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*waves at you all*
I know! I know. I'm sorry. I dunno why this bit was so hard - i just couldn't seem to make my brain work. Plus, school started, and things happened, and etc., and....
Anyway, here is the next bit, quite late.
BUT - first - a small pimp. My dearest![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
darkhavens has been my beta for years, but she's *also* a writer. She's just had some horrible, horrible blocking going on. However, at last, she got inspired and did some writing! So if you like 'The Losers' fandom, then please hop over and read the fun ficlets she wrote. You won't regret it! :)
Also at AO3.
...Sometime am I
All wound with adders who with cloven tongues
Do hiss me into madness. - Caliban, Act 2, scene 2, 'The Tempest'
Jared thought he was going to throw up. Or maybe faint, though he really fucking hoped not. But his ears were ringing and his belly was heaving and he kept having to swallow, his mouth filling with cold, slick spit. Jensen was…. Fuck, he was covered in blood. It was because it was his head - Jared knew this - but it looked like he was dead, limp on the gurney that Jared was trying (and failing) to help push, stumbling over his own feet, his hands shaking.
He’d brought in others, before this - others with the ANGEL system, others crushed under debt and obligation, under fear. It had made his heart pound and his skin flush, adrenalin and a little fear, but mostly excitement. But never, never....
God, he’d thought Jensen was going to literally bash his own brains out, slamming himself into the bulkhead over and over; that noise, sick-wet crunch. Almost as bad had been the sounds - the guttural, animal bellows - that had coughed out of Jensen’s mouth, wordless and senseless, pain and anger.
The gurney clacked over a seam in the floor and Jensen’s head lolled on his neck. His eyes mostly shut, blood was a solid, scarlet sheet down the right side of his face and throat, trailing in lines across his cheekbone, his jaw, his forehead, a thick, crimson stain all down the shoulder of his jacket, the collar. Fuck, it was everywhere. The sliver of eye that Jared could see was glazed and lifeless. Jared swallowed hard and looked away.
It was the Jo boys who manhandled the gurney, dressed in fake EMT gear, getting it into a mag-lift and using a special, coded card - forged - to lock the lift out of the system for the ride. It took all four of them down and sideways, halfway around the monolithic ‘stem’ of the station to a bolt-hole carved out by the Devils, a safe space for them to hide Jensen away until…. Until.
Jared leaned against the wall just inside the door, watching the Jo boys lock the gurney into place inside a scaffold of polycarbonate tubes. He flinched, startled, when Raleigh came through the door a moment later, Doc right behind him. She moved immediately to Jensen’s side, disposable gown tied loosely at the back, face shield protecting the scanners. She snapped on gloves, listening intently to the litany of vitals the taller Jo boy was rattling off. The shorter one was efficiently slicing every bit of Jensen’s clothing off him, not bothering to even attempt salvaging anything.
“Jared, you okay?” Raleigh asked, bumping Jared’s shoulder with his own, and Jared gulped and took in a hard, stuttery breath, nodding jerkily.
“Yeah, I- Fuck, Raleigh. I’m okay, but he- Did you see? He...he really...fucked himself up.”
“He’ll be okay. Angel, remember?”
“Doesn’t look like it,” Jared muttered. He wiped his face on his sleeve, clammy sweat cool in the chilled room, and dared another sidelong glance at Jensen. Jo One stripped the last of the clothing off Jensen, leaving him naked on the gurney, thin and pale. His entire left shoulder, side, and thigh was a mass of livid bruising, and it looked like more were coming up on his belly and chest. There were raw spots where he’d been ‘burned’ from friction with the floor, and a scattering of scratches that were welling with blood again, lately-formed scabs ripped away with the clothes. Under all that mess, Jensen’s skin was grayish with indifferent hygiene, blue-white and bloodless under the unforgiving halogen spots. He looked...fucking horrifying.
