Padalecki Exanimating Services, PG 13, Part Two
The first vampire they interview seems largely undeterred by walking into a blowjob the next morning. Jensen lets go of Jared’s cock from his mouth with an obscene pop and Jared apologizes profusely, but the vamp's totally chill about it.
"No trouble," it keeps insisting in an accent Jared's pretty sure is supposed to sound Romanian. "Please, continue if you feel you must."
"We don't." Jensen says firmly. "Care for some tea?"
The vampire acquiesces, and Jensen gives Jared a warning look before disappearing into the kitchen.
Accordingly, they make awkward small talk until Jensen reappears.
"Murray here's seen the Exterminator firsthand,” Jensen says significantly as he re-enters the room, three cups levitating in front of him like small moons in orbit.
Jared raises his eyebrows. "That so?"
The vampire -Murray- nods emphatically. "That I did."
Jared and Jensen watch patiently as Murray digs out a hip flask from his pocket and tips two, three drops of dark liquid into his tea. As he returns the flask, his sleeve rides up and Jared sees his wrist is paler than the rest of him.
Murray notices him noticing. His voice goes soft and dangerous, no trace of an accent. "What you're hunting, this...woman. You're in way over your heads, Exanimator or no." Jared feels, rather than sees, Jensen look at him sharply.
Murray thrusts out his pale, pale hand. "See these?"
Up close, it's obvious what he's seeing: a fine patchwork of scars, each with a serrated edge like it's been drawn on with a screwdriver. Jared hears Jensen's sudden intake of breath.
He stays where he is, leaning back in his chair. "Pretty."
Murray draws his injured hand back. "Yes, quite. She did that."
He's standing up, adjusting his coat. His cup still lies on its saucer, untouched.
"Murray?" Jensen grits out.
"There is no going against life itself, boys." Murray announces. "The only useful piece of information I can impart is that this is where you two should get off this train. She'll have you in seconds."
Murray nods at Jared, who's still sitting in his chair with his fists clenched. "It was good to put a face to the name, Exanimator."
Jared nods curtly. "If that's about as helpful as you're ready to be, then you might as well leave."
He can feel Jensen's incredulity hitting him in waves, so strong Jensen's probably unconsciously doing mirror touch. He glances at him briefly, lets his anger shine through in his eyes, but when he looks back Murray's gone.
"Murray, invitation rescinded." Jared says clearly.
The walls of the room glow faintly.
"What the fuck, Jen?" a satisfying crack as Jared brought his fist down on the table. "You brought him here for, what, therapy sessions? To show off your new scary Exanimator boyfriend? Seriously, what the fuck?"
Jensen's eyes are wide and startled, and he's the palest he's been in the past twenty-four hours, almost transparent. "I-"
"And what, maybe you wanted to show off apple pie life you're living, instead of clanking rusty chains somewhere?"
Jared's so pissed off he's shaking with it. He sets his cup down with deliberate care, and it clinks tunelessly against the saucer.
Jensen's eyes harden and briefly, his form flares bright like a beacon. "Fuck you, Jared. You think I went through all that trouble of dragging him out here so he could tell us what to do and how to do it? I didn't fucking know. I was desperate, Jared! We're fucking going in circles chasing a myth, and you were out there being the Department’s golden boy, their precious little pet Exanimator." Jensen spits out the word like it's burned the inside of his mouth.
"You're the one who suggested it in the first place! You said you could handle it!"
"Not this way, Jared." and Jensen's breathing hard through his nose, looks like he might shimmer out entirely and where would that leave Jared?
He bites down hard on the inside of his lip, but the question escapes anyway. "Got any other bright ideas, then?"
Jensen meets his eyes head-on. "You know what I mean. There aren't any answers for us on this dimension, Jay."
Jared stands up so fast the china rattles on the table. He snatches a handful of Jensen's shirt and drags him close, taking perverse pleasure in the way Jensen stumbles.
Jensen slams up against him, human-solid and hot as a furnace, and Jared's dick twitches with interest at the way their hips notch together, the hard line of Jensen's thighs.
"You, you do not get to talk about that place like it's a fucking library." Jared hisses. Jensen glares right back up at him, so palpably angry Jared can count his fucking eyelashes. Jared's dick goes from half-hard to nearly ripping the seam of his jeans at the observation.
