Amnesty fic dump
Should be posted to likeanything but I don't feel like switching journals. These are things I'll never finish, which I feel nothing for at this point. Most of them are in only very rough form. Maybe I've even posted them before.
2010 reversebang. There ought to be more of it, but it's been misplaced.
think I better follow you around
When Dean Winchester was a little boy, he used to pretend that his baby brother was actually just his imaginary friend. It worked fairly well until about the time Sammy started talking. The problem with Sammy was, of course, that when he started talking, he never really stopped. It's hard to have an imaginary friend when you can't get a word in edgewise.
It was harder when six-year-old Sammy started moving stuff with his mind.
Their father, of course, was delighted. By that point, Dean was already a huge disappointment, no abilities manifested, just plain mundane Dean-o (nevermind that he could strip down an engine and rebuild it in hours, have parts left over, and the thing would run better than before. Nevermind that Dean could touch at something once and just know exactly how it worked, what it might be used for, and what made it tick. That wasn't an ability as far as John Winchester was concerned.)
But when Sammy thought about apple juice one day and suddenly, the fridge was opening and the bottle of juice was floating out into his fat little kid hands while Dean and their father watched with mouths open-that was something.
"What?" Sammy had asked, blinking at them like it that was totally commonplace. And maybe it was, but Dean thought that at very least, he might have known about this.
"Well," their father said. "Goddamn."
That was that. Sammy could move things with his mind, a showy, obvious ability as far as Dean was concerned. It meant he was going to have to keep an even closer eye on the kid, because even among Special people, Sammy was a rare thing.
A year later, a man who introduced himself as Mr. Azazel tracked them down and offered Dad a deal he couldn't refuse. Mr. Azazel was headmaster of a school for Special children, where they could grow up without hiding who they were, where they could be themselves and learn to control their abilities.
Mr. Azazel had yellow eyes, explaining to them he had a liver condition that was difficult to treat. Doctors couldn't touch him, being a Brainy like Sammy, so they couldn't do the normal things. It gave him a very unsettling look, and Dean tried not to catch his eyes.
"Your sons are Special, Mr. Winchester. Especially Sammy here. I'm offering him a place, and perhaps one for Dean, too."
[John wants his boys with him and tells Mr. A to piss off, but Sam talks him into letting them go because isn't their safety the most important? they'd be safest in a facility where they'd be protected and wouldn't have to hide. so john agrees and sends them away.
dean meeting others at the school.
john dies.
dean doesn't fit in, leaves as often as he can and drops out at sixteen. hates it, has to get out. feels like the school is trying to brainwash them. sam loves it. dean does odd jobs to get by.
two years later, he gets a strange letter from sam and he goes back to the school. big fight, azazel is using the kids for highly illegal shit. dean rescues sam and they leave.]
When Dean was thirteen, their father was killed by a Heartstopper.
Dean was on break from school, home with Dad for just a week. Sammy, nine then and in love with Mr. Azazel's school, had refused to come.
Dad was on a mission to kill Special people who were giving them all a bad name, the scum that made the greater population agree that Specials should be regulated and kept sequestered by the government, too dangerous for society at large.
The house was a shit-hole, the kind of place Chemics gone bad always set up in when they found a place where they could sell their Bliss, their Quiet, their Contentment unmolested by the government. It had been a fine Queen Anne house at one time, wide sweeping porch and a turret room on the top floor, but it was several decades of misuse from any kind of former grandeur. The place smelled like urine (human and a couple kinds of animal), the walls were dropping their paint and wallpaper in great curls, and wasted people were tucked into corners with faces that looked roughly carved with a screwdriver.
The people were the worst, a legion of the shriveled husks that always followed a Chemic around. You touched a Chemic too many times and you lost the ability to feel on your own, too used to the lack of stress in getting your emotions synthetically from a Chemic. It was worse than drug addiction because this changed your whole brain, hollowed you out until you were gone, just a zombie floating around the world. Most weren't dangerous, not human enough for that, later stages not even interested in getting their fix of a touch from a Chemic anymore.
Dean kept his eyes straight ahead through the house and Dad thundered on, full-tilt and rash as always. Dad had never been good at stealth, but usually a Chemic full-up on stolen emotion was slow to react like a tick after a big meal. Chemics with set ups like the one running this house were always full, easy targets for men like Dad with overgrown senses of right and wrong.
"There's a Heartstopper here," Dad said, pausing and sniffing the air. It wasn't a smell on the air, but that was how you sensed another Special person nearby. Dean was too young to tell the difference between the kinds, but he was starting to pick up on the general sensation. Dad hated Heartstoppers more than anything-and he hated everything-and he immediately forgot his original mission.
Dean didn't see it happen. He'd been in the hallway trying to get this little girl to stop crying, white knight complex of his detaining him. He knew as soon as he heard a woman shriek then the hissing organic sound of a Heartstopper's power in the next room that he would regret hanging back for the rest of his life.
"What are you doing!" the woman howled. "You shouldn't be here!"
Dean ran into the room, leaving the crying child behind. The bright light over the door bleached out all the color from the room but illuminated the scene perfectly. The Heartstopper was a narrow-faced black woman with a scarf on her head that had been pulled askew. She was on her knees, one ungloved hand to her face. Her other hand, still in its protective glove, was stretched out and clawed, twisted in horror and pain like her face.
"I'm just here for some Bliss," she sobbed. "I'm not hurting anyone!"
In front of her was Dad's body, limp and crumpled on the warped floorboards.
Dean's knees gave out. He caught himself with a hand on the doorjamb, getting two splinters in his palm to find later.
"I didn't-I've never hurt anyone," the Heartstopper whimpered, looking beyond grief, her eyes wide and glassy. She turned her face towards Dean in the doorway. "Never, never, never," she said. She shook her head, further dislodging her scarf and revealing a deep silvery-purple scar that sliced over her temple and disappeared into her hair. She touched her forehead with two gloved fingers, then she collapsed to the floor next to the body.
"She's not used to feeling things," the little girl said, coming into the doorway next to Dean and looking up at him. She was still sniffling, her cheeks shining with tears she hadn't bothered to wipe away, stringy blonde hair in her eyes. "I'm sorry."
Dean crawled forward and put his head on Dad's chest to listen even though he knew that there wouldn't be anything to hear. Dad's chest was quiet and still, his eyes were open and staring like all Heartstoppers' victims. Dean closed his own eyes and pressed himself up against the side of Dad's body, not caring that the little girl was watching.
It was the Chemic himself that helped Dean get back. His name was Ted and he was bone-thin and white-haired even though he was probably only forty. The crying girl went off to get him, coming back and introducing him to Dean.
"You're special," Ted said, narrowing his eyes at Dean, smelling it on him like all special people could.
"You're a parasite," Dean spat at him, drawing back but still keeping himself between Ted and Dad's body.
Ted held up his hands, which were encased in the familiar thick, black gloves. He was wearing a long-sleeved shirt that came up to his chin. "I'm not going to touch you," he said calmly. "You're a child. Would never touch a child."
The crying little girl nodded. "He wouldn't," she agreed.
"What about all these people?" Dean demanded, righteous even then.
Something sad flickered across Ted's bony white face and he heaved a great rattling sigh. "Everyone is looking for something. We're all looking for feeling. That's all any human interaction is, kid. I'm just a business transaction for people who can't do it normally."
"You're disgusting."
"Just wait, my little Metric. Take Daddy's gun now and tell me you won't steal a marksman's on down the road someday when you can't get anything out of this one anymore, when you've used it all up," Ted said calmly. "We're Special people, kid. If touching is basic to humanity, we're superhuman, more than people. Not better, not worse, just more. Some of us give feeling or take it right through the skin, some of us kill on contact, and some of us know everything about a person just by touching them."
Dean backed up a step and glared fiercely at him. "We're not all like you," he said.
"That's true. I'm not a good example." Ted smiled. "I'm going to phone a friend to help us out here. He specializes in
avoid that one, she's a Heartstopper. killed her parents by accident. or maybe it wasn't an accident. lizzie fuckin' borden up in here.
he's a Brainy (a what?) a TK, a telekinetic. y'know, a Brainy.
Metrics - what Dean is
Chemic
Heartstoppers can't hurt Chemics, Chemics can't hurt Brainys, Brainys can't hurt Metrics, Metrics can't hurt Stones, Stones can't hurt Heartstoppers.
Azazel's got a liver condition that makes his eyes yellow
Unknown Jo/Dean thing with flowers.
• Sam/Ruby, AU, These are just ghosts that broke my heart before I met you, horror
• Sam/Ruby, AU, Ruby wishes things could have been different, she really does
• Dean/Jo, AU, our house is a very, very fine house
• Dean/Jo, post-apocalypse, Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl
• Dean/Bela, Bela's back and she's looking for revenge, horror, case file with a healthy side dose of Sam
good reasons to freeze to death
This is not a test.
"That was wonderful," she says, "and I need you to do it again immediately."
She's standing in the living room doorway in tight jeans and a band shirt she stole from your drawer. She has a chef's knife in her hand because it's nearly dinnertime and there is a chicken to debone, three colors of peppers to reduce to three colors of ribbons, onions to chop with a candle lit nearby. (Look, she says every time, no tears! It's a candle, so you don't cry.) You can smell the candle, soft and lavender, curling its scent throughout the house.
That smell will fight with the food when chicken hits hot pan, you think idly.
She smiles, holds it for a few beats, and it fades when you don't respond in a timely manner because you're too busy fiddling with the guitar strings.
"I haven't played in years," you say. You found the old guitar in your parents' attic over the weekend when you were helping your mother go through old stuff, and you had a fit of feeling sixteen and surly just seeing the old acoustic.
(Dad bought it for sixty bucks at a yard sale when you were in junior high, talked down from a hundred and twenty. He told you he'd teach you how to play "Free Bird," and he tried, but you had no real aptitude for music and eventually he gave up. Story of your life.)
"I couldn't tell," she says, and you smile, grateful for such a kind thing to say. She laughs. She points the tip of the knife at you and winks. "Well, carry on. I'm still working on dinner."
She goes back into the other room, humming the song you were just trying to pluck out, and her voice is certainly better than your meager guitar skills. You look down at the guitar, gleaming black lacquer and new strings, and you think you should have paid more attention to Dad when you were a teenager. At least you'd maybe be able to play some Skynyrd.
Sometimes you want to put your hand on her elbow and stop her, sit her down and have a serious talk. "Do you ever think that there's, like, this life we're not living?" you'd ask her, if only you could figure out how to phrase it the way you really mean it. Sometimes you have this clanging silence inside of you; a dream you can't quite remember, a déjà vu feeling you kind of hate, no way to tease it into a tangible thought to be examined. It's the monster in the closet Dad can't find even though seven-year-old you knows the fucker's in there.
But you're not sure she'd understand if you tried, so you stay silent. You don't like being on the receiving end of bitch-crazy looks, not from your little brother, not from your girl, not from anyone.
None of this is real, though.
This is not, however, a test.
Your house is quite small, located in a deeply blue-collar neighborhood, but it's decorated beautifully and kept neat as a pin. Your girl keeps a fine house. You think she deserves better than the body in the basement, but it's the only blemish your fine little life has and she pretends not to notice these things.
She's watching the news with a blank look on her face and a glass of iced tea in her hand when you get home late that evening. The Royals lost, surprise surprise, and it's almost football season, which means months of the Chiefs losing, too. You wish one of the local teams wasn't worthless. She looks at you when you sit down next to her and she smiles. New crinkles crop up around her eyes.
"Good day, dear?" she asks.
You nod. "Oh, yes," you say, and she moves closer, puts her head on your shoulder.
"I'm glad," she says. "Did you eat? I was thinking about making dinner."
You look down at her, where her thin blonde hair spills across your shirt, the very tip of her nose. "I ate," you tell her, even though you didn't.
You leave again after she falls asleep that night, after you make love. You pull on your black shirt and kiss her hair before you go, and she makes a soft sound, forehead lining and eyes moving under her eyelids, but she doesn’t wake up.
You come back very late. You slip back into bed after a scalding shower, put your arms around her, and whisper good night.
When you get home the next day, she's arranging flowers.get them for pretty
title: The Rates Are Better in the Summer
summary: After his starlet girlfriend breaks his heart, TV writer Jensen heads to Canada for a much-needed vacation. Only… she’s there, too. Forgetting Sarah Marshall for whenboymeetsboy.
notes: This world is very much like the one you know, except that it’s totally not. Title from the Dresden Dolls. Thanks be to pyrebi for hand-holding, brainstorming, and awesome-being.
All in all, being one of the head writers for Eric Kripke’s live-action G.I. Joe show was a pretty sweet deal. Jensen got to pretend to be very fucking serious about his subject and the show’s responsibility and political awareness and shit, when really, all he was doing most of the time was trying to keep his co-writer, Sera, from making American Hero’s sparkling gay subtext into actual text.