And he won, Jared thought, swallowing again. Hating what that implied. As he watched, Doc got an IV started in Jensen’s right forearm, taping it securely down. The taller Jo boy - Jo Two - put a nasal cannula under Jensen’s nose for oxygen, while Jo One hung various monitoring equipment off the scaffold, arranging it all to Doc’s specifications. Then, they both unrolled and wrapped around Jensen’s wrists and ankles soft-looking restraints, buckling them snugly.
“Fuck,” Jared muttered, not liking that at all, but-
“You know we have to,” Raleigh said quietly, and Jared nodded. He did know. Jensen was an addict, in withdrawal, a trained soldier and, above all, an Angel. Without restraints, he’d hurt himself - he’d hurt them. And that wasn’t the plan.
Doc finished hanging the last IV bag - one big one of saline, and a cluster of four or five smaller ones - and stepped back with a sigh. “So, this is the best I can do. He’s lucky as hell. The most worrying things are two basal fractures of the temporal and zygomatic bones-” Doc saw the looks on Jared’s and Raleigh’s faces and shot them a weak little grin. “He cracked his skull, but not too badly; there’s some swelling but it doesn't look like any brain damage or hemorrhaging. If he wasn’t so damn malnourished, he’d have been strong enough to give himself a depressed fracture and drive bone fragments into his brain.” She tugged the face shield up and off, running a hand back through her spiky hair. “He’s got four stress fractures in his ribs, one in his femur and a chip out of his left ulna, two broken fingers and three broken toes, plus numerous contusions, including some deep muscle ones we’re gonna have to keep an eye on.”
“Fuck.” Jared ran a shaking hand over his mouth. “Is he going to be okay?”
“Yeah, he will be. Once we get all that shit out of his system, get some damn vitamins in him, keep him hydrated.... He’ll be okay.” Doc lifted her scanner glasses up onto the top of her head and watched as the Jo boys got a catheter in, got the broken fingers straightened out and taped together, stuck a handful of sticky telemetry patches to Jensen’s bruised chest, and finally settled a thin thermal blanket over his lax body.
“The trick’s gonna be keeping him calm and hoping like hell he hasn’t burned out too many brain cells with the crap he’s been ingesting.”
“Do you know-?” Raleigh started, and Doc held up her hand with three vials of blood between her long fingers.
“I’m on it. Gonna double-check everything we think we know, run a tox screen - all that. The Jo boys are gonna get set up next door, and Jared-” Doc looked him up and down, and made a small, pained face. “You should get cleaned up.”
Jared looked down at himself, confused, and finally realized that the uncomfortable sensation of his clothes sticking to him wasn’t sweat but Jensen’s blood, and he was going to be sick, right fucking then. He barely made it to the toilet in time.
Once Jared had gotten a shower and a change of clothes, he pulled on a pair of surgical gloves and carefully went through all of Jensen’s cut-up, blood-drenched clothing. They weren’t particularly clean, or new - there were holes and stains and badly-done patches - and the only things that had really survived were the heavy coat, and the long scarf Jensen had been wearing, wrapped around his throat and head.
Jared took his time, feeling every seam and turning everything inside-out, and his haul was depressingly small. A non-descript debit card, still shiny and new; various pieces of wire and metal, most pared down to sharp edges; a makeshift knife, scrap and tape, with a razor-sharp edge; a battered package of candy, pale sugar coating over white discs, cheap and sugary and mostly dust, now. Also, a scrap of paper with Jensen’s name on it, written in tiny, crabbed, handwriting, shaky and smeared, over and over.
It was the last thing Jared found that made no sense, until it abruptly did. It was the wrapper off something, some kind of thin plastic printed with hologram sparkles, and wrapped up inside it was...trash. Stickers from something, Jared thought; maybe vending-machine food. One had a blue-green wave with a fat little stylized fish grinning out of it; another had a cartoon girl with fly-away hair and little wings on her back, winking. They were bright, supersaturated - childish - and they were carefully stuck in orderly rows on the inside of the wrapper. The wrapper itself was carefully folded around bits of bright string - colors and tinsel twisted together - that maybe had tied a label or a tag onto something, and shards of a broken polycarb globe in sparkling, primary colors, and what look like sequins from a shirt.
