Roll the Dice - Chapter 2 (3/9)

[mangacat201]

Chapter One

Jensen sat before a wide computer screen, chin propped up in his hand while he stared unseeingly at the charts and calculations. He had been doing that for twelve minutes and twenty-five seconds, the slowly ticking clock at the side of his desk the only thing capable of holding his attention for longer than ten seconds at a time. He was still rattled from yesterday’s events, but apart from Chris, the team seemed unaware of anything amiss. He liked to keep it that way, but he couldn’t very well shut his own brain up, and the numbers were just not adding up for the first time. A blinking window on his computer screen caught his eye, indicating an incoming call. With a few keystrokes he accepted, and it took but a second, until the video feed initialized to broadcast a sharp image of Lieutenant Commander JD. Morgan.

“Professor Ackles.”

“Commander Morgan, is it that time of the month again?”

A tentative smile hid in the scruffy beard, but Jensen could see the Commander’s eyes flash with amusement.

“I’m afraid so. I’m hoping for good news, Doc, so what can you give me.”

“Mixed ones,” Jensen tapped at the keyboard absentmindedly to send off the latest status reports, “we managed to get the internal injuries fixed, and we deemed him stable enough to start on the extensive muscle restoration of the leg yesterday morning. Initially, everything went according to plan, but then there were some complications that resulted in the disruption of the procedure.”

Jensen saw Morgan breathe in sharply, so he hurried on.

“He was in critical condition, but thankfully we managed to get the situation under control and finish the process without much delay or additional damage.”

“So, he’s going to pull through?”

“I can’t make any definite guarantees, but the first thirty-six hours are crucial and he responded quite well then. Yesterday’s incident is of course an anomaly we’ll look into, but I’m confident that we’ll be able to handle the further treatment without further such problems. As things are looking now, he’s going to make a full recovery.”

This time, Jensen was quite sure that the Commander looked relieved.

“Very well then, good job, Doc. And on behalf of my superiors I am to tell you that the board is very interested in the progress of your work and quite satisfied with the achievements of the program.”

Jensen grinned.

“Is that your courteous way of saying that my funding won’t dry up anytime soon?”

“It’s my way of saying that your work has been closely followed, and that your latest case is an exceptional challenge that would be quite an advancement if it turned out to be fully successful. It would open a lot of doors.”

“Carrot and stick, eh? I get it. Uhm, Jeff, I…” Jensen hesitated, unsure of whether he should bring it up at all. “I wanted to ask… you know what, never mind.”

“You want to ask if I know him.”

Jensen stayed quiet, but nodded minutely.

“I do. Since he was a kid half the size he’s now. His family lived next door to my house for more than half a decade. I’ve been keeping track of him since he
joined.”

Jensen wondered if Jeff had anything to do with their latest assignment, if he’d called in a personal favor, but it wasn’t his place to ask.

“I see. Well, Commander, I hope I can come back with more good news next time.”

“I’ve got faith in you, Doc.”

Both men hovered for a few seconds in that murky area between dry protocol and informal familiarity, not quite knowing what else to say, before Morgan said
good bye and ended the call.

0300 hrs LT 07/30/2009

Jensen sat in a chair with his head leaning back against the wall, elbow so close to the mattress of the bed beside him that he could feel the fabric of his lab coat brushing against the linen, but that was as close as he ever got. He absently picked at the cuticle of his thumb, hands loosely clasped in his lap and opened his mouth again to say something. He breathed through his nose for a few heartbeats, mouth hanging stupidly open, wracking his brain for something to say before snapping his jaw shut again with a loud click that disturbed the near silence of the lab. He had been doing that more than once over the last month, ever since they had taken down the barrier, sitting here late at night and trying to come up with something to say. Sometimes he had stories to tell, jokes and teasing from shared meals, interesting news from the outside world he rarely ever acknowledged at all anymore, but if you lived in a top secret government facility smack in the middle of three dozen square miles of New Mexican desert 24/7 with the same people around, stories tended to run thin fast. He had thought about just making stuff up as he went, it was not like Jay was likely to notice the difference, but Jensen wasn’t the creative type who could spin fantasy worlds out of fancy words. He was clean cut, physical, scientific and straightforward. The urge to say something anyway, fill the silence with his voice – which was the sole purpose of him being here anyway – drove him to start talking about his work and what they’d actually done. But Jensen had given up on that quickly as well because he felt that if Jay could really hear him, giving him the explanation without the possibility of asking questions in return would be more upsetting than getting the thing over with once he was finally awake.