Seriously. She had a draft of an episode called “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” that she tossed on the table every time writers’ meetings got stale. Jensen thought the rest of the staff was missing out on some particularly biting social commentary by vetoing it every time Sera brought it up, not to mention that the script was blisteringly hilarious, but he could kind of see their point.
(Not that several of the show’s crazier fangirls hadn’t written that exact plot a fair few times. Jensen had a sockpuppet livejournal and he kept up with his show’s fandom. And if the fangirls got “Kripked” occasionally, well.)
Sera always said that it wasn’t her fault that American Hero’s Snake-Eyes had more chemistry with a dead horse, let alone Tom Welling’s Duke, than he did with Danneel Harris, who played his love interest, Scarlett. Jensen didn’t disagree with her, but they still had to keep beating that poor horse. It would be like Clark Kent ending up with Lex Luthor instead of Lois Lane.
There had been conversation about GI Joe’s ultimate enemy, the evil Cobra organization, maybe blowing up the moon (it had been a particularly terrible writers’ meeting) and Sera had tossed out her usual pitch for a gay-themed episode. “I adore love triangles, especially when the tension goes all three ways.” She paused. “Homoerotic subtext, I mean.”
Kripke had stared at her accompanying obscene gesture, rubbed his bald spot, and sighed. “Yeah, we got that, Sera. Thanks.”
“I’m just making sure you get what I mean,” she’d said, pulling her much-abused script back towards herself.
“I’m pretty sure retarded francophone children from the seventeenth century could catch your meaning,” Jensen had assured her.
So yeah, Jensen pretty much had the most cake job ever. He got to write cracked-out scripts about insane secret military ops. His only constraint (which was largely self-inflicted if what the other writers churned out was any indication) was that he had to try to keep the inane dialogue to a minimum. If he occasionally wrote about aliens threatening the American Embassy in Prague, or Cobra kidnapping the President’s niece and brainwashing her full-on Patty Hearst-style, nobody said a thing. It was when he tried to give Scarlett jobs that actually might not inspire a hundred online metas on the show’s slap-you-in-the-face-with-its-giant-cock brand of misogyny that his job got difficult.
“You’re just trying to make your girlfriend happy,” Sera teased him.
“Oh, I’m sorry for pointing out that our show is incredibly sexist,” he protested. He pointed at a recent article from Entertainment Weekly about that very thing, which he’d framed and hung on the wall in the writers’ room. Someone had written Damn the man! on the glass in green Sharpie. Someone else drew a big red dick under that.
“All America cares about is seeing her in skintight leather, Jensen,” Sera said not unkindly. “Trust me, baby, nobody gives two shits that Scarlett supposedly graduated college at twelve when she’s got a rack like that.”
“Wow,” he replied, staring at her a little in awe. “You are so writing for the right show.”
She cackled. “I know, right? Fuck my ovaries!”
--
The network announced it was bumping the American Hero finale back a couple of weeks to accommodate American Idol, so suddenly the writers had a little break. Jensen was glad. He was getting tired of dealing with Duke’s psyche or Scarlett’s shrieking. Plus, it meant he had a few days’ break and he could wear his glasses all the time, scratch himself whenever he felt like it, and eat progressively stankier Chinese takeout for every meal.
Jensen was taking full advantage of his freedom while she was off doing some press shindig for the show he hadn’t been invited to. He wasn’t bitter. He had a four-day-old carton of moo go gai pan in his lap, a little army of empty Molson bottles lined up on the coffee table, and his comfiest pair of sweatpants keeping his balls toasty. He was the happiest man in LA right then, probably.
He had Zeppelin on the stereo and was seriously considering lighting his bong and working on his novel when the front door opened. “Jensen?” he heard Danneel yell from the foyer and he peeled himself off the couch to go see what she wanted.
“You’re home, uh, a lot sooner than I thought you would be,” he said awkwardly, standing in the doorway between the entryway and the dining room. She bit her lip and fidgeted with her top. It looked new.
“You’re looking kind of… ripe,” she commented. She glanced around, frowning at the dirty clothes hanging from the banister and the pile of takeout receipts and unopened mail next to the door. Now that he thought about it, the whole house had a little bit of a funk.
“Vacation,” he said, shrugging and scratching his beard. He took a step toward her to kiss her hello, but she took a step back toward the door and broke eye contact.
“Jensen,” she said after a second. “Jensen.”
He stared at her. His pulse started to pick up and he could just feel a flush starting on his chest and creeping up to his face. “What?” he said, trying to keep his voice calm.
She sighed. “Can we go into the living room-maybe sit down?”
“Seriously?” he said after a second.
“Jensen…”
“Are you breaking up with me?” he asked. He didn’t even care that his voice cracked.
She took a few steps closer and raised her hand to put it on his arm, but he glared at it like it was personally responsible (which, really, it could be) and she let it hover in the air for a minute before she snatched it back and ran it through her hair like that’s what she meant to do all along. “Jensen, this can’t be a surprise to you,” she said finally, brushing past him and heading in to the living room.
“The moon exploding would be a smaller shock,” he muttered, following behind her.
Danneel stopped in front of the couch and looked around. “What?” she said distractedly.
“Nothing,” he said. He stared at his collection of beer bottles and suddenly wished there were many, many more of them. Because that would mean he was smashed off his face that this whole thing might be a really awful hangover dream.
“It’s just that… this can’t be surprising, Jensen,” she said, stooping to wipe some invisible crumbs off the couch before sitting down gingerly and looking up at him with a beseeching look on her face. “This whole relationship hasn’t been working for a long time now and-”
“What?” He blinked.
She looked mildly surprised, and then she busied herself with moving the carton of Chinese food farther away from where she was sitting. “Our relationship is broken, Jensen.”
“We’ve been together four years,” he said, taking a seat in the ratty old recliner he’s had since he was in college. He didn’t think he’d ever seen Danneel touch it, but he liked how half the springs in the seat were busted and made a nice cup for your ass, and he liked that the nap of the burgundy velour was worn away in places.
Daneeel sighed and swallowed. He could actually see her changing tactics, like she wanted to ask him why he was making her breaking up with him so difficult. “We haven’t been happy in a long time, Jensen. Not really. Maybe it’s not you-maybe it’s just me, okay?”
“There’s someone else, isn’t there?”
“No, Jensen. I just need my space and-”
“You really are a terrible actress sometimes,” he said quietly.
“Fine!” she snapped. “Yes, there is someone else. I met him while I was out having a life that isn’t mostly on a computer screen, okay? God.” They stared at each other for a long time, before she cracked first and looked away.
“Get out of my house,” he said finally, hoisting himself out of his chair and going into the kitchen. He could hear her get up to follow him, but he stopped. He didn’t even turn around, just said, “I mean it. I need you to not be here.”
He ate a carton of rocky road with a fork because he didn’t have any clean spoons, fell asleep in his recliner, and woke up a few hours later with a headache and a handful of missed calls from people he didn’t want to talk to.
--
The bedroom door thumped open. “Wake up, lardass. It’s seven PM.”
“Eat shit and die,” Jensen growled, though he was sure the effect was somewhat dampened by the pillow over his head.
Steve was Jensen’s best friend. It was mostly just an abusive relationship that Jensen couldn’t walk away from, but he knew Steve meant well. Most of the time, anyway. He figured Steve was just unhappy because he had a fancy degree in music and he was using it to compose the music for American Hero, which everyone agreed was really the worst show on Fox. And that was saying something.
“Come on, get up,” Steve wheedled. “I want to go see Watchmen again.”
“I do not want to see Watchmen again,” Jensen said wearily, not bothering to pull his head out from under his pillow. “I didn’t want to see Watchmen the first seven times we went. I did not like the book, I do not like Jeffrey Dean Morgan, and you know I can’t deal with Zack Snyder after that time when we went to see 300 and I sat next to that guy who whacked off during the writhing oracle scene.”
There was a pause. Jensen could clearly imagine the look on Steve’s face. He was a little sorry that he couldn’t see it. “That is a motherfuckin’ lie and you know it, dude,” Steve said finally. “You know you want to perv on Rorschach’s creepy ass,” he added, like that was incentive. “Come on, I know you had a huge hard-on for that guy in Little Children.”
Jensen groaned and flopped over onto his back to look up at his best friend, knocking his pillow to the floor in the process. He gave it a sad look over the edge of the bed but made no effort to fish it off the ground. “Are we talking about Patrick Wilson? Because he’s Nite Owl-”
“We are not talking about Patrick Wilson.”
“Oh.” Jensen blinked. “Oh, ew. Get out of my room.”
Steve just laughed. “Pussy.”
Jensen threw his arm over his face and sighed. “Look,” he said, “I appreciate the effort, man, but I think I just want to lie here and pretend to be a corpse for a while.”
Steve made a face and flopped back on the bed himself, lying on the side where Danneel used to. His hair spread out across the pillow and looked a lot like hers. Jensen turned his head away and sighed heavily. “Look, man,” Steve said. “It’s been, like, a month. Sera called me and said you tried to get a script for the finale in where Scarlett dies and Snake-Eyes and Duke get gay married. Which, okay, it’s not like nobody sees that shit coming, but come on. That’s not why people watch your stupid show.”
“I can introduce you to a couple hundred women on the internet who would disagree with you,” Jensen said.
Steve snorted. “Women are batshit. Sera offered to marry you for that script, by the way. She told me to pass it on, though, since apparently you’re not taking her calls? I don’t even want to know.”
“This is where you tell me I need to fuck my way to absolution, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Steve said immediately. “Come on, sad face. The night’s a’ wastin’ and you smell like a dirty sock after a bad night out.”
--
The first night, he meets a tall, stacked blonde who swallows him right down without any hint of a gag reflex.
It goes well until he’s going down on her, two fingers in, and she yells out, “Oh, yes! Fuck! Teabag my hamster!”
Two days later, he meets a spectacularly hot guy and actually starts to cry when he discovers the guy is hung like a hamster.
--
Finally, about a week after that, Sera sat him down in her office and frowned at him. “You need a vacation,” she said. “You are the most miserable, pathetic creature in the world right now and you need to get out of LA immediately.”
“That actually sounds good,” he agreed. “You know, Danneel always talked about-”
“Absolutely not. Whatever you’re about to say, I forbid it,” Sera said, thumping her hand on her desk.
“I was going to say skiing in Whistler-you know, Vancouver? Uh, Canada? She fell in love with it when she was filming up there before she got the role on American Hero.” He could see Sera’s expression softening so he soldiered on. “I’ve always wanted to learn how to ski, anyway. I’ve never even lived somewhere with snow, y’know? That’s just sad.”
“It’s smart is what it is,” Sera muttered, shuddering. “I hate snow.”
“There was this one resort she always mentioned. A smaller one, not as touristy.”
Sera gave him a half-smile and shrugged. “I still don’t like it, but this is the first time I’ve seen you smile in a month, so I’ll allow it,” she said. She turned her iMac so that he could see the screen and pulled up Safari. He didn’t even bat an eye that her visible tab appeared to be a graphic guy-on-guy love scene. She shot him a grin and opened a new window.
“What are you doing?” he asked, watching as she pulled up her Google homepage.
“We’re planning your trip, dummy. Now what’s this resort called?”
“Singer something,” Jensen said. “They’re really discreet about stuff, apparently.”
Sera typed. The first google result was for Singer Resort Lodge, a “five-star destination in beautiful Whistler, British Columbia.” The photograph on the splash page featured a man with goggles and impressive dimples coming to a dramatic stop at the bottom of a mountain, an arc of powdery snow kicked up behind him.
“This the place?” Sera asked.
“This is the place,” Jensen agreed, hoping all the men in Canada looked like that. He was done with women for a while.
--
And pretty much the next thing Jensen knew, the season wrapped and he found himself in Canada. They’d tried to end it on a satisfying note, since the network was dragging its feet in announcing pickups and cancellations for the ‘09-‘10 season, with a predictable near-death experience for Duke at the hands of Cobra, a predictable kiss between Scarlett and Snake-Eyes, and the predictable obliteration of several dozen red-shirts.
Jensen tipped his cabbie and grabbed his bags, looking up at the lodge and taking a deep breath. There wasn’t any snow lying around, here at the bottom of the mountain, especially at the tail end of March, but the slopes looked white and smooth enough. He felt a little ridiculous swearing his big ski jacket, but it had been too awkward to pack in a bag. His shirt was sticking to him in very uncomfortable ways, chafing a little as he crossed the lobby.
The girl at the front desk was pretty, small and dark-haired with fantastic lips that stretched into a welcoming smile as he approached. “Welcome to Singer Resort Lodge,” she said as he set his wallet and sunglasses down. “What can I do for you today, sir?”