A magpie hoard, it was just junk, and Jared nudged the collection carefully with his fingertips, feeling a tightness in his throat, because he’d seen the inside of troopships, everyone had. Grey corridors and nothing-colored light and everything just...boring. Industrial and colorless. A lot like the Axis Mundi, really. Powered down and stripped of life, the underlying structure of Axis was mostly steel and bland paint in various shades of blue-grey or green-grey or grey-grey. It was ugly and uninspiring, but here...here was a little treasure trove of color and warmth and sparkle, hidden and secret and obviously important, because you don’t carry something like that around with you if it means nothing. Jared swallowed and closed his eyes for a moment and almost crushed the whole collection when, behind him, Jensen made a noise.
Jared jerked around, eyes wide, and saw Jensen staring at him. His hands were working, fisting and then opening, twisting a little, his arms straining against the restraints but not in any coordinated way. It looked like pure reflex, nothing more. His bruised, hollow gaze wasn’t tracking quite right, and Jared had a sudden, sick feeling that maybe he had done some damage, had hurt his brain somehow.
“Hey, hey, Jensen, don’t- Don’t move, okay? You’re...hurt, you broke a couple bones, but you’re- We got you, okay?” Jared glanced frantically over at the big observation window that separated the rooms. Jo One was on the cot, asleep, and Jo Two- Hell. The ‘occupied’ light was lit up on the little cubby of shower and toilet, and Jared dithered for a moment, undecided if he should run next door or just...deal.
Jensen made a noise again, low and kind of hurting, and Jared decided to just deal. He moved to the side of the gurney, the wrapper forgotten in his hand, and stood there, close enough for Jensen to see him, close enough to touch if he thought he should. He didn’t think he should, just yet.
“Jensen, can you hear me?” Jensen’s gaze tracked slowly to Jared and seemed to focus, and a moment later, Jensen actually nodded, a jerky little bob of his head. “Okay, good, that’s- that’s good. I’m Jared. I- I’m here to help you.”
Jensen stared at him, his fingers working, working - crumpling the paper covering the gurney and letting it go, over and over. He opened his mouth, but the sound that came out was rasping and jumbled, not a word, just noise. His lips were cracked - dry-looking - still etched with thread-fine lines of blood. Jared grimaced and reached for the little wand that hung from the drinking tank one of the Jos had hung up - sterile water, not too cold, and a flexible tube to drink from.
“Here, you’re probably- You need a drink? Here.” Jared held the wand up, touched the tip of it to Jensen’s mouth and let a couple of drops wet his lips. After a moment, Jensen actually drank, tiny, separate sips that looked like it hurt to swallow, but he did anyway, again and again, until he sighed, turning his face away ever so slightly.
Jared hooked the wand back into its clip, fumbling the wrapper full of junk he still held, and Jensen was suddenly staring, his whole body gone rigid.
“Hey, you okay? What’s wrong?”
Jensen jerked against the wrist restraints, a whole-body wrench that made the gurney creak. This time, when he opened his mouth, he did make a noise, the same noise he’d been making in the corridor, low and guttural and horrible.
“Oh, fuck. Fuck, hey, c’mon, it’s okay, are you-? Does something hurt? Do you need-? What do you-? Fuck!”
“Sssss….” Jensen said. Hissed. Spitting through clenched teeth, his gaze was fixed on Jared now, his eyes hectic-bright, pupils blown. “Ssss’mm.”
Jared looked desperately over at the observation window, but Jo One was still out, Jo Two still in the toilet and maybe - maybe that was okay, because if something really bad was happening, the monitors would be going off, there would be alarms.
“Sss mu…mu-mi...ine. Mu-mine, sss...mu-miine!” Jensen’s voice, already raw, broke on the last word, devolving into a painful-sounding rasp, his eyes huge, his face pale and sweating. He was twisting in the restraints now, his whole body trying to break free. Not looking at Jared anymore, looking-
“Oh shit, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” Jared held the loosely crumpled packet of wrapper and stickers and things out to Jensen; stepped hastily forward and tucked it under his hand and Jensen’s fingers curled around it, squeezing.
