Work Text:
The Ackles and Padaleckis like to joke that they have two and a half children each. Their two J’s, interwoven at all times, oh, they only ever count as One and are shared in equal parts.
Things kind of start when the Ackles come over to see the New Baby, and it hasn’t stopped since.
You don’t question these kind of things until your brain starts connecting the dots. You crave or you don’t; it’s simple, it’s pure. You’re hungry, you eat. You’re lonely, you go see your friend. You love someone, you keep them.
Jensen is kept. Keeps in return. Teaches the squirmy bug the smallest things up to the biggest. Jared can’t even speak yet, and nevertheless he’s the best friend-brother Jensen could ever want.
Jared grow-blooms like a sprouting tree, right in front of Jensen’s wondering eyes, and his Mom is angry with him because why can’t he be like that with his own baby sister? But she doesn’t get it—and how could she, when Jensen doesn’t understand himself in the first place.
There is a strip of green between their houses, a wooden fence nobody really pays attention to—one two three four five six seven HOP one two three four five six seven, and the respective boy is at its respective home.
Baby-sitters have to be paid extra for the extra-child that might come over unexpectedly. There are always leftovers from dinners cooked for six, one backyard apart.
Jared is eager to follow. Could outrun Jensen, easy, at age four and with lightning in his legs, Jensen at eight and clumsy-limbed, teeth-gapped. Jared keeps Jensen’s milk teeth for him because they’re magic, he explains (breathlessly). Jared loses two of them in an attempt to wear them as a necklace. Jensen isn’t angry with him. Jared can and will get all Jensen can give him; it’s that simple.
The Middle-J’s. The accidentally-non-twins.
Grade schoolers have uglier words.
“Fagsfagsfagsfagsfags!”
Jared’s baby-fist makes chantings swirl into panicked yelps, and Jensen is stone with mirror-wide eyes, enrapt, while Jared gets beaten only slightly less than he does beat. But His Boy stands, in the end. A bloody hero, thick-lipped and stupid-reckless as they come.
(Jensen, the more patient one of them, had thought and cradled and eventually had his big brother drill a tiny tiny hole, threaded a band through. Carries Jared’s chipped front tooth in the dip of his clavicles until someone rips the lace loose, strews the precious Part between pebbles Jensen will crawl his knees bloody on (to no avail, sadly).)
“I hate your guts, J-Dog.”
“I’ll punch your lights out, Idiot.”
“Try me, try me, Jenny!”
“Oh no you didn’t!”
Jared is devotion on long, long legs, framed by the knobbiest knees, the sharpest elbows. His child-tummy is so fatless he’s got ridges of muscles where Jensen is softer; bulges under heaps of burgers and fries and soda just to even out by the end of the day, or next morning, or the next time Jensen blinks.
At Jared-age nine they are eye to eye. Hip to hip, lip to lip.
Jared is strong, so strong the kids in Jensen’s class went from kicking and stealing and screaming to low-dark-hatred whispers Jensen can ignore easily. Jared rides bikes so so fast, maybe even faster once he’s got Jensen straddling the back. They dash as fast as light, and Jared never crashes them.
Jensen clings to his little-big brother, his Hero, his Starlight.
“’’Cause obviously I’m the sun,” he explains, knitting flower crowns with little sisters and His Boy, “an’ stars get their light from the sun, so you’re my Starlight.”
(Little did Tiny Ackles know that he mistook stars with moons, and that what we see as starlight is a star already being dead for hundreds of thousands of billions of years, and that Jared in fact is His Moon he tides and waves with; oh, Jensen didn’t know that back then.)
Jensen is being outgrown when he starts growing body hair, and for the first time since They sneaked up on Jared and him that first time on the way home from school, before Jared had steeled himself and was just as soft and hurt like Jensen, for the first time since then, Jensen Ackles is scared.
Jared grows shiny teeth and bones, and Jensen doesn’t want to turn not-child yet.
Every inch is an inch between them. Jensen doesn’t want anything that Jared doesn’t have, nothing at all.
The tweezers become his first secret.
Jared smells like chlorine, and Jared blows raspberries on him. He likes to make him squeal; that high-baby tone Jensen wants to keep forever, or at least until Jared doesn’t need his own anymore either.
They’re out of breath, Jensen flopping on the towel on his back, hands still roaming over Jared’s belly. It’s a comfort, it feels good, can feel all of Jared here, the heat and stretch of his insides, right underneath his fingers, his palm, fluttering like a small animal.
