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ladyjanellyNot spamming y'all tonight, really. Okay, maybe I am, but here, have some fic?
Beta by Embroiderama, thank you so much for the bunny and the look-over.
As usual for my unpimped stuff, this is something I'm working on. If you have any advice or concrit, I'd love to have it.
More Homeless Jensen
With the sun’s rise comes the return of patients, the arrival of more clinic workers, the end of Jared’s quiet time with Jensen. Between assisting with a teen with pneumonia and an old man with an infected scrape on his knee, Jared calls every shelter on their list, looking for a place Jensen can sleep off his beating in warmth and safety. The weather’s still too cold though, too many need services meant for too few.
The waiting room’s filling up, and the five beds they have in the back are all needed. Jared sees George looking at him, looking at Jensen and wondering why he’s not been kicked out in favor of someone in more critical need.
There’s only one thing to do, and screw the rules that say he shouldn’t. Jared can’t just dump him on the street. He grabs his car keys and goes to wake Jensen up.
Jensen's still on the exam table where Jared left him, blanket pulled up around his ears and the battered and filthy sneakers poking out of the bottom. “Hey,” Jared says, reaching to touch with the one hand, the other ready to restrain Jensen if he rolls off the bed or block a blow if he comes up fighting.
Jensen wakes slow and easy, the pain killers making him groggy. His color’s good though, and it looks like the Pedialyte has put a little moisture back into him. Keeping up a steady stream of soft words, Jared gets him dressed again, the clinic’s blanket wrapped around his shoulders. Dried blood is caked around the edge of his hairline where Jared missed a spot, and he makes a mental note to get that later.
Jensen rubs at his eyes like a child as Jared gets him on his feet. “Other people need the bed,” he says, “but I’ve got somewhere warm for you to rest for a little while.”
“Believes everything it sees,” Jensen replies, but he lets himself be lead through the back door of the clinic and into the little fenced-in parking lot behind it. “No filters, no lens.”
Jared squints against the bright sunlight and thinks that a filter would be kind of nice right about then, or at least some sunglasses. He unlocks the back door of his car. She’s ancient and half-rusted from the salt on the roads, but she still gets him to work and the heater runs.
“Watch your head,” he says and helps Jensen duck as he climbs inside. “Go ahead, lay down. You’re safe here. Nobody can get in here from the street, and nobody can come out of the building without me seeing them.”
While Jensen squirms around in the back seat, getting comfortable, Jared folds himself into the front seat and starts the engine. He looks back and catches a glimpse of wide eyes, too much white around the edges.
“Hey,” he says, “It’s okay. We’re not going anywhere. I just want to get the heat running before I have to go back in.”
Jared takes fifteen minutes, getting Jensen settled in his car, the heat turned down to a level that’ll keep it warm but won’t get too hot for comfort. George gives him a look when he comes in through the back door.
“I didn’t see that,” his superior says, worry etched into the lines of his face. The man’s seen a lot of hurt and hopelessness and Jared can’t take it personal that he doesn’t feel optimistic about Jared taking home a stray.
“Thanks,” Jared says. He’s not sure why he feels the need to justify this breech of conduct, but he does. Maybe because it’s so major, maybe because another man could do the same thing for reasons so much worse than Jared’s. Either way, he can’t come up with words to explain the sensation that he can help this man. Of all the starving, filthy, crazy souls to come through his door on a daily basis, this is the one worth risking his job and career over. “I just can’t leave this half-done,” he says, and hopes it’s enough.
There’s just an hour of Jared’s shift left, and when he gets to his car he’s glad to see Jensen's still curled up asleep in the back. He doesn’t stir when Jared puts the vehicle in drive and passes through the clinic’s gates, doesn’t even make a sound as he slides the car through rush hour traffic towards home.
With calm words and no small amount of manhandling, Jared gets Jensen out of the car and up the stairs of his apartment building. He’s still drowsy and easy to maneuver and Jared wonders how long it’s been since he felt safe to sleep somewhere. By the third landing, Jensen is awake again, hesitant and wary as Jared draws him upward and onward.
Jared’s glad to see it, glad to see Jensen's sense of self-preservation is intact enough that he thinks twice about going up to a strange place with someone he doesn’t know. He stops guiding Jensen along and lets him just stand for a minute.