“I need a room-I mean, I called, like, a week ago and got a reservation, but I was kind of hoping you might’ve had a cancellation or something and I might get a room with a view,” Jensen explained awkwardly. He unzipped the jacket and exhaled loudly in relief as cool air hit his chest. “It doesn’t have to be a great room, or anything. It can even be a smaller, crappier one than the one I’ve got. I just want to see trees and snow and sky when I look out my window, you know?”
She looked amused. “So… you’re checking in?” she asked politely.
“Oh! Yes. Sorry. It’s been a real motherfucker of a month for me.” He shook his head and handed her his passport. “Should be under Ackles.”
She glanced up at him for a second, eyes narrowed. “Hey, were you on-”
“Yes,” he said, cutting her off. “It was a very long time ago and I was young and stupid enough to think that I could appear in a daytime soap and retain my dignity.” Her eyebrows raised a few notches and he sighed. “If you’re wondering about that, too, the answer is no. I failed to retain any dignity at all. It’s very embarrassing.”
“Uh, good to know, Mr. Ackles,” she said, grinning. “I was going to ask if you were on Access Hollywood a few weeks back, but now that you’ve mentioned it, you do look like Eric Brady.”
Jensen considered pulling his hood up. It would flop down and cover his face, which while tremendously dangerous if he were hurtling down a ski slope at thirty miles an hour would be fucking convenient to hide himself when women starting talking about that dark period in his life.
“Yes, I was on Access Hollywood a few weeks back,” he said dully. “I’m a TV writer.”
She grinned. “Singer Lodge is very popular with Hollywood stars who want to ski in anonymity,” she said cheerfully as she typed his information into the computer. “With the Olympics next year, we’re seeing a huge increase in tourism. What brings you to Whistler?”
“Uh, an overwhelming urge to learn to ski?”
“Well, you’ve come to the right place,” she said. She kept talking, but Jensen didn’t hear it over the horrified roaring in his ears that flared up when he caught sight of shining red hair being shaken out of a ponytail just across the lobby.
It was Danneel, wearing a fantastic powder blue jacket that actually fit her. She had goggles strapped to her forehead and fluffy boots.
“Fuck me,” he said.
“Excuse me?” the front desk girl said, looking up sharply. She noticed where he was looking and nodded sagely. “Yeah, Danneel Harris from American Hero. She comes here a lot. We actually named her suite the Danneel Harris suite. Original, huh?”
Jensen tried to find something to hide behind before she spotted him. “Uh, you remember how I mentioned I was a TV writer and then you said you saw me on Access Hollywood? The show I write for is American Hero, and that woman over there? I’ve been inside of her-she dumped me on Valentine’s Day.”
Front desk girl looked dubious. “What? Seriously?”
“Seriously,” Jensen said, hunching down and hoping the ridiculous coat was camouflaging him with the rest of the stupid-coat-wearing snow bunnies. He watched as front desk girl’s face flickered. “She saw me, didn’t she?”
“Yep.”
“And she’s coming over here right now with a look of righteous indignation on her face, isn’t she?”
“She’s kind of blotchy and red,” front desk girl said. “And I think she’s vibrating.”
“She gets like that when she’s in caffeine withdrawal,” Jensen replied automatically. “Is there a restaurant… I’m wearing the stupidest coat in the world right now, too. Fuck. Jesus, why have you forsaken me? Ganesh? Xenu?”
“Jensen?”
He gave front desk girl one last panicked look before turning to his ex girlfriend with a tight smile. The coat scraped loudly across the edge of the counter and everyone winced. “Hi, uh, Danny,” he said.
She didn’t look amused, mostly just beautiful and annoyed. “What are you doing here?”
“Skiing?” he said weakly.
“Skiing. In Vancouver. Weeks after we break up?” She narrowed her eyes at him. “Did you know I was going to be here?”
He shook his head. “Trust me, Elta, I would be in Daytona Beach right now if I’d known you were going to be here this week,” he said.
Danneel blinked. “What? Oh, well, okay.” She looked like she wanted to say more, but a pair of arms wrapped around her waist from behind and a face appeared over one of her shoulders.
“Come on, baby, the bald waiter hooked me up...” the man said in a gravelly voice that matched his rugged, stubbly face.
“Holy shit,” Jensen said, staring.
Danneel winced and extricated herself from the circle of arms. “Jensen, this isn’t-”
“Oh, hi,” the man behind her said, offering a hand, “I’m Jeff Morgan. You look familiar. Have I worked with you?”
Jensen stared at the outstretched paw for a second, then slowly offered his own, which was promptly swallowed up in an overly friendly grip, pumped a few times, and dropped like a crushed soda can.
“No, Jeff, this is Jensen,” Danneel said in a way-too-high voice. “My ex-boyfriend.”
“Oh, right. Well, how the hell are you, Jensen? I’ve heard… almost nothing about you, actually, except that our girl here is jealous of your eyelashes.”
“They really are impressively long and lush, Mr. Ackles,” front desk girl added, butting into the conversation. “Here’s your key card and a copy of the Whistler visitor’s guide, along with a little packet with everything that is included in your package. I was also able to get your that upgrade you requested, unlimited time on the slopes and the Jessica Alba suite.”
Jensen stared at her for a second and she winked exaggeratedly. “Oh, right!” he said. “Yeah, thank you!”
“Okay, well, if you have any questions or you need anything, don’t hesitate to phone us here at the desk. My name is Genevieve, by the way.”
“Thanks,” he said awkwardly, shoving the pile of papers into his carry-on bag and pocketing the little envelope holding his keycard. He lurched around to turn back to Danneel and Jeff, who were whispering furiously at each other. “Well, I’ll see you around,” he said stiffly.
“Yeah, man,” Jeff said, grinning. “Hey, by the way, I like your coat.”
Jensen walked away, contemplating all the ways he could commit suicide at a ski resort. None of them involved the lifts, but several made creative use of ski wax.
--
Ten minutes later, Jensen was facedown on the bed, contemplating how long it would take him to suffocate in the down comforter when the phone rang. He grabbed the handset from the base on the bedside table and propped it against the side of his head, somewhere in the vicinity of his ear. He grunted an unintelligible greeting.
“Uh, Mr. Ackles? It’s Genevieve from the front desk.”
Jensen sat up and scratched the side of his face. “Oh,” he said. “Is something, uh, wrong?”
“I didn’t want to ruin your dramatic exit earlier, but you didn’t actually pay for the room,” Genevieve said sheepishly. “We need a credit card number on file in case you decide to pull a Led Zeppelin and, like, throw a TV out the window and sexually assault a groupie with a fish.”
“That was actually their manager who did that,” Jensen said after a second. “And I’ll be right down.”
--
That night, Jensen headed down to the restaurant down in the lobby, which was apparently included as part of the resort experience. Jensen figured that it fucking better be, the amount he was dropping on the whole vacation. After a sad room service dinner and some of VH1’s frightening idea of reality, he really needed a drink.
The bartender was a tall, square-jawed guy with messy dark hair and slightly odd cadence to his voice. “What can I do for you today, sir?” he asked politely.
Jensen shrugged. “Uh, how ‘bout a Jack and Coke?”
The bartender looked at him with concern. He had blue eyes. “Are you sure, man?” he asked slowly. Jensen wondered briefly why the hotel was letting a guy tend bar when he was clearly baked out of his gourd. “You don’t really look like you should be partaking of a large quantity of alcohol right now.”
“Excuse me?”
“I mean, it’s not really any of my business what toxic shit you decide to put into your body, but by the looks of the bags under your eyes, the sallow state of your skin, and the tension in your shoulders, I’d say you’re in serious need of some tofu and some zen.”
Jensen stared up at the guy, trying to figure out if he was serious or not. If he wasn’t, then Jensen had a date with the management for hiring dicks; if he was, then clearly Jensen had farther to go to escape the L.A. loony bin than he had previously thought. “Excuse me?” he asked.
“Orange juice,” the bartender replied blithely. “Perhaps tomorrow I’ll make it a tequila sunrise, after you’ve spent the day on the slopes and all your have to show for it is a severe case of windburn and a firm hatred of whichever lucky ski instructor gets to break your spirit.” He slid a glass across the bar and smiled sagely. “For now, however, you just get juice. And it's not even from concentrate.”
“Um, okay then,” Jensen said, raising his glass in a toast that he couldn’t even manage to make properly mocking.
--
He ran into Genevieve as he trekked back across the lobby to the elevators.
“Mr. Ackles!” she said, smiling. She had a coat on and her purse in hand, apparently on her way home. “You’re walking in an awfully straight and steady line for just coming from the bar.”
“I just spent the last hour drinking orange juice and hearing about Tibet,” Jensen said tightly. “I am about to go upstairs and raid my minibar for a twenty-dollar bottle of vodka that isn’t big enough to get a woodland creature tipsy.”
She looked instantly sympathetic. “Ah, Misha’s working tonight,” she said, nodding. “Next time he does that? Just call him a Communist. He’ll clam right up, get you your drink, and leave you alone. I mean, there might be arsenic in your drink when you get it, but you won’t have to hear about Namaste anymore.”
“Great,” Jensen said. They stood there in slightly awkward silence for a second. Genevieve fiddled with her purse strap. “So I was thinking I should get started on those ski lessons tomorrow.”
She smiled. “There’s a list of instructors in your info packet,” she said, nodding. “I recommend either Milo or Jared. Now, Milo kind of looks like a stiff breeze would blow him away and but he’s really serious about skiing in a technical, dedicated kind of way. He qualified for Torino in slalom but he broke his collarbone, like, right before the Games.”
Jensen was impressed. “That sounds good,” he agreed. “I’ll look him up tomorrow.”
“He’s usually booked up pretty solid. Jared’s probably your better bet,” she said. “Jared’s a sweetheart. Built like a Mack truck and pretty much the nicest guy you’ll ever meet. Milo can be kind of a hardass sometimes.”
“Do I look like I need delicate handling?” Jensen bristled.
“Kind of, yeah,” she said, smiling a little. She punched him lightly on the shoulder. “Hey, good luck, buddy. I’ll see you in the morning, okay?”
“Night,” he said, shoulders slumping as he watched her disappear around a corner by the sundry shop. As he watched her go, he realized that the lobby was pretty full of people going about their evenings, so he sat down on a nearby squashy chair and people watched like he hadn’t in a long time.
There was an elderly couple cuddled up on a nearby couch, both sipping from demitasse cups and smiling at each other. A squinty blond guy was heading for the bar with a distinctly annoyed look on his face. The pretty, much younger blonde girl on his arm seemed oblivious, chattering away a mile a minute and gazing up at him adoringly. A couple of guys still in their ski gear clomped over to a table over by the floor to ceiling windows that lined the back of the room, laughing and carrying on. Behind them, the darkness outside and the lobby lights obscured the spectacular view of the mountain.
Just like that, Jensen had an idea for his novel.
He still went to bed early, though.
--
It was still dark out when he woke up the next morning, but no amount of rolling over and trying to pretend to be asleep worked, and he just gave up pretending around five-thirty. He glanced over the room service menu for about ten seconds before deciding to just head down to the twenty-four-hour restaurant to try his luck.
There was a surprisingly large number of people down in the lobby, but Jensen figured they were the ones who subscribed to the idea that the early bird got nicer worms or whatever when it came to the slopes.
“Do you want to wait a few minutes for your wife to come down, dude?” the waiter asked, rubbing his hand over the hazy fuzz of black stubble covering his scalp.
“No wife,” Jensen said, shoving his hands in his pockets.
“Girlfriend? Boyfriend?” the waiter tried, grabbing two menus and waving them at Jensen.
“All by my lonesome,” Jensen replied.
The waiter stopped and raised an eyebrow. “What, seriously?”
Jensen followed him through the restaurant to a table in the back, by the windows. “Why does everyone think it’s weird?”
“Um, because it’s weird,” the waiter said, still looking at him like he wasn’t quite right in the head. “Dude, nobody up and decides to just go skiing in Whistler by himself. This is a family destination.” He gestured around the room. “Look around. You got Squinty and his little blonde over there, total newlyweds. They got caught having sex against an ice machine last night. Now, I think she kind of looks like an underage bobblehead doll, but whatever. To each his own. Look at Jeffrey Dean Morgan and the hot chick from the gay G.I. Joe show.”
Jensen froze and slowly turned his head in the direction the waiter was pointing, and sure enough there they were. “Oh, Jesus,” Jensen moaned. He collapsed into his seat with his back to them.
“Oh, wait,” the waiter said after a second, eyes comically wide. “You’re the ex-boyfriend with the terrible timing, aren’t you? Gen mentioned you. Dude, that sucks. You didn’t come here to, like, stalk her, did you?”
Jensen pinched the bridge of his nose and counted to ten. “No, I did not come to stalk her. Why does everyone keep asking me that? Do I look creepy? No. I don’t even look dangerous. I’m pretty enough that I probably couldn’t intimidate third-graders. I am not stalking Danneel Harris, okay?”