He licks his lips and tightens his grip on Jensen's T-shirt. "Not gonna be able to drag you out again, Jen," he whispers, ducking his head to taste the shell of Jensen's ear. He feels Jensen's entire body shiver. "Don't think you can make it out on your own, either."
He thinks about all the Reapers out there, just waiting to drag Jensen off to Purgatory. Some combinations of luck and timing and Jared’s rep had kept Jensen in this dimension for so long: if he just walks into Purgatory, Jared’s never going to see him again.
Despite the way his hands are clutching at Jared’s waist, Jensen's voice is even, almost annoyed. "I can do it, Jared. Last time you were-"
"Mmhmm." Jared chases the phantom taste of salt on Jensen's jaw down his neck, tongues at the dip of his collarbone until Jensen's clinging to him and shivering continuously, making these little noises. He raises his head long enough to say, "Still as unholy as all fuck, Jen. Still can’t make it into Purgatory to drag you back. Still an Exanimator."
Jensen makes an urgent noise in reply, thumbing Jared's jeans open and sliding a hand in his boxers. Jared hisses through his teeth at first contact, his head falling back a little.
"'Sides," Jared gasps as Jensen sinks to his knees. "It's not like the folks up there are real helpful."
Jensen looks up at him, so close his every breath slides up Jared's cock like a touch, making it twitch and leak. "Jared." Jensen says, painstakingly, and Jared whimpers a little at the vibration of his voice. "Do not talk to me about Purgatory when I'm about to blow you."
"Got that." Jared wheezes, and Jensen smiles beatifically, and sucks him down in one.
*
Despite the regular and mind-blowing sex that happens under their roof, things don't really settle after that.
Nothing noticeable, not really. Jensen's almost always already gone when Jared wakes up, and he doesn't bother with food anymore. It's not like he has to anyway. He always seemed to enjoy it, though, their little illusion of normalcy, and Jared was a little bit proud of himself for being able to give that to Jensen.
Not anymore apparently.
But it's not until Danneel drops by with groceries that it really hits Jared that he hasn't really talked to Jensen except when they're fucking in little over two weeks.
"So, Jen seems stressed," Danny comments in her offhand way while she unpacks oranges from the bags. She's actually levitating them, and Jared really, really hopes she doesn't try touching them. He's not ready to go into detail about the mechanics of Exanimation just yet with her.
"Yeah?" he looks up from his notes Jared's mildly apprehensive about how Danny's got practically no compunctions about stealing from the store she's haunting, but he's mostly glad someone's in charge.
Danny shrugs. "Very. He seems to grow more insubstantial by the day." she looks disapproving. "Did you do something?"
Jared sighs. He's just realized that Danny probably doesn't know the handy animation spell Jensen uses to keep raw food alive in their fridge, safe from Jared's radiation
Sure enough, the oranges in Danny's hands are starting to shrivel and go brown.
She looks down at them in confusion, then looks at him with her eyes wide.
"Protection charms on the walls," Jared lies seamlessly. He feels like there's a rock strapped to his chest, this weight that seems ridiculous and unnecessary stealing his breath.
He watches dully as she drops the blackened fruit in the trash. She gives him one last uncertain smile before she vanishes.
"Did I do something?" Jared asks Cad, who's dozing on his designated patch of carpet.
Cad does a bizarre cat version of a shrug.
"Thought so." Jared groans, and puts his face in his hands.
*
After the spirit throws him, he flies for an indeterminable time before he hits the mausoleum so hard it feels like he keeps going, through the surface and into the core of the planet.
Disoriented, his brain still two seconds behind and telling him he's still in freefall, he watches as the ghost moves forward.
He feels absurdly alone as it comes even closer, a middle-aged looking guy so powerful he looks more real than Jared does. He's got his rookie for company, but it doesn't look like it'll be for long: his own crash made him land badly, so that the kid's limbs are bent all wrong. He's making soft, hurt noises from where he's crumpled on the floor, a few feet away from Jared.
Jared has never felt more human in his life. Past his screwed up genetics, his badass radiation and his ability to degenerate any living thing, he's human, and a hell of a long way off from being invincible. This spirit's about to show him just how mortal he really is. This spirit is about to kill him.