“Falling alone,” Jensen murmurs, “And one path leads two ways, towards and away.” He seems emotionally withdrawn, staring off to the side, his shoulders tense. “The television calls in sparks of words.”
“Hey,” Jared says at last, “Hey. You don’t have to. You don’t have to come with me. I’ll take you back to where you want to go, or you can just walk out the door.” He waits, watching Jensen mutter to himself, frown and look around.
“I won’t force you to come with me,” Jared says, low and soft, “I won’t ever force you to do anything.”
He waits, and Jensen fidgets, shifting his feet and shaking his head. But each time his feet move, they’re closer to Jared, and when he’s close enough, his hand reaches down, catching the cuff of Jared’s jacket in his fingertips and holding on. Jared lets him keep that grip, and reaches with his other hand to pat Jensen's shoulder. So many of the homeless are denied simple human contact for so long that it’s enough to drive a person crazy. This act of reaching out, small though it is, gives him that little spark of hope, that he wasn’t wrong, that this one can be saved.
Jared starts up the stairs again and Jensen follows with him, compliant as Jared could want.
The apartment isn’t much. Jared usually doesn’t bring people up. It was his ex’s idea, a place Darren could practice with his band, close enough to the club district to make getting to gigs easy and Jared got stuck with it when they broke up. What it’s got in space it loses in amenities like carpet over the bare plywood floors or fresh paint or a super that sets the heat on higher than sixty degrees all winter. A working stove would be nice too. At least the hot water works and it’s not like Jared spends much time there. Three more months, and Jared can’t wait for the lease to be up.
He leaves Jensen standing near the door and gets the space heater running in the bathroom. That done, he heads to the stretch of counter that passes for a kitchen and digs through the fridge, looking for something not-too-rich, not-too-heavy.
“Beans and rice?” he asks and Jensen cocks his head. “Beans and rice it is,” Jared decides. He nukes it and serves it to Jensen in a small bowl with bread. Jensen doesn’t sit at the table, and Jared’s not surprised. He stands in a corner at first, ignoring the spoon and using the edge of the bread as a scoop. When Jared doesn’t come close, doesn’t try to take the food back or take advantage of his distraction, Jensen seems to relax a little more, sinking down to his haunches in the corner and eating like he’s starving. Which he probably is.
After the food Jared gives Jensen a sports drink, getting some more calories and electrolytes into him. “Ready to take a bath?” Jared asks, and he gets that head-cock and a flicker of a frown again. Jensen follows him to the bathroom though. Jared starts the water running and takes off the other man’s jacket and shirts just like he had back at the clinic. A glimmer of guilt tickles along the back of his brain, but he reminds himself he’s doing nothing wrong, nothing he wouldn’t do at the clinic if it had the facilities and more time per patient.
The skin on Jensen's privates and legs is as bad as it is on his torso, and his feet worse. It doesn’t look like he’s had those shoes off or changed socks for much too long.
The socks go in the garbage. The shoes would too, but Jared can see that his would be about four sizes too large for Jensen's feet, so until he has something to replace them with he can’t dispose of them. He helps Jensen into the tub and gets him started with soap and a washcloth before he gathers up the soiled clothing and takes it to the washer. It might not all survive, but Jared’s willing to risk having to give up some of his wardrobe to get Jensen into clean clothes.
Back in the bathroom, Jared gives Jensen the minimum amount of help he can and still have the job done right. The bruised collarbone makes washing his own hair and back impossible for Jensen, but everything else he seems to reach alright on his own. They wash, rinse, repeat three times before Jared’s satisfied with the healthy clean of Jensen's skin.
Jared shows Jensen how to put the ointment on his skin, lets him again do every part he can reach, except his feet. Jared takes his time with those, cleaning between his toes one last time with an iodine mixture and then treating and bandaging the raw skin. He gets Jensen into a set of his own sweats and socks and then brings him into the living room, bringing the space heater along with them.
Jensen doesn’t speak throughout the bath. Thinking back, Jared realizes Jensen hasn’t spoken since they came into the apartment. He wishes he knew if that was a good sign or not. Either way, the night spent in the clinic and morning getting washed and treated is starting to show, and Jensen looks ready to fall asleep on his feet. Jared leaves him on the couch while he goes to the bedroom for a spare blanket.
