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apocalypsosPart One
If It Wasn‘t For You Meddling Kids
*
“Cut!”
It’s take five thousand and twenty-seven, or at least it feels that way, and Kim is going to kill him. Jared’s positive of that much, at least. It’s not like Kim’s taken to cradling a meat cleaver in his hands and humming the theme to Halloween while staring at Jared with crazy-serial-killer eyes or anything. But he’s starting to think that’s the next step.
Hopefully there’s a step in the middle where he gets rotten fruit thrown at his head and his ancestry insulted.
Maybe one where Kim makes him go sit in a corner and think about what he’s done?
Yeah, okay, maybe Jared’s a little bit distracted.
He and Jensen hang back for a second while the crew repositions everything for the shot. Jared nearly runs his fingers through his hair but remembers the dirty looks he usually gets from the stylist when he does that and resorts to trying to shake the tension out of his shoulders and arms. He exhales deeply, so deep he nearly makes himself dizzy.
Jensen just keeps staring at him like he’s deranged or a pod person or been hanging out with Chad or something. “What’s with you, man? Yesterday you were nailing that scene.”
Yeah, yesterday. When they’d run through their lines in Jensen’s trailer while the two of them threw gummi bears into each other’s mouths like a couple of goddamn girls.
Yesterday, before Jared met the man in black.
Jared forces a big dopey puppy-dog smile, the kind that makes his grandmother rumple his hair and make him one more batch of double chocolate chip cookies. “Nothing, really, I’m just a little sore, is all.”
Right, sore.
Last night he’d gotten back from an abbreviated patrol shortened by an early call to the set and only managed to shed his costume before passing out in bed. He dreamed of black leather and motorcycle engines and woke up with a hard-on he could use to knock over a fucking skyscraper.
Jesus, he doesn’t even know who the hell is under there.
Like, what if it were Lindsay Lohan in that thing? Okay, sure, it probably wasn’t, because Jared’s pretty sure there’s a guy in there and if Lindsay Lohan were in there she wouldn’t have gotten ten feet on that damn motorcycle without tipping over in a drunken leap and ending up in the lap of someone’s ex-boyfriend, but … well, really. He doesn’t know and it’s starting to drive him up a fucking wall and he’d come so hard this morning after jerking off that he’ll swear on a truckload of Bibles that he couldn’t remember who he was for at least forty seconds.
Jensen gets this thoughtful look on his face, lets the makeup girl double-check him for a second before she stands on her tiptoes to check Jared.
“More elephant training?” he asks.
Jared can‘t resist a grin at that. “Shut up,” he says.
“Seriously, though. If you need someone to talk to about something it isn’t like I’m not going to be here all day, you know?”
“Yeah, I know,” Jared says.
Oh, sure, that conversation would go over well, he thinks to himself I think a superpowered biker I don‘t even know is turning me into an utter hornball. Well, more of one than usual. Got any advice on reminding my hormones I‘m not all that into sucking cock?
Jared lets out this nervous giggle for some stupid reason, and Jensen’s brow furrows as he stares at him, the crew bustling around them. “You’re not going to go nuts on me and dump a bowl of Jell-O over my head at lunch or something, are you?”
“Of course not,” Jared says, and Jensen just frowns.
“Well, that sucks,” he says. “That story‘d come in real handy in interviews.”
And Jared laughs again, except this time it’s real and free, and then Kim’s waving his hand in the air to tell them to get on with it and Jared completely forgets what he was thinking about.
*
“What do you guys know about a guy dressed in black leather riding a motorcycle?”
Okay, so maybe he doesn’t forget about it forever.
Mike just shrugs as he tosses another peanut into the air and catches it in his open mouth on the other side of the table. “He has an easy time picking up chicks but blows all of his money on extra deodorant?”
Tom shakes his head while smacking Mike upside his, and Jared adds, “I meant a superhero who looks like that, asshole,” even though he’s pretty sure it’s unnecessary.
He almost wishes Jensen hadn’t been busy with whatever flavor-of-the-week had been pawing him when Jared had called his cell phone, although it’s probably a good thing he hadn’t tagged along. It would be a lot harder to have this conversation with him here.
The crowd shifts towards their table as the latest cheesy pop anthem pours from the start-of-the-art sound system neatly tucked behind artfully worn saddles and cheap ten-gallon hats Jared would bet were picked up in bulk at the local Wal-Mart. The bar Mike and Tom told him to meet them at couldn’t be trying any harder to be a genuine cowboy hangout if one of the waitresses walked past them every few minutes leading a steer on a leash behind her. It makes Jared want sweet tea and his mama’s peach cobbler and big fat juicy steaks cooked by his dad on a grill he lit with the lasers from his eyes the same way he craves real Mexican food after driving past a Taco Bell.
If he’d known what he was getting into when he left the hotel, he definitely would have avoided the Texas buckle, he thinks, and shifts lower in his seat.
“We’ve heard rumors,” Tom says. He darts a glance over at Mike, who’s still rubbing at the red mark on the back of his bald head. “Telepath, right?”
“Yeah,” Jared says.
Mike lets out a derisive snort. “Explains the outfit.”
The corner of Jared‘s mouth tugs upward, “So what explains yours? You still lookin’ to win Miss Teen Superhero USA?”
“Cute, Padalecki.”
“So I hear,” Jared says with a grin.
Tom rolls his eyes at both of them, drums his fingers on the tabletop and flashes them an annoyed look. “Supposedly he’s like a dispatcher,” he says, barely loud enough to be heard over the crappy music. “Drives around, gives other superheroes the head’s-up on shit that’s about to go down.”
Jared nods at that. Makes sense, really. There’s not much you can do with telepathy other than know something’s coming and alert the proper (or improper) authorities accordingly.
“Hey, he never tells us a damn thing,” Mike says.
The comment catches Tom mid-pull on his beer and he nearly choked on the stuff, narrowing his eyes. “Can you blame him? Would you go anywhere near the guy who dresses like the drum major at a gay wizarding college?”
Mike opens his mouth to defend himself, then just shrugs and goes back to his peanuts.
It takes a second for Jared to notice the silent -- okay, maybe not all that silent -- lover’s quarrel or whatever the hell this is that’s going on in front of him. Tom snatches the bowl of peanuts from in front of Mike, which leads to Mike trying to casually grab them back, which leads to Tom pointedly smashing a peanut open on the table with his fist.
Jared resists a low whistle. Mike and Tom’s fights are the things of legend, mostly because Tom’s idea of ending them usually involves showing roomfuls of people embarrassing illusions of Mike wearing a woman’s cheerleading outfit or naked or rooting for the Yankees or something.
Mike’s response is usually to laugh until beer squirts out of his nose, which is somehow twice as embarrassing as anything Tom’s ever come up with.
Tom slams his fist down again and peanut shells fly everywhere.
Jared leans towards Mike and says, “What’s his problem?”
“I offended his delicate sensibilities,” Mike says.
“Do I even want to know?”
Tom‘s shoulders heave as he sighs harshly and says, “We were on patrol the other day and the kid we were saving from a burning car took one look at this idiot’s costume and said, ‘That’s so gay.’”
Jared frowns. “So?”
“So this moron says, ‘No, this is gay,’ and kisses me.”
When your friend tells you something like that, it turns out that you’re not really supposed to laugh.
Well, all right you get to laugh a little but you definitely don’t get to slap your big old paws on the counter and laugh so loud even the bartender gives you warning looks and chuckle until you cry and your eyelids start to twitch. For some stupid reason, sometimes that just makes your friends scowl like toddlers about to throw tantrums.