So Jensen sat in mostly in silence, not really uncomfortable, but not really clear on why he couldn’t give up this ridiculous habit. He’d never been one to give much thought to beliefs, spiritual energy or things that happened without any explanation. To him, everything could be explained. It was just a matter of time and place before someone would get to the bottom of things, and he’d done the explaining for a lot of mysterious phenomena in the past, so he should know. Still, after all these weeks he couldn’t fathom how he could have reached Jay and calmed him down like he did, or how he’d found the right words to say at the time. The EEG readings from the incident had been inconclusive, but they had detected some elevated activity in the follow-up, something about Jay’s readings had been off from the start, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. Jensen had no way of proving that it was anything like actual awareness. He had no idea whether his presence was even helping the man, but strangely the nightly visits seemed to help Jensen himself, no matter how foolish and short-sighted the endeavor might be. He felt centred, laying his mind to rest for the first time in years, and it was a good feeling. Still, he couldn’t quell the rising worry in the back of his mind that increased with every passing day.

They’d taken Jay down from complete life support a week ago, and there hadn’t been any complications. He was breathing on his own, his vitals and neuronal responses were promising and physically, he was in as great a shape as he was ever going to get as long as he remained asleep. He hadn’t woken though, not even stirred or shown any sign of returning to consciousness. Jensen knew these things could take time, the body demanding natural sleep for a while after being subjected to severe trauma, not to mention being suspended in artificial coma for weeks, and not even counting the extensive interference they had to run to trick the human body into accepting the treatment. But the cruelty of waiting for a sign was far worse the hectic energy that buzzed around when people were constantly fighting for a life that hung on a single thread.

“Where are you hiding out, hmmm? It’s time to come back now, really, we’re all ready to meet you here, even if it’s just to battle eternal boredom.”

Jensen sighed when, of course, there was no answer and decided to stop agonizing over it for tonight. He put his hands on his knees and lifted himself out of the chair with stiff muscles protesting along the way.

“Alright, partypooper, I’m going to bed. G’night Jay.”

When Jensen left for his room a moment later, he didn’t look back, which was how he missed the fluttery movement, a mere twitch of fingers that bent into the linen blanket before settling again.

~*~

Incessant beeping in his ear annoyed the crap out of him, because it drilled into his foggy brain at regular intervals, loud… then fainter… like waves crashing to the shore…

Nervous energy buzzing under skin, like not moving for days, but at the same time limbs like… asleep, weighted down … concrete…

Throat parched… lips chapped, with raspy breath sliding over them… slowly…

Eyes open, cracking at the dim room … murky, fuzzy around the edges…

Blinking twice, and suddenly the ceiling above him is thrown into such sharp contrast … flinching and an achy feeling settling behind his eyes almost immediately….

He blinked more rapidly to dispel the unpleasant sensation, but it was no use. He had muddled through much worse though, and a little bit of a headache wasn’t going to slow him down too much.

Looking around, sniffing, listening… had to be in a hospital,… sounds like a duck… complicated machinery surrounding his bed, and the beeping sound finally identified as a heart monitor, slowly picking up the pace now that he was shaking off the drowsiness. Jared wondered how long he’d been here, and whether his stint on the bench had been long enough that his time was already up. Ditching the last two weeks of his tour would totally trump being blown up.

Wait.