When he comes back, Jensen is curled up in the corner of the couch, knees pulled up against his chest, arms wrapped around himself, half asleep. Jared wraps the blanket around him and his eyes flutter open. For half a heartbeat, Jared’s struck by how beautiful those eyes are, so green and luminous, edged with some of the longest lashes he’s ever seen on a man.
“Go back to sleep,” he says, and touches Jensen's hair. The other man seems to accept the comfort in the way it was intended--he closes his eyes and snuggles down a little more into the blanket.
Jared feels a sense of peace, and he has no doubts that he’s done the right thing.
=========
Jared knows he should be sleeping. He just finished a twelve hour shift and then another hour of extracurricular nursing. He should be in his own bed, not sitting on his coffee table watching Jensen.
He knows it’s just the mystery. When he put Jensen's jeans into the dryer he caught sight of the tag. If Jared and Darren hadn’t had one of their huge blowouts of a fight over Darren buying the same jeans with almost two hundred dollars that should have gone for rent money, Jared wouldn’t have recognized the brand. That was enough to get him curious. Watching Jensen sleep, he notices that his hair, now that it’s clean, has darker roots where the highlights have grown out. The line of demarcation is too well defined to be a natural streaking.
So now he’s sitting, watching the mystery on his couch. This situation has to be new for Jensen. At some point within the past three months or so, a drastic change has occurred in his life, leaving a man that had some level of wealth and probable self-sufficiency homeless, confused, half-starving on the streets.
Jared scrubs the heels of his hands against his eyes. Schizophrenic, most likely, he thinks. Late bloomer with his first break from reality, or else just another statistic who decided he didn’t really need those meds and the side effects they brought.
Someone, somewhere, has to be missing him. People don’t just drop off the face of the earth without somebody looking. Jared sighs. He needs to take a picture and get fingerprints, see if Jensen's a missing person. That’ll have to wait for after Jensen wakes up though, and Jared’s getting close to the point where he needs to get to bed himself.
The drier buzzes that the clothes are done, and Jared folds them on the end of the couch. Jensen might wake up confused, and it’ll be good for him to see his own things if he does.
That taken care of, Jared’s done. Feeling like he’s run a marathon, he crawls into bed. He’s asleep before he knows it, dreams of being alone in an empty city stirring through his mind, making him feel restless, lost.
Beta by Embroiderama, thank you so much for the bunny and the look-over.
As usual for my unpimped stuff, this is something I'm working on. If you have any advice or concrit, I'd love to have it.
More Homeless Jensen
With the sun’s rise comes the return of patients, the arrival of more clinic workers, the end of Jared’s quiet time with Jensen. Between assisting with a teen with pneumonia and an old man with an infected scrape on his knee, Jared calls every shelter on their list, looking for a place Jensen can sleep off his beating in warmth and safety. The weather’s still too cold though, too many need services meant for too few.
The waiting room’s filling up, and the five beds they have in the back are all needed. Jared sees George looking at him, looking at Jensen and wondering why he’s not been kicked out in favor of someone in more critical need.
There’s only one thing to do, and screw the rules that say he shouldn’t. Jared can’t just dump him on the street. He grabs his car keys and goes to wake Jensen up.
Jensen's still on the exam table where Jared left him, blanket pulled up around his ears and the battered and filthy sneakers poking out of the bottom. “Hey,” Jared says, reaching to touch with the one hand, the other ready to restrain Jensen if he rolls off the bed or block a blow if he comes up fighting.
Jensen wakes slow and easy, the pain killers making him groggy. His color’s good though, and it looks like the Pedialyte has put a little moisture back into him. Keeping up a steady stream of soft words, Jared gets him dressed again, the clinic’s blanket wrapped around his shoulders. Dried blood is caked around the edge of his hairline where Jared missed a spot, and he makes a mental note to get that later.
Jensen rubs at his eyes like a child as Jared gets him on his feet. “Other people need the bed,” he says, “but I’ve got somewhere warm for you to rest for a little while.”
“Believes everything it sees,” Jensen replies, but he lets himself be lead through the back door of the clinic and into the little fenced-in parking lot behind it. “No filters, no lens.”
Jared squints against the bright sunlight and thinks that a filter would be kind of nice right about then, or at least some sunglasses. He unlocks the back door of his car. She’s ancient and half-rusted from the salt on the roads, but she still gets him to work and the heater runs.