“Yeah, sorry. That’s really not funny.” Jared forces himself to catch his breath and plaster on a serious expression, shaking his finger in Mike‘s direction. “Shame on you.”
“You’re right,” Mike says with mock solemnity. “I’m a terrible person. I should never have paid the kid to take pictures and send them to the tabloids.”
“I hate both of you,” Tom says.
Five minutes later they get asked to leave, but that’s what happens when everybody else suddenly sees you sitting there in curly wigs and ludicrous amounts of makeup and nothing else.
*
Patrolling that weekend is a mistake. Instead of following the police cars riding through the streets or keeping his eyes on what might be lurking in the shadows, he’s scanning the roads looking for motorcycles. It’s fucking ridiculous.
Jared can just see himself doing something dorky like drawing “JP S + ?” on a telephone pole and then calling every fourteen-year-old girl for miles so that he can coo about it with someone on his current maturity level. He really does feel that goddamn weird about the whole thing.
He perches on the edge of the rooftop and drums his fingers against the ledge. Usually he’s not so openly bored on patrol but then again he usually isn’t. He’s always busy, and if he’s not busy then he has a good time people-watching or picks up a newspaper or something, and if Mike and Tommy are spending the night on patrol with him he can always swim in the constant worry of Mike getting them all arrested for public indecency. Hell, he comes close to it often enough.
When he hears that familiar rumble coming down the street, he can’t resist his wide welcoming smile as he leaps off the building.
Jared comes down on the sidewalk, light as a feather, solidifying only when his feet reach the cold hard ground. When he lands the stranger is parked right in front of him, leaning easily on his bike.
The way his head is tilted, Jared likes to think he’s smiling just as wide as Jared behind that helmet.
“Hey,” he says, and okay, he hasn’t sounded half that fucking excited since getting the call about Supernatural. “I haven’t seen you around in days. Maybe this time we can actually have an introduction with more than one name involved.”
Your name isn’t Shadow, the stranger’s voice points out.
“Fine, codenames. Whatever.”
It really doesn’t matter. I’m nobody.
You‘d think Jared couldn‘t smile any wider but he does, because it‘s either that or laugh like an utter jackass. That‘s just how much giddy energy‘s rushin through his veins right now. “You realize now I’m just going to end up calling you Nobody,” he says.
The stranger shrugs. I kind of expected as much, yeah.
“How’d you know I’d be here?”
Some idiot’s trying to rob the mini-mart two blocks over, the stranger says, not answering his question. His helmet tilts to the side. Race you?
Jared cocks an eyebrow at that.
Nobody revs his engine.
Jared spins on his heels and runs through the nearest wall.
Racing through buildings without knowing what he’s about to run through isn’t something Jared normally does. You never know when you might run through a ladies’ restroom or somebody’s bedroom and catch an eyeful of something you’d definitely rather not see. It had only taken one really ugly couple engaged in an act for which he probably should have turned right back around and arrested them or something for Jared to learn that particular lesson.
Plus, there’s the whole trespassing issue, which … hi, he’s sat through that lecture before, and it wasn’t fun the first time when he’d gotten to eat his mom’s fajitas afterwards and his dad had told him he might have gotten away with it if it hadn’t been the girl’s locker room he’d been in.
He darts through a hair salon and a video store and then finally there he is, blocking the doorway of the mini-mart and shocking the hell out of the guy up to his wrists in the register. The robber jolts as soon as he sees some six-and-a-half-foot weirdo in spandex walk right through the goddamn wall, looking like he wants to make a run for it but isn’t sure whether or not he’s about to be turned into a frog or something.
Jared’s grin turns wicked and wild and daring, increasing his density until his body’s a fucking freight train hard enough to smash diamonds.
He crouches between the robber and his only escape, beckoning to the robber with a “come get some” curl of his fingers.
“You really want to try going out this way? Be my guest.”
*
The police slap the cuffs on the guy and toss him into the back of a police car pretty damn quickly, although they’re still a little confused as to why he just walked right out of the mini-mart with his arms in the air. It probably helped that Jared told him that there were twenty other heroes littering the nearby rooftops ready to pick him up and drop him in the bay if he tried to run.
What? He’s a hero but no one ever said he had to be completely honest about the whole thing.
He leans against the wall of the pharmacy across the street with his arms crossed, unable to resist a grin as he glances over at Nobody. The motorcycle’s tilted just so, ready to be revved up and ridden hard in a matter of seconds, but he hasn’t gone anywhere yet and that’s the important thing.
“You’re not going to say we make a good team, are you?” Jared asks.
Nobody‘s helmet turns in his direction. You don’t like teams either?
Jared shakes his head. Two days ago Chad had left him a voicemail hollering that Sophia had thrown him into a pit of angry squids and left him there after he’d told Teen People she’d been dating Captain California while they’d still been married. Chad hadn’t really appreciated it when Jared had asked when the calamari barbecue was being held.
Actually, his precise words were, “Fuck you, Padalecki. Get dumped into a vat of seafood by your own goddamn girlfriend.”
So, yeah, if he hadn’t already been warned off the dangers of teaming up with people (especially significant others) by his family, knowing Chad would be a definite deterrent.
“You could be my sidekick if you want,” Jared says.
Nobody revs the motorcycle‘s engine like a threat. Why can’t you be my sidekick?
“Well, I am taller than you.”
You don’t know that.
Well, that’s true. God knows Jared’s sure as hell never seen him off the damn bike, but he takes a stab in the dark anyway. “What are the chances I’m not?”
Shut up, he grumbles in Jared’s head.
“Make me, dude,” Jared shoots back.
It’s force of habit, too many hours spent around annoyingly infantile co-workers and an adorably oversexed girlfriend, but there’s something about the smooth graceful way the guy’s body shifts on the bike that has Jared squirming uncomfortably. He gets so hard he knows he’ll be useless for the rest of the night, too busy thinking about stripping away that black leather and exploring just what’s hiding underneath with meaningful swipes of his tongue.
Maybe I will, Nobody says.
He drives off then before Jared can say anything, which is probably a good thing.
*
Later on Jared leans up against the wall of his shower, pressing his forehead against the cool tiles under his forearm as his other hand strokes hard and slow over his cock. He drags his thumb roughly over the head to the chorus of a bone-deep moan and a full-body shudder, and he could swear he smells leather and exhaust.
Aw, hell, he thinks, and when he comes he’s just surprised he doesn’t slip up and lose enough density to make him fall through the wall into the next room.
*
The next month is a blur of filming and patrolling and hanging out with Jensen, and sometimes Mike and Tom, and once there’s the threat that Jensen’s going to come out to the bar with them.
Jared promptly spazzes out, at least in his own head. Jensen never comes out with the three of them at the same time, always scrounging up some excuse. He’s taking a class. He’s dating a Playboy bunny. He’s got to … fuck, Jared doesn’t know. Stare into the mirror for hours on end and think about how goddamn pretty he is.
Okay, maybe not that last one, but still.
He puts on the damn ankle weights, though. He shouldn’t even bother to drink anyway just in case he gets drunk and does something stupid like fall through the pool table while wailing bad country music. God knows it wouldn’t be the first time. Hell, at least he’s lucky that the ankle weights are usually enough to hold him down even when they’ve shifted along with the rest of him.
All he can think about is Jensen like he’s one of his silly flailing fan girls. Jensen’s coming, Jensen’s coming, Jensen’s coming, he thinks, his eyes sparkling and his smile so damn wide his face is starting to hurt.
Okay, maybe he needs a little more Corona.
“No wonder our wardrobe mistress can’t find half of Lana’s sweaters,” Mike says as he tugs at the light pink button-down Jared’s wearing. “They’re all in your closet, aren’t they?”
