guests find this odd for a man of religion, they do not comment upon it, and simply hang their coats and hats on the statue when they arrive as their host instructs, and, later, pretend not to stare as their host's touch lingers a bit too long on certain parts of the statue when he returns their outerwear and bids them goodbye.
-end-
A/N: Debts owed to the books Dreadlocks by Neal Shusterman, which gave me the idea to turn Jared into a Medusa in the first place, and Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day by Judith Viorst, for the title
For the rps_advent prompt "Turning into a Mythical Beast" for crackfic week.
Crack!fic, obviously.
Jared Padalecki and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Hair Day
Although the day was the furthest thing from bright, Jared had arrived to their first morning back on set wearing mirrored sunglasses.
"Suave," Jensen cackles, flicking the bill of Jared's baseball cap, "I hope you haven't been picking up bad habits from Chad over the hiatus," and then reminds Jared that Vancouver isn't exactly known for its cutthroat paparazzi. This earns Jensen what would be a petrifying glare, except for the fact that the sunglasses ruin the effect entirely.
Which, actually, is kind of the point.
**
Taking off the cap and glasses causes him further trouble. He lies and tells Amy that he's developed a condition that makes him sensitive to light, and she coos as she sponges the orangey makeup across his t-zone.
"Poor baby," she says, then she turns around to sort through her concealers. "Just keep your eyes shut, then, while I find something that will cover that zit."
"Happy to do it," Jared grits, and keeps his eyes closed for the duration.
"Jesus Christ, Jared, where did you go on vacation?" Karen the hairstylist remarks a half hour later as she runs a comb through the snarls that were once Jared's hair, "Jamaica?"
"Greece," he answers, wincing. She was tugging HARD. "Can't we just do a wig or something?"
"We might have to," Karen replies and moves the comb to the front where he can see it. Eight of its teeth are broken.
The door of the trailer bangs open and they both turn. It's Jensen.
"Kripke says you'd better get your ass and stupid hair out here before we lose the light." He flashes a brilliant, Dean-like smile at Karen and Amy before he leaves, and Jared feels his throat tighten.
"My hair's not stupid," Jared yells over his shoulder as the door slams closed. "Just unmanageable!"
**
Kripke won't let them write the new style into the script like they did Jared's cast.
"I can't believe it. You leave for three months and come back with dreadlocks. This is a breach of your contract."
Jared doesn't respond, just tries to look hangdog and remorseful, which he has always been told is a good look on him. He knows that despite the huff in his voice, Kripke won't report him, and he's right. They work out that in today's scenes Sam's wearing a baseball cap that covers most of the damage, and by tomorrow hair and makeup will have a passable wig ready for him.
Jared touches the hair at the nape of his neck, which Karen had finally freed after an hour of fussing and two broken combs, just so it would look decent in the cap.
Even without a mirror, the tips of Jared's fingers can tell - the hair has begun to curl around itself, already bunching back together, and by tonight, he knows, it will be as it had been before.
He'd tried it a dozen times already, and it always ended in the same way.
**
He manages to make it through the first hour of the shoot without looking Jensen in the eyes, which causes more than a few problems. Kim yells at him from the director's chair, then pulls him aside to ask if he's sick, if he and Jensen had a fight, if he lost his acting mojo over the hiatus and if so he'd better get it back damn quickly.
"That's one way of looking at it," Jared says to his feet.
"Next time, try to CONNECT with your brother. Remember, people don't watch this show for the well-crafted plots." Kim slaps Jared on the back, pushing him towards the cameras.
He does the next take, holding his breath while he looks at Jensen.
He doesn't feel anything out of the ordinary when their eyes meet. Not the first time or the second time or the third time, so he stops holding his breath and wonders if it has passed.
**
But his hair still won't unsnarl.
**
"Whoa, whoa, whoa. Don't tell me you learned to read Greek on your vacation," Jensen pushes a chair to Jared's side and straddles it. Jared can feel him breathing on his neck as he flips the pages.