“Ssss m-mine,” Jensen said again, but his voice wasn’t a growl anymore, it was just a whisper. He wasn’t fighting the restraints anymore, but he was shaking, making the gurney shiver under him, and oh, God, Jared wanted to punch himself, his eyes looked wet. Fuck, was he crying?
“Jensen, I’m sorry, I wasn’t- I wouldn’t take it, I was just...I didn’t want it to get...lost, I swear-”
Jensen sucked in a hitching breath and blinked, hard. “You died,” Jensen he said, and his voice was...perfectly normal. Flat, and hoarse, but normal. “You died,” and Jared could only gape at him, bewildered.
Jensen just stared back, shaking, shaking. Fuck, it wasn’t stopping, that was a seizure or something, that wasn’t right! Jared spun on his heel and ran for the observation room, shouting. Jo One shot up off the cot, dazed, and Jo Two all but fell out of the toilet, towel wrapped around his hips, his hair wet.
“What the hell?”
“Seizure, something- Fucking help me!” Jared snapped, and then he was running back to Jensen, prying the wadded wrapper out of his hand, ripping at the fastening on the restraints because he was sick, he was choking, and he had to be on his side, now, right the fuck now.
Jo Two belted in, clad only in underwear, a kit of some kind under his arm, yanking on gloves and pushing right past Jared. He spoke into a throat mic to Doc, or Jo One, his words rapid-fire and incomprehensible to Jared, and Jared fell back, and then back again as Jo One ran in, pushing a rattling cart. Jared didn’t know what to do except stay out of the way, and he faded back another step and then another, until he was nearly to the door, the wrapper in his hands. They were shaking, just like Jensen’s, and Jared let his legs fold under him and he collapsed to the floor in slow motion, sprawling there while the Jo boys worked over Jensen’s convulsing body. Jared’s hands compulsively smoothed the wrapper - checked the contents - over and over and over.
It was the least he could do.
Part Eight.
Thanks for waiting, guys!
I know! I know. I'm sorry. I dunno why this bit was so hard - i just couldn't seem to make my brain work. Plus, school started, and things happened, and etc., and....
Anyway, here is the next bit, quite late.
BUT - first - a small pimp. My dearest
darkhavens has been my beta for years, but she's *also* a writer. She's just had some horrible, horrible blocking going on. However, at last, she got inspired and did some writing! So if you like 'The Losers' fandom, then please hop over and read the fun ficlets she wrote. You won't regret it! :)Also at AO3.
...Sometime am I
All wound with adders who with cloven tongues
Do hiss me into madness. - Caliban, Act 2, scene 2, 'The Tempest'
Jared thought he was going to throw up. Or maybe faint, though he really fucking hoped not. But his ears were ringing and his belly was heaving and he kept having to swallow, his mouth filling with cold, slick spit. Jensen was…. Fuck, he was covered in blood. It was because it was his head - Jared knew this - but it looked like he was dead, limp on the gurney that Jared was trying (and failing) to help push, stumbling over his own feet, his hands shaking.
He’d brought in others, before this - others with the ANGEL system, others crushed under debt and obligation, under fear. It had made his heart pound and his skin flush, adrenalin and a little fear, but mostly excitement. But never, never....
God, he’d thought Jensen was going to literally bash his own brains out, slamming himself into the bulkhead over and over; that noise, sick-wet crunch. Almost as bad had been the sounds - the guttural, animal bellows - that had coughed out of Jensen’s mouth, wordless and senseless, pain and anger.
The gurney clacked over a seam in the floor and Jensen’s head lolled on his neck. His eyes mostly shut, blood was a solid, scarlet sheet down the right side of his face and throat, trailing in lines across his cheekbone, his jaw, his forehead, a thick, crimson stain all down the shoulder of his jacket, the collar. Fuck, it was everywhere. The sliver of eye that Jared could see was glazed and lifeless. Jared swallowed hard and looked away.