Jared‘s in a good enough mood not to let Mike get to him, grabbing onto his shoulders and giving him a shake before Mike can shrug him off. “Yeah, Mikay, you should talk,” he says.
Tom groans and rolls his eyes. “Why do you always have to give him shit, Mikey?”
“I give everybody shit. Why should I stop with Jared?”
Jared leans against the bar, checking the door again for any sign of Jensen. Okay, yeah, tonight’s probably going to be really damn uncomfortable, but he’s kinda looking for forward to it. Jensen never comes out with the three of them, for crying out loud.
When he spots Tom watching him go just a little bit nuts, he forces a smile. “Look, if I say the wrong thing, could you …”
“What, wave my magic wand and make Jen forget? It doesn’t exactly work that way, man.”
Mike slings an arm around Jared’s shoulders and says, “I could whack him over the head with a bottle of Jager. That might work. You know, if we all suddenly start working in sitcoms.”
Jared laughs at that, loud and bright, and he’s already having such a good time it doesn’t even bother him when Jensen skips out.
*
A dozen calls to Jensen’s cell phone after Jared gets home from the bar don’t warrant an answer from Jensen, so Jared texts him somewhere between stumbling out of the taxi and passing out on his bed.
u skipped out on us, he sends, more that a little amazed that he managed to spell that much right.
It only takes a few seconds for an answer to pop up on his phone, thankfully before he throws up or drunk-dials somebody else or falls asleep.
Those elephants aren’t going to train themselves, it says.
Jared’s just drunk enough to giggle at that, bury his face in his pillow, and let it slide.
*
Jared brings the dogs to the set the day Jeff shows up to film a scene, and it only takes a minute of Harley and Sadie behaving a million times better than they ever do for him for Jared to suspect something’s up.
“You too, huh?” he asks, once they’re out of earshot of the rest of the crew.
Jeff shrugs and smiles, rough and easy. “Been retired a few years now. I’m not all that crazy about setting up a new crew of partners and my girl isn’t exactly the world-saving kind.”
Sadie looks like she’s planning on leaving with Jeff, the little attention whore, flopping down on her back with her big goofy paws hanging in midair silently begging for a tummy rub. Jeff’s too busy getting down and dirty with those spots right behind Harley’s ears that completely sway his loyalty, and Harley barks in delight and closes his eyes in sweet doggy bliss.
“Harley wants you to scratch behind his ears more often,” Jeff says.
Jared snorts and crosses his arms. “Harley wants me to quit my job and scratch behind his ears professionally.”
With a chuckle, Jeff gets to his feet and the dogs follow. They pounce at him until he makes a guttural noise in his throat that makes them back off. They sit happily at his feet, slobbery tongues lolling out of their mouths.
“Traitors,” Jared mutters, and Jeff shakes his head with a smile.
“What about Jensen? You and he workin’ together in your offtime?”
“Oh, no, man, he’s not -- I mean.”
Jared doesn’t know why he doesn’t just say that Jensen doesn’t have any damn superpowers, that if he did then Jared would have to know by now. But he doesn’t, and he doesn’t even know why. He just makes a face and waves Jeff off, saying, “I don’t work in teams.”
Not that I don’t want to, he thinks. Well, sort of.
And then Jensen walks up to them, grinning like he’s just found out that one of this week’s female guest stars wants to the crawl into his lap and never leave, and Jared gets a little distracted with pretending to be a normal guy all over again.
*
Two days later Jared saves a carload of teenagers from driving into a brick wall and Jensen won’t shut up about it.
“I don’t even get how these guys do it,” he says, waving the newspaper in the air and getting the makeup artist to give him a good hard swat on the arm for flinching. “Could you imagine dressing up in some dorky costume and going out to save people’s lives? That takes balls, man.”
“Yeah, and in that outfit you can see ‘em if you squint,” Jared says, which makes Jensen grin.
Jared goes back to foraging through the last of the Warheads in the candy container, pointedly ignoring the picture on the front page of the newspaper. It’s definitely him, although thankfully it’s a blurry unidentifiable version of him where he’s phasing halfway through a concrete pylon. You can’t really see his face and unless you’ve been up close and personal with his rear view it’s not exactly a body part anybody can just pick out of a lineup.
Mike had text-messaged him that morning with, nothing like an ass shot on the front page to wake a guy up in the morning, gorgeous.
He really has to stop giving Mike his cell phone number.
“Jay?”
“Yeah, what?” he says, practically jumping ten feet up out of his chair.
Jensen narrows his eyes as concern clouds his expression. “I was just askin’ if you’ve ever met a superhero. You know, seen one up close.”
I am a professional, Jared thinks, and shakes his head while flashing his most innocent smile. “Nah, dude. You?”
Jensen’s lips curl into a satisfied smirk, like he’s got something on Jared and he knows it. “Once, when I was on Days. Some girl stopped a guy who was running away after robbing a liquor store by freezing him in the middle of the goddamn intersection. It was awesome, like something out of a comic book.”
Jared grins as the stylist tousles his hair with gel-covered fingers. Yeah, okay, if he weren’t spending his days off killing time on rooftops, that’d sound pretty sweet to him, too.
“Did you ever want to do this kind of stuff?”
Jensen’s waving the newspaper in midair, and Jared can’t help but grin as he says, “Well, I was one of those kids who was dumb enough to jump off the garage wearing a Superman costume, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Seriously?”
Jared shrugs. “At least I didn’t break anything, right?”
He doesn’t bother to mention that the reason he hadn’t broken any bones was that he hadn’t landed at all until his dad had talked him down by making him think about heavy stuff like anvils and battleships, but still.
“Hey,” he says, “how about you? If you were one of those guys what would you want to be able to do? Flying, laser vision, super strength … what?”
Jensen shrugs, flips through the newspaper as he distractedly searches for the rest of the article. “I don’t know, dude. I’ve always thought walking through walls was kind of the shit, you know what I mean?”
Jared just nods and smiles like a gibbering idiot, and for some reason he’s pretty sure he won’t be able to wipe the smile off his face for the rest of the day.
*
Two months after Jared goes up to Vancouver for Supernatural, Sandy breaks up with him.
Okay, it’s mutual. Sort of.
Look, the main thing is that Sandy shows up on his doorstep -- pretty much literally; Jared would bet money on that being the reason housekeeping looks at him funny now and keeps forgetting to leave him those little light green soaps shaped like seashells -- and steers him towards the nearest chair.
“We need to talk,” she says, then stands in front of him with her hands on her hips.
Her costumed hips. That little skirt and the boots and the damn cape.
Jared would really love to know how she plans to make him concentrate on a conversation about their relationship when she’s wearing quite possibly the sexiest superheroine costume she could aside from a Wonder Woman outfit.
“You have a crush on that guy in leather,” she says.
The part of Jared’s brain that’s already been planning some fairly pornographic things to do with those boots skids to a halt with an almost audible halt.
“Excuse me?”
“You’re excused,” she says with a wave of her hand, and the tone of her voice says that he totally is, that of course it’s okay he’s having fantasies about some mind reading weirdo on a bike whom he doesn’t even know, really.
And the thing is, it’s not that Jared is gay. He’s not particularly straight, either, but that’s beside the point. It’s just hard enough to hide the whole superhero thing without adding that sometimes a hard day of filming his television show and saving lives he comes home and jerks off to gay porn.
Not that that’s the kind of thing you casually slip into an interview anyway, but still.
“Sandy, I’m not -- I mean.” Nervous laughter bubbles up from his chest, and he suddenly has no idea where to put his hands. “Why would you think I want to --”
“Do you know how many times in the past few weeks you’ve talked about him to me over the phone? Honestly, baby, I’m having middle school flashbacks of listening to Heather Comstock talk about the quarterback for three straight hours.”