He's lifted off the ground and every cell in his body tenses further in anticipation, but he never hits the ground.
Bewildered, the pain really setting in, he looks down to see a team of five Department spirits quickly and efficiently take the rogue out. All the Department ghosts are new, not really experienced in this kind of thing, but someone finally gets a curse through and they get him.
Right before Jared passes out, he misses Jensen so badly the darkness seems almost welcome in comparison.
*
He drifts in and out during the next hour, catching phrases like 'heavy internal bleeding' and 'fractured spine' while trying to communicate that he really, really needed to see Jensen.
He comes to for maybe the sixth time in what feels like a day feeling like his insides had been scraped out and kicked around before they were put back in.
It takes him a second to place the man on the bedside chair as Singer, and a little longer to realize he's still in the hospital. The room's not like any other hospital room he's seen before; iron walls and iron nails and it feels like he's in a tin can.
"What-"
Singer's head snaps up as Jared begins coughing. "Easy, son." He points at his throat. "Looks like it was real keen on strangling you."
Jared raises a tentative hand to his neck, and winces when he feels the line of bruises. He hadn't even noticed at the time, too busy holding it off from the main section of the building.
"It wasn't a C4," he says, remembering. "Whatever that was, that wasn't a C4."
Singer nods grimly. "The techs messed it up. It was a B2, and we would never have let you go in alone."
Jared's eyebrows rise, but then the last part of Singer's statement registers. "How's the kid?"
"Alive." The older officer leans back in his chair. "He's in bad shape, but he's gonna make it. He's in the main section of the hospital."
Jared nods. His throat acts up, almost choking off the question, but he gets it out anyway: "And does Jensen know that, that I-"
Singer smiles with no trace of humor. "We're sure as hell trying to tell him. That boy's real good at being untraceable."
The initial relief that Jensen doesn't actually hate him enough not to visit his (maybe) deathbed is drowned out by the sudden tide of fear. "Untraceable?" Jared asks sharply.
Singer nods. "None of the rituals worked. Rosenbaum and his team are trying it the hard way now."
Rosenbaum's team, Jared recalls, has twenty-odd spirits and vampires. It'll take them weeks to wad through urgatory, maybe months. He feels like someone poured icy water along his spine, and bites down hard on his lip until he sees stars to keep the panic in.
"Alright." He says cautiously. "Uh, can I talk to a doctor?"
Singer nods, and gets up. "I'll call yours in. They're keeping a distance because of the, you know," he gestures awkwardly at Jared.
"Yeah, I get it." Jared smiles a little.
He keeps his smile pasted on until Singer's well out of the room. Then he lets it slide, studies the IV for a second before ripping it out of him.
Thus freed, he slips out of bed quietly and tries not to fall over. Two more seconds spent trying to remember how to walk, and then he pads across the room and peers out the open door.
Like he'd guessed, they've put him in the basement. It's a good call, since he's about the last thing the people who come here need.
He summons up a rough idea of the layout of the hospital, closets and exits and the posts of the people who would try to stop him. He looks around for a weapon and grabs a pair of steel scissors, then realizes he has nowhere to hide it and reluctantly lets it go.
Then, as quietly as he can, he slips out of his room.
*
The man sitting at their kitchen table doesn't look up when Jared breaks in. A few tense seconds pass while Jared stares at him and the man stares at the glass of whiskey in his hands, and absurdly, Jared feels like he should apologize for intruding.
Jared clears his throat. No reaction. The man just kept staring, and the only sign of life was the way he was spinning his glass in slow, hypnotic circles.
"Hope you like the whiskey, at least." Jared tells his bent head. His muscles are straining in protest against being on the defensive for so long.
Finally, the man looks up at him, and Jared says, flatly, "Oh."
His pupils aren't there. Not like they’re pale or anything, they're simply absent. It's like looking into two silver pools that reflect nothing.
Which begs the question: "What the fuck is a Reaper doing here?"
The Reaper offered him the barest curl of a smile.
"Where's Jensen?" Jared asks, trying to keep his voice even, trying to keep his mind go where it's straining to go. It's not hard to think up worst case scenarios doing what Jared does for a living, even if Jensen's a ghost.