What?

Red. Hot. Pain.

Hell flashed through his brain for a moment, and was immediately blanked out by some healthy repression.

Couldn’t quite shake off the sense memory of the metallic stench of his blood and the infernal ringing though…

With a gasp, Jared surged up and propped himself onto his palms, the sheet slipping down his naked torso to pool around his hips. Frantically, he checked for any recent injuries, but while his skin was littered with scars from cuts and patchea of burned tissue fanning out from his right side, the marks looked faded… years old even…. Wherever they had taken him to, the doctors had apparently done a bang up job of patching him up, and he obviously hadn’t been hit as badly as he had anticipated. Just for confirmation, he tried to wriggle his toes, which seemed pretty slow and kind of achy, but at least he felt them, and they obeyed his command. Chances were if that worked, the rest of his legs were attached as well. He resisted the urge to peek under the sheet and check for the junk. Noticed the little patch thingies sticking all over his chest. Jared hated things sticking to his skin. Started peeling at one of them with a fingernail even though he knew he probably houldn’t. He tried anyway, because the fingers of his left hand bent with the precision and agility of an arthritic octogenarian. He stubbornly made his muscles obey, scratching at the nearest electrode, tugging at the tubes stuck in his arm in the process, hissing at the discomfort.

All attention riveted to the right in a fraction of a second. Change of lighting, sound,… doors opening,… muscles bunched and ready… Guy in white coat  doctor walking through talking over his shoulder at someone  Chris about checking wonky data. Voice deep, booming in his head. Doctor walked further into the room, finally turned around and nearly dropped the tablet pc he’d been tapping away on, face going white from one second to the next as if he’d seen a ghost.

“Holy Shit, you’re awake!”

Jared wanted to offer him a cheeky smile, wanted to shoot back a witty retort about spectacular greetings, but out came a stifled croak, and his body chose that very moment to inform him that the batteries were empty, and he had no business staying vertical a second longer. Jared had to brace himself on both arms to keep from crashing back onto the mattress, which would probably be very painful. He was shaking badly, muscles trembling from exertion and threatening to buckle under his weight. The doctor saw it and hurried to his side, murmuring under his breath ‘easy, easy there’… ‘you shouldn’t have…’ as he laid his hand on Jared’s shoulder to support him.  He wanted to scream when his nerves started firing away. It wasn’t pain, not pleasure, not even heat, just an incredibly intense sensation he didn’t have a name for as if his brain had invented a new way to process touch. It was too much, and he lashed out and felt the back of his hand connect with something soft and pliable, heard a faint thud. But exhaustion dragged him under before he could wonder about it, freckles and russet stubble swimming through his mind.

~*~

Chris came barging into the lab after the sound of a dull thud and a pained shout and raced right into a cacophony of angrily beeping instruments and Jensen in a heap on the floor, sitting on his ass about four feet from the bed with his precious control tablet lying discarded next to him. Chris gave himself a split second to wince at the obviously cracked screen, and the shitstorm Jensen was going to let loose once he noticed, but what worried him a lot more was that Jensen didn’t seem to have noticed yet.

Chris kneeled down next to his friend and tried to figure out what had sent the machinery completely haywire, and Jensen stumped into speechlessness.

“Jesus, Jensen, what the hell did you do?”

Apart from sitting motionless on the floor and staring at the bed as if he’d never seen something like it before, Jensen seemed fine, but Chris noticed with a
closer look that the man was holding his ribs with his hand.

“Jensen? Jensen! Can you hear me?”

Chris tried to get Jensen to respond to see how badly hurt he was, but Jensen only stared over Chris’ shoulder with wide eyes, glasses askew on his face in a way that gave him an endearingly dishevelled Professor look, which would have been adorable if he hadn’t looked like he wasn’t quite all there and in his right
mind. Finally, Chris managed to attract Jensen’s gaze by snapping his fingers insistently in front of his face.

“Jensen, what the fuck happened?”