Jared’s head turns, gaping smirk of youth, and he lisps, “Your turn,” before Jensen can interfere.
Jared’s bone-fingers on his fat feel like pain, and Jensen yelps, starts flailing in earnest at the touch of spit-wet mouth, tries to kick and hit and scratch but Jared’s too strong, too little to get a grip on.
Jensen cry-laughs, and he feels weird.
Can’t make Jared stop. Is sopped over his softness by baby-mouth, can feel the distant (so so distant, why is it so far) dig of teeth.
“Nonono, stop, no!”
Hand in Jared’s hair, pulling mean—Jared curls tighter, like a snake.
Jensen heats all over.
Little Boy. My Boy. J-Squad. Jerkoff. Shithead.
Bean. Peach. Peanut. Asshole. Douchebag.
They use nicknames on each other like couples on TV, like best friends, like any of the other ruddy little boys.
Jensen feels so drawn, so needed and needy he can barely take it. Presses up against Jared in whosever’s bed they’re in, tugs the sleep-bug tight to his chest, frames twig-legs. Jared curls so tiny he fits, stretches so long they change position every other hour; subconsciously.
Jared’s breath smells horrible in the morning but he’s warm warm warm where Jensen’s always lacking. Rubs his diamond-cheekbones into Jensen’s, nose against nose, until he’s awake enough to hear him when he whispers, “You made me wet,” one hand on Jensen’s chest and one tucked under Jensen’s waist.
Jensen blinks, huffs. Stills. Feels down Jared’s spine, the damp back of his boxer shorts. Stutters back, away.
“Oh,” he whimpers.
His front is soaked. He only notices when he detangles from Jared.
The morning is mild, still tinted blue outside. The house is quiet.
Jared helps him shimmying out of his wet underwear, lets him monkey-cling all around him, legs and arms, head tucked into neck, heart so so loud and Jared simply holds him.
“It’s normal,” explains Baby Jared, ten-year-old know-it-all tucked away with Jensen in their tree house (NO GIRLS ALLOWED), and fourteen-year-old fuck-it-all Jensen squirms closer on the blanket on the added, “mine does it too.”
Can I see?—Only if you show me yours.
Jared starts kissing him on the mouth. Jensen’s all spit these days, and it’s not his own. He’s flushed, but Jared always runs hotter. Holds him closer, now, and it’s summer and sweat glues together if you do it right.
Jensen is breathless and small. Jared has big hands, kisses like boys kiss their girlfriends in the movies the oldest Ackles and Padalecki boy watches with, well, the respective girlfriend.
So, Jensen kinda is a girlfriend, now.
Jared holds his hand like marriage but tugs it hard like war, and Jensen is dizzy with the scent of mayflowers, never feels hungry anymore because all he eats is Jared’s mouth, and that’s a lot, such a lot to take. He eats often, and he eats long.
Boys don’t do that with other boys.
Jared throws fists, breaks bones.
Jensen kisses blood from knuckles. Raspberries on Jared’s neck, bared, Eat Me.
That’s sick, that’s gay, you’ll go to Hell.
Jensen scribbles pictures and notes in class which Jared vows to get tattooed on himself, one day, once he finally can. It’s mostly hearts or flowers, bound tight, or the letter J which looks a lot like L (and both are true), but Jared treasures scraps like Bible pages, has them tucked away in an album he makes Jensen decorate, too. Jared hands him some big brother’s pocket knife to carve into the thick leather. How Jensen ends up carving double-J’s into their palms, he doesn’t know, but they’re Blood Brothers by evening, sealed with a kiss.
And Jared’s growing so thin-long and God it’s beautiful, why is it so beautiful?
Jensen’s more on the pudgy side, and it’s Faulty. He wants what Jared has. Has always been that way, growing up in each other’s pockets, eating each other’s food...
...but Jared does it so much prettier.
Jensen is betrayed.
Moms start pushing unfinished dishes back to him at dinner and breakfast, urge, “Kid, come on, you need it,” as if they knew anything about what Jensen needs. He insists he’s done, he’s full, and he is, he is, it’s not a lie.
Jared can eat and eat and eat and never stops growing—lengthwise. He stretches likes bubblegum.
Jensen is sixteen when he stops taking his shirt off for swims.
“What’s wrong? Why? Tell me, you know you can.”
(Jared is such a puppy. Jensen calls him like that; Puppy. Stupid. Idiot. My Boy. My Baby.)
“Nothing; not everything means something, stupid.”
Jared tucks him under and close, tight to his boy-heart, bare, always for Jensen. Holds his hands, nestles chin on top of blond crown. “If there’s ever anything,” he murmurs, already half-asleep ’cause they’ve been up all day, roaming around the forest and riverside, playing and fooling around (collecting sunburns), “you’ll tell me, right. Gotta promise you’ll tell me. Wanna know. All of you, Jen.”
“Yeah,” and Jensen means it; he swears.
Good intentions. Well, you grow older, and you find out: you’re not what you think you were. You grow older, and in fact, you change, you transform.
Jensen wants to be mistaken for Jared’s brother forever. Wants Jared to be mistaken for Jensen’s brother forever. Wants to stitch the two of them up into one, fold himself against and up into this child, his brother, his All.
Growing up. Growing up.
Jensen’s not born to be a rebel, so he fights his world twice as hard.
Mirrors turn him on-off. He wants to check, but doesn’t want to see. Is afraid to get stuck, to find something new that isn’t like anything Jared has.
Numbers are easier at first. They don’t remind of anything, aren’t Jared-shaped. Jensen starts adoring seeing them shrink – shrink – shrink. The number is him, right? He’ll get smaller too if they do, right? They’re locked to him. Jared has his own. Like teeth or fingers, you count them, they’re yours.
Jensen has no idea how much Jared weighs, but as he becomes friends with numbers, he finds out they work differently for each and every one anyway. Sometimes they listen to what he does, and sometimes not. He knows what he looks like, though, and that’s what fuels him.
Jared grows up so pretty, prettier than Jensen ever did. He’s fourteen and Jensen’s Everything, holds hands with him during recess and wears shiners like trophies (which they are).
Their families chip in to gift a falling-apart Chevy Cavalier for Jensen Ross’ eighteenth birthday, May First. Jensen drives everywhere then, usually with extra-weight in the passenger seat and a warm hand between or on top of his thighs; always a smile on his face.
There’s this old drive-in cinema two towns over where, one night, Jared devours Jensen’s weight in popcorn throughout the first half of Dirty Dancing just to have his dick sucked throughout the second. Jensen swallows in greed, in bliss, and won’t stop calling Jared Loverboy for weeks to come.
Jared’s spunk tastes like all the things he eats, and then like himself, and then like Jensen’s mouth.
(It’s almost like real food.)
Jensen gets slightly obsessed with it. Fantasizes about getting it everywhere, like the pretty girls in the stolen magazines up in their treehouse.
He hates the expression but dies at the sight.
God, God, he wants, he wants.
“The thing where they finish in. Inside.”
Sweaty-close, His Boy reduced to gasp-shakes ’cause it’s Jensen’s turn to talk tonight. He’s got his own eyes closed, trembles his tip-tongue over his own bottom lip, moves his hand just a little faster, a little tighter.
“’N’s all runny an’. Like frosting, but. It would be yours.”
Jared seizes and huffs like a dog-cat when he comes, and there’s always a hand on Jensen, somewhere, digging in like hunger.
The first time Jared brings actual gay porn to their treehouse, poor Ackles crosses himself in tears. Wants to hide. The images are scary. Bulky and big and hairy; neither of them is any of that.
There is nothing like Jared and him. There are no pictures for the things Jensen wants, and he’ll die before he asks.
Jared, on the other hand, runs his mouth without pause, and that’s kinda fine. Is very fine. Gets Jensen head-over-heels, zero to a hundred in a few hushed syllables ’cause Jared knows all too well what parts Jensen likes about himself, and which of Jared’s he likes most.
Holds Jensen down even though he wouldn’t have to. Lets Jensen leave his shirt on even though it’s eighty degrees in the shade today, doesn’t ask anymore, accepted, respects. Uses his big, big, big hands to pin Jensen’s wrists, squeeze hard enough to make rings around them, makes Jensen feel so tender, makes him so wonderfully tight in his looseuglysloppy body.
“Wanna put it in you. Right—here.”
Jensen comes on the mixed sensation of Jared’s blunt-boy push of fingers into the crack of his ass and both of his wrists locked in a single one of Jared’s hands.