The Reaper looks like a middle-aged suburban dad out on his lunch break, minus pupils. When he speaks, it's in a normal voice, but it chills Jared straight down to the bone anyway. "He was late."
Jared looks at him through narrowed eyes. "Late for what." He doesn't make it sound like a question.
The Reaper smiles his bone-chilling smile again. "Whatever you prefer to call it. The Better Life, maybe. The Great Beyond."
Jared's fingers curl unconsciously. He's shaking now, shaking so hard he almost feels his dislocated bones rattle. "What did you do?" His voice is still even, barely.
“I came in to answer a few questions, like he asked me to. He was willing to take the risk of my hauling him off to Purgatory, apparently, and it didn’t pay off." He takes a swig of whiskey, and looks at Jared speculatively. "I'm sure he was aware of what I was."
Jared moves so fast even he has trouble working out what he's doing. He crashes into the Reaper's personal space, yanks him to his feet and gets right up in his face. "Which section?"
The Reaper's eyes go very wide. "You wouldn't-"
"After all the shit I take for trying to do the right thing, I'm allowed to stray, hell, it's practically encouraged." Jared snarls. "Which. Section."
"Nine," The Reaper spits at him, his voice dropping lower, etched with fire and brimstone.
Jared laughs in his face. "Next time you try to intimidate an Exanimator, don't. You're not very good at it."
He lets go of the fistful of the Reaper's suit, and the Reaper immediately doubles up coughing. Black smoke begins to pour from his skin and Jared stumbles a little as he gets out of the way. Outside, a fork of lightning streaks straight through the sky, ripping it in half.
The corpse hasn't even stopped steaming when Jared leaves the apartment and shuts the door behind him.
*
The bar's seedier than Jared remembers, seemingly jam-packed with dark corners and a mist of cigar smoke hanging in the air so thick he can almost reach out and touch it.
The bartender's a big guy, wearing a dirty red bandanna that stands out in the hazy darkness like a dried bloodstain. He grunts as he passes Jared a beer over the counter.
"You'd expect the bottle to make a path in the dust." Jared remarks to the man on th bar stool o his immediate right. "Doesn't quite live up to the status quo if the counter's clean."
The man snorts in gruff amusement.
Jared surveys him out the corner of his eye. Fifty-ish, with a grizzled face and a worn jacket.
"Huh." Jared says. "Somehow I keep expecting you to turn up in your robes."
"Sorry to disappoint." Jim grunts, and takes a long drink from his beer. "What do you want, Jared?"
"I'm in one of those situations where a person of some degree of holiness is required." Jared says, slowly. "And those happen to be in short order. I'm sure you understand, Father Beaver."
"Don't mince words, kid." Jim drinks again. "What do you really want?"
"I need something from Purgatory, Section Nine. To bring someone back."
"Impossible." Jim says immediately.
There's a tense sort of silence as Jared waits him out.
"Who have you lost this time?" Jim asks finally. The way he's handling his beer changes fractionally, grows more careful, absorbed.
Jared pretends not to notice. "A friend."
Jim raises his eyebrows. "You'll need to be more specific than that."
"That's if you agree to help me." Jared says, trying to keep his exasperation under wraps. He wouldn't be any use to Jensen pissed off.
Jim looks about as frustrated as Jared feels. "That's not how this works and you know it. I'll need to know what I'm getting into."
Jared nods curtly. "Jensen."
For a second, it looks like Jim's about to spray the drink of beer he just took through his nose. Jared watches, amused in a vague secondhand way, as he coughs and coughs and clutches at his sides.
"Son, you don't do that to men my age," Jim gasps, and Jared scoffs. "Jensen? You're not fooling around?"
Jared barks, "Do I look like I'm fooling around?" and there's an undeniable edge in his voice. "Sir." he adds, to cover it up.
Jim eyes him. "I'll have you know," he says in measured tones, like he's weighing each word in his mind carefully, "if I do this -if, mind you- I'll only be doing it because I owe you for saving my life, Jared, and for no other reason."
Jared smiles, showing more teeth than strictly necessary. "Wouldn't have it any other way."
*
What looks like roughly the entire Paranormal squad is waiting for him in his apartment when he gets back, Bobby Singer in the lead.
Jared collapses on the couch with a groan. "What now?"
"I think you know." Singer says, and jerks his head towards the kitchen.
