Chapter Text
When Jensen first feels three hearts beating next to his, he's sitting in the passenger seat of Wade's truck, contemplating the most recent hand shaped bruises on his arm. A dented up tow truck just pulled into the gas station parking lot. They're parked at the tank furthest from Jensen and he can only see the top of a cowboy hat as the driver gets out to fill up the tank.
It feels like his whole world has shifted. He's like a fucking deer standing in the middle of the road with an eighteen-wheeler barreling towards him at eighty miles an hour. He can't do anything but curl up and try to breathe around the pain of suddenly feeling four heartbeats instead of one. He doesn't realize the tow truck has started driving away, until he feels a pull like a string wrapped around his heart and trying to drag it out. He doesn't have a clue who was in the truck.
He doesn't have the name of the tow company or a license plate. Trying to find his soul-mates is a reckless thought. He's got a good life where he is. He and Wade have been together for three years, he shouldn't still be trying to find an excuse to move on.
He's always figured that he didn't have anywhere left to go. Wade swore they were soul-mates and Jensen was just too much of a screw up to feel anybody else's heartbeat. Now the very idea of Wade being his soul-mate seems like sacrilege. He thinks about the creased and worn picture of Jenny and her daughter Lizzy that he has stuffed into his pocket. He hasn't seen them in two years. Not since Jenny had tried to get him away from Wade. She and Wade never got along. She tried to get him to wait, but he'd been young and Wade had seemed like everything he wanted.
By the time he figured out that he should have listened to Jenny he'd lost everything that came close to autonomy. He's still trying to convince himself that it's for the best. He thinks he is close to finally silencing the little kernel of anger that makes him want to scream at Wade. If he's smart he'll ignore the feeling of his soul-mates' heartbeats. Once the tow truck far enough away the feeling of having his heart pulled out of his chest will fade. There's no telling where he'll end up if he goes looking for them.
He looks through the window of the gas station, to where Wade is leaning against the counter casually flirting with the attendant. He's so busy trying to decide if Wade is going to take her into the bathroom for a quick fuck that it takes him a minute to realize he's rubbing at his chest trying to calm down the staccato beat of his heart. Then, praying to whatever God brought him to this backwater patch of a town, he slides across the bench, into the driver's seat.
Wade left the keys in the ignition and the heat running when he went into the convenience store. Jensen shifts the car into drive and pushes the gas pedal to the floor. The truck jerks forward with a squeal and Jensen barely has time to turn onto the main road before there is a slam and Wade starts screaming at him to stop or else.
Jensen doesn't listen and just concentrates on getting as far away as he can. He's got a full tank of gas, a half-full thermos of coffee in the foot well, and a rucksack of clothes in the back. He'll be okay even if he doesn't have any money or identification.
He keeps telling himself that as he drives south. By the time the truck runs out of gas and he abandons it on the side of the road, the heartbeats grow from a faint patter to a steady series of thumps. He hopes that means he's close.
Outside the truck, the air tastes of snow and wet asphalt. A bowl of gray sky stretches unbroken over Jensen's head. The road stretches out until it reaches the horizon and meets the sky. Fields picked clean and left fallow for the winter spread out on either side.
Jensen pushes back the urge to dig through the bag and pull out the thermos to shake it and reassure himself that there is still a little coffee left. If he gets it out, he doesn’t know if he'll have the self-control to put it back without taking a sip.
He can't afford to do that right now. He's in the middle of nowhere with no way to tell how far to the next town. The sheer openness of the road and the plowed under fields is frightening. He'd be terrified if he couldn't feel the pull in his chest, guiding him like the point of a compass.
Another hour of walking and he gives in and takes a sip of lukewarm coffee from the thermos. The temperature is dipping. He still can't see the sun, but he guesses that it's going down.
He's wondering if he's going to die, when the pain in his chest stops. Rooting him to the road like he's been glued there. If he doesn't have the pull to guide him, how is he going to find his soul-mates. Approaching panic at lightning speed he starts turning in circles trying to figure out what's gone wrong. It takes him a few tries before sees that he's dead even with a faint line of mud-filed wheel-tracks leading away from the road and out of sight.
A mailbox is barely staying vertical next to what he thinks might be a driveway. It might have had numbers on it once, but now there are only shadows where the paint has peeled off leaving a shadow behind. 42.
It seems like a random number for a farm in the middle of nowhere. That doesn't stop Jensen from whispering: “The Answer to … Life, the Universe, and Everything” as he steps off the asphalt and onto the ice covered dirt road.
His feet try to slip out from under him until he digs his toes down through the crust of frost and into the mud beneath. He makes sure to plant his feet more firmly after that. Jensen moves forward in a staggering shuffle. When he dares to look behind him, he can see dirty holes marring the frost wherever he's broken through the ice and dirty water has risen up to fill the divots left behind.
Hopefully, Wade won't come by this place until after the next frost covers up his tracks. Otherwise, Jensen might as well draw a map to his soul-mates.
There isn't anything Jensen can do about the tracks so he turns to face forward and keeps moving. His hands burn with cold. His fingers are stiff around the strap of his pack. The fabric of his gloves is now covered in a dusting of ice crystals formed like snowflakes.
Finally, he passes by the empty fields and into a copse of bushes and trees. The wind is gentler here. He dares to stop and huddle around his hands. Jensen's body heat isn't much, but it is enough to loosen the ice crystals. His hands are still clumsy as he opens the top of his sack and pulls out the thermos. With the insulation of his clothes and the thermos itself the coffee inside hasn't frozen.
It is still icy, but he forces himself to take a few sips. It sits like a rock in his chest. He shoves it back into the sack, making sure that it is surrounded on all sides. Then he slides the pack back onto his shoulder.
The woods get thicker the further he goes. Until he can only see a few yards ahead, until the next turn in the road. He can see the road clearly now at least. The ice is kept off by the trees and he doesn't have to fight for every step.
Jensen is so busy being glad for the ease of movement that when the thin dirt trail widens he doesn't notice. Not until he's a few feet past the last of the trees.
The increase of wind startles him enough to look up. In front of him is a quaint two-story farm house. It's sided in graying whitewashed boards, and faded green shutters are hung beside each window. It looks like the Kent family farm from the Superman comics he read as a kid.
There are three cars tucked up against the far side of the house. There is a beat up red pick-up that looks like it came off the assembly line a century before, a teal Bug that shows obvious signs of being refurbished in the last couple years, and the third vehicle is up on blocks and covered by a blue tarp. They are all sheltered by a haphazard carport that, given the shape of the roof, looks like it might have been a barn at some point.
Now that he finds himself faced with meeting his soul-mates, Jensen wavers. The house looks perfectly settled and stately. He can't imagine that his soul-mates are looking to take in a bedraggled fugitive with nothing to his name but a bag of second-hand clothes.
He can't turn back now though. The sky has darkened from a milky gray to something that resembles thunderheads. The sun will be fully set soon, and he won't make it to the road if he turns around.
That should make his decision easier. He finds himself dreaming about how he would have acted if he came here before Wade found him. He'd have strode up the steps and onto the porch like he had a right to be there. Maybe Jenny and Lizzy would have driven out with him, or maybe he'd have come alone and just brought a camera full of pictures. Everything would have been different.
The fantasy blows away when a flurry of snow blows past. He's not going to be able to count on his past naiveté to take him up those steps. So he's just going to have to buckle down and get on with it.
The boards creak beneath Jensen's feet as he climbs the three steps to the wide, open porch that stretches across the entire bottom floor of the house. There is a mat in front of the door, it has cat paw prints around the edges and enthuses that one should 'wipe their paws' before entering. A hedgehog with bristled boot-scraper fur glares at him balefully.
He stares back at the hedgehog for a minute, trying to process the sheer kitschiness of it. The whole place feels like it belongs in a comic book or an old fifties sitcom. It certainly doesn't feel like it belongs in the same world he and Wade have been living in the last three years.