The waiter didn’t say anything for a second then he nodded and grinned. “Uh, here’s your menu. My name’s Mike. The special this morning’s the French toast.”
“Great. I’ll have that, a side of bacon, and a Bloody Mary,” Jensen said through bared teeth. “You can keep the celery. And the tomato juice. Actually, just bring me vodka. Lots of vodka.”
--
Jensen was halfway through his second piece of French toast when his phone buzzed with a text from Steve.
freeze to death yt fucker?
He shook his head but had to smile a little.
fml daneels here at singer, he sent back.
The phone rang before he even finished chewing his next bite.
“What the fuck? Is that a joke? Because it’s a sick fuckin’ joke,” Steve said as soon as Jensen hit the green button.
“Hello to you, too, asswipe,” Jensen snapped. “My flight was fine. My room is epic. Thank you for asking.”
“I could give a shit if they put you in the fucking Presidential suite, numbnuts,” Steve replied. “Wanna tell me how you managed to end up at the same resort as the woman who busted your heart into a bunch of Chiclet-sized pieces?”
“You know what else?” Jensen asks, cramming an entire rasher of bacon into his mouth and chewing loudly. “She’s here with the goddamn Comedian.”
“Which comedian?” Steve asked. “Tell me it’s not Carlos Mencia.” He paused. Jensen winced in anticipation of whatever was about to come out of Steve’s mouth. “Actually, no. Tell me it is so I can laugh at you for the rest of time for getting dumped for Carlos Mencia.”
“Jeffrey Dean Morgan, asshole. The Comedian,” Jensen said slowly.
“Oh,” Steve said softly. “Well, at least… I mean, look on the bri… yeah, I got nothing. I’m sorry. I would break up with you for Jeffrey Dean Morgan and I don’t even like dick.”
Jensen stared at his fork and thought about stabbing himself with it, but the mess and the medic’s visit didn’t seem worth it. “I’m going to go ski now, okay?”
“Please don’t die. Dying means Danneel wins, okay?”
“Got it.”
He hung up and finished his breakfast. He had some skiing to do.
--
Ski lessons were totally included in the package, so all Jensen had to do was head out to the Singer Resort shack over at the mountain and sign up. The blonde behind the desk kept snapping her gum loudly while he gave her his information and signed a waiver that he wouldn’t sue the resort if he broke his spine or something.
“Now, both of our instructors are out until nine-thirty, but you’re welcome to leave your gear here and head into the Village to kill time,” she was explaining when the door to the office banged open.
“Hey, Kristen, got anybody? My seven o’clock took one look at the lift and ran,” a man laughed. Jensen could hear a zipper being drawn down and elastic being snapped, but he was trying to wade his way through the legal jargon in the waiver and didn’t turn around right away.
“It’s your lucky day, Mr. Ackles,” she said, grinning. “Because right behind you is Jared Padalecki and he’s the best damn ski instructor in Whistler.”
Jensen turned to greet his new teacher and immediately forgot how to speak English.
“Aw, K-Bell, you’re gonna go and make me blush. Anyway, hi,” said the same smiling gorgeous face from the resort’s splash page, holding out a hand to shake. Jensen just stared at him and felt small. “Kristen talks big game, but I guess I don’t completely suck.”
“Jensen,” he managed to reply after his brain powered back on.
“You ever been on a pair of skis?” Jared asked, taking in Jensen’s lack of gear with the beginnings of a smirk.
“This trip was kind of a whim,” Jensen admitted.
“Yeah, you’re the guy who got dumped for Jeff Morgan. I’ve heard.”
“Jesus Christ,” Jensen said, feeling his face go pale. “Do you people have nothing else to talk about?
“Honestly?” Kristen asked, raising her eyebrows. “Nothing whatsoever.”
“I should have gone to Australia,” Jensen muttered.
“Well, you’re here now,” Jared said cheerfully, zipping his coat back up. “Let’s head out to the rental station and get you outfitted, then we’ll hit the hill. Sound good?”
--
The rest of the day did not improve.
Several hours later, Jensen found himself being carried from a large SUV and into the lodge. On the other hand, the clinic had given him Vicodin and he was seeing shit.
“You know, when I said ‘hit the hill’ I meant it like a figure of speech,” Jared claimed as they passed through the vestibule and front doors. “I’ve never seen what happened to you happen to anyone in my life!”
“The universe wants me to just give up and die,” Jensen said morosely, hiding his face against Jared’s shoulder. He tried to block out the fact his right leg felt like it was on fire from calf to halfway up his thigh, but it was either think about the pain the Vicodin couldn’t get rid of or focus on the fact he was being carried like a girl. He preferred actual pain.
“I’ve never seen the human knee bend like that,” Jared continued, sounding awed. “It was amazing.”
“You’ve never seen it because it’s not supposed to happen like that!” Jensen snapped. “And put me down!”
Jared ignored him. “You want to head up to your room?”
Jensen thought about it, but he didn’t want to find himself in an elevator still in this guy’s arms. With his luck, it would be Danneel and Jeff who shared the car with them. At that horrible thought, he looked around, but they didn’t appear to be loitering in the lobby.
“There’s a couch in the elevator, you freak. I’ll plop you on it and you can lick your poor bruised ego for a couple of minutes until I have to pick you back up and drag you to your room when we reach your floor.”
“You’re really pretty. Oh, wow. I’m sorry, I’m pretty high right now,” Jensen admitted. “All I got is that holy shit, you’re carrying me like-dude, I am almost two hundred pounds of muscle and you’re carrying me like… like… something light. I am really high right now and I need you to put me down.”
“Ding,” Jared said. Well, to be fair, that might have been the elevator arriving. Jensen found himself rather unceremoniously dumped on a bench at the back of the car.
“I’m on six,” Jensen said.
“Thanks,” Jared replied, jabbing the six and then pressing the door close button about fifty times like that was going to miraculously make everything faster.
“You know, it’s only going to move as fast as it’s going to move,” Jensen pointed out. “Going Full Metal Jacket on the button isn’t going to do anything but give you carpal tunnel and me a headache.”
“I’m starting to think I should have left you to either freeze to death or get run over by passing skiers on the slope,” Jared replied, smiling.
Jensen leaned back against the wall behind him and shook his head. “Some vacation this has been,” he muttered.
“Just think, you only checked in yesterday,” Jared pointed out as the car reached the sixth floor.
The pain in his knee had gone down considerably just over the elevator ride and Jensen waved him away when he turned around. “No, how about you help me limp the rest of the way there, okay? I don’t really feel like playing blushing bride to your prince charming as you ferry me over the threshold.”
Jared gave him an odd look, but Jensen was too busy trying to use the fichus in the corner to pull himself to a standing position.
--
Jensen spent the next two days hobbling between the lobby restaurant, where he tried to eat his way to happiness, and the awesome deck overlooking the mountain, where he sat and watched brightly colored, vaguely humanoid shapes hurtle down the slope. Sometimes he took his laptop and camped out in one of the big squashy easy chairs in the lobby, right in front of the fireplace. There were only so many places where he could sit with his leg up, but the hotel staff seemed to have some kind of agreement to be ridiculously accommodating.
They kept trying to keep him company, too. Which, he would admit, was pretty awesome of them. Jared and Kristen, the ski shack girl, would show up every so often, too. In fact, Jared probably showed up the most, and he clearly felt awful about what happened to Jensen’s knee.
Jensen was trying to have a peaceful dinner
In June, the Diamondbacks come to town. The first thing Edwin Jackson does is come into the home clubhouse and attach himself to Verlander in the biggest, saddest hug any of them have ever seen. Perry has to look away.
"How's it?" Jackson asks, and Verlander just shakes his head. Jackson looks around, spots the empty locker with its lone 48 jersey and his whole face crumples. "Fuck this," he snarls. "Fuck this whole thing."
Perry nods and throws a wadded up jock into his own locker with so much force it pulls a shirt off of a hanger. He has a feeling a lot of guys will be coming into the Tiger clubhouse this year, looking for ghosts.
"I'mma win this shit tomorrow, you watch," Jackson says, like he forgets he's in Sedona red and not home whites. "You fuckin' mark it down. Win it for him, yeah, yeah?"
Verlander nods. "Yeah," he says.
Jackson does win, too. He practically no-hits the Tigers in the process, while poor Andy Oliver looks spooked and gives up six runs in six innings, the excruciatingly slow-moving start where the other team nickels and dimes you to death.
In the fifth inning of that game, Robbie Weinhardt looks up from whatever silently annoying thing he was going, blinks at everyone in the bullpen, and says, "Do you think anybody would care this much if it was, like a black or a Latin guy who disappeared?"
Everyone goes silent, pivoting in place to stare at him. The big wad of gum drops out of Schlereth's mouth and lands with a wet splat on the concrete. Brad Thomas chokes on sunflower seeds and started coughing up shells. Perry's foot slips off the railing he'd been resting it on and he nearly overbalances his whole chair. None of them say anything.
"What?" Weinhardt says, blinking, like he hadn't expected such a reaction. Perry wants to throw something at his annoying wide-open kid's face, get him to shut the fuck up for five minutes for once.
Schlereth's face goes dark and kind of sad. "What the fuck, man?" he says after a long pause where everybody shares meaningful looks and Weinhardt looks more and more upset.
"What?" Weinhardt says again, clearly confused and stubborn enough not to just drop it. He blinks again, fluttering his freaky long eyelashes that always make Perry think of spider legs.
"You don't just say shit like that," Thomas says from his spot at the end of the row of them, shaking his head and crossing his arms. Perry looks over at him out of pure habit, the accent always so out of place.
Weinhardt sticks his lower lip out defensively, like pouting is going to make them stop staring at him. Perry spits to the side a bit more violently than usual and Weinhardt huffs. "Look, it's just… me and Rhymes were talking about it on the phone last night. About, you know, how everybody's talking about it everywhere, what might've happened."
"And Rhymes talks too goddamn much, don't he?" Perry finds himself snarling. Weinhardt shrinks back and Perry bares his teeth at him. "'Specially for a midget middle infielder in fuckin' Toledo."
"Yeah, and? We all think about it!" Weinhardt snaps after a second, finding his nerve or some backbone or something. He'd say more, but Oliver gives up another hit and they get Thomas up, 'get ready, Aussie, might get ugly quick, here.' Perry puts his feet back up on the railing.
"Dude, anybody disappears like that, it's news," Schlereth says. "Black, Hispanic, white kid from wherever. Where was he from, Jersey?" He glances at Perry, who nods. "Oh, that's right. You were calling him Guido during spring training."
Perry finds himself smiling at that. "Yeah, he gets all pissy at that." He's determined to use the present tense.
There are, as it turns out, precisely one hundred billion beautiful things in the world, and he doesn't want a single one of them. Those are just the things he can actually acquire, of course, but the Mona Lisa isn't really beautiful anyway, and why would he want it?
it's not like it's a surprise that he's into tall, beautiful brunettes, he thinks.
Vanessa had been the best accessory to bring to a funeral. She was lovely, she looked good in black, and she had loved Rick as much as he did. But like parents who divorce after losing a child, they had simply fallen apart. He hadn't been aware that his relationship with her had anything to do with any Rick Porcellos until she was packing her things and telling him this was for the best, and she was right.
September 16
In the end, Jensen decides that Food Porn isn't actually about food at all. Jared might play it like the whole thing was about the restaurant industry, or his hard-on for molecular gastronomy, or how to boil water-and maybe it was in the beginning. May it was in the middle, even. In the end, however, the blog boiled down to two things: Chef Guy's ginormous crush on Norm, for one, and his years-long quest to secure a reservation at El Bulli.
(and, okay, maybe a third: Jared's vociferous contempt for Pim Techamuanvivit, another food blogger who made good with a bestselling book, who had been nothing but unwaveringly gracious both times Jensen met her. For what it's worth, though, Jess hates her, too)
Now that one of Jared's objectives has been achieved, moving Jensen upstairs and all, his attention had focused completely on the other. It quickly became an obsession, and from there a problem. Jensen went from amused to slightly disturbed.
Now that Jared had achieved one of his objectives, moving Jensen upstairs and all, he had turned his attention to his other goal. It quickly became an obsession. He spent most of his time reading about El Bulli, often on his iPhone in inappropriate places. Jensen found it alarming
They went to the Giordano's on Belmont for early lunch, because Jared had Cubs tickets he didn't want to waste
“Well, can I just tell you how I’m about to take the most epic shit ever?”
“Um… I’d rather you not, if I do actually have a choice in this matter.”
“I’m just really excited.”
“About defecating.”
“Well, yeah. Shitting feels awesome, dude.”
“Well, I’m glad you’re glad about your bowel movements, I guess.”
“Damn right.”
“I can’t believe we just had this conversation.”
“I think I’ll crop-dust the hallway on my way to the bathroom.”
“You fart on my pillow and we’re gonna have a problem, son.”