His second-in-command, Lieutenant McCoy, looks sad. She's worked with him and Jensen before, and used to think the way Jared could provide a life for Jensen was nothing short of amazing. "Jared," she says, and then stops.
"You're smarter than this, Jared," Singer says. Jared feels every word like a blow to the head. "You don't get to gank Reapers just like that."
Jared looks down at his hands and tries his best to have faith. Faith in the squad team who swear Jensen's not on this dimension, faith in a preacher who promises to scour the next dimension, faith in Jensen to find his way home.
It's a losing battle and he knows it. Already he's thinking of escape routes and weak links and of running through the streets yelling Jensen's name.
He looks at McCoy. She looks helpless and a little like she's about to cry. Jared's never seen her like this before
"Take me in," Jared tells Singer, who looks relieved. "Might as well wait it out in the Department."
The spirits move to cuff him, and Jared holds his hands out obediently.
"How'd you swing it?" Singer asks, looking genuinely curious. "I mean, I thought a lot of red tape was involved with killing a Reaper." He gestures, and two junior officers frog march Jared to the door. "The ground splitting open and you getting struck down with lightning and whatnot."
Jared shrugs. "Everyone’s lenient on an Exanimator, I guess."
The words taste of ash and dust in his mouth. He leaves the dark apartment without looking back, head held high and an unnamed and relentless pain in his chest.
*
"You should get some rest."
Sandy's face is barely illuminated by the fluorescent lights and the glow of the monitor off her computer, but her expression is still recognizable as one of concern.
Jared makes a face, and attempts to sidetrack her. "Are these walls really laced with platinum? I bet they aren't."
Sandy raises her eyebrows. "Jared, you've been pacing that cell for three nights in a row. I don't think that-" she bites her lip, but ploughs on. "I don't think you're really helping Jensen by exhausting yourself."
Jared gives her a small nod of acknowledgment, and then goes back to monitoring cloud patterns through the tiny window of his makeshift cell.
*
By the sixth day of confinement, the doctors tell him that his ribs are mostly healed. Jared gives Singer a significant look at the news, but the officer ignores it completely and locks him right back up.
The officer who has the shift comes up to him noon-ish. "Visitor for you."
Danneel drifts towards the cell, looking perturbed. "This doesn't really look like they’re holding you to protect you, Jared. It looks like you're a wanted serial killer or something."
He grins wryly. "They mean well, I guess."
She nods. "If you squint just right, yeah." She looks down at her near-transparent shoes. When she looks back up, she's glowing a bit brighter, like she's just screwed up her courage. "There was a man looking for you. A...a priest, I think. I mean, I'm pretty sure, but-" her eyes meet his, "-there was so much blood."
Jared sinks on to the bed, his legs giving out. The world swims for three seconds, blurred whirlpool of color where the building used to be.
"What did he say?" he asks mechanically.
"That he couldn't find him." Danny pauses. "He kept saying that, tell Jared I failed, tell him he wasn't there."
"What had happened to him?"
"The priest?" Danneel waits for his nod, then says, "I don’t know. It looked like something had tried to claw his insides out." She stares at the lunar chart stuck on Jared's wall, not really seeming to register it. "I took him to the hospital as soon as I could, but they wasted a lot of time on ID. I'm not sure whether he's okay yet."
Jared forces himself to nod. It’s a little offbeat, a little mechanical, but it's the most he can manage. The inside of his mouth has begun to taste bitter and he keeps running his tongue over the backs of his teeth, making it worse.
Danneel nods back, and turns to leave. She pauses just as she's almost shimmered out entirely.
"One more thing." She says, almost tentatively. "The priest, he. He, uh, said something about a woman."
Jared’s on his feet faster than he could blink. "What woman?"
Danneel shrugs. "A woman, a dangerous one. Kept going on about how she got there first, how she would swallow him whole. He wasn't referring to himself, by the way."
An almost audible click as everything slides into place and the darkest of Jared's worst case scenarios come true. He can only stare as Danneel asks whether he’s okay, and then vanishes.
Like a talisman, his hand reaches for the charts on the wall. At least it's the right date.
*
A minute past midnight, Jared wakes up in his holding cell. He's lying in the same position he went to sleep in: arms crossed over his chest, body completely straight.