"It's ancient Greek, actually," Jared confesses, slipping the sunglasses back over his eyes. He looks at Jensen's open face and unspools. "Jen, I think -" he stammers, trying to figure out the best way of confessing "no, I know - something weird -"
He doesn't get any further, because that's when Christine, the most gossipy P.A. on crew, barges into craft services. "Oh my god, have you heard? Chad Michael Murray didn't show up on the One Tree Hill set today and no one has seen him for over a WEEK!" She positively glows, and Jared has to work to hold down his sandwich and four oatmeal cookies. "I'm totally e-mailing a tip to PopSugar."
She squeals and runs out of the tent, probably to annoy someone else.
Jensen's mouth presses into a serious line, which is always a bad sign. "Dude, so what's up with Chad? Is he being treated for his latest STD? I know you were in Greece - were there goats involved?"
At Jensen's words Jared's chest heats up and his eyes begin to water. He panics, picks up the text he'd been consulting, and runs back to his trailer with his eyes pinned to the ground. It's only after he's safely locked inside that he realizes he forgot to finish his last two oatmeal cookies.
**
"I turned Chad into stone while we were in Greece," Jared speaks aloud to the mirror in his locked trailer. Even as he's saying the words he realizes how utterly dumb they sound. "I didn't mean for it to happen, but it did."
He doubts his heartfelt remorse will be any consolation to the CW executives, who will be busy a) firing him and b) looking for a new blonde douchebag that isn't made of marble.
He shuffles through his drawers until he finds the electric clippers behind the toothpaste and Preparation H (For my eyes! he'd had to insist more than once when Mike had found it. He doubted Mike had heard him over his own laughter.)
Jared squares his jaw and takes a deep breath before he starts in on a sideburn. When he reaches his hairline, he screams at the top of his lungs and passes out.
**
"Where am I?" His tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth.
He squints, opening his eyes and Jen's above him, dangling a key in his face. "Was coming to see if you're okay. Heard you scream. Remember, you gave it to me for emergencies."
The kind of 'emergencies' that ended with Jared's pants around his ankles, Jensen's mouth stretched around his cock.
"Your head's bleeding," Jensen says, and touches Jared's temple tenderly.
"Not my head, my hair," Jared mumbles before passing out again.
**
This is how it had happened with Chad: Jared had gotten pissed off that all Chad wanted to do was ride mopeds and see the nightlife.
Or, wait, no. At first, Jared hadn't minded the mopeds and the nightlife, even though his knees came up to the handlebars on his first rental and Chad had taken a picture with his digital camera and put it on his flickr with a caption reading "Jared's first tricycle." What Jared HAD minded, however, was the fact that that was all Chad wanted to do. It was Jared's first time in Greece, and he had hoped to see sights other than the insides of bars that played bad Greek disco music.
So one morning, while Chad slept off his fourth hangover in three days, Jared hopped on his now-exchanged-for-a-better size moped and gone to some of the ancient ruins in the town that bordered the village where they had rented a cottage. The ruins weren't the Parthenon or the Acropolis, just a small village that was currently being excavated by a team of American and British archaeologists. Jared wouldn't have even known the site had existed - it wasn't in any of the guide books - if Chad hadn't picked up one of the graduate students on the expedition team at the bar two nights before.
The site was quiet and dusty, with only five people crouched over a foundation with brushes and sifters. Jared stood on the outskirts and watched for a moment, careful not to step in any of the areas that had been gridded off by string, before a short woman wearing a bandana kerchief style over her blonde hair smiled and waved him over.
"Jared!" she said with obvious delight as she scrubbed her hands down the front of her jeans. Her palms left dusty streaks on the denim. "Is Chad with you?"
"Sorry, Simone," Jared smiled and pretended not to notice the girl's grin waver. "But I'd love to see your work here."