“Watch your head,” he says and helps Jensen duck as he climbs inside. “Go ahead, lay down. You’re safe here. Nobody can get in here from the street, and nobody can come out of the building without me seeing them.”
While Jensen squirms around in the back seat, getting comfortable, Jared folds himself into the front seat and starts the engine. He looks back and catches a glimpse of wide eyes, too much white around the edges.
“Hey,” he says, “It’s okay. We’re not going anywhere. I just want to get the heat running before I have to go back in.”
Jared takes fifteen minutes, getting Jensen settled in his car, the heat turned down to a level that’ll keep it warm but won’t get too hot for comfort. George gives him a look when he comes in through the back door.
“I didn’t see that,” his superior says, worry etched into the lines of his face. The man’s seen a lot of hurt and hopelessness and Jared can’t take it personal that he doesn’t feel optimistic about Jared taking home a stray.
“Thanks,” Jared says. He’s not sure why he feels the need to justify this breech of conduct, but he does. Maybe because it’s so major, maybe because another man could do the same thing for reasons so much worse than Jared’s. Either way, he can’t come up with words to explain the sensation that he can help this man. Of all the starving, filthy, crazy souls to come through his door on a daily basis, this is the one worth risking his job and career over. “I just can’t leave this half-done,” he says, and hopes it’s enough.
There’s just an hour of Jared’s shift left, and when he gets to his car he’s glad to see Jensen's still curled up asleep in the back. He doesn’t stir when Jared puts the vehicle in drive and passes through the clinic’s gates, doesn’t even make a sound as he slides the car through rush hour traffic towards home.
With calm words and no small amount of manhandling, Jared gets Jensen out of the car and up the stairs of his apartment building. He’s still drowsy and easy to maneuver and Jared wonders how long it’s been since he felt safe to sleep somewhere. By the third landing, Jensen is awake again, hesitant and wary as Jared draws him upward and onward.
Jared’s glad to see it, glad to see Jensen's sense of self-preservation is intact enough that he thinks twice about going up to a strange place with someone he doesn’t know. He stops guiding Jensen along and lets him just stand for a minute.
“Falling alone,” Jensen murmurs, “And one path leads two ways, towards and away.” He seems emotionally withdrawn, staring off to the side, his shoulders tense. “The television calls in sparks of words.”
“Hey,” Jared says at last, “Hey. You don’t have to. You don’t have to come with me. I’ll take you back to where you want to go, or you can just walk out the door.” He waits, watching Jensen mutter to himself, frown and look around.
“I won’t force you to come with me,” Jared says, low and soft, “I won’t ever force you to do anything.”
He waits, and Jensen fidgets, shifting his feet and shaking his head. But each time his feet move, they’re closer to Jared, and when he’s close enough, his hand reaches down, catching the cuff of Jared’s jacket in his fingertips and holding on. Jared lets him keep that grip, and reaches with his other hand to pat Jensen's shoulder. So many of the homeless are denied simple human contact for so long that it’s enough to drive a person crazy. This act of reaching out, small though it is, gives him that little spark of hope, that he wasn’t wrong, that this one can be saved.
Jared starts up the stairs again and Jensen follows with him, compliant as Jared could want.
The apartment isn’t much. Jared usually doesn’t bring people up. It was his ex’s idea, a place Darren could practice with his band, close enough to the club district to make getting to gigs easy and Jared got stuck with it when they broke up. What it’s got in space it loses in amenities like carpet over the bare plywood floors or fresh paint or a super that sets the heat on higher than sixty degrees all winter. A working stove would be nice too. At least the hot water works and it’s not like Jared spends much time there. Three more months, and Jared can’t wait for the lease to be up.
He leaves Jensen standing near the door and gets the space heater running in the bathroom. That done, he heads to the stretch of counter that passes for a kitchen and digs through the fridge, looking for something not-too-rich, not-too-heavy.
“Beans and rice?” he asks and Jensen cocks his head. “Beans and rice it is,” Jared decides. He nukes it and serves it to Jensen in a small bowl with bread. Jensen doesn’t sit at the table, and Jared’s not surprised. He stands in a corner at first, ignoring the spoon and using the edge of the bread as a scoop. When Jared doesn’t come close, doesn’t try to take the food back or take advantage of his distraction, Jensen seems to relax a little more, sinking down to his haunches in the corner and eating like he’s starving. Which he probably is.