It was the Jo boys who manhandled the gurney, dressed in fake EMT gear, getting it into a mag-lift and using a special, coded card - forged - to lock the lift out of the system for the ride. It took all four of them down and sideways, halfway around the monolithic ‘stem’ of the station to a bolt-hole carved out by the Devils, a safe space for them to hide Jensen away until…. Until.
Jared leaned against the wall just inside the door, watching the Jo boys lock the gurney into place inside a scaffold of polycarbonate tubes. He flinched, startled, when Raleigh came through the door a moment later, Doc right behind him. She moved immediately to Jensen’s side, disposable gown tied loosely at the back, face shield protecting the scanners. She snapped on gloves, listening intently to the litany of vitals the taller Jo boy was rattling off. The shorter one was efficiently slicing every bit of Jensen’s clothing off him, not bothering to even attempt salvaging anything.
“Jared, you okay?” Raleigh asked, bumping Jared’s shoulder with his own, and Jared gulped and took in a hard, stuttery breath, nodding jerkily.
“Yeah, I- Fuck, Raleigh. I’m okay, but he- Did you see? He...he really...fucked himself up.”
“He’ll be okay. Angel, remember?”
“Doesn’t look like it,” Jared muttered. He wiped his face on his sleeve, clammy sweat cool in the chilled room, and dared another sidelong glance at Jensen. Jo One stripped the last of the clothing off Jensen, leaving him naked on the gurney, thin and pale. His entire left shoulder, side, and thigh was a mass of livid bruising, and it looked like more were coming up on his belly and chest. There were raw spots where he’d been ‘burned’ from friction with the floor, and a scattering of scratches that were welling with blood again, lately-formed scabs ripped away with the clothes. Under all that mess, Jensen’s skin was grayish with indifferent hygiene, blue-white and bloodless under the unforgiving halogen spots. He looked...fucking horrifying.
And he won, Jared thought, swallowing again. Hating what that implied. As he watched, Doc got an IV started in Jensen’s right forearm, taping it securely down. The taller Jo boy - Jo Two - put a nasal cannula under Jensen’s nose for oxygen, while Jo One hung various monitoring equipment off the scaffold, arranging it all to Doc’s specifications. Then, they both unrolled and wrapped around Jensen’s wrists and ankles soft-looking restraints, buckling them snugly.
“Fuck,” Jared muttered, not liking that at all, but-
“You know we have to,” Raleigh said quietly, and Jared nodded. He did know. Jensen was an addict, in withdrawal, a trained soldier and, above all, an Angel. Without restraints, he’d hurt himself - he’d hurt them. And that wasn’t the plan.
Doc finished hanging the last IV bag - one big one of saline, and a cluster of four or five smaller ones - and stepped back with a sigh. “So, this is the best I can do. He’s lucky as hell. The most worrying things are two basal fractures of the temporal and zygomatic bones-” Doc saw the looks on Jared’s and Raleigh’s faces and shot them a weak little grin. “He cracked his skull, but not too badly; there’s some swelling but it doesn't look like any brain damage or hemorrhaging. If he wasn’t so damn malnourished, he’d have been strong enough to give himself a depressed fracture and drive bone fragments into his brain.” She tugged the face shield up and off, running a hand back through her spiky hair. “He’s got four stress fractures in his ribs, one in his femur and a chip out of his left ulna, two broken fingers and three broken toes, plus numerous contusions, including some deep muscle ones we’re gonna have to keep an eye on.”
“Fuck.” Jared ran a shaking hand over his mouth. “Is he going to be okay?”
“Yeah, he will be. Once we get all that shit out of his system, get some damn vitamins in him, keep him hydrated.... He’ll be okay.” Doc lifted her scanner glasses up onto the top of her head and watched as the Jo boys got a catheter in, got the broken fingers straightened out and taped together, stuck a handful of sticky telemetry patches to Jensen’s bruised chest, and finally settled a thin thermal blanket over his lax body.
“The trick’s gonna be keeping him calm and hoping like hell he hasn’t burned out too many brain cells with the crap he’s been ingesting.”