El Bulli. Reservation. May 15, 2010 at 7.
I love you.
SPN will be closing at the end of October.
2010 reversebang. There ought to be more of it, but it's been misplaced.
think I better follow you around
When Dean Winchester was a little boy, he used to pretend that his baby brother was actually just his imaginary friend. It worked fairly well until about the time Sammy started talking. The problem with Sammy was, of course, that when he started talking, he never really stopped. It's hard to have an imaginary friend when you can't get a word in edgewise.
It was harder when six-year-old Sammy started moving stuff with his mind.
Their father, of course, was delighted. By that point, Dean was already a huge disappointment, no abilities manifested, just plain mundane Dean-o (nevermind that he could strip down an engine and rebuild it in hours, have parts left over, and the thing would run better than before. Nevermind that Dean could touch at something once and just know exactly how it worked, what it might be used for, and what made it tick. That wasn't an ability as far as John Winchester was concerned.)
But when Sammy thought about apple juice one day and suddenly, the fridge was opening and the bottle of juice was floating out into his fat little kid hands while Dean and their father watched with mouths open-that was something.
"What?" Sammy had asked, blinking at them like it that was totally commonplace. And maybe it was, but Dean thought that at very least, he might have known about this.
"Well," their father said. "Goddamn."
That was that. Sammy could move things with his mind, a showy, obvious ability as far as Dean was concerned. It meant he was going to have to keep an even closer eye on the kid, because even among Special people, Sammy was a rare thing.
A year later, a man who introduced himself as Mr. Azazel tracked them down and offered Dad a deal he couldn't refuse. Mr. Azazel was headmaster of a school for Special children, where they could grow up without hiding who they were, where they could be themselves and learn to control their abilities.
Mr. Azazel had yellow eyes, explaining to them he had a liver condition that was difficult to treat. Doctors couldn't touch him, being a Brainy like Sammy, so they couldn't do the normal things. It gave him a very unsettling look, and Dean tried not to catch his eyes.
"Your sons are Special, Mr. Winchester. Especially Sammy here. I'm offering him a place, and perhaps one for Dean, too."
[John wants his boys with him and tells Mr. A to piss off, but Sam talks him into letting them go because isn't their safety the most important? they'd be safest in a facility where they'd be protected and wouldn't have to hide. so john agrees and sends them away.
dean meeting others at the school.
john dies.
dean doesn't fit in, leaves as often as he can and drops out at sixteen. hates it, has to get out. feels like the school is trying to brainwash them. sam loves it. dean does odd jobs to get by.
two years later, he gets a strange letter from sam and he goes back to the school. big fight, azazel is using the kids for highly illegal shit. dean rescues sam and they leave.]
When Dean was thirteen, their father was killed by a Heartstopper.
Dean was on break from school, home with Dad for just a week. Sammy, nine then and in love with Mr. Azazel's school, had refused to come.
Dad was on a mission to kill Special people who were giving them all a bad name, the scum that made the greater population agree that Specials should be regulated and kept sequestered by the government, too dangerous for society at large.
The house was a shit-hole, the kind of place Chemics gone bad always set up in when they found a place where they could sell their Bliss, their Quiet, their Contentment unmolested by the government. It had been a fine Queen Anne house at one time, wide sweeping porch and a turret room on the top floor, but it was several decades of misuse from any kind of former grandeur. The place smelled like urine (human and a couple kinds of animal), the walls were dropping their paint and wallpaper in great curls, and wasted people were tucked into corners with faces that looked roughly carved with a screwdriver.
The people were the worst, a legion of the shriveled husks that always followed a Chemic around. You touched a Chemic too many times and you lost the ability to feel on your own, too used to the lack of stress in getting your emotions synthetically from a Chemic. It was worse than drug addiction because this changed your whole brain, hollowed you out until you were gone, just a zombie floating around the world. Most weren't dangerous, not human enough for that, later stages not even interested in getting their fix of a touch from a Chemic anymore.
Dean kept his eyes straight ahead through the house and Dad thundered on, full-tilt and rash as always. Dad had never been good at stealth, but usually a Chemic full-up on stolen emotion was slow to react like a tick after a big meal. Chemics with set ups like the one running this house were always full, easy targets for men like Dad with overgrown senses of right and wrong.
"There's a Heartstopper here," Dad said, pausing and sniffing the air. It wasn't a smell on the air, but that was how you sensed another Special person nearby. Dean was too young to tell the difference between the kinds, but he was starting to pick up on the general sensation. Dad hated Heartstoppers more than anything-and he hated everything-and he immediately forgot his original mission.
Dean didn't see it happen. He'd been in the hallway trying to get this little girl to stop crying, white knight complex of his detaining him. He knew as soon as he heard a woman shriek then the hissing organic sound of a Heartstopper's power in the next room that he would regret hanging back for the rest of his life.
"What are you doing!" the woman howled. "You shouldn't be here!"
Dean ran into the room, leaving the crying child behind. The bright light over the door bleached out all the color from the room but illuminated the scene perfectly. The Heartstopper was a narrow-faced black woman with a scarf on her head that had been pulled askew. She was on her knees, one ungloved hand to her face. Her other hand, still in its protective glove, was stretched out and clawed, twisted in horror and pain like her face.
"I'm just here for some Bliss," she sobbed. "I'm not hurting anyone!"
In front of her was Dad's body, limp and crumpled on the warped floorboards.
Dean's knees gave out. He caught himself with a hand on the doorjamb, getting two splinters in his palm to find later.
"I didn't-I've never hurt anyone," the Heartstopper whimpered, looking beyond grief, her eyes wide and glassy. She turned her face towards Dean in the doorway. "Never, never, never," she said. She shook her head, further dislodging her scarf and revealing a deep silvery-purple scar that sliced over her temple and disappeared into her hair. She touched her forehead with two gloved fingers, then she collapsed to the floor next to the body.
"She's not used to feeling things," the little girl said, coming into the doorway next to Dean and looking up at him. She was still sniffling, her cheeks shining with tears she hadn't bothered to wipe away, stringy blonde hair in her eyes. "I'm sorry."
Dean crawled forward and put his head on Dad's chest to listen even though he knew that there wouldn't be anything to hear. Dad's chest was quiet and still, his eyes were open and staring like all Heartstoppers' victims. Dean closed his own eyes and pressed himself up against the side of Dad's body, not caring that the little girl was watching.
It was the Chemic himself that helped Dean get back. His name was Ted and he was bone-thin and white-haired even though he was probably only forty. The crying girl went off to get him, coming back and introducing him to Dean.
"You're special," Ted said, narrowing his eyes at Dean, smelling it on him like all special people could.
"You're a parasite," Dean spat at him, drawing back but still keeping himself between Ted and Dad's body.
Ted held up his hands, which were encased in the familiar thick, black gloves. He was wearing a long-sleeved shirt that came up to his chin. "I'm not going to touch you," he said calmly. "You're a child. Would never touch a child."
The crying little girl nodded. "He wouldn't," she agreed.
"What about all these people?" Dean demanded, righteous even then.
Something sad flickered across Ted's bony white face and he heaved a great rattling sigh. "Everyone is looking for something. We're all looking for feeling. That's all any human interaction is, kid. I'm just a business transaction for people who can't do it normally."
"You're disgusting."
"Just wait, my little Metric. Take Daddy's gun now and tell me you won't steal a marksman's on down the road someday when you can't get anything out of this one anymore, when you've used it all up," Ted said calmly. "We're Special people, kid. If touching is basic to humanity, we're superhuman, more than people. Not better, not worse, just more. Some of us give feeling or take it right through the skin, some of us kill on contact, and some of us know everything about a person just by touching them."
Dean backed up a step and glared fiercely at him. "We're not all like you," he said.
"That's true. I'm not a good example." Ted smiled. "I'm going to phone a friend to help us out here. He specializes in
avoid that one, she's a Heartstopper. killed her parents by accident. or maybe it wasn't an accident. lizzie fuckin' borden up in here.
he's a Brainy (a what?) a TK, a telekinetic. y'know, a Brainy.
Metrics - what Dean is
Chemic
Heartstoppers can't hurt Chemics, Chemics can't hurt Brainys, Brainys can't hurt Metrics, Metrics can't hurt Stones, Stones can't hurt Heartstoppers.
Azazel's got a liver condition that makes his eyes yellow
Unknown Jo/Dean thing with flowers.
• Sam/Ruby, AU, These are just ghosts that broke my heart before I met you, horror
• Sam/Ruby, AU, Ruby wishes things could have been different, she really does
• Dean/Jo, AU, our house is a very, very fine house
• Dean/Jo, post-apocalypse, Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl
• Dean/Bela, Bela's back and she's looking for revenge, horror, case file with a healthy side dose of Sam
good reasons to freeze to death
This is not a test.
"That was wonderful," she says, "and I need you to do it again immediately."
She's standing in the living room doorway in tight jeans and a band shirt she stole from your drawer. She has a chef's knife in her hand because it's nearly dinnertime and there is a chicken to debone, three colors of peppers to reduce to three colors of ribbons, onions to chop with a candle lit nearby. (Look, she says every time, no tears! It's a candle, so you don't cry.) You can smell the candle, soft and lavender, curling its scent throughout the house.
That smell will fight with the food when chicken hits hot pan, you think idly.
She smiles, holds it for a few beats, and it fades when you don't respond in a timely manner because you're too busy fiddling with the guitar strings.
"I haven't played in years," you say. You found the old guitar in your parents' attic over the weekend when you were helping your mother go through old stuff, and you had a fit of feeling sixteen and surly just seeing the old acoustic.
(Dad bought it for sixty bucks at a yard sale when you were in junior high, talked down from a hundred and twenty. He told you he'd teach you how to play "Free Bird," and he tried, but you had no real aptitude for music and eventually he gave up. Story of your life.)
"I couldn't tell," she says, and you smile, grateful for such a kind thing to say. She laughs. She points the tip of the knife at you and winks. "Well, carry on. I'm still working on dinner."
She goes back into the other room, humming the song you were just trying to pluck out, and her voice is certainly better than your meager guitar skills. You look down at the guitar, gleaming black lacquer and new strings, and you think you should have paid more attention to Dad when you were a teenager. At least you'd maybe be able to play some Skynyrd.
Sometimes you want to put your hand on her elbow and stop her, sit her down and have a serious talk. "Do you ever think that there's, like, this life we're not living?" you'd ask her, if only you could figure out how to phrase it the way you really mean it. Sometimes you have this clanging silence inside of you; a dream you can't quite remember, a déjà vu feeling you kind of hate, no way to tease it into a tangible thought to be examined. It's the monster in the closet Dad can't find even though seven-year-old you knows the fucker's in there.
But you're not sure she'd understand if you tried, so you stay silent. You don't like being on the receiving end of bitch-crazy looks, not from your little brother, not from your girl, not from anyone.
None of this is real, though.
This is not, however, a test.
Your house is quite small, located in a deeply blue-collar neighborhood, but it's decorated beautifully and kept neat as a pin. Your girl keeps a fine house. You think she deserves better than the body in the basement, but it's the only blemish your fine little life has and she pretends not to notice these things.
She's watching the news with a blank look on her face and a glass of iced tea in her hand when you get home late that evening. The Royals lost, surprise surprise, and it's almost football season, which means months of the Chiefs losing, too. You wish one of the local teams wasn't worthless. She looks at you when you sit down next to her and she smiles. New crinkles crop up around her eyes.
"Good day, dear?" she asks.
You nod. "Oh, yes," you say, and she moves closer, puts her head on your shoulder.
"I'm glad," she says. "Did you eat? I was thinking about making dinner."
You look down at her, where her thin blonde hair spills across your shirt, the very tip of her nose. "I ate," you tell her, even though you didn't.
You leave again after she falls asleep that night, after you make love. You pull on your black shirt and kiss her hair before you go, and she makes a soft sound, forehead lining and eyes moving under her eyelids, but she doesn’t wake up.
You come back very late. You slip back into bed after a scalding shower, put your arms around her, and whisper good night.
When you get home the next day, she's arranging flowers.get them for pretty
title: The Rates Are Better in the Summer
summary: After his starlet girlfriend breaks his heart, TV writer Jensen heads to Canada for a much-needed vacation. Only… she’s there, too. Forgetting Sarah Marshall for whenboymeetsboy.
notes: This world is very much like the one you know, except that it’s totally not. Title from the Dresden Dolls. Thanks be to pyrebi for hand-holding, brainstorming, and awesome-being.
All in all, being one of the head writers for Eric Kripke’s live-action G.I. Joe show was a pretty sweet deal. Jensen got to pretend to be very fucking serious about his subject and the show’s responsibility and political awareness and shit, when really, all he was doing most of the time was trying to keep his co-writer, Sera, from making American Hero’s sparkling gay subtext into actual text.