She reaches out and pats him on the knee, this subdued sympathetic smile on her face, and his shoulders sag a little at that.
“Speaking of,” she adds, “you aren’t twirling the phone cord around your fingers when you call me, are you?”
He frowns at her and says, “Just for that, I’m not taping me making out with that guy for you to watch.”
“Oh, you suck so much,” she says, then teleports out of the room before he can stop laughing and come up with some sarcastic comeback for that one.
*
Jared expects to be upset the next day at work, but he’s actually pretty blasé about the whole Sandy thing. Sandy’s a great girl. She’s smart, funny, cute, and has amazing tits. Guys would have to be braindead (or lusting after mysterious superheroes) not to want to date her. Hell, the lifetime of free transportation to anywhere on the planet alone is enough.
Really, that’s the only thing he’s worried about.
Well, that, and what the hell he’s supposed to tell his friends.
So far he hasn’t told anyone. But, you know, he’s thinking about it. He thinks about telling people it was just some stupid argument, or maybe just lying through his teeth and telling them the commute was a bitch (a phrase Sandy used on more than one occasion to describe those days when she had to fight crime when she was really pissed off).
And of course there was always the too-much-information route of telling them that Sandy simply didn’t reach the height requirement to ride him.
Hey, it beat announcing to everybody knew that she’d broken it off because he had a crush on a stranger, right?
Was this what Lois Lane felt like? Wanting to fuck a superhero when you didn’t even know who he was? She probably drank a lot in the missing panels of the comics, didn’t she?
But Nobody is all he can think about, damn it.
He’s on set hanging out in his trailer between scenes a few days after the break-up thinking about him, about that voice in his head and the way he’s pretty sure the guy spends most of his time around Jared smirking behind that dark visor. It just feels right, like the guy’s giving off these freaky vibes that make Jared want to peel the leather from his skin and lick him from head to toe.
He goes hard so quick now he knows what a jackrabbit mainlining Viagra feels like, and seriously, if this keeps happening every time he thinks about Nobody it was going to be a huge problem.
His inner thirteen-year-old laughs hysterically at that one, but he quickly elbows him out of the way so he can go back to rubbing his hand over the hard line of his cock in his jeans and fantasizing about what the guy might look like under that fucking costume.
Well, really.
In fact, he’s so busy worrying about the growing erection he’s currently sporting and how he’s going to explain it to the wardrobe department if he comes in Sam’s jeans that when Jensen sticks his head into the trailer and says, “Sorry about you and Sandy, man,” Jared just waves him off.
It never even occurs to him that he still hasn’t told anyone.
*
“You and Sandy broke up?”
“Long-distance relationships never work,” Jared says with an easy roll of his shoulders, then flushes bright red as Tom chokes on his beer. “Fuck, sorry, sorry. Force of habit. I’ve only been giving that excuse for every other question for the past week, honestly.”
Tom just nods in sympathy at that, even though Mike’s still laughing like he’s going to keel over and eject a lung in a minute.
“So then why did you really break up?” Tom asks.
Oh, hell. Jared hadn’t really thought about how anybody who knew them -- who really knew them -- wasn’t going to buy that long-distance-relationships excuse. It worked just fine with everybody else, which was why the makeup girls stocked the trailer with all of his favorite candy and the caterer in charge of the craft services keeps bringing him his favorites and that shy redheaded PA offered to clean out his trailer.
But, yeah. Mike and Tom were going to see right through that one.
He shifts awkwardly in his seat in the booth, long legs bumping against Mike and Tommy‘s knees with nowhere else to go. “She wants to start going out with that tall guy in her new superhero team,” he says.
Mike’s laughter starts up all over again.
“That dick with the bow and arrows? Dude, that’s Neil Patrick Harris. Unless it’s a version of him that was ejected from the alternate universe where Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle was a true story, she is going to have the worst first date ever.”
“Sort of like ours?” Tom says.
Mike practically sprays the beer he’s just swallowed all over the table and darts a dirty glare in Tom’s direction.
“Since when the hell are you two dating?” Jared asks.
“We’re not dating.” Tom pushes aside his beer and frowns in this way that makes Jared think Mike’s the one making cracks about them going out together and not the other way around. “We weren’t dating. We haven’t been --”
“Some idiot was trying to rob a lemonade stand,” Mike says.
“Since when is that a date?”
“We had drinks and saw a show!”
“We got free lemonade and watched him trip over his shoelaces in front of the cops,” Tom snaps.
Mike nods with enthusiasm, as if his point were proven. “Right, we … hey, where’d my beer go?”
Tom just grins as he goes to change the music on the jukebox.
*
The next night … morning … look, whatever. All Jared knows is that it’s three in the morning and he is dog-tired, and he really can’t remember if he’s starting his workday or ending it, and if he sees another cup of coffee he’s going to lower his density to the point where the coffee goes right through his body instead of down his throat. It’s not exactly a trick he likes to pull very often, but then again some mornings warrant it.
He’s just tired, is all. Tired of splitting his time between the set and the rooftops, tired of having two different sets of friends, and really fucking tired of trying to figure out who the hell Nobody is under that damn helmet.
What he could really use is a vacation.
See, this is why a girlfriend who could teleport came in so handy. All he had to say was, “Sweetie, I could really use a day off,” and the next thing he knew he was on a nude beach in Cancun.
Which, granted, Sandy probably could have stood to warn him about more often before she did it, but still.
He’s hanging back on set in his chair, idly sketching a sloppy stick-figure version of Nobody, when Jensen flops down beside him. He’s sweaty and dirty and covered in fake blood, ready to be filmed doing something appropriately heroic and Dean Winchester-esque.
“Hey,” he says, clapping Jared on the knee.
Jared mutters something that might be a word or two as he shifts just so, shielding the pretty crappy drawing of Nobody from view.
Jensen narrows his eyes in suspicion. “What’s your problem?”
“You ever feel like you just spent the entire night hanging out at the mall with a pair of preteen girls?”
Shaking his head with a groan, Jensen can‘t keep the laughter out of his voice when he says, “Didn’t I tell you to stop going out drinking with Mike and Tom? You’ll pass out drunk and wake up with stickers all over your face and your bra in the freezer.”
Jared doesn’t even want to know where Jensen had learned all that stuff. He’d hidden in his room whenever his sister’s friends had slept over, although he supposed it was just a good thing he was the one who could walk through walls and all she could do was shape shift. “Well, I couldn’t go drinking out with you, could I? What was it this time, Cambodian breast milk-chugging contest?”
Jensen stops watching the crew do whatever it is they have to do to get the Impala in today‘s scene to work and cocks an eyebrow as he glances sideways at Jared. “Do you really want me to tell you what I was doing last night?”
Sinking further down in his seat, Jared grumbles, “Not really, no.”
“Look, let’s make a deal,” Jensen says. “I won’t tell you what I do when I’m not at work or your place and you won’t tell me just how low Rosenbaum’s IQ’s dropped this week. Sound fair?”
Jared looks up from the sketch in his lap with a curious expression on his face. “Why don’t you ever come out drinking with all of us?”
“I go out drinking with you,” Jensen says, playing at being confused, but it’s pretty evident that he knows damn well what Jared means. For as good an actor as he is, he makes a lousy liar.
“Yeah, me,” Jared says. “But the four of us never see each other in one place outside of network events.”
Jensen’s green eyes go dark and he throws his hands up in the air, the twist of his lips sarcastic and telling. “Fine, you caught me. I’m really Michael Rosenbaum and Tom Welling. That’s why you never see us in the same place at the same time.”
