A/N: This was a blast to write. I love poetry and I love Supernatural and irony and characterization. I hope you enjoy. Let me know in a review of any comments you have, about this story or about the emotional turmoil called Being a Supernatural Fan.
(Minor edit made 6/28/14, because it was a consistency error that was driving me crazy.)
Set a couple years into Stanford.
What Is Inescapable
You turn on the news today
Without thinking.
Because that's a normal thing to do.
"Victim's neck sliced open, bled to death
Sulfur residue at the crime scene
No witnesses."
You get a sick feeling
You can almost smell the sulfur and motor oil and cheeseburger wrappers,
And, irrationally, your gut churns in fear for her life.
-x-
Jess stares at the TV with disbelieving horror
And tear tracks on her cheeks.
And all you can think of is learning about dramatic irony in high school
And reading Macbeth for Mr. Hastings.
All you can see in her face is Macduff
About to learn his family's dead
But unaware, in the moment,
Completely without knowledge, oblivious.
And Ross, and the audience, burdened with the screaming news,
Looks on helplessly.
-x-
You've never known of anyone who can love like her
Without inhibitions or conditions
Without prerequisites
Or a catch.
You're all she needs, and she loves you.
She wants you to have the happiness
That you have always wanted.
All she gives is love,
She takes nothing
Despite the love you try to give,
Despite what she doesn't know you are.
-x-
She asks you what you think of the case,
How someone could do such a thing-
And you're Ross again,
With the weight of that terrible knowledge of evils
Haunting you behind closed eyelids.
And you can't tell her, because
She is too beautiful to be tainted
With that knowledge that could hurt her as easily as a knife.
-x-
Sometimes you wonder if this will be the day.
The day when you explain
Why you sometimes wake up sweating cold in the dark
And why when you run you run hard.
But there are so many things stopping her from knowing
Like fear
-hers and yours-
But mostly yours.
If she sees you for you...
You know everything will change.
You can't make yourself release your grip on Normal,
Which you have missed and craved and longed for
And is better than you ever even dreamed.
She'd look at you with tears and different eyes, and
You just can't
Be the freak anymore.
You will resist the labels and the family name and your father's expectations with everything you have.
-x-
Because you're your own person, dammit.
You're the son of a mechanic
And Stanford material.
Stanford material, despite everything.
And Jess is all you need,
And you don't need or want or think about
Everything you know.
-x-
There was another death on the news today
This time tortured and bloodied.
Whatever they were looking for
They got.
You hold Jessica's hand as she cries.
And you numbly think,
How remarkable
That she mourns for them.
-x-
You remember last summer at her parents' house
A different kind of news
-her sister was pregnant-
And you congratulated them with as little awkwardness as you
-always the outsider-
could muster.
There were tears in her eyes then too
As she wept happiness for
Someone other than herself.
You can't understand how she can
So vicariously feel emotions.
-x-
You think of the last time you were shot, when it was you whose blood was spilling.
No one cried for you then.
(You didn't even cry for you then.)
She would've.
-x-
The chaos streaming over the news is calming down.
The two deaths are unsolved
But time creates distance as literal as the stretch of highway from here to Kansas
And people are trying to forget.
Because maybe it wasn't as horrible as it had seemed.
-x-
You try to remember the last time you cried.
That's right,
There were tears in your eyes That Night
When your eyes swam with confusion and hurt and anger and
Not-belonging
And excitement.
You were finally getting away and nothing-
-The Bluffing or the Begging-
Could keep you.
You cried, and some of your tears were guilty and miserable,
But they were for yourself.
-x-
When Jessica comes in to breakfast sobbing
You already know it's happened again.
This one is like the first
-someone needs a phone call-
And you don't understand, but you know you could if you tried,
And that's the worst part.
-x-
You have tears in your eyes.
And you have a scream in your throat
That's been buried there since that Christmas in Nebraska when everything changed.
Jess is lost, she doesn't know what to do
Because she hasn't seen you cry before.
Her eyes shine fear
But all you see is that incomprehensible loving sympathy.
-x-
And the irony is that she finds solace in rubbing your back and
Feeling your emotions,
Thinking that you are crying for the strangers that died.
The guilt Ross must have felt,
You think,
For knowing and knowing and knowing too much
More than he ever wanted or asked for.
And you cry pitiful tears for yourself
And she cries selfless tears for you
And you wonder whether it's your knowledge or your nature
That makes the two of you so different.