Jared hadn't expected the dig to be all that exciting, and if he's going to be honest, it wasn't. But Simone's clear enthusiasm quickly transferred, and soon he was carefully stepping around the foundations of buildings with almost supernatural energy and excitement.
"Now this," she said, walking to the edge of what had once been a particularly large building, "is the temple. We don't know whom it was devoted to exactly, but we have found a large number of engravings in the village proper that support the idea that this was once a religious community. There's also evidence of an unusually high number of stone statues inside and around the houses. Strangely, none of the statues seem to depict a diety that we've been able to identify. All we've been able to recover are bits and pieces that defy recognition, although when I say they're everywhere, I mean they're everywhere. With more research, hopefully our team will be able to come to a conclusion. We still have to excavate most of the temple as well. As you can see, we've only exposed the very tops of the foundation."
"Huh," Jared had said, and ran his fingers over the edges of the hard stone wall. It felt old. Older than the Alamo in San Antonio, which he had been to seven times, six of them on school trips. The rock seemed to shoot sparks of history up his arm as he touched it.
"Pretty amazing, huh?" Simone had said with a wide smile, and she didn't notice at all when Jared picked up an oddly shaped rock from next to the ruin and shoved it in his pocket.
//
It had just been a rock, he rationalized once he was back at the cottage that afternoon, but Jared still felt a pang of guilt. He had taken it without a thought from a national historic site, and he didn't even know why. It was like the rock had called to him or something, which is probably the stupidest thing he has ever heard outside a of a script for his show.
Jared removed the stone from his pocket for the first time and ran his fingers over it. It was heavy with dark sinuous lines shot through it. The markings made the stone appear to resemble a snake coiled around itself. He traced the line of what could have once been a head and it sent the same sparks up Jared's arm as the temple wall had.
In fact, here in the hotel room, now that he had a chance to examine it, it looked less like a rock and more like a piece of one of the statues that Simone had described. The rock flickered in his vision - snake, rock. Rock, snake. He blinked and it looked like a rock again, not even a statue. Just a rock.
Jared shook it off, chalked the hallucination up to dehydration, drank two bottles of blue Gatorade, and laid down to take a nap.
//
This is how it had happened with Chad, really: Jared had woken up to hear Chad walking in the door, alone for once. Chad laid down behind Jared, smelling of beer and olive oil and lemons, and buried his head in Jared's neck. Jared heard Chad unzip, felt the hand rubbing up and down his back, snaking a path down and around and over Jared's stomach. He popped open the button on Jared's jeans before Jared rolled out of his reach.
"Fuck, Chad, what are you doing?"
"Old time's sake," Chad muttered drunkenly and curled his finger at Jared. "Come on, neither of us are married."
"If I recall, that was the problem last time," Jared said, standing up without looking at Chad and rebuttoning his pants. "I've moved on."
"Yeah, to old Jenny A. Sounds to me like you've got a bad case of love the one you're with. Since you can't be with the one you love when you're all the way in Vancouver. Excuse me. I have to take a dump."
Chad stood up and walked into the adjacent bathroom before Jared could speak. His chest was hot and his eyes burned and he'd never had an urge to hit someone so much in his life. He'd let Chad take advantage of him for too long and he was going to give that fucker a piece of his mind, dump or not.
He kicked in the bathroom door; it had seemed appropriate at the time. Chad was on the toilet, surprised at first, then laughing, then giving Jared a lazy middle finger, and then, then - doing nothing at all.
**
"You turned Chad Michael Murray into stone?"
"Yep," Jared says miserably, taking another sip of his drink. Production had shut down for the day, what with his swooning like a little girl and giant head - or hair - wound. That is why he was at Jensen's at four in the afternoon, drinking. Heavily.
"On the toilet."
"Yep."
"While he was giving you the finger?"
"Yep."
Jensen laughed, then stifled it. "I'm sorry. That's just so - appropriate."
Jared stares mournfully into his martini and says, "When I was a kid, I always thought martinis would taste like olive juice. The fact that they don't still disappoints me."