“Okay, fine, whatever,” Jared mumbles, and goes back to his sketching.
Part Three
“Cut!”
It’s take five thousand and twenty-seven, or at least it feels that way, and Kim is going to kill him. Jared’s positive of that much, at least. It’s not like Kim’s taken to cradling a meat cleaver in his hands and humming the theme to Halloween while staring at Jared with crazy-serial-killer eyes or anything. But he’s starting to think that’s the next step.
Hopefully there’s a step in the middle where he gets rotten fruit thrown at his head and his ancestry insulted.
Maybe one where Kim makes him go sit in a corner and think about what he’s done?
Yeah, okay, maybe Jared’s a little bit distracted.
He and Jensen hang back for a second while the crew repositions everything for the shot. Jared nearly runs his fingers through his hair but remembers the dirty looks he usually gets from the stylist when he does that and resorts to trying to shake the tension out of his shoulders and arms. He exhales deeply, so deep he nearly makes himself dizzy.
Jensen just keeps staring at him like he’s deranged or a pod person or been hanging out with Chad or something. “What’s with you, man? Yesterday you were nailing that scene.”
Yeah, yesterday. When they’d run through their lines in Jensen’s trailer while the two of them threw gummi bears into each other’s mouths like a couple of goddamn girls.
Yesterday, before Jared met the man in black.
Jared forces a big dopey puppy-dog smile, the kind that makes his grandmother rumple his hair and make him one more batch of double chocolate chip cookies. “Nothing, really, I’m just a little sore, is all.”
Right, sore.
Last night he’d gotten back from an abbreviated patrol shortened by an early call to the set and only managed to shed his costume before passing out in bed. He dreamed of black leather and motorcycle engines and woke up with a hard-on he could use to knock over a fucking skyscraper.
Jesus, he doesn’t even know who the hell is under there.
Like, what if it were Lindsay Lohan in that thing? Okay, sure, it probably wasn’t, because Jared’s pretty sure there’s a guy in there and if Lindsay Lohan were in there she wouldn’t have gotten ten feet on that damn motorcycle without tipping over in a drunken leap and ending up in the lap of someone’s ex-boyfriend, but … well, really. He doesn’t know and it’s starting to drive him up a fucking wall and he’d come so hard this morning after jerking off that he’ll swear on a truckload of Bibles that he couldn’t remember who he was for at least forty seconds.
Jensen gets this thoughtful look on his face, lets the makeup girl double-check him for a second before she stands on her tiptoes to check Jared.
“More elephant training?” he asks.
Jared can‘t resist a grin at that. “Shut up,” he says.
“Seriously, though. If you need someone to talk to about something it isn’t like I’m not going to be here all day, you know?”
“Yeah, I know,” Jared says.
Oh, sure, that conversation would go over well, he thinks to himself I think a superpowered biker I don‘t even know is turning me into an utter hornball. Well, more of one than usual. Got any advice on reminding my hormones I‘m not all that into sucking cock?
Jared lets out this nervous giggle for some stupid reason, and Jensen’s brow furrows as he stares at him, the crew bustling around them. “You’re not going to go nuts on me and dump a bowl of Jell-O over my head at lunch or something, are you?”
“Of course not,” Jared says, and Jensen just frowns.
“Well, that sucks,” he says. “That story‘d come in real handy in interviews.”
And Jared laughs again, except this time it’s real and free, and then Kim’s waving his hand in the air to tell them to get on with it and Jared completely forgets what he was thinking about.
“What do you guys know about a guy dressed in black leather riding a motorcycle?”
Okay, so maybe he doesn’t forget about it forever.
Mike just shrugs as he tosses another peanut into the air and catches it in his open mouth on the other side of the table. “He has an easy time picking up chicks but blows all of his money on extra deodorant?”
Tom shakes his head while smacking Mike upside his, and Jared adds, “I meant a superhero who looks like that, asshole,” even though he’s pretty sure it’s unnecessary.
He almost wishes Jensen hadn’t been busy with whatever flavor-of-the-week had been pawing him when Jared had called his cell phone, although it’s probably a good thing he hadn’t tagged along. It would be a lot harder to have this conversation with him here.
The crowd shifts towards their table as the latest cheesy pop anthem pours from the start-of-the-art sound system neatly tucked behind artfully worn saddles and cheap ten-gallon hats Jared would bet were picked up in bulk at the local Wal-Mart. The bar Mike and Tom told him to meet them at couldn’t be trying any harder to be a genuine cowboy hangout if one of the waitresses walked past them every few minutes leading a steer on a leash behind her. It makes Jared want sweet tea and his mama’s peach cobbler and big fat juicy steaks cooked by his dad on a grill he lit with the lasers from his eyes the same way he craves real Mexican food after driving past a Taco Bell.
If he’d known what he was getting into when he left the hotel, he definitely would have avoided the Texas buckle, he thinks, and shifts lower in his seat.
“We’ve heard rumors,” Tom says. He darts a glance over at Mike, who’s still rubbing at the red mark on the back of his bald head. “Telepath, right?”
“Yeah,” Jared says.
Mike lets out a derisive snort. “Explains the outfit.”
The corner of Jared‘s mouth tugs upward, “So what explains yours? You still lookin’ to win Miss Teen Superhero USA?”
“Cute, Padalecki.”
“So I hear,” Jared says with a grin.
Tom rolls his eyes at both of them, drums his fingers on the tabletop and flashes them an annoyed look. “Supposedly he’s like a dispatcher,” he says, barely loud enough to be heard over the crappy music. “Drives around, gives other superheroes the head’s-up on shit that’s about to go down.”
Jared nods at that. Makes sense, really. There’s not much you can do with telepathy other than know something’s coming and alert the proper (or improper) authorities accordingly.
“Hey, he never tells us a damn thing,” Mike says.
The comment catches Tom mid-pull on his beer and he nearly choked on the stuff, narrowing his eyes. “Can you blame him? Would you go anywhere near the guy who dresses like the drum major at a gay wizarding college?”
Mike opens his mouth to defend himself, then just shrugs and goes back to his peanuts.
It takes a second for Jared to notice the silent -- okay, maybe not all that silent -- lover’s quarrel or whatever the hell this is that’s going on in front of him. Tom snatches the bowl of peanuts from in front of Mike, which leads to Mike trying to casually grab them back, which leads to Tom pointedly smashing a peanut open on the table with his fist.
Jared resists a low whistle. Mike and Tom’s fights are the things of legend, mostly because Tom’s idea of ending them usually involves showing roomfuls of people embarrassing illusions of Mike wearing a woman’s cheerleading outfit or naked or rooting for the Yankees or something.
Mike’s response is usually to laugh until beer squirts out of his nose, which is somehow twice as embarrassing as anything Tom’s ever come up with.
Tom slams his fist down again and peanut shells fly everywhere.
Jared leans towards Mike and says, “What’s his problem?”
“I offended his delicate sensibilities,” Mike says.
“Do I even want to know?”
Tom‘s shoulders heave as he sighs harshly and says, “We were on patrol the other day and the kid we were saving from a burning car took one look at this idiot’s costume and said, ‘That’s so gay.’”
Jared frowns. “So?”
“So this moron says, ‘No, this is gay,’ and kisses me.”
When your friend tells you something like that, it turns out that you’re not really supposed to laugh.
Well, all right you get to laugh a little but you definitely don’t get to slap your big old paws on the counter and laugh so loud even the bartender gives you warning looks and chuckle until you cry and your eyelids start to twitch. For some stupid reason, sometimes that just makes your friends scowl like toddlers about to throw tantrums.