After the food Jared gives Jensen a sports drink, getting some more calories and electrolytes into him. “Ready to take a bath?” Jared asks, and he gets that head-cock and a flicker of a frown again. Jensen follows him to the bathroom though. Jared starts the water running and takes off the other man’s jacket and shirts just like he had back at the clinic. A glimmer of guilt tickles along the back of his brain, but he reminds himself he’s doing nothing wrong, nothing he wouldn’t do at the clinic if it had the facilities and more time per patient.
The skin on Jensen's privates and legs is as bad as it is on his torso, and his feet worse. It doesn’t look like he’s had those shoes off or changed socks for much too long.
The socks go in the garbage. The shoes would too, but Jared can see that his would be about four sizes too large for Jensen's feet, so until he has something to replace them with he can’t dispose of them. He helps Jensen into the tub and gets him started with soap and a washcloth before he gathers up the soiled clothing and takes it to the washer. It might not all survive, but Jared’s willing to risk having to give up some of his wardrobe to get Jensen into clean clothes.
Back in the bathroom, Jared gives Jensen the minimum amount of help he can and still have the job done right. The bruised collarbone makes washing his own hair and back impossible for Jensen, but everything else he seems to reach alright on his own. They wash, rinse, repeat three times before Jared’s satisfied with the healthy clean of Jensen's skin.
Jared shows Jensen how to put the ointment on his skin, lets him again do every part he can reach, except his feet. Jared takes his time with those, cleaning between his toes one last time with an iodine mixture and then treating and bandaging the raw skin. He gets Jensen into a set of his own sweats and socks and then brings him into the living room, bringing the space heater along with them.
Jensen doesn’t speak throughout the bath. Thinking back, Jared realizes Jensen hasn’t spoken since they came into the apartment. He wishes he knew if that was a good sign or not. Either way, the night spent in the clinic and morning getting washed and treated is starting to show, and Jensen looks ready to fall asleep on his feet. Jared leaves him on the couch while he goes to the bedroom for a spare blanket.
When he comes back, Jensen is curled up in the corner of the couch, knees pulled up against his chest, arms wrapped around himself, half asleep. Jared wraps the blanket around him and his eyes flutter open. For half a heartbeat, Jared’s struck by how beautiful those eyes are, so green and luminous, edged with some of the longest lashes he’s ever seen on a man.
“Go back to sleep,” he says, and touches Jensen's hair. The other man seems to accept the comfort in the way it was intended--he closes his eyes and snuggles down a little more into the blanket.
Jared feels a sense of peace, and he has no doubts that he’s done the right thing.
=========
Jared knows he should be sleeping. He just finished a twelve hour shift and then another hour of extracurricular nursing. He should be in his own bed, not sitting on his coffee table watching Jensen.
He knows it’s just the mystery. When he put Jensen's jeans into the dryer he caught sight of the tag. If Jared and Darren hadn’t had one of their huge blowouts of a fight over Darren buying the same jeans with almost two hundred dollars that should have gone for rent money, Jared wouldn’t have recognized the brand. That was enough to get him curious. Watching Jensen sleep, he notices that his hair, now that it’s clean, has darker roots where the highlights have grown out. The line of demarcation is too well defined to be a natural streaking.
So now he’s sitting, watching the mystery on his couch. This situation has to be new for Jensen. At some point within the past three months or so, a drastic change has occurred in his life, leaving a man that had some level of wealth and probable self-sufficiency homeless, confused, half-starving on the streets.
Jared scrubs the heels of his hands against his eyes. Schizophrenic, most likely, he thinks. Late bloomer with his first break from reality, or else just another statistic who decided he didn’t really need those meds and the side effects they brought.
Someone, somewhere, has to be missing him. People don’t just drop off the face of the earth without somebody looking. Jared sighs. He needs to take a picture and get fingerprints, see if Jensen's a missing person. That’ll have to wait for after Jensen wakes up though, and Jared’s getting close to the point where he needs to get to bed himself.
The drier buzzes that the clothes are done, and Jared folds them on the end of the couch. Jensen might wake up confused, and it’ll be good for him to see his own things if he does.
That taken care of, Jared’s done. Feeling like he’s run a marathon, he crawls into bed. He’s asleep before he knows it, dreams of being alone in an empty city stirring through his mind, making him feel restless, lost.