“Do you know-?” Raleigh started, and Doc held up her hand with three vials of blood between her long fingers.
“I’m on it. Gonna double-check everything we think we know, run a tox screen - all that. The Jo boys are gonna get set up next door, and Jared-” Doc looked him up and down, and made a small, pained face. “You should get cleaned up.”
Jared looked down at himself, confused, and finally realized that the uncomfortable sensation of his clothes sticking to him wasn’t sweat but Jensen’s blood, and he was going to be sick, right fucking then. He barely made it to the toilet in time.
Once Jared had gotten a shower and a change of clothes, he pulled on a pair of surgical gloves and carefully went through all of Jensen’s cut-up, blood-drenched clothing. They weren’t particularly clean, or new - there were holes and stains and badly-done patches - and the only things that had really survived were the heavy coat, and the long scarf Jensen had been wearing, wrapped around his throat and head.
Jared took his time, feeling every seam and turning everything inside-out, and his haul was depressingly small. A non-descript debit card, still shiny and new; various pieces of wire and metal, most pared down to sharp edges; a makeshift knife, scrap and tape, with a razor-sharp edge; a battered package of candy, pale sugar coating over white discs, cheap and sugary and mostly dust, now. Also, a scrap of paper with Jensen’s name on it, written in tiny, crabbed, handwriting, shaky and smeared, over and over.
It was the last thing Jared found that made no sense, until it abruptly did. It was the wrapper off something, some kind of thin plastic printed with hologram sparkles, and wrapped up inside it was...trash. Stickers from something, Jared thought; maybe vending-machine food. One had a blue-green wave with a fat little stylized fish grinning out of it; another had a cartoon girl with fly-away hair and little wings on her back, winking. They were bright, supersaturated - childish - and they were carefully stuck in orderly rows on the inside of the wrapper. The wrapper itself was carefully folded around bits of bright string - colors and tinsel twisted together - that maybe had tied a label or a tag onto something, and shards of a broken polycarb globe in sparkling, primary colors, and what look like sequins from a shirt.
A magpie hoard, it was just junk, and Jared nudged the collection carefully with his fingertips, feeling a tightness in his throat, because he’d seen the inside of troopships, everyone had. Grey corridors and nothing-colored light and everything just...boring. Industrial and colorless. A lot like the Axis Mundi, really. Powered down and stripped of life, the underlying structure of Axis was mostly steel and bland paint in various shades of blue-grey or green-grey or grey-grey. It was ugly and uninspiring, but here...here was a little treasure trove of color and warmth and sparkle, hidden and secret and obviously important, because you don’t carry something like that around with you if it means nothing. Jared swallowed and closed his eyes for a moment and almost crushed the whole collection when, behind him, Jensen made a noise.
Jared jerked around, eyes wide, and saw Jensen staring at him. His hands were working, fisting and then opening, twisting a little, his arms straining against the restraints but not in any coordinated way. It looked like pure reflex, nothing more. His bruised, hollow gaze wasn’t tracking quite right, and Jared had a sudden, sick feeling that maybe he had done some damage, had hurt his brain somehow.
“Hey, hey, Jensen, don’t- Don’t move, okay? You’re...hurt, you broke a couple bones, but you’re- We got you, okay?” Jared glanced frantically over at the big observation window that separated the rooms. Jo One was on the cot, asleep, and Jo Two- Hell. The ‘occupied’ light was lit up on the little cubby of shower and toilet, and Jared dithered for a moment, undecided if he should run next door or just...deal.
Jensen made a noise again, low and kind of hurting, and Jared decided to just deal. He moved to the side of the gurney, the wrapper forgotten in his hand, and stood there, close enough for Jensen to see him, close enough to touch if he thought he should. He didn’t think he should, just yet.
“Jensen, can you hear me?” Jensen’s gaze tracked slowly to Jared and seemed to focus, and a moment later, Jensen actually nodded, a jerky little bob of his head. “Okay, good, that’s- that’s good. I’m Jared. I- I’m here to help you.”