The room, however, has changed: the quality off the light is different, like it's coming from another source. None of the shapes are defined properly, like the whole scene's part of a smeared watercolor painting.
No matter how much he's been expecting it, Jared starts when the voice rises from the slanted shadows. "You’ve been acting out lately."
Jared watches as a man steps out of the shadows. He's tall, almost emaciated, with a mane of silver hair, wearing an ash-colored suit. A single ring glows bright on the middle finger of his right hand, a platinum band set with a dark stone.
Jared's never been sure what to call him, so he doesn't. "I've been provoked to."
The old man laughs. "Not accusing you of anything, Jared. Not yet."
"Thank you," Jared says, still on the defensive.
The man prowls around the room, studying the charts curiously, and then smiling his approval. "You've been expecting me."
Jared nods. "I may not have strayed before, but I do know how this works."
"Which is why you've always been my favorite." The man says, and Jared can actually hear the trace of fondness in his voice. The man turns to face him, still smiling a little. "Now, Jared. How has life been treating you?"
He makes it sound like a private joke they share, both intimate and entertaining. Jared feels a little sick, but he's still mostly numb.
"Fine," he replies, the words tasting of grit and sawdust.
"Though it does seem to like you less than you'd think." he gestures at the iron bars of the cell.
Before Jared can blink, before he can even blink, the old man's standing behind Sandy, who looks like she's fallen asleep at her desk. Jared's nausea grows.
"It seems she's the one who keeps you behind bars." The old man says in a soft voice.
He's reaching one long-fingered, skeletal hand towards Sandy's head when Jared finally gets his throat to open.
"Stay the fuck away from her!"
The world freezes. Jared can feel it.
The old man's gaze is calculating as it lands back on him, like he's sizing Jared up all over again. From the comparative distance, his eyes glow like embers at the bottom of a dark, dark pit.
Jared relents to the urge and calls the old man by the name he knows is the right one. "Not her, Death.”
Death smiles ruefully at him, the way a teacher would at a favorite student who gets an answer wrong. "And why not, Jared?" His smile grows colder, and the room follows suit. "Do you care for her?"
Jared's dimly aware that if he gets this one wrong, they're all fucked, Jensen most of all. But there's something about Death that really rubs him the wrong way. "Yeah, she's a friend."
Death continues to look at him, head cocked at an angle. "You really are the most unpredictable of them all, aren't you, Jared?" he asks softly.
The room's now cold enough to feel it dagger-sharp against his skin. He half-expects to see blood when he looks down at himself.
"You do realize," Death continues, "that that makes her a lost cause already?"
Jared forces himself to look up. It feels like his neck might snap from the impact, but he does.
A mist hangs above Sandy's head, swirling pink and green. As he watches, the vibrant colors dim into a murky grey, then eventually into the deepest black.
"Exanimator," Death says, in that voice that sounds like the soft sigh of falling leaves
Jared's nodding before he even registers it. "Yeah, yeah, hanging out after work is a bad idea if you have evil death radiation, got that one." He tries not to look at Sandy's peaceful expression and the storm above her head. "Jensen," he blurts out desperately. "Jensen doesn't get affected."
He sees the look on Death's face and adds, "He's my partner, he's a ghost. He's been taken, which is why I wanted to meet you in the first place."
Death's expression changes from mild inquiry to flinty-eyed suspicion. "What now, Jared?"
"The Exterminator," Jared says quickly. "She's got Jensen."
"And you want to find him," Death says, in an oddly flat voice.
Jared tries to think of an answer to that -it sounds too simple, less like the one most important thing he's done in his life- but in the end just nods.
"I can send you to where he is," Death says in the same hollow voice, "but you must remember, not everyone fears these powers you have." Death's eyes look almost smothered, like dying embers. "Not every being fears me, Jared, and therefore you have no power over them."
He sounds almost...defeated, receding into the form of the old man he's taken like a turtle into its shell.
That lasts for maybe five seconds at a stretch. Then the room temperature goes down further, and Death’s eyes look like a thousand condemned souls again. "Well, Jared?"
Jared stares back unflinchingly. All he can think of is this gap in his chest, the edges blackened and serrated, and that it's been almost a week since he last saw Jensen.
"Do it." He says clearly.
Part Three