Seriously. She had a draft of an episode called “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” that she tossed on the table every time writers’ meetings got stale. Jensen thought the rest of the staff was missing out on some particularly biting social commentary by vetoing it every time Sera brought it up, not to mention that the script was blisteringly hilarious, but he could kind of see their point.
(Not that several of the show’s crazier fangirls hadn’t written that exact plot a fair few times. Jensen had a sockpuppet livejournal and he kept up with his show’s fandom. And if the fangirls got “Kripked” occasionally, well.)
Sera always said that it wasn’t her fault that American Hero’s Snake-Eyes had more chemistry with a dead horse, let alone Tom Welling’s Duke, than he did with Danneel Harris, who played his love interest, Scarlett. Jensen didn’t disagree with her, but they still had to keep beating that poor horse. It would be like Clark Kent ending up with Lex Luthor instead of Lois Lane.
There had been conversation about GI Joe’s ultimate enemy, the evil Cobra organization, maybe blowing up the moon (it had been a particularly terrible writers’ meeting) and Sera had tossed out her usual pitch for a gay-themed episode. “I adore love triangles, especially when the tension goes all three ways.” She paused. “Homoerotic subtext, I mean.”
Kripke had stared at her accompanying obscene gesture, rubbed his bald spot, and sighed. “Yeah, we got that, Sera. Thanks.”
“I’m just making sure you get what I mean,” she’d said, pulling her much-abused script back towards herself.
“I’m pretty sure retarded francophone children from the seventeenth century could catch your meaning,” Jensen had assured her.
So yeah, Jensen pretty much had the most cake job ever. He got to write cracked-out scripts about insane secret military ops. His only constraint (which was largely self-inflicted if what the other writers churned out was any indication) was that he had to try to keep the inane dialogue to a minimum. If he occasionally wrote about aliens threatening the American Embassy in Prague, or Cobra kidnapping the President’s niece and brainwashing her full-on Patty Hearst-style, nobody said a thing. It was when he tried to give Scarlett jobs that actually might not inspire a hundred online metas on the show’s slap-you-in-the-face-with-its-giant-cock brand of misogyny that his job got difficult.
“You’re just trying to make your girlfriend happy,” Sera teased him.
“Oh, I’m sorry for pointing out that our show is incredibly sexist,” he protested. He pointed at a recent article from Entertainment Weekly about that very thing, which he’d framed and hung on the wall in the writers’ room. Someone had written Damn the man! on the glass in green Sharpie. Someone else drew a big red dick under that.
“All America cares about is seeing her in skintight leather, Jensen,” Sera said not unkindly. “Trust me, baby, nobody gives two shits that Scarlett supposedly graduated college at twelve when she’s got a rack like that.”
“Wow,” he replied, staring at her a little in awe. “You are so writing for the right show.”
She cackled. “I know, right? Fuck my ovaries!”
--
The network announced it was bumping the American Hero finale back a couple of weeks to accommodate American Idol, so suddenly the writers had a little break. Jensen was glad. He was getting tired of dealing with Duke’s psyche or Scarlett’s shrieking. Plus, it meant he had a few days’ break and he could wear his glasses all the time, scratch himself whenever he felt like it, and eat progressively stankier Chinese takeout for every meal.
Jensen was taking full advantage of his freedom while she was off doing some press shindig for the show he hadn’t been invited to. He wasn’t bitter. He had a four-day-old carton of moo go gai pan in his lap, a little army of empty Molson bottles lined up on the coffee table, and his comfiest pair of sweatpants keeping his balls toasty. He was the happiest man in LA right then, probably.
He had Zeppelin on the stereo and was seriously considering lighting his bong and working on his novel when the front door opened. “Jensen?” he heard Danneel yell from the foyer and he peeled himself off the couch to go see what she wanted.
“You’re home, uh, a lot sooner than I thought you would be,” he said awkwardly, standing in the doorway between the entryway and the dining room. She bit her lip and fidgeted with her top. It looked new.
“You’re looking kind of… ripe,” she commented. She glanced around, frowning at the dirty clothes hanging from the banister and the pile of takeout receipts and unopened mail next to the door. Now that he thought about it, the whole house had a little bit of a funk.
“Vacation,” he said, shrugging and scratching his beard. He took a step toward her to kiss her hello, but she took a step back toward the door and broke eye contact.
“Jensen,” she said after a second. “Jensen.”
He stared at her. His pulse started to pick up and he could just feel a flush starting on his chest and creeping up to his face. “What?” he said, trying to keep his voice calm.
She sighed. “Can we go into the living room-maybe sit down?”
“Seriously?” he said after a second.
“Jensen…”
“Are you breaking up with me?” he asked. He didn’t even care that his voice cracked.
She took a few steps closer and raised her hand to put it on his arm, but he glared at it like it was personally responsible (which, really, it could be) and she let it hover in the air for a minute before she snatched it back and ran it through her hair like that’s what she meant to do all along. “Jensen, this can’t be a surprise to you,” she said finally, brushing past him and heading in to the living room.
“The moon exploding would be a smaller shock,” he muttered, following behind her.
Danneel stopped in front of the couch and looked around. “What?” she said distractedly.
“Nothing,” he said. He stared at his collection of beer bottles and suddenly wished there were many, many more of them. Because that would mean he was smashed off his face that this whole thing might be a really awful hangover dream.
“It’s just that… this can’t be surprising, Jensen,” she said, stooping to wipe some invisible crumbs off the couch before sitting down gingerly and looking up at him with a beseeching look on her face. “This whole relationship hasn’t been working for a long time now and-”
“What?” He blinked.
She looked mildly surprised, and then she busied herself with moving the carton of Chinese food farther away from where she was sitting. “Our relationship is broken, Jensen.”
“We’ve been together four years,” he said, taking a seat in the ratty old recliner he’s had since he was in college. He didn’t think he’d ever seen Danneel touch it, but he liked how half the springs in the seat were busted and made a nice cup for your ass, and he liked that the nap of the burgundy velour was worn away in places.
Daneeel sighed and swallowed. He could actually see her changing tactics, like she wanted to ask him why he was making her breaking up with him so difficult. “We haven’t been happy in a long time, Jensen. Not really. Maybe it’s not you-maybe it’s just me, okay?”
“There’s someone else, isn’t there?”
“No, Jensen. I just need my space and-”
“You really are a terrible actress sometimes,” he said quietly.
“Fine!” she snapped. “Yes, there is someone else. I met him while I was out having a life that isn’t mostly on a computer screen, okay? God.” They stared at each other for a long time, before she cracked first and looked away.
“Get out of my house,” he said finally, hoisting himself out of his chair and going into the kitchen. He could hear her get up to follow him, but he stopped. He didn’t even turn around, just said, “I mean it. I need you to not be here.”
He ate a carton of rocky road with a fork because he didn’t have any clean spoons, fell asleep in his recliner, and woke up a few hours later with a headache and a handful of missed calls from people he didn’t want to talk to.
--
The bedroom door thumped open. “Wake up, lardass. It’s seven PM.”
“Eat shit and die,” Jensen growled, though he was sure the effect was somewhat dampened by the pillow over his head.
Steve was Jensen’s best friend. It was mostly just an abusive relationship that Jensen couldn’t walk away from, but he knew Steve meant well. Most of the time, anyway. He figured Steve was just unhappy because he had a fancy degree in music and he was using it to compose the music for American Hero, which everyone agreed was really the worst show on Fox. And that was saying something.
“Come on, get up,” Steve wheedled. “I want to go see Watchmen again.”
“I do not want to see Watchmen again,” Jensen said wearily, not bothering to pull his head out from under his pillow. “I didn’t want to see Watchmen the first seven times we went. I did not like the book, I do not like Jeffrey Dean Morgan, and you know I can’t deal with Zack Snyder after that time when we went to see 300 and I sat next to that guy who whacked off during the writhing oracle scene.”
There was a pause. Jensen could clearly imagine the look on Steve’s face. He was a little sorry that he couldn’t see it. “That is a motherfuckin’ lie and you know it, dude,” Steve said finally. “You know you want to perv on Rorschach’s creepy ass,” he added, like that was incentive. “Come on, I know you had a huge hard-on for that guy in Little Children.”
Jensen groaned and flopped over onto his back to look up at his best friend, knocking his pillow to the floor in the process. He gave it a sad look over the edge of the bed but made no effort to fish it off the ground. “Are we talking about Patrick Wilson? Because he’s Nite Owl-”
“We are not talking about Patrick Wilson.”
“Oh.” Jensen blinked. “Oh, ew. Get out of my room.”
Steve just laughed. “Pussy.”
Jensen threw his arm over his face and sighed. “Look,” he said, “I appreciate the effort, man, but I think I just want to lie here and pretend to be a corpse for a while.”
Steve made a face and flopped back on the bed himself, lying on the side where Danneel used to. His hair spread out across the pillow and looked a lot like hers. Jensen turned his head away and sighed heavily. “Look, man,” Steve said. “It’s been, like, a month. Sera called me and said you tried to get a script for the finale in where Scarlett dies and Snake-Eyes and Duke get gay married. Which, okay, it’s not like nobody sees that shit coming, but come on. That’s not why people watch your stupid show.”
“I can introduce you to a couple hundred women on the internet who would disagree with you,” Jensen said.
Steve snorted. “Women are batshit. Sera offered to marry you for that script, by the way. She told me to pass it on, though, since apparently you’re not taking her calls? I don’t even want to know.”
“This is where you tell me I need to fuck my way to absolution, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Steve said immediately. “Come on, sad face. The night’s a’ wastin’ and you smell like a dirty sock after a bad night out.”
--
The first night, he meets a tall, stacked blonde who swallows him right down without any hint of a gag reflex.
It goes well until he’s going down on her, two fingers in, and she yells out, “Oh, yes! Fuck! Teabag my hamster!”
Two days later, he meets a spectacularly hot guy and actually starts to cry when he discovers the guy is hung like a hamster.
--
Finally, about a week after that, Sera sat him down in her office and frowned at him. “You need a vacation,” she said. “You are the most miserable, pathetic creature in the world right now and you need to get out of LA immediately.”
“That actually sounds good,” he agreed. “You know, Danneel always talked about-”
“Absolutely not. Whatever you’re about to say, I forbid it,” Sera said, thumping her hand on her desk.
“I was going to say skiing in Whistler-you know, Vancouver? Uh, Canada? She fell in love with it when she was filming up there before she got the role on American Hero.” He could see Sera’s expression softening so he soldiered on. “I’ve always wanted to learn how to ski, anyway. I’ve never even lived somewhere with snow, y’know? That’s just sad.”
“It’s smart is what it is,” Sera muttered, shuddering. “I hate snow.”
“There was this one resort she always mentioned. A smaller one, not as touristy.”
Sera gave him a half-smile and shrugged. “I still don’t like it, but this is the first time I’ve seen you smile in a month, so I’ll allow it,” she said. She turned her iMac so that he could see the screen and pulled up Safari. He didn’t even bat an eye that her visible tab appeared to be a graphic guy-on-guy love scene. She shot him a grin and opened a new window.
“What are you doing?” he asked, watching as she pulled up her Google homepage.
“We’re planning your trip, dummy. Now what’s this resort called?”
“Singer something,” Jensen said. “They’re really discreet about stuff, apparently.”
Sera typed. The first google result was for Singer Resort Lodge, a “five-star destination in beautiful Whistler, British Columbia.” The photograph on the splash page featured a man with goggles and impressive dimples coming to a dramatic stop at the bottom of a mountain, an arc of powdery snow kicked up behind him.
“This the place?” Sera asked.
“This is the place,” Jensen agreed, hoping all the men in Canada looked like that. He was done with women for a while.
--
And pretty much the next thing Jensen knew, the season wrapped and he found himself in Canada. They’d tried to end it on a satisfying note, since the network was dragging its feet in announcing pickups and cancellations for the ‘09-‘10 season, with a predictable near-death experience for Duke at the hands of Cobra, a predictable kiss between Scarlett and Snake-Eyes, and the predictable obliteration of several dozen red-shirts.
Jensen tipped his cabbie and grabbed his bags, looking up at the lodge and taking a deep breath. There wasn’t any snow lying around, here at the bottom of the mountain, especially at the tail end of March, but the slopes looked white and smooth enough. He felt a little ridiculous swearing his big ski jacket, but it had been too awkward to pack in a bag. His shirt was sticking to him in very uncomfortable ways, chafing a little as he crossed the lobby.
The girl at the front desk was pretty, small and dark-haired with fantastic lips that stretched into a welcoming smile as he approached. “Welcome to Singer Resort Lodge,” she said as he set his wallet and sunglasses down. “What can I do for you today, sir?”
“I need a room-I mean, I called, like, a week ago and got a reservation, but I was kind of hoping you might’ve had a cancellation or something and I might get a room with a view,” Jensen explained awkwardly. He unzipped the jacket and exhaled loudly in relief as cool air hit his chest. “It doesn’t have to be a great room, or anything. It can even be a smaller, crappier one than the one I’ve got. I just want to see trees and snow and sky when I look out my window, you know?”
