Chapter One

Jared wondered how anyone could work in a hospital, or how anyone could heal in one for that matter. If he had to sit in bed all day staring at stark white walls and counting the seconds he'd lose his mind.

He rubbed his hand over his tired face and stood up from the cracked, plastic chair in the hallway outside the man's room. There were several laminated posters about different illnesses and diseases on the wall, each a little more depressing than the one before.

He looked down at his watch and laughed bitterly. Twelve-twenty-seven, three minutes until his final exam and here he was, stuck in the hallway of some hospital for being a Good Samaritan. He was going to fail his final exam because he wouldn't even be there, and his entire future was ruined just like that. His father was going to have his balls.

He walked aimlessly up and down the hallway, glancing in through the half open door at the stranger he had picked up earlier.

He had been on his way to grab some lunch and cram before going to his exam, though he hadn't gotten more than halfway there when he came across the stranger, stumbling across the road, bloody and dragging his foot. Jared had braked hard, narrowly missing the man who did little more than stare back at him through the windscreen like a wild animal.

He had gotten out of the car and seen the way the man was wincing as he pressed his hand into his stomach. Only as he got closer did he see the deep cut. It looked like the man had been stabbed.

"It's okay, the hospital's just a few blocks away. Get in, I'll drive you," he'd said.

The man just looked at him suspiciously, tilting his head to the side, seemingly trying to determine if Jared could be trusted or not. Finally he had walked around to the passenger side and gotten in, not shutting the door until he saw Jared do so, almost as if he was copying him.

He hadn't said a word the entire journey, despite all the questions Jared had fired at him. Jared figured it was the shock. Maybe he'd been mugged or something, or perhaps just attacked for no reason, living in this city that was certainly a possibility.

He felt his cell phone vibrate in his pocket, bringing him out of his memories. He glanced down to see the caller ID and groaned when he saw that it was his father, the man he was going to work for, or was going to work for before some injured stranger screwed up his plans. He was close to his dad, he looked up to him, but they some times butted heads. Jared wanted to be a lawyer he really did, but he couldn't help but wonder if maybe his father had somehow made him want it. He knew his father could be morally liquid when it came to his clients and what he was willing to do for them, but he was a good man at heart and Jared knew that he would never defend a man that he believed to be guilty.

His father wouldn't understand that Jared had seen a man's life as being more important than his exam, he saw this as the last leg of Jared's long journey to becoming what he'd always hoped he would be, so he ignored the call and went back to pacing.

"Sir?" a young doctor said from behind him, making him turn around and shake the hand that was being offered to him. "I'm Doctor Kripke. You're the one who brought Jared in?"

Jared frowned. "Jared?"

"Yes," the doctor replied, looking down at the chart that the nurse had filled out. "Jared Padalecki."

Jared was about to correct the man when he realised that the nurse, who had been firing off questions at him, had written down Jared's name under 'name of patient.'

"Yes," he quickly said, suddenly seeing this as an opportunity. If he could tell his father that he had been mugged then there was no way he could hold that against him. And the school was bound to let him re-sit his exam. He found himself grinning. "Yes, how is he?"

Doctor Kripke looked in through the door at the man in the bed. He had passed out the moment they'd gotten through the hospital's automatic doors. Luckily Jared had caught him and called over to the nurse's station for help.

"He lost a fair amount of blood, which is why he passed out, but the wound isn't too deep. We've stitched him up, he should be fine," the doctor told him.

Jared let out a sigh of relief, he didn't know the man but once he had taken charge he felt responsible for him.

"That's great. What about his leg?"

"No more than a sprained ankle, we'll bandage it up before sending him home in a day or so. There are also some burns on his body, not extensive, but I can't explain where he got them. Can you tell me what happened? Do I need to call the police?" The doctor asked and Jared found himself at a loss for what to say.

"Listen, do me a favour? Don't call anyone just yet. Wait until he wakes up and I'll talk to him, find out what happened. I thought maybe he was mugged or something," he said, lowering his voice. "Can you tell what cut him?"

The doctor shook his head. "It doesn't look like a knife wound, so it could have been an accident. As you say, I'll wait until he comes round."

Jared thanked the doctor and grabbed his jacket from the back of the plastic chair before going into the stranger's room. He was surprised to see bright green eyes blinking and darting around the room like those of a caged cat.

"Hey, you're awake. Listen, you're okay, just stay clam. You're in the hospital, they say you're gonna be just fine," Jared told him in what he hoped was a soothing voice as he neared the bed.

The man in the bed began pushing himself up, gritting his teeth as he did so.

"Whoa, whoa, you should stay still, you'll tear your stitches," Jared told him, only for the man to frown at him, as though he were concentrating hard.

"Stitches," the injured man repeated, making Jared raise his eyebrows at hearing him talk for the first time. He voice was deep and rough, possibly from the trauma he had been though today. "Used to stitch things together. A pain in your side after exercise. To stitch someone up for something they didn't do. So funny you have them in stitches."

Jared stared at him incredulously, trying to fight the bubble of laughter that wanted to come out of him. "That's right. I meant the first one. You were stabbed or something, do you remember? They had to stitch up your wound."

"Fire," the man told him, his eyes looking around the room like he was trying to figure something out. "There was fire, but I got out… he let me out."

Jared found that the amusement he'd felt just seconds ago was gone. "Let you out? You were trapped somewhere?"

The man's eyes suddenly went wide and he got out of the bed. Jared was by his side in seconds trying to stop him. "Dude, you gotta stay still, seriously."

"How long has it been since you found me?"

"I dunno, about an hour and a half?" Jared told him.

The man cocked his head and looked right into Jared's eyes, his hand coming up to clutch the taller man's shoulder. "There was an accelerant. The fire would have spread at a rate of two square feet every seven seconds. It would have taken less than sixty seconds to reach the alarm. The units would have been dispatched within four minutes of the alarm going off. There are, on average, a total of twenty-five guards, searching in a pattern spiralling out from the grounds. I was injured, probability that I required medical attention is seventy-eight percent likely. I predict that they will be here within the next three minutes. I have to get out of here."

Jared just stared at him wide eyed, half impressed and half scared. "Great, so you're insane." Even as he said it he could hear the sound of a running march and he watched as the man backed up against the wall, flattening himself beside the door. A man in a black uniform glanced in through the door as they moved, seeing only Jared, and moving on.

Jared suddenly found himself thinking that the stranger might not be so crazy after all.

"My calculations were off," the man whispered with a confused frown. "Please, help me."

Jared stood there for a moment, looking from the stranger to the open door. Finally he nodded. "Okay, I might be a little crazy too, but okay."

The man looked frightened, like a rabbit about to gnaw off his own foot to escape.

Jared looked around the room, deciding that he would get answers out of the stranger later, just as soon as he got him out of there. He couldn't find anything that could help disguise the stranger but then he remembered seeing a gurney out in the hