Chapter Text
They find Jared behind the temple, where a broken pedestal ends in some stairs that lead to roots and rubble. He’s covered in leaves, almost deemed unrecognizable with mud and other slimy substances. When they bring him out into sunlight and clear some dirt off of his face, the true extent of his injuries are visible. He’s still unconscious when he’s boarded into a helicopter and sent to Jakarta for immediate medical attention.
The locals are not happy; even before the bird is air bound, they’re cursing the foreigner for daring to infuriate the nagraj, immediately arranging a sacrificial ceremony to try and calm the beast’s rage.
On the way to the hospital,Jared’s vitals drop multiple times only to climb so high that the paramedics worry about a cardiac event. But that doesn’t happen, becauseJared’s heart isn’t irregular because of venom, it’s leaping out of his chest because Jensen is drowning and he can’t seem to grab him. The deeper he goes to try to grab Jensen, the further Jensen goes, slipping right through his fingers.
The cardiac event happens in the emergency ward of Asri hospital; attendees of other patients looking around curiously as a sharp beep floods the crowded room. Jensen has closed his eyes, his face getting lost in the blue water of the lake and suddenlyJared can’t remember the color of his irises. He tries to swim deeper down, but his feet get stuck to dry land and his hands are suddenly bound. Jared cannot move and Jensen is floating into infinity.
When he wakes up on his third day at the hospital, his hands are bound with leather cuffs to the side rails. Sherry Padalecki is looking down at him with teary eyes while a guy in a white coat flashes a torch at his eyes. He jerks his head back. “What?”
“Hello Mr. Padalecki. Quite a scare you gave us.” Jared blinks several times to adjust to the rude, bright light of the room.
They poke him about hundred different times and when satisfied with his stable vitals, tell him about how he’d gone missing and had been found in a pile of rubble. Jared objects immediately, then promptly shuts up when he can’t come up with a counter argument. He doesn’t remember. He has no idea how or where he was. But still he cannot help but object because he was not lying in a pile of rubble all this time, and it wasn’t a viper that bit him. He ends up being scheduled for an MRI.
They don’t find anything wrong; there is nothing wrong. The neurologist explains to him how his confusion is because his brain is trying to protect him from traumatic experience.
WhenJared says that he doesn’t feel traumatized, he patiently repeats the same thing again and signs him up for counseling.
“To help you get your memories and emotions right.”
Right,Jared does need that right now. Because particular shades of bottle green and blue make his head do crazy things, which worsens his physical condition; ultimately leading to a longer hospital stay.
His “counseling” is upgraded to “therapy” after he wakes the night shift nurse up several times, his desperate pleadings echoing through the corridor. He wakes up with little to no memory of the nightmares, just an aching hollow in his chest like he’s lost something vital among the tide of time and space. His stay in Jakarta extends until his body is free from lethal venom and his wounds are dry brown instead of raw purple.
The more he gets physically better though, the more his mind’s “protective techniques” become very unhelpful, harmful even. Being high on morphine was a good way of keeping cavities numb, cavities in his memories and in his chest. His mom gets more than one psychologists’ appointment for him even before he’s in the states.
It’s only when he begins unpacking his luggage that the travel bag gets his attention. It’s the one that the rescuers found in the temple, minus the rotten food and cleaned by hotel staff. Going through its contents,Jared finds some missing pieces; his map, pen, recorder and camera.
The next morning, he calls a psychiatrist.
“So it speaks English?”
This psychiatrist, Dr. Steven, is the opposite of his therapist. She’s indulgent and graceful, pathetically understanding. This one is anything but; he’s incredulous and scrutinizing. Jared’s not even sure how he got his license as a psychiatrist with this crude personality. Jared likes him.
“Yes, he does.” Not really. I mean, Jensen has never spoken out loud, but his thoughts are in English. Or soJared thinks.
“You speak English.”
Is that supposed to be a question? Jared opens his mouth to answer, but Dr. Steven cuts him off. “You know, Sigmund Freud was a very wise man when he said that there’s an ‘it’ in all of us.”
Oh, this. Jared studied this; the super-ego, ego and the id. He agrees viciously, might even go a bit further and say that the “ego” is a byproduct of the ‘it’ in us. But he also knows that he’s not going to like whatever the doctor says next.
“When you’re in a forest away from civilization, your super ego stops existing, so your id, or it, takes control.” He pauses for dramatic effect, then delivers the punch line. “Same applies to your dreams.”
IfJared hadn’t been suffering for months, maybe he’d have enough will or patience to explain to the kind doctor how it’s not a case of “it inside us” but a “him inside it”. He doesn’t have either at the moment, and he has a feeling that Dr. Steven won’t appreciate the sentiment anyway.
Nefertiti was a powerful queen. So powerful, that after her death, her story was erased by her own son so that people would forget about her reign. But it didn’t work, did it? Legacy remained, dug itself out of the valley of kings and right into the museum.
Legacies are stubborn like that. You can bury them and steal them, put them hundreds of years below ground, but eventually they’ll be dug out, sometimes by “just dirt diggers”.
Jared is good at it, at finding treasure from plain old sand. It’s no trouble for him to pull a sunken island up from 100 BC pacific and walk with those natives. He traces their lives like he’s one of their own, goes deeper and deeper until he finds a devoted son. Candir was a good mother and her son was, is, a worthy one. AndJared is not going to let him drown in a lake with white swans and blue skies. Nope, he belongs inside the rapid beating thing inJared’s chest, the one that pumps Jensen’s very own toxin through his veins and keeps him warm on cold nights.
He can drown inJared’s blood if he wanted.
*********************
He arrives at the island a few minutes after sunrise, choosing to be as invisible as humanly possible. If the locals find the law-breaking foreigner trying to snoop again, they’ll be less than happy; may even try to sacrifice him in the name of the snake god. The idea that people think of Jensen as a reckless monster doesn’t sit well withJared, but he knows the importance of the rumor to stay that way. If people change their perspective and find the actual being that is Jensen,Jared knows exactly what humans do to rare and interesting new species.
That thought makes him laugh in the middle of the forest. Jensen is not a new species; the opposite in fact. But the fact still remains. Humans destroy; even gods aren’t out of the list of things they’ve robbed. Jared picks up his pace, wanting to get away from this world and into the one where only he and Jensen exist with a few hundred swans and whatever elseJared hasn’t managed to see.
The doubt starts creeping through the cracks when the huge banyan tree comes into view. Jared thinks he knows where Jensen is, that there is a Jensen here, but what if there isn’t? What if the professionals were right when they told him that these are all just dreams; his brain playing tricks?”
Jared shakes his head against the intruding doubts. He knows what’s here, he knows how he survived the venom of a cobra. Jensen is there, in a lake under the pedestal. Jared has to go and pull him up to the shore and make him his.
The nagin is exactly where he last saw her, in all her graciousness, and so are the bones. The more familiarity he finds, the more his optimism grows. Which lasts up until the moment he walks up to the stone where the locals had apparently found him.
There’s just a slab and stones, broken stairs leading to solid ground and twisted roots. He doesn’t know how to get down below.
He spends hours looking for a gateway to another world and doesn’t find anything. It’s just an old temple made on solid soil; there’s no underground cavity, certainly no otherworldly lake. There’s no Jensen. How’s he gonna find Jensen?
The possibility hurts. Was this all just dreams? He woke up and they’re gone? He panics, because people forget dreams. People wake up, go on with their lives, and dreams get forgotten.
He drops his things on the ground and drops down himself, head swimming from the million different thoughts and feelings running through his mind. Just when he’s about to snap from it all, the green monster makes his entrance.