She looked amused. “So… you’re checking in?” she asked politely.
“Oh! Yes. Sorry. It’s been a real motherfucker of a month for me.” He shook his head and handed her his passport. “Should be under Ackles.”
She glanced up at him for a second, eyes narrowed. “Hey, were you on-”
“Yes,” he said, cutting her off. “It was a very long time ago and I was young and stupid enough to think that I could appear in a daytime soap and retain my dignity.” Her eyebrows raised a few notches and he sighed. “If you’re wondering about that, too, the answer is no. I failed to retain any dignity at all. It’s very embarrassing.”
“Uh, good to know, Mr. Ackles,” she said, grinning. “I was going to ask if you were on Access Hollywood a few weeks back, but now that you’ve mentioned it, you do look like Eric Brady.”
Jensen considered pulling his hood up. It would flop down and cover his face, which while tremendously dangerous if he were hurtling down a ski slope at thirty miles an hour would be fucking convenient to hide himself when women starting talking about that dark period in his life.
“Yes, I was on Access Hollywood a few weeks back,” he said dully. “I’m a TV writer.”
She grinned. “Singer Lodge is very popular with Hollywood stars who want to ski in anonymity,” she said cheerfully as she typed his information into the computer. “With the Olympics next year, we’re seeing a huge increase in tourism. What brings you to Whistler?”
“Uh, an overwhelming urge to learn to ski?”
“Well, you’ve come to the right place,” she said. She kept talking, but Jensen didn’t hear it over the horrified roaring in his ears that flared up when he caught sight of shining red hair being shaken out of a ponytail just across the lobby.
It was Danneel, wearing a fantastic powder blue jacket that actually fit her. She had goggles strapped to her forehead and fluffy boots.
“Fuck me,” he said.
“Excuse me?” the front desk girl said, looking up sharply. She noticed where he was looking and nodded sagely. “Yeah, Danneel Harris from American Hero. She comes here a lot. We actually named her suite the Danneel Harris suite. Original, huh?”
Jensen tried to find something to hide behind before she spotted him. “Uh, you remember how I mentioned I was a TV writer and then you said you saw me on Access Hollywood? The show I write for is American Hero, and that woman over there? I’ve been inside of her-she dumped me on Valentine’s Day.”
Front desk girl looked dubious. “What? Seriously?”
“Seriously,” Jensen said, hunching down and hoping the ridiculous coat was camouflaging him with the rest of the stupid-coat-wearing snow bunnies. He watched as front desk girl’s face flickered. “She saw me, didn’t she?”
“Yep.”
“And she’s coming over here right now with a look of righteous indignation on her face, isn’t she?”
“She’s kind of blotchy and red,” front desk girl said. “And I think she’s vibrating.”
“She gets like that when she’s in caffeine withdrawal,” Jensen replied automatically. “Is there a restaurant… I’m wearing the stupidest coat in the world right now, too. Fuck. Jesus, why have you forsaken me? Ganesh? Xenu?”
“Jensen?”
He gave front desk girl one last panicked look before turning to his ex girlfriend with a tight smile. The coat scraped loudly across the edge of the counter and everyone winced. “Hi, uh, Danny,” he said.
She didn’t look amused, mostly just beautiful and annoyed. “What are you doing here?”
“Skiing?” he said weakly.
“Skiing. In Vancouver. Weeks after we break up?” She narrowed her eyes at him. “Did you know I was going to be here?”
He shook his head. “Trust me, Elta, I would be in Daytona Beach right now if I’d known you were going to be here this week,” he said.
Danneel blinked. “What? Oh, well, okay.” She looked like she wanted to say more, but a pair of arms wrapped around her waist from behind and a face appeared over one of her shoulders.
“Come on, baby, the bald waiter hooked me up...” the man said in a gravelly voice that matched his rugged, stubbly face.
“Holy shit,” Jensen said, staring.
Danneel winced and extricated herself from the circle of arms. “Jensen, this isn’t-”
“Oh, hi,” the man behind her said, offering a hand, “I’m Jeff Morgan. You look familiar. Have I worked with you?”
Jensen stared at the outstretched paw for a second, then slowly offered his own, which was promptly swallowed up in an overly friendly grip, pumped a few times, and dropped like a crushed soda can.
“No, Jeff, this is Jensen,” Danneel said in a way-too-high voice. “My ex-boyfriend.”
“Oh, right. Well, how the hell are you, Jensen? I’ve heard… almost nothing about you, actually, except that our girl here is jealous of your eyelashes.”
“They really are impressively long and lush, Mr. Ackles,” front desk girl added, butting into the conversation. “Here’s your key card and a copy of the Whistler visitor’s guide, along with a little packet with everything that is included in your package. I was also able to get your that upgrade you requested, unlimited time on the slopes and the Jessica Alba suite.”
Jensen stared at her for a second and she winked exaggeratedly. “Oh, right!” he said. “Yeah, thank you!”
“Okay, well, if you have any questions or you need anything, don’t hesitate to phone us here at the desk. My name is Genevieve, by the way.”
“Thanks,” he said awkwardly, shoving the pile of papers into his carry-on bag and pocketing the little envelope holding his keycard. He lurched around to turn back to Danneel and Jeff, who were whispering furiously at each other. “Well, I’ll see you around,” he said stiffly.
“Yeah, man,” Jeff said, grinning. “Hey, by the way, I like your coat.”
Jensen walked away, contemplating all the ways he could commit suicide at a ski resort. None of them involved the lifts, but several made creative use of ski wax.
--
Ten minutes later, Jensen was facedown on the bed, contemplating how long it would take him to suffocate in the down comforter when the phone rang. He grabbed the handset from the base on the bedside table and propped it against the side of his head, somewhere in the vicinity of his ear. He grunted an unintelligible greeting.
“Uh, Mr. Ackles? It’s Genevieve from the front desk.”
Jensen sat up and scratched the side of his face. “Oh,” he said. “Is something, uh, wrong?”
“I didn’t want to ruin your dramatic exit earlier, but you didn’t actually pay for the room,” Genevieve said sheepishly. “We need a credit card number on file in case you decide to pull a Led Zeppelin and, like, throw a TV out the window and sexually assault a groupie with a fish.”
“That was actually their manager who did that,” Jensen said after a second. “And I’ll be right down.”
--
That night, Jensen headed down to the restaurant down in the lobby, which was apparently included as part of the resort experience. Jensen figured that it fucking better be, the amount he was dropping on the whole vacation. After a sad room service dinner and some of VH1’s frightening idea of reality, he really needed a drink.
The bartender was a tall, square-jawed guy with messy dark hair and slightly odd cadence to his voice. “What can I do for you today, sir?” he asked politely.
Jensen shrugged. “Uh, how ‘bout a Jack and Coke?”
The bartender looked at him with concern. He had blue eyes. “Are you sure, man?” he asked slowly. Jensen wondered briefly why the hotel was letting a guy tend bar when he was clearly baked out of his gourd. “You don’t really look like you should be partaking of a large quantity of alcohol right now.”
“Excuse me?”
“I mean, it’s not really any of my business what toxic shit you decide to put into your body, but by the looks of the bags under your eyes, the sallow state of your skin, and the tension in your shoulders, I’d say you’re in serious need of some tofu and some zen.”
Jensen stared up at the guy, trying to figure out if he was serious or not. If he wasn’t, then Jensen had a date with the management for hiring dicks; if he was, then clearly Jensen had farther to go to escape the L.A. loony bin than he had previously thought. “Excuse me?” he asked.
“Orange juice,” the bartender replied blithely. “Perhaps tomorrow I’ll make it a tequila sunrise, after you’ve spent the day on the slopes and all your have to show for it is a severe case of windburn and a firm hatred of whichever lucky ski instructor gets to break your spirit.” He slid a glass across the bar and smiled sagely. “For now, however, you just get juice. And it's not even from concentrate.”
“Um, okay then,” Jensen said, raising his glass in a toast that he couldn’t even manage to make properly mocking.
--
He ran into Genevieve as he trekked back across the lobby to the elevators.
“Mr. Ackles!” she said, smiling. She had a coat on and her purse in hand, apparently on her way home. “You’re walking in an awfully straight and steady line for just coming from the bar.”
“I just spent the last hour drinking orange juice and hearing about Tibet,” Jensen said tightly. “I am about to go upstairs and raid my minibar for a twenty-dollar bottle of vodka that isn’t big enough to get a woodland creature tipsy.”
She looked instantly sympathetic. “Ah, Misha’s working tonight,” she said, nodding. “Next time he does that? Just call him a Communist. He’ll clam right up, get you your drink, and leave you alone. I mean, there might be arsenic in your drink when you get it, but you won’t have to hear about Namaste anymore.”
“Great,” Jensen said. They stood there in slightly awkward silence for a second. Genevieve fiddled with her purse strap. “So I was thinking I should get started on those ski lessons tomorrow.”
She smiled. “There’s a list of instructors in your info packet,” she said, nodding. “I recommend either Milo or Jared. Now, Milo kind of looks like a stiff breeze would blow him away and but he’s really serious about skiing in a technical, dedicated kind of way. He qualified for Torino in slalom but he broke his collarbone, like, right before the Games.”
Jensen was impressed. “That sounds good,” he agreed. “I’ll look him up tomorrow.”
“He’s usually booked up pretty solid. Jared’s probably your better bet,” she said. “Jared’s a sweetheart. Built like a Mack truck and pretty much the nicest guy you’ll ever meet. Milo can be kind of a hardass sometimes.”
“Do I look like I need delicate handling?” Jensen bristled.
“Kind of, yeah,” she said, smiling a little. She punched him lightly on the shoulder. “Hey, good luck, buddy. I’ll see you in the morning, okay?”
“Night,” he said, shoulders slumping as he watched her disappear around a corner by the sundry shop. As he watched her go, he realized that the lobby was pretty full of people going about their evenings, so he sat down on a nearby squashy chair and people watched like he hadn’t in a long time.
There was an elderly couple cuddled up on a nearby couch, both sipping from demitasse cups and smiling at each other. A squinty blond guy was heading for the bar with a distinctly annoyed look on his face. The pretty, much younger blonde girl on his arm seemed oblivious, chattering away a mile a minute and gazing up at him adoringly. A couple of guys still in their ski gear clomped over to a table over by the floor to ceiling windows that lined the back of the room, laughing and carrying on. Behind them, the darkness outside and the lobby lights obscured the spectacular view of the mountain.
Just like that, Jensen had an idea for his novel.
He still went to bed early, though.
--
It was still dark out when he woke up the next morning, but no amount of rolling over and trying to pretend to be asleep worked, and he just gave up pretending around five-thirty. He glanced over the room service menu for about ten seconds before deciding to just head down to the twenty-four-hour restaurant to try his luck.
There was a surprisingly large number of people down in the lobby, but Jensen figured they were the ones who subscribed to the idea that the early bird got nicer worms or whatever when it came to the slopes.
“Do you want to wait a few minutes for your wife to come down, dude?” the waiter asked, rubbing his hand over the hazy fuzz of black stubble covering his scalp.
“No wife,” Jensen said, shoving his hands in his pockets.
“Girlfriend? Boyfriend?” the waiter tried, grabbing two menus and waving them at Jensen.
“All by my lonesome,” Jensen replied.
The waiter stopped and raised an eyebrow. “What, seriously?”
Jensen followed him through the restaurant to a table in the back, by the windows. “Why does everyone think it’s weird?”
“Um, because it’s weird,” the waiter said, still looking at him like he wasn’t quite right in the head. “Dude, nobody up and decides to just go skiing in Whistler by himself. This is a family destination.” He gestured around the room. “Look around. You got Squinty and his little blonde over there, total newlyweds. They got caught having sex against an ice machine last night. Now, I think she kind of looks like an underage bobblehead doll, but whatever. To each his own. Look at Jeffrey Dean Morgan and the hot chick from the gay G.I. Joe show.”
Jensen froze and slowly turned his head in the direction the waiter was pointing, and sure enough there they were. “Oh, Jesus,” Jensen moaned. He collapsed into his seat with his back to them.
“Oh, wait,” the waiter said after a second, eyes comically wide. “You’re the ex-boyfriend with the terrible timing, aren’t you? Gen mentioned you. Dude, that sucks. You didn’t come here to, like, stalk her, did you?”
Jensen pinched the bridge of his nose and counted to ten. “No, I did not come to stalk her. Why does everyone keep asking me that? Do I look creepy? No. I don’t even look dangerous. I’m pretty enough that I probably couldn’t intimidate third-graders. I am not stalking Danneel Harris, okay?”
The waiter didn’t say anything for a second then he nodded and grinned. “Uh, here’s your menu. My name’s Mike. The special this morning’s the French toast.”