Jared never says he’s strange, or funny, or weird. He’s just as deep in as Jensen, after all. Maybe worse. Looks starved half of the time, really, leers after Jensen hard enough to turn Jensen’s knees weak with nothing but that.
“I wanna wait. W-wait till you’re eighteen, too.”
Jared can never deny Jensen his will, especially not when he’s got his dick squeezed in his fist, nods puppy-blind; and Jensen is pleased.
“’S gonna be good if we wait, you’ll see.” He dreams with his eyes open as long as all he sees is Jared, Jared. “Want you so big. Want you to eat me whole then, Jay. You’ll be so big.”
They’ve always played games. They make up news every day.
Jared pearls white and thick, and Jensen fondles the softest patch of pubes around the base while he suckles the tip until Jared finally, finally starts humping up and in, helps with his palm on the back of Jensen’s head.
Nights are filled with existential crises, such as:
How on Earth is Jensen supposed to survive college away from his boy?
“Can you hold me? Please, jus hold me, hold me tight!”
Jared can do that. Does it until it hurts, until Jensen whimpers soft, then goes even further. Jensen wants to be rearranged. Wants to fit on and around nobody but his boy. Lives on second-mouth grunts and loads and loads and loads and one PBJ toast a day, a gallon of herbal tea.
There’s a black hole, and he’ll fall. Without Jared, he’ll fall, he knows.
Lets Jared pat under his shirt ’cause it’ll be a long time until he can have him again. Tries not to hear the gasps not even his perfect boy can hold back when he feels The Ugly that is Jensen.
“Can I. C-can I, I wanna suck your tits, Jen. Can I? Please. Let me.”
Lets Jared lift his shirt; only the moonlight and Jared sees him here, and Jared looks hurt but he also looks fond, in a way, cradles Jensen’s ribs like a gift basket, and eats at him. Suckle-sweet, soft and endless. Makes Jensen feel teeth, makes Jensen see the back of his own skull. Makes Jensen raw and makes him ache; good, Jensen wants to feel for days.
Jensen is the Campus Ghost. The courses are nice, but. And his dorm room is nice, but. It’s not Jared. Jared is nowhere but under Jensen’s skin, in Jensen’s phone, a combination of numbers. Jensen eats them in three-digit format, each day. Day five only leaves two, but that’s okay, that’s okay.
“I miss you, I miss you.”
“Are you crying? Oh baby, are you crying again?”
“I miss you. I need you. Jay, I’ll die. I’ll die if you don’t come hold me.”
Jared leers at Jensen’s roommate who is here for biochemistry or chemistry, Jensen doesn’t remember or care, and who eyes Jensen even less curiously after Jared stood in all of his sweet-sixteen-swagger to ask him to give them the room to themselves, an hour or so.
God, Jensen forgot to jerk off since he came here. He’s so full, he bursts so easy, barely a graze, barely a touch. He’s throbbing under Jared’s fingertips, mouth tipped open under flaring nostrils and pretty-moled cheek.
“Baby, look’a you. So hungry for it. My pretty baby.”
Jensen is this close to caving in that night. Nothing goes into anyone below the waist, that’s his rule, but god, Jared licks him so wet and loose that he almost humps back, wants to be pried open.
Jared is missing school that next day and their parents will be mad, but now Jensen tags him along to class with a belly full of warmth, cocooned in a fresh too-long-unwashed sweater of Jared. For the first time, he’s Someone in school. The boy with the pretty boy by his side who glares daggers at everything and everyone.
“Geez, calm down, you’re not a watchdog, are you.”
“They’re lookin’ at you,” growls Jared, squeezes Jensen’s hand just hard enough to make Jensen whimper behind his teeth and fatten up between his legs.
“Only ’cause you’re here,” he breathes, lets eyes fall shut and Jared pull him against his shoulder.
Jared leaves only to put the idea of a side job into Jensen’s empty heart. A secret stash of money turns into gas money turns into more Jared, on the weekends, unknown to parents who are already worried sick enough about their shadow of a son.
The taller Jared sprouts, the smaller Jensen seems to become. Jared can pick him up now, one-armed, uses the other to brace against wall or floor or wherever he wants. Only a hint of power is enough to hold himself here, cradle-saddled, cherished like something dear about to break.
“I love you, I love you so. I love you to the moon and back, forever. Want you all, want you, always.”