Jensen stared at him, his fingers working, working - crumpling the paper covering the gurney and letting it go, over and over. He opened his mouth, but the sound that came out was rasping and jumbled, not a word, just noise. His lips were cracked - dry-looking - still etched with thread-fine lines of blood. Jared grimaced and reached for the little wand that hung from the drinking tank one of the Jos had hung up - sterile water, not too cold, and a flexible tube to drink from.
“Here, you’re probably- You need a drink? Here.” Jared held the wand up, touched the tip of it to Jensen’s mouth and let a couple of drops wet his lips. After a moment, Jensen actually drank, tiny, separate sips that looked like it hurt to swallow, but he did anyway, again and again, until he sighed, turning his face away ever so slightly.
Jared hooked the wand back into its clip, fumbling the wrapper full of junk he still held, and Jensen was suddenly staring, his whole body gone rigid.
“Hey, you okay? What’s wrong?”
Jensen jerked against the wrist restraints, a whole-body wrench that made the gurney creak. This time, when he opened his mouth, he did make a noise, the same noise he’d been making in the corridor, low and guttural and horrible.
“Oh, fuck. Fuck, hey, c’mon, it’s okay, are you-? Does something hurt? Do you need-? What do you-? Fuck!”
“Sssss….” Jensen said. Hissed. Spitting through clenched teeth, his gaze was fixed on Jared now, his eyes hectic-bright, pupils blown. “Ssss’mm.”
Jared looked desperately over at the observation window, but Jo One was still out, Jo Two still in the toilet and maybe - maybe that was okay, because if something really bad was happening, the monitors would be going off, there would be alarms.
“Sss mu…mu-mi...ine. Mu-mine, sss...mu-miine!” Jensen’s voice, already raw, broke on the last word, devolving into a painful-sounding rasp, his eyes huge, his face pale and sweating. He was twisting in the restraints now, his whole body trying to break free. Not looking at Jared anymore, looking-
“Oh shit, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” Jared held the loosely crumpled packet of wrapper and stickers and things out to Jensen; stepped hastily forward and tucked it under his hand and Jensen’s fingers curled around it, squeezing.
“Ssss m-mine,” Jensen said again, but his voice wasn’t a growl anymore, it was just a whisper. He wasn’t fighting the restraints anymore, but he was shaking, making the gurney shiver under him, and oh, God, Jared wanted to punch himself, his eyes looked wet. Fuck, was he crying?
“Jensen, I’m sorry, I wasn’t- I wouldn’t take it, I was just...I didn’t want it to get...lost, I swear-”
Jensen sucked in a hitching breath and blinked, hard. “You died,” Jensen he said, and his voice was...perfectly normal. Flat, and hoarse, but normal. “You died,” and Jared could only gape at him, bewildered.
Jensen just stared back, shaking, shaking. Fuck, it wasn’t stopping, that was a seizure or something, that wasn’t right! Jared spun on his heel and ran for the observation room, shouting. Jo One shot up off the cot, dazed, and Jo Two all but fell out of the toilet, towel wrapped around his hips, his hair wet.
“What the hell?”
“Seizure, something- Fucking help me!” Jared snapped, and then he was running back to Jensen, prying the wadded wrapper out of his hand, ripping at the fastening on the restraints because he was sick, he was choking, and he had to be on his side, now, right the fuck now.
Jo Two belted in, clad only in underwear, a kit of some kind under his arm, yanking on gloves and pushing right past Jared. He spoke into a throat mic to Doc, or Jo One, his words rapid-fire and incomprehensible to Jared, and Jared fell back, and then back again as Jo One ran in, pushing a rattling cart. Jared didn’t know what to do except stay out of the way, and he faded back another step and then another, until he was nearly to the door, the wrapper in his hands. They were shaking, just like Jensen’s, and Jared let his legs fold under him and he collapsed to the floor in slow motion, sprawling there while the Jo boys worked over Jensen’s convulsing body. Jared’s hands compulsively smoothed the wrapper - checked the contents - over and over and over.
It was the least he could do.
Part Eight.
Thanks for waiting, guys!
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