“Yeah, sorry. That’s really not funny.” Jared forces himself to catch his breath and plaster on a serious expression, shaking his finger in Mike‘s direction. “Shame on you.”
“You’re right,” Mike says with mock solemnity. “I’m a terrible person. I should never have paid the kid to take pictures and send them to the tabloids.”
“I hate both of you,” Tom says.
Five minutes later they get asked to leave, but that’s what happens when everybody else suddenly sees you sitting there in curly wigs and ludicrous amounts of makeup and nothing else.
Patrolling that weekend is a mistake. Instead of following the police cars riding through the streets or keeping his eyes on what might be lurking in the shadows, he’s scanning the roads looking for motorcycles. It’s fucking ridiculous.
Jared can just see himself doing something dorky like drawing “
He perches on the edge of the rooftop and drums his fingers against the ledge. Usually he’s not so openly bored on patrol but then again he usually isn’t. He’s always busy, and if he’s not busy then he has a good time people-watching or picks up a newspaper or something, and if Mike and Tommy are spending the night on patrol with him he can always swim in the constant worry of Mike getting them all arrested for public indecency. Hell, he comes close to it often enough.
When he hears that familiar rumble coming down the street, he can’t resist his wide welcoming smile as he leaps off the building.
Jared comes down on the sidewalk, light as a feather, solidifying only when his feet reach the cold hard ground. When he lands the stranger is parked right in front of him, leaning easily on his bike.
The way his head is tilted, Jared likes to think he’s smiling just as wide as Jared behind that helmet.
“Hey,” he says, and okay, he hasn’t sounded half that fucking excited since getting the call about Supernatural. “I haven’t seen you around in days. Maybe this time we can actually have an introduction with more than one name involved.”
Your name isn’t Shadow, the stranger’s voice points out.
“Fine, codenames. Whatever.”
It really doesn’t matter. I’m nobody.
You‘d think Jared couldn‘t smile any wider but he does, because it‘s either that or laugh like an utter jackass. That‘s just how much giddy energy‘s rushin through his veins right now. “You realize now I’m just going to end up calling you Nobody,” he says.
The stranger shrugs. I kind of expected as much, yeah.
“How’d you know I’d be here?”
Some idiot’s trying to rob the mini-mart two blocks over, the stranger says, not answering his question. His helmet tilts to the side. Race you?
Jared cocks an eyebrow at that.
Nobody revs his engine.
Jared spins on his heels and runs through the nearest wall.
Racing through buildings without knowing what he’s about to run through isn’t something Jared normally does. You never know when you might run through a ladies’ restroom or somebody’s bedroom and catch an eyeful of something you’d definitely rather not see. It had only taken one really ugly couple engaged in an act for which he probably should have turned right back around and arrested them or something for Jared to learn that particular lesson.
Plus, there’s the whole trespassing issue, which … hi, he’s sat through that lecture before, and it wasn’t fun the first time when he’d gotten to eat his mom’s fajitas afterwards and his dad had told him he might have gotten away with it if it hadn’t been the girl’s locker room he’d been in.
He darts through a hair salon and a video store and then finally there he is, blocking the doorway of the mini-mart and shocking the hell out of the guy up to his wrists in the register. The robber jolts as soon as he sees some six-and-a-half-foot weirdo in spandex walk right through the goddamn wall, looking like he wants to make a run for it but isn’t sure whether or not he’s about to be turned into a frog or something.
Jared’s grin turns wicked and wild and daring, increasing his density until his body’s a fucking freight train hard enough to smash diamonds.
He crouches between the robber and his only escape, beckoning to the robber with a “come get some” curl of his fingers.
“You really want to try going out this way? Be my guest.”
The police slap the cuffs on the guy and toss him into the back of a police car pretty damn quickly, although they’re still a little confused as to why he just walked right out of the mini-mart with his arms in the air. It probably helped that Jared told him that there were twenty other heroes littering the nearby rooftops ready to pick him up and drop him in the bay if he tried to run.
What? He’s a hero but no one ever said he had to be completely honest about the whole thing.
He leans against the wall of the pharmacy across the street with his arms crossed, unable to resist a grin as he glances over at Nobody. The motorcycle’s tilted just so, ready to be revved up and ridden hard in a matter of seconds, but he hasn’t gone anywhere yet and that’s the important thing.
“You’re not going to say we make a good team, are you?” Jared asks.
Nobody‘s helmet turns in his direction. You don’t like teams either?
Jared shakes his head. Two days ago Chad had left him a voicemail hollering that Sophia had thrown him into a pit of angry squids and left him there after he’d told Teen People she’d been dating Captain California while they’d still been married. Chad hadn’t really appreciated it when Jared had asked when the calamari barbecue was being held.
Actually, his precise words were, “Fuck you, Padalecki. Get dumped into a vat of seafood by your own goddamn girlfriend.”
So, yeah, if he hadn’t already been warned off the dangers of teaming up with people (especially significant others) by his family, knowing Chad would be a definite deterrent.
“You could be my sidekick if you want,” Jared says.
Nobody revs the motorcycle‘s engine like a threat. Why can’t you be my sidekick?
“Well, I am taller than you.”
You don’t know that.
Well, that’s true. God knows Jared’s sure as hell never seen him off the damn bike, but he takes a stab in the dark anyway. “What are the chances I’m not?”
Shut up, he grumbles in Jared’s head.
“Make me, dude,” Jared shoots back.
It’s force of habit, too many hours spent around annoyingly infantile co-workers and an adorably oversexed girlfriend, but there’s something about the smooth graceful way the guy’s body shifts on the bike that has Jared squirming uncomfortably. He gets so hard he knows he’ll be useless for the rest of the night, too busy thinking about stripping away that black leather and exploring just what’s hiding underneath with meaningful swipes of his tongue.
Maybe I will, Nobody says.
He drives off then before Jared can say anything, which is probably a good thing.
Later on Jared leans up against the wall of his shower, pressing his forehead against the cool tiles under his forearm as his other hand strokes hard and slow over his cock. He drags his thumb roughly over the head to the chorus of a bone-deep moan and a full-body shudder, and he could swear he smells leather and exhaust.
Aw, hell, he thinks, and when he comes he’s just surprised he doesn’t slip up and lose enough density to make him fall through the wall into the next room.
The next month is a blur of filming and patrolling and hanging out with Jensen, and sometimes Mike and Tom, and once there’s the threat that Jensen’s going to come out to the bar with them.
Jared promptly spazzes out, at least in his own head. Jensen never comes out with the three of them at the same time, always scrounging up some excuse. He’s taking a class. He’s dating a Playboy bunny. He’s got to … fuck, Jared doesn’t know. Stare into the mirror for hours on end and think about how goddamn pretty he is.
Okay, maybe not that last one, but still.
He puts on the damn ankle weights, though. He shouldn’t even bother to drink anyway just in case he gets drunk and does something stupid like fall through the pool table while wailing bad country music. God knows it wouldn’t be the first time. Hell, at least he’s lucky that the ankle weights are usually enough to hold him down even when they’ve shifted along with the rest of him.
All he can think about is Jensen like he’s one of his silly flailing fan girls. Jensen’s coming, Jensen’s coming, Jensen’s coming, he thinks, his eyes sparkling and his smile so damn wide his face is starting to hurt.
Okay, maybe he needs a little more Corona.
“No wonder our wardrobe mistress can’t find half of Lana’s sweaters,” Mike says as he tugs at the light pink button-down Jared’s wearing. “They’re all in your closet, aren’t they?”
Jared‘s in a good enough mood not to let Mike get to him, grabbing onto his shoulders and giving him a shake before Mike can shrug him off. “Yeah, Mikay, you should talk,” he says.
Tom groans and rolls his eyes. “Why do you always have to give him shit, Mikey?”
“I give everybody shit. Why should I stop with Jared?”
Jared leans against the bar, checking the door again for any sign of Jensen. Okay, yeah, tonight’s probably going to be really damn uncomfortable, but he’s kinda looking for forward to it. Jensen never comes out with the three of them, for crying out loud.
When he spots Tom watching him go just a little bit nuts, he forces a smile. “Look, if I say the wrong thing, could you …”
“What, wave my magic wand and make Jen forget? It doesn’t exactly work that way, man.”
Mike slings an arm around Jared’s shoulders and says, “I could whack him over the head with a bottle of Jager. That might work. You know, if we all suddenly start working in sitcoms.”
Jared laughs at that, loud and bright, and he’s already having such a good time it doesn’t even bother him when Jensen skips out.
A dozen calls to Jensen’s cell phone after Jared gets home from the bar don’t warrant an answer from Jensen, so Jared texts him somewhere between stumbling out of the taxi and passing out on his bed.
u skipped out on us, he sends, more that a little amazed that he managed to spell that much right.
It only takes a few seconds for an answer to pop up on his phone, thankfully before he throws up or drunk-dials somebody else or falls asleep.
Those elephants aren’t going to train themselves, it says.
Jared’s just drunk enough to giggle at that, bury his face in his pillow, and let it slide.
Jared brings the dogs to the set the day Jeff shows up to film a scene, and it only takes a minute of Harley and Sadie behaving a million times better than they ever do for him for Jared to suspect something’s up.
“You too, huh?” he asks, once they’re out of earshot of the rest of the crew.
Jeff shrugs and smiles, rough and easy. “Been retired a few years now. I’m not all that crazy about setting up a new crew of partners and my girl isn’t exactly the world-saving kind.”
Sadie looks like she’s planning on leaving with Jeff, the little attention whore, flopping down on her back with her big goofy paws hanging in midair silently begging for a tummy rub. Jeff’s too busy getting down and dirty with those spots right behind Harley’s ears that completely sway his loyalty, and Harley barks in delight and closes his eyes in sweet doggy bliss.
“Harley wants you to scratch behind his ears more often,” Jeff says.
Jared snorts and crosses his arms. “Harley wants me to quit my job and scratch behind his ears professionally.”
With a chuckle, Jeff gets to his feet and the dogs follow. They pounce at him until he makes a guttural noise in his throat that makes them back off. They sit happily at his feet, slobbery tongues lolling out of their mouths.
“Traitors,” Jared mutters, and Jeff shakes his head with a smile.
“What about Jensen? You and he workin’ together in your offtime?”
“Oh, no, man, he’s not -- I mean.”
Jared doesn’t know why he doesn’t just say that Jensen doesn’t have any damn superpowers, that if he did then Jared would have to know by now. But he doesn’t, and he doesn’t even know why. He just makes a face and waves Jeff off, saying, “I don’t work in teams.”
Not that I don’t want to, he thinks. Well, sort of.
And then Jensen walks up to them, grinning like he’s just found out that one of this week’s female guest stars wants to the crawl into his lap and never leave, and Jared gets a little distracted with pretending to be a normal guy all over again.
Two days later Jared saves a carload of teenagers from driving into a brick wall and Jensen won’t shut up about it.
“I don’t even get how these guys do it,” he says, waving the newspaper in the air and getting the makeup artist to give him a good hard swat on the arm for flinching. “Could you imagine dressing up in some dorky costume and going out to save people’s lives? That takes balls, man.”
“Yeah, and in that outfit you can see ‘em if you squint,” Jared says, which makes Jensen grin.
Jared goes back to foraging through the last of the Warheads in the candy container, pointedly ignoring the picture on the front page of the newspaper. It’s definitely him, although thankfully it’s a blurry unidentifiable version of him where he’s phasing halfway through a concrete pylon. You can’t really see his face and unless you’ve been up close and personal with his rear view it’s not exactly a body part anybody can just pick out of a lineup.
Mike had text-messaged him that morning with, nothing like an ass shot on the front page to wake a guy up in the morning, gorgeous.
He really has to stop giving Mike his cell phone number.
“Jay?”
“Yeah, what?” he says, practically jumping ten feet up out of his chair.
Jensen narrows his eyes as concern clouds his expression. “I was just askin’ if you’ve ever met a superhero. You know, seen one up close.”
I am a professional, Jared thinks, and shakes his head while flashing his most innocent smile. “Nah, dude. You?”
Jensen’s lips curl into a satisfied smirk, like he’s got something on Jared and he knows it. “Once, when I was on Days. Some girl stopped a guy who was running away after robbing a liquor store by freezing him in the middle of the goddamn intersection. It was awesome, like something out of a comic book.”
Jared grins as the stylist tousles his hair with gel-covered fingers. Yeah, okay, if he weren’t spending his days off killing time on rooftops, that’d sound pretty sweet to him, too.
“Did you ever want to do this kind of stuff?”
Jensen’s waving the newspaper in midair, and Jared can’t help but grin as he says, “Well, I was one of those kids who was dumb enough to jump off the garage wearing a Superman costume, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Seriously?”
Jared shrugs. “At least I didn’t break anything, right?”
He doesn’t bother to mention that the reason he hadn’t broken any bones was that he hadn’t landed at all until his dad had talked him down by making him think about heavy stuff like anvils and battleships, but still.
“Hey,” he says, “how about you? If you were one of those guys what would you want to be able to do? Flying, laser vision, super strength … what?”
Jensen shrugs, flips through the newspaper as he distractedly searches for the rest of the article. “I don’t know, dude. I’ve always thought walking through walls was kind of the shit, you know what I mean?”
Jared just nods and smiles like a gibbering idiot, and for some reason he’s pretty sure he won’t be able to wipe the smile off his face for the rest of the day.
Two months after Jared goes up to Vancouver for Supernatural, Sandy breaks up with him.
Okay, it’s mutual. Sort of.
Look, the main thing is that Sandy shows up on his doorstep -- pretty much literally; Jared would bet money on that being the reason housekeeping looks at him funny now and keeps forgetting to leave him those little light green soaps shaped like seashells -- and steers him towards the nearest chair.
“We need to talk,” she says, then stands in front of him with her hands on her hips.
Her costumed hips. That little skirt and the boots and the damn cape.
Jared would really love to know how she plans to make him concentrate on a conversation about their relationship when she’s wearing quite possibly the sexiest superheroine costume she could aside from a Wonder Woman outfit.
“You have a crush on that guy in leather,” she says.
The part of Jared’s brain that’s already been planning some fairly pornographic things to do with those boots skids to a halt with an almost audible halt.
“Excuse me?”
“You’re excused,” she says with a wave of her hand, and the tone of her voice says that he totally is, that of course it’s okay he’s having fantasies about some mind reading weirdo on a bike whom he doesn’t even know, really.
And the thing is, it’s not that Jared is gay. He’s not particularly straight, either, but that’s beside the point. It’s just hard enough to hide the whole superhero thing without adding that sometimes a hard day of filming his television show and saving lives he comes home and jerks off to gay porn.
Not that that’s the kind of thing you casually slip into an interview anyway, but still.
“Sandy, I’m not -- I mean.” Nervous laughter bubbles up from his chest, and he suddenly has no idea where to put his hands. “Why would you think I want to --”
“Do you know how many times in the past few weeks you’ve talked about him to me over the phone? Honestly, baby, I’m having middle school flashbacks of listening to Heather Comstock talk about the quarterback for three straight hours.”
She reaches out and pats him on the knee, this subdued sympathetic smile on her face, and his shoulders sag a little at that.
“Speaking of,” she adds, “you aren’t twirling the phone cord around your fingers when you call me, are you?”
He frowns at her and says, “Just for that, I’m not taping me making out with that guy for you to watch.”
“Oh, you suck so much,” she says, then teleports out of the room before he can stop laughing and come up with some sarcastic comeback for that one.
Jared expects to be upset the next day at work, but he’s actually pretty blasé about the whole Sandy thing. Sandy’s a great girl. She’s smart, funny, cute, and has amazing tits. Guys would have to be braindead (or lusting after mysterious superheroes) not to want to date her. Hell, the lifetime of free transportation to anywhere on the planet alone is enough.
Really, that’s the only thing he’s worried about.
Well, that, and what the hell he’s supposed to tell his friends.
So far he hasn’t told anyone. But, you know, he’s thinking about it. He thinks about telling people it was just some stupid argument, or maybe just lying through his teeth and telling them the commute was a bitch (a phrase Sandy used on more than one occasion to describe those days when she had to fight crime when she was really pissed off).
And of course there was always the too-much-information route of telling them that Sandy simply didn’t reach the height requirement to ride him.
Hey, it beat announcing to everybody knew that she’d broken it off because he had a crush on a stranger, right?
Was this what Lois Lane felt like? Wanting to fuck a superhero when you didn’t even know who he was? She probably drank a lot in the missing panels of the comics, didn’t she?
But Nobody is all he can think about, damn it.
He’s on set hanging out in his trailer between scenes a few days after the break-up thinking about him, about that voice in his head and the way he’s pretty sure the guy spends most of his time around Jared smirking behind that dark visor. It just feels right, like the guy’s giving off these freaky vibes that make Jared want to peel the leather from his skin and lick him from head to toe.
He goes hard so quick now he knows what a jackrabbit mainlining Viagra feels like, and seriously, if this keeps happening every time he thinks about Nobody it was going to be a huge problem.
His inner thirteen-year-old laughs hysterically at that one, but he quickly elbows him out of the way so he can go back to rubbing his hand over the hard line of his cock in his jeans and fantasizing about what the guy might look like under that fucking costume.
Well, really.
In fact, he’s so busy worrying about the growing erection he’s currently sporting and how he’s going to explain it to the wardrobe department if he comes in Sam’s jeans that when Jensen sticks his head into the trailer and says, “Sorry about you and Sandy, man,” Jared just waves him off.
It never even occurs to him that he still hasn’t told anyone.
“You and Sandy broke up?”
“Long-distance relationships never work,” Jared says with an easy roll of his shoulders, then flushes bright red as Tom chokes on his beer. “Fuck, sorry, sorry. Force of habit. I’ve only been giving that excuse for every other question for the past week, honestly.”
Tom just nods in sympathy at that, even though Mike’s still laughing like he’s going to keel over and eject a lung in a minute.
“So then why did you really break up?” Tom asks.
Oh, hell. Jared hadn’t really thought about how anybody who knew them -- who really knew them -- wasn’t going to buy that long-distance-relationships excuse. It worked just fine with everybody else, which was why the makeup girls stocked the trailer with all of his favorite candy and the caterer in charge of the craft services keeps bringing him his favorites and that shy redheaded PA offered to clean out his trailer.
But, yeah. Mike and Tom were going to see right through that one.
He shifts awkwardly in his seat in the booth, long legs bumping against Mike and Tommy‘s knees with nowhere else to go. “She wants to start going out with that tall guy in her new superhero team,” he says.
Mike’s laughter starts up all over again.
“That dick with the bow and arrows? Dude, that’s Neil Patrick Harris. Unless it’s a version of him that was ejected from the alternate universe where Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle was a true story, she is going to have the worst first date ever.”
“Sort of like ours?” Tom says.
Mike practically sprays the beer he’s just swallowed all over the table and darts a dirty glare in Tom’s direction.
“Since when the hell are you two dating?” Jared asks.
“We’re not dating.” Tom pushes aside his beer and frowns in this way that makes Jared think Mike’s the one making cracks about them going out together and not the other way around. “We weren’t dating. We haven’t been --”
“Some idiot was trying to rob a lemonade stand,” Mike says.
“Since when is that a date?”
“We had drinks and saw a show!”
“We got free lemonade and watched him trip over his shoelaces in front of the cops,” Tom snaps.
Mike nods with enthusiasm, as if his point were proven. “Right, we … hey, where’d my beer go?”
Tom just grins as he goes to change the music on the jukebox.
The next night … morning … look, whatever. All Jared knows is that it’s three in the morning and he is dog-tired, and he really can’t remember if he’s starting his workday or ending it, and if he sees another cup of coffee he’s going to lower his density to the point where the coffee goes right through his body instead of down his throat. It’s not exactly a trick he likes to pull very often, but then again some mornings warrant it.
He’s just tired, is all. Tired of splitting his time between the set and the rooftops, tired of having two different sets of friends, and really fucking tired of trying to figure out who the hell Nobody is under that damn helmet.
What he could really use is a vacation.
See, this is why a girlfriend who could teleport came in so handy. All he had to say was, “Sweetie, I could really use a day off,” and the next thing he knew he was on a nude beach in Cancun.
Which, granted, Sandy probably could have stood to warn him about more often before she did it, but still.
He’s hanging back on set in his chair, idly sketching a sloppy stick-figure version of Nobody, when Jensen flops down beside him. He’s sweaty and dirty and covered in fake blood, ready to be filmed doing something appropriately heroic and Dean Winchester-esque.
“Hey,” he says, clapping Jared on the knee.
Jared mutters something that might be a word or two as he shifts just so, shielding the pretty crappy drawing of Nobody from view.
Jensen narrows his eyes in suspicion. “What’s your problem?”
“You ever feel like you just spent the entire night hanging out at the mall with a pair of preteen girls?”
Shaking his head with a groan, Jensen can‘t keep the laughter out of his voice when he says, “Didn’t I tell you to stop going out drinking with Mike and Tom? You’ll pass out drunk and wake up with stickers all over your face and your bra in the freezer.”
Jared doesn’t even want to know where Jensen had learned all that stuff. He’d hidden in his room whenever his sister’s friends had slept over, although he supposed it was just a good thing he was the one who could walk through walls and all she could do was shape shift. “Well, I couldn’t go drinking out with you, could I? What was it this time, Cambodian breast milk-chugging contest?”
Jensen stops watching the crew do whatever it is they have to do to get the Impala in today‘s scene to work and cocks an eyebrow as he glances sideways at Jared. “Do you really want me to tell you what I was doing last night?”
Sinking further down in his seat, Jared grumbles, “Not really, no.”
“Look, let’s make a deal,” Jensen says. “I won’t tell you what I do when I’m not at work or your place and you won’t tell me just how low Rosenbaum’s IQ’s dropped this week. Sound fair?”
Jared looks up from the sketch in his lap with a curious expression on his face. “Why don’t you ever come out drinking with all of us?”
“I go out drinking with you,” Jensen says, playing at being confused, but it’s pretty evident that he knows damn well what Jared means. For as good an actor as he is, he makes a lousy liar.
“Yeah, me,” Jared says. “But the four of us never see each other in one place outside of network events.”
Jensen’s green eyes go dark and he throws his hands up in the air, the twist of his lips sarcastic and telling. “Fine, you caught me. I’m really Michael Rosenbaum and Tom Welling. That’s why you never see us in the same place at the same time.”
“Okay, fine, whatever,” Jared mumbles, and goes back to his sketching.
Part Three