“Great. I’ll have that, a side of bacon, and a Bloody Mary,” Jensen said through bared teeth. “You can keep the celery. And the tomato juice. Actually, just bring me vodka. Lots of vodka.”
--
Jensen was halfway through his second piece of French toast when his phone buzzed with a text from Steve.
freeze to death yt fucker?
He shook his head but had to smile a little.
fml daneels here at singer, he sent back.
The phone rang before he even finished chewing his next bite.
“What the fuck? Is that a joke? Because it’s a sick fuckin’ joke,” Steve said as soon as Jensen hit the green button.
“Hello to you, too, asswipe,” Jensen snapped. “My flight was fine. My room is epic. Thank you for asking.”
“I could give a shit if they put you in the fucking Presidential suite, numbnuts,” Steve replied. “Wanna tell me how you managed to end up at the same resort as the woman who busted your heart into a bunch of Chiclet-sized pieces?”
“You know what else?” Jensen asks, cramming an entire rasher of bacon into his mouth and chewing loudly. “She’s here with the goddamn Comedian.”
“Which comedian?” Steve asked. “Tell me it’s not Carlos Mencia.” He paused. Jensen winced in anticipation of whatever was about to come out of Steve’s mouth. “Actually, no. Tell me it is so I can laugh at you for the rest of time for getting dumped for Carlos Mencia.”
“Jeffrey Dean Morgan, asshole. The Comedian,” Jensen said slowly.
“Oh,” Steve said softly. “Well, at least… I mean, look on the bri… yeah, I got nothing. I’m sorry. I would break up with you for Jeffrey Dean Morgan and I don’t even like dick.”
Jensen stared at his fork and thought about stabbing himself with it, but the mess and the medic’s visit didn’t seem worth it. “I’m going to go ski now, okay?”
“Please don’t die. Dying means Danneel wins, okay?”
“Got it.”
He hung up and finished his breakfast. He had some skiing to do.
--
Ski lessons were totally included in the package, so all Jensen had to do was head out to the Singer Resort shack over at the mountain and sign up. The blonde behind the desk kept snapping her gum loudly while he gave her his information and signed a waiver that he wouldn’t sue the resort if he broke his spine or something.
“Now, both of our instructors are out until nine-thirty, but you’re welcome to leave your gear here and head into the Village to kill time,” she was explaining when the door to the office banged open.
“Hey, Kristen, got anybody? My seven o’clock took one look at the lift and ran,” a man laughed. Jensen could hear a zipper being drawn down and elastic being snapped, but he was trying to wade his way through the legal jargon in the waiver and didn’t turn around right away.
“It’s your lucky day, Mr. Ackles,” she said, grinning. “Because right behind you is Jared Padalecki and he’s the best damn ski instructor in Whistler.”
Jensen turned to greet his new teacher and immediately forgot how to speak English.
“Aw, K-Bell, you’re gonna go and make me blush. Anyway, hi,” said the same smiling gorgeous face from the resort’s splash page, holding out a hand to shake. Jensen just stared at him and felt small. “Kristen talks big game, but I guess I don’t completely suck.”
“Jensen,” he managed to reply after his brain powered back on.
“You ever been on a pair of skis?” Jared asked, taking in Jensen’s lack of gear with the beginnings of a smirk.
“This trip was kind of a whim,” Jensen admitted.
“Yeah, you’re the guy who got dumped for Jeff Morgan. I’ve heard.”
“Jesus Christ,” Jensen said, feeling his face go pale. “Do you people have nothing else to talk about?
“Honestly?” Kristen asked, raising her eyebrows. “Nothing whatsoever.”
“I should have gone to Australia,” Jensen muttered.
“Well, you’re here now,” Jared said cheerfully, zipping his coat back up. “Let’s head out to the rental station and get you outfitted, then we’ll hit the hill. Sound good?”
--
The rest of the day did not improve.
Several hours later, Jensen found himself being carried from a large SUV and into the lodge. On the other hand, the clinic had given him Vicodin and he was seeing shit.
“You know, when I said ‘hit the hill’ I meant it like a figure of speech,” Jared claimed as they passed through the vestibule and front doors. “I’ve never seen what happened to you happen to anyone in my life!”
“The universe wants me to just give up and die,” Jensen said morosely, hiding his face against Jared’s shoulder. He tried to block out the fact his right leg felt like it was on fire from calf to halfway up his thigh, but it was either think about the pain the Vicodin couldn’t get rid of or focus on the fact he was being carried like a girl. He preferred actual pain.
“I’ve never seen the human knee bend like that,” Jared continued, sounding awed. “It was amazing.”
“You’ve never seen it because it’s not supposed to happen like that!” Jensen snapped. “And put me down!”
Jared ignored him. “You want to head up to your room?”
Jensen thought about it, but he didn’t want to find himself in an elevator still in this guy’s arms. With his luck, it would be Danneel and Jeff who shared the car with them. At that horrible thought, he looked around, but they didn’t appear to be loitering in the lobby.
“There’s a couch in the elevator, you freak. I’ll plop you on it and you can lick your poor bruised ego for a couple of minutes until I have to pick you back up and drag you to your room when we reach your floor.”
“You’re really pretty. Oh, wow. I’m sorry, I’m pretty high right now,” Jensen admitted. “All I got is that holy shit, you’re carrying me like-dude, I am almost two hundred pounds of muscle and you’re carrying me like… like… something light. I am really high right now and I need you to put me down.”
“Ding,” Jared said. Well, to be fair, that might have been the elevator arriving. Jensen found himself rather unceremoniously dumped on a bench at the back of the car.
“I’m on six,” Jensen said.
“Thanks,” Jared replied, jabbing the six and then pressing the door close button about fifty times like that was going to miraculously make everything faster.
“You know, it’s only going to move as fast as it’s going to move,” Jensen pointed out. “Going Full Metal Jacket on the button isn’t going to do anything but give you carpal tunnel and me a headache.”
“I’m starting to think I should have left you to either freeze to death or get run over by passing skiers on the slope,” Jared replied, smiling.
Jensen leaned back against the wall behind him and shook his head. “Some vacation this has been,” he muttered.
“Just think, you only checked in yesterday,” Jared pointed out as the car reached the sixth floor.
The pain in his knee had gone down considerably just over the elevator ride and Jensen waved him away when he turned around. “No, how about you help me limp the rest of the way there, okay? I don’t really feel like playing blushing bride to your prince charming as you ferry me over the threshold.”
Jared gave him an odd look, but Jensen was too busy trying to use the fichus in the corner to pull himself to a standing position.
--
Jensen spent the next two days hobbling between the lobby restaurant, where he tried to eat his way to happiness, and the awesome deck overlooking the mountain, where he sat and watched brightly colored, vaguely humanoid shapes hurtle down the slope. Sometimes he took his laptop and camped out in one of the big squashy easy chairs in the lobby, right in front of the fireplace. There were only so many places where he could sit with his leg up, but the hotel staff seemed to have some kind of agreement to be ridiculously accommodating.
They kept trying to keep him company, too. Which, he would admit, was pretty awesome of them. Jared and Kristen, the ski shack girl, would show up every so often, too. In fact, Jared probably showed up the most, and he clearly felt awful about what happened to Jensen’s knee.
Jensen was trying to have a peaceful dinner
In June, the Diamondbacks come to town. The first thing Edwin Jackson does is come into the home clubhouse and attach himself to Verlander in the biggest, saddest hug any of them have ever seen. Perry has to look away.
"How's it?" Jackson asks, and Verlander just shakes his head. Jackson looks around, spots the empty locker with its lone 48 jersey and his whole face crumples. "Fuck this," he snarls. "Fuck this whole thing."
Perry nods and throws a wadded up jock into his own locker with so much force it pulls a shirt off of a hanger. He has a feeling a lot of guys will be coming into the Tiger clubhouse this year, looking for ghosts.
"I'mma win this shit tomorrow, you watch," Jackson says, like he forgets he's in Sedona red and not home whites. "You fuckin' mark it down. Win it for him, yeah, yeah?"
Verlander nods. "Yeah," he says.
Jackson does win, too. He practically no-hits the Tigers in the process, while poor Andy Oliver looks spooked and gives up six runs in six innings, the excruciatingly slow-moving start where the other team nickels and dimes you to death.
In the fifth inning of that game, Robbie Weinhardt looks up from whatever silently annoying thing he was going, blinks at everyone in the bullpen, and says, "Do you think anybody would care this much if it was, like a black or a Latin guy who disappeared?"
Everyone goes silent, pivoting in place to stare at him. The big wad of gum drops out of Schlereth's mouth and lands with a wet splat on the concrete. Brad Thomas chokes on sunflower seeds and started coughing up shells. Perry's foot slips off the railing he'd been resting it on and he nearly overbalances his whole chair. None of them say anything.
"What?" Weinhardt says, blinking, like he hadn't expected such a reaction. Perry wants to throw something at his annoying wide-open kid's face, get him to shut the fuck up for five minutes for once.
Schlereth's face goes dark and kind of sad. "What the fuck, man?" he says after a long pause where everybody shares meaningful looks and Weinhardt looks more and more upset.
"What?" Weinhardt says again, clearly confused and stubborn enough not to just drop it. He blinks again, fluttering his freaky long eyelashes that always make Perry think of spider legs.
"You don't just say shit like that," Thomas says from his spot at the end of the row of them, shaking his head and crossing his arms. Perry looks over at him out of pure habit, the accent always so out of place.
Weinhardt sticks his lower lip out defensively, like pouting is going to make them stop staring at him. Perry spits to the side a bit more violently than usual and Weinhardt huffs. "Look, it's just… me and Rhymes were talking about it on the phone last night. About, you know, how everybody's talking about it everywhere, what might've happened."
"And Rhymes talks too goddamn much, don't he?" Perry finds himself snarling. Weinhardt shrinks back and Perry bares his teeth at him. "'Specially for a midget middle infielder in fuckin' Toledo."
"Yeah, and? We all think about it!" Weinhardt snaps after a second, finding his nerve or some backbone or something. He'd say more, but Oliver gives up another hit and they get Thomas up, 'get ready, Aussie, might get ugly quick, here.' Perry puts his feet back up on the railing.
"Dude, anybody disappears like that, it's news," Schlereth says. "Black, Hispanic, white kid from wherever. Where was he from, Jersey?" He glances at Perry, who nods. "Oh, that's right. You were calling him Guido during spring training."
Perry finds himself smiling at that. "Yeah, he gets all pissy at that." He's determined to use the present tense.
There are, as it turns out, precisely one hundred billion beautiful things in the world, and he doesn't want a single one of them. Those are just the things he can actually acquire, of course, but the Mona Lisa isn't really beautiful anyway, and why would he want it?
it's not like it's a surprise that he's into tall, beautiful brunettes, he thinks.
Vanessa had been the best accessory to bring to a funeral. She was lovely, she looked good in black, and she had loved Rick as much as he did. But like parents who divorce after losing a child, they had simply fallen apart. He hadn't been aware that his relationship with her had anything to do with any Rick Porcellos until she was packing her things and telling him this was for the best, and she was right.
September 16
In the end, Jensen decides that Food Porn isn't actually about food at all. Jared might play it like the whole thing was about the restaurant industry, or his hard-on for molecular gastronomy, or how to boil water-and maybe it was in the beginning. May it was in the middle, even. In the end, however, the blog boiled down to two things: Chef Guy's ginormous crush on Norm, for one, and his years-long quest to secure a reservation at El Bulli.
(and, okay, maybe a third: Jared's vociferous contempt for Pim Techamuanvivit, another food blogger who made good with a bestselling book, who had been nothing but unwaveringly gracious both times Jensen met her. For what it's worth, though, Jess hates her, too)
Now that one of Jared's objectives has been achieved, moving Jensen upstairs and all, his attention had focused completely on the other. It quickly became an obsession, and from there a problem. Jensen went from amused to slightly disturbed.
Now that Jared had achieved one of his objectives, moving Jensen upstairs and all, he had turned his attention to his other goal. It quickly became an obsession. He spent most of his time reading about El Bulli, often on his iPhone in inappropriate places. Jensen found it alarming
They went to the Giordano's on Belmont for early lunch, because Jared had Cubs tickets he didn't want to waste
“Well, can I just tell you how I’m about to take the most epic shit ever?”
“Um… I’d rather you not, if I do actually have a choice in this matter.”
“I’m just really excited.”
“About defecating.”
“Well, yeah. Shitting feels awesome, dude.”
“Well, I’m glad you’re glad about your bowel movements, I guess.”
“Damn right.”
“I can’t believe we just had this conversation.”
“I think I’ll crop-dust the hallway on my way to the bathroom.”
“You fart on my pillow and we’re gonna have a problem, son.”
El Bulli. Reservation. May 15, 2010 at 7.
I love you.
SPN will be closing at the end of October.