Two inside -J2- Chapter 1

Chapter 1: Bitch, Jerk

"The insane, on occasion, are not without their charms"
-Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.



"Red dot means you gotta check on em' every half hour, yellow every hour, greens you don't really need to check but once or twice in the night is good, just in case" the woman drawled as she lead Jared around the white halls of the mental hospital he would be working nights in.

It was a lot for Jared Padalecki to take in, especially since he was moving up from washing the floors to being the night orderly in the men's ward, but he had finally gotten through pre-med and was in full swing of his medical degree at Texas State University, which meant he was allowed to deal with patients now.

Of course a mental hospital was no doctors surgery, but it would do to settle the work experience requirement in his degree, and from what he could tell, it was a pretty cushy job; Check on the patients once and a while, hand out their meds and just chill once everybody went to bed. It was easy street compared to the ER at the local hospital.

"So I just sort of... bust in to their rooms? Isn't that a breach of privacy?" Jared asked as he was lead to the nurse station where he would spend most of his nights in the hospital.

"Hon' if we gave some of them privacy, we'd have more dead bodies than we have patients, they're in here to be watched and taken care of, not a holiday" the tall woman, Ellen said slapping a clip board into Jared's hands with a frown.

"You check em', like I said. Keep the doors out of the ward locked and hit the alarm if you need help and they'll send someone to the ward. Just do everything that I said and you'll be fine" she said with a twisted smile that said that she knew what it was really like in the place, but she wasn't sharing.

"Good luck kid" she said signing off for the afternoon shift and leaving Jared to his first night alone.

"Uh… Thanks, I guess?" Jared nervously fidgeted once he was alone, sitting behind the desk at the nurse station making him jittery. It wasn't quite dark out yet, so patients were still wandering, he'd never been in contact with them, even as a cleaner he'd only been allowed into the wards when they were empty.

Ellen had given him all the patient files for this ward; He had eight patients in here, all young men between the ages of eighteen to thirty-eight all with a screw or two loose in their heads. There were coloured dots on the front of each, little round stickers in red, yellow and green to state how safe the patients were he guessed, but he knew his job would revolve around those three colours.

Most files had stickers overlapping stickers, from red to yellow and then green on top if they made it that far into sanity, all except one that had a faded red sticker stuck to the front that looked like it had been there for years.

The patient with the red sticker was a man named Jensen Ackles, a few years Jared's senior, he was a schizophrenic – multiple personalities was all the information he was given, not being a doctor himself he wasn't privy to the details exactly, just their disorders and behaviours to watch out for.

This Jensen character seemed to be the one that would cause the most trouble for him.

"Yo! New guy, how's about some tunes?" a blonde man about six foot tall came up to the station, bashing his hand down on the table in front of Jared and making him jump.

"W-what?" Jared closed the file in front of him and looked at the man before him, he was pretty, freckles decorating his face, full lips and striking green eyes with lashes that made him look like he belonged on the cover of a magazine.

"Tunes? Music? Come on!, last guy who worked here at least had some AC/DC cassettes stashed away" the pretty man before him said with a smile that actually made Jared feel uncomfortable to be on the other end of, it was a nice smile, and cheeky too. Far too nice for a man in an insane asylum.

Jared looked around his station to see a beat up old stereo player sitting there, right behind the dying plant.

"Umm, I don't think I can do that, it's nearly lights out" Jared said glancing away from the dirty desk decorations to be on the other end of one hell of a frown from the other man.

"Don't be a little bitch man, we only get to listen to Christian radio, I need some real music" the other tried to ply Jared once again, but he held fast, not exactly sure of what he could and couldn't do yet. It was his first day after all.

"Trade you some valium for some Metallica?" Jared simply stared in awe as the man's tongue slipped out of his mouth and on the tip was a small pink pill.

"You need to swallow that" Jared simply said and got the finger from the man before him, watching him storm off towards one of the rooms and slam the door behind him.

"Man that guy is a jerk" Jared whispered to himself and opened the file once again, flipping through pages until he found a photo, a photo of the man that he had just met; Jensen Ackles, the pretty schizophrenic with a penchant for mullet rock, who was now pissed at him. And he had a red sticker… great.