“He’s awake. He’s…”

Chris whipped around focusing on the bed in a daze where their patient lay motionless and breathing calmly like he’d done for the past week. Chris wondered if Jensen had tripped and hit his head somewhere along the way, but on second glance he noticed the rumpled sheet and the twisted IV-lines, and he turned back Jensen just as quickly.

“You mean he did this?”

Jensen frowned in confusion as if he couldn’t quite fathom what Chris was on about before frantically shaking his head and then groaning in pain at the stupid move.

“I… he… no, it’s nothing, he was just … awake and sitting up, and then… he caught me by accident, and I just lost my footing and planted myself on my ass like a klutz. I’m fine, I’m… he was awake, Chris!”

Jensen looked at Chris as if he’d just found the Holy Grail and all, which made his stomach churn with worry about a completely different issue, but for the
moment, he would take Jensen’s word for it and accept the course of events. Still, he had to get his friend out of there and checked out, since he had no way of determining what kind of injuries Jensen had sustained as it was. Chris checked for any serious problem with the equipment, but found that their patient was going to be fine for the moment if he could sleep through the ruckus his disgruntled life support system were beeping up.

“Come on, Jensen, up you go. We need to get those ribs looked at and bandaged
properly, and you can tell me everything while we do, alright?”

He hauled Jensen up by his arm and kept his hand closed tight around the man’s biceps all the way to the infirmary to be able to monitor any shortness of breath the other man might suffer. Jensen kept muttering under his breath the whole way, and Chris really, really didn’t want to think about what kind of trouble Jensen’s latest obsession was going to bring down onto their heads as he set out to patch him up.

He managed to get them to the staff medic’s room without further complications. They all were medical professionals in some way or other and knew their way around basic first aid. For that reason, Chris didn’t bother waking Traci, their resident physician, but opted to raid her cabinets and bring her wrath down on him later for messing up her stock. Jensen began to ramble the moment Chris urged him to sit down on the cot.

“Like I said, I just went to see what those strange readings were all about – should have noticed instantly that they were inherent activity of a conscious state – and then he just sits there, straight in his bed, PICKING at his electrodes if you can imagine that.”

Chris grunted non-committally and ignored Jensen’s hiss when he peeled off his lab coat and shirt.

“I mean, he shouldn’t be able to do that, obviously, but you should have seen his coordination, it was awesome. He focused on me immediately, and reacted to my exclamation like he isn’t technically half deaf. It’s like he just does it
because he has no idea he’s not supposed to be able to do it. Damn, I’ll say it again if no one else will, I’m fucking amazing at my job… ow, watch the merchandise!”

Chris had pinched him in the side to get him back down from his high. It wasn’t that Jensen was really vain or arrogant, just… encouraged by success, and he needed someone to take him down a peg from time to time.

“I can’t wait for the physical trial when we can test full functionality. I bet his readings will be through the roof once he’s got full conscious control,
although I’m in half a mind to let him run blind for the moment just to see what happens.”

He rolled his eyes at Jensen’s enthusiastic planning and then frowned, concerned at the massive bruise that had already spread in colourful layers over Jensen’s lower ribs on his left side. Chris poked and prodded at the contusion, and Jensen bent out of the way instinctively, growling in pain and finally stopping his rant to look down at his torso.

“Huh, looks like he got me better than I thought.”

“You don’t say? Jensen, seriously, you’ve got to be more careful. You know better than that.”

Busying himself with spreading salve on the abused skin first, Chris then went on to bandage the ribs just in case.

“It’s my own fault, he was buckling, and I just grabbed reflexively to catch him, but the touch set him off big time. Must be some readjustments to the processing of the neuronal support grid that are in order as soon as he’s up and about again.”

Chris just shook his head and ignored Jensen’s cheeky grin that told him how the other man knew exactly what he was going to say next. This dance was so old
that they could do it by heart ten times over, ever since Jensen had gotten in trouble the first time. Still, he would have to keep an eye on Jensen in the upcoming weeks. This reeked of a disaster of epic proportions.

~*~

Jensen had been ecstatic over the fact that Jay had finally woken up, even though that meant they’d have a rocky start, kind of. He berated himself afterwards for not thinking that there might be a problem with sensory transmission, but he had been so caught up in the excitement that he had disregarded all professional reserve. Still, he planned to remedy his faux-pas the minute Jay woke up again; it was a minor issue that was easily fixed with a few adjustments. Chris had made him rest though, go easy on his ribs, which were badly bruised, and for once Jensen had actually felt the need to heed the advice. Besides, there was little chance that Jay would come out of it so fast after he’d exerted himself like that. So why was he lying on his back, staring at the ceiling, thinking of startled hazel eyes (that he’d matched perfectly, mixed all colours) and pale bronze skin with a flutter deep in his stomach?

Jensen scrubbed his hands over his face and up into his hair, tangling his fingers in the short strands to tug lightly in frustration. Deep down he knew very well that he wasn’t treating Jay anything like any patient they’d ever had, hadn’t done right from the start. The rational part of his brain was screaming profanities at him for compromising his professional distance like that, and that he didn’t even know what the guy would be like, once he was awake for more
than sixty seconds at a time, – not even counting that he was untouchable for like half a million more important reasons – but the rest of him didn’t particularly care. Jensen knew that he’d been down here, holed up away from the world for such a long time now that he was bound snap one way or another, but the direction he was headed was about a continent removed from what he’d expected. Jensen had been prepared to deal with pathological narcissism – ok, not completely off the table, granted –, a god-complex that went off the rails, mad scientist trying to cheat death in a way that went past healing and out the other side.

But he had certainly not been prepared for this. Oh, his rational mind recognized the signs sure enough: accelerated heart rate accompanied by quick huffing breaths, heat coiling in his belly, a tingle in his muscles and the thread of the fine sheets rasping against his oversensitive skin. It all bubbled
underneath, ready to be acknowledged, and barging past his defences.

And then there was his primal self shouting take,  want,  need  from the depths of his thoughts where images swirled around to run his own private show.

Small grooves in sleep-lax features that promised dimples, which had almost made an appearance on a conscious face in the beginnings of a real smile.

Dusky, pebbled nipples right when his fingertips catch on his own smooth expanse of skin, scars faint and faded but proud brushing over the slight ridge on his hip, strong thighs well matched for the long and graceful
limbs dragging his fingernails lightly over the soft skin on the inside of
his thigh sending sparks up in front of his eyes, shudder running right up to
his spine, heat spreading from his belly.

If he kept the sheet in place, kept quiet, hid it from everyone, even from
himself, no one had to know, no one would know, would they? No one could.

Breath hitching as fingertips slide down the crease of his hip, coarse hair and sweat-slick skin tingling with anticipation. Blood rushing in his ears, rushing down, down to where the sensations gather, adding a sting of arousal every time his fingers brush against the base. Can’t keep away, can’t keep his hands off – bronze skin, paled by confinement, defined ridges of muscle down to the folds of the sheets – circle, pull, squeeze lightly, insistently, thumb swiping under the head and up into wetness, ease the way, but not enough, not nearly enough.

The harsh, quick breaths hurt his ribs, bone-deep ache spreading, taken as
punishment for the transgression, eyes locked onto the ceiling while the images
still played, played all the while.

Breathing faster, more erratic, more pressure, more heat, more wet just more, spine arching like a taut bowstring and the hurt settles, right in the middle of pleasure, surging up, sweeping…

Jensen came with a choked scream, biting his lip until the tang of blood welled in his mouth, and he curled on his side with his eyes tightly shut to wall off the last vestiges of the pleasure until it ebbed.

“Stupid, stupid, Jensen, fucking stupid.”

Sleep was a long time coming after that.

Chapter three