"The sunglasses are making you into an emo Michael Jackson. I know you think you're a Medusa and that everything you touch - I mean, look at - will turn to stone, but it's been, what, a week? And no one has gone granite on you. I mean, you looked at me and it didn't hurt. You told me you left the magical snake rock in that house in Greece. Why can't you take them off already?"
And Jared, still mournfully, replies, "Why don't you take off your pants already?"
*
It was Jensen's fault. He had convinced Jared that the hair thing and the suddenly-understanding-ancient-Greek thing was only a weird side effect of the stone, and that there was no way that Jared's hair was turning into snakes like he insisted. To prove his point, he had threatened to get a mouse from the pet store and attempt to feed it to Jared's hair, which just made Jared feel all the more retarded for suggesting it in the first place.
He had convinced Jared that his clippers had malfunctioned and cut a giant gash into Jared's head, and that hair didn't have feeling at all, and the only reason Jared remembers it wrong is because he had fallen to the floor and concussed himself in the process.
He reminded Jared that he had been looking directly at his two galumphing dogs for days and days since they he had returned from Greece, and they were still giant and annoying and prone to slobbering all over Jensen's steel toed boots and not at all stone, and Jared's muscles relaxed for the first time in over a week.
He had even managed to convince Jared that by smashing rock-Chad into gravel with a sledgehammer and scattering him on the hillside he had done a service to the world.
Jared actually had found it hard to disagree with Jensen's points on the last one.
He had leaned over Jared's lap, removed his sunglasses and made him stare into his eyes for five minutes straight as they had sat on the couch together.
Nothing had happened, and that had made Jared complacent.
Jensen had taken of his pants, and they had gone into Jensen's room, laid on Jensen's bed, and Jared had thought the heat in his chest and the burning in his eyes was just lust, as it had been a thousand times before. He had run his lips up Jensen's bare chest, felt his heartbeat under the warm skin, so unlike marble. He had slid a hand around to Jensen's cock, they had looked into each other's eyes.
"I want to look at you while I come," Jensen had said, and Jared had gone hot, and emotion spilled out of him, and so did something else, and he slumped on Jensen's suddenly cold shoulder, and moved to kiss Jensen's soft mouth, but it was no longer soft.
"Jared," Jensen managed to croak out through cracking and stiffening lips, and that was the last thing he said, because then he was grey and he was gone.
**
Epilogue
The cottage in Greece is on a hill not far from the place where he and Chad had stayed on their vacation, and Jared has managed to find peace there. He had told the realtor that he was a monk, and he needed quiet in order to meditate. From the arched eyebrow he had been given he was sure that the realtor had not quite believed him, and he wasn't sure he would have either, with his mirrored sunglasses and worn green cotton jacket.
He isn't quite lying about being a monk. He has found that being ascetic helps his particular condition. He can even interact with people on occasion, though it helps that the town was mostly isolated and he can avoid others if necessary. Still, he takes visitors from time to time, as he gets lonely on the hill. He particularly enjoys discussing ancient Greek traditions with the archaeology teams that arrive in the area to excavate a small settlement a few miles away, near the bottom of the hill, and will listen to their stories about their finds intently as if cataloging the discoveries in his mind.
Most find him to be a friendly and genial young man, if a bit quiet, but he supposes they probably expect that from a monk. But all of the visitors at the cottage always take the time to remark upon the remarkable piece of marble sculpture that stands in the front entry, a splendid nude of a handsome young man with a large erection.
If Jared's guests find this odd for a man of religion, they do not comment upon it, and simply hang their coats and hats on the statue when they arrive as their host instructs, and, later, pretend not to stare as their host's touch lingers a bit too long on certain parts of the statue when he returns their outerwear and bids them goodbye.
-end-
A/N: Debts owed to the books Dreadlocks by Neal Shusterman, which gave me the idea to turn Jared into a Medusa in the first place, and Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day by Judith Viorst, for the title