Jared talks nonsense with his dick down Jensen’s throat, long past tonsils ever since he passed age fourteen, stretches Jensen’s child-tight-kept gullet like a death threat that never, ever comes.
Loves to blow all over Jensen’s face, watch him kitten-paw it all into his hungry mouth, lick himself raw in the attempt to get it all, to the last drop.
Loves to tease, “That’s so nasty,” and, “Look at you,” and, “My perfect, slutty baby.”
God, he gets Jensen wet.
After work, Jensen has to scrub extra-hard. The grease stench likes to cling to him. At least it gives him the illusion of having consumed some part of it, calms his mind, calms his stomach. And there’s this one girl. Jensen thinks he’s seen her in class before, or at least on campus. She looks at him like an old friend. He invites her to her next diet soda on his break, suckles ice cubes with her, hides his hands in overlong hoodie-sleeves just like she does it.
Her name’s Molly, and she makes college kinda okay for the times Jared isn’t around.
Unfortunately, Molly is gone a few months after Jensen gets to know her, and the world somehow keeps turning without the tip-tap of her falling-apart Chucks.
“Oh. Oh—oh.”
Jared’s eighteen and packs eleven wet inches that fit into Jensen’s body with less resistance than originally feared.
Jensen is sweating, overwhelmed by the sensation of Complete Fullness and Jared and his own pulse, the closeness they share—all of a sudden, like something they had lost and now found anew.
Jensen cries like a proper virgin on his back in the back of his trustworthy car Jared’s parents half-paid for, and Jared’s got him loaded up twice without pulling out within the first thirty minutes.
“I wun. I wunna.” He feels wide and lonely where Jared was, has him next to but not inside anymore, fingers the precious cream back inside to keep. “God, it wun. Idwun close, Jay, Jay I’m leakin’, you made it too much, you.”
But it’s never enough. It never is.
Bottomless pit. Jared gets it so deep, only half ever finds the day of light.
Wine and coffee enemas work, right? So Jen’s got his protein covered, right?
God, he’s so warm. Finally, finally warm. (Jared keeps him knocked up through both Fall and Christmas break.)
“C-can we. Jen, can we maybe leave the. Leave the light on this time? Wanna see you. Wanna see you, baby.”
Cane-and-sugar toss of head, fingers digging into Jared's arm like Please.
“Okay,” love-sigh, baby-bird-shy, “another time. Whenever you’re ready.”
Growing so tall he’d reach the stars if he only tried. Big, too, all thick where it counts. Got selected for the school basketball team who’s got national reputation; hot candidate for a Good scholarship for a Good school. Jensen’s close to graduating and already looking for jobs and two-room-apartments where his boy will let him gravitate to anyway.
Jared, beautiful tall perfect everything Jared gathers him (who came to visit pre-finals to breathe again) up against the bleachers after a game, Jensen library-pale and mouth pinking up wet because that’s the effect Jared’s got on him. Own shorts tucked under balls and Jensen’s barely shoved up, exposed only between the secret of their bodies, where he’s still gaping creamy from pre-game. Gets hoodie-loose arms around Jared to hold on to what he knows is a gift with expiration date.
“We’re together,” announces Jared Tristan over dinner, “an’ I don’t care what any of you think. I don’t.” Folds Jensen’s hand in his own, on top of the neat white tablecloth. “We love each other. Always have.”
Nobody is surprised, but all Jensen can think about is if they now can see his come-bloated belly and think (understand) shit, Ackles ruined our Future God.
“Am I. If I’m not enough, then I. I want you to...”
“Don’t you fuckin’ end that sentence, Jensen.”
Jared is always hungry when he comes home from school, and Jensen always cooks for two without eating more than a spoonful himself—all gets finished anyway.
Jensen’s not the only bottomless pit, but Jared wears it better.
Jared is jock-proud of regularly fucking him into unconsciousness until he gets a call that Mr. Ackles fainted at work, again, they had to call an ambulance this time, sorry.
“What are you doin’. Baby, what are you doin’ to yourself.”
(Doesn’t even raise his voice, ’cause it’s not a question.)
“You gotta stop. Baby, you gotta eat, do it for me, please.”
“Oh, Starlight.” Jensen leans into the palm tracing his face, the odds and angles of it. Oh, Jared’s finally outgrown him. Outgrew him so far. “Oh, but I am eating? I’ve got you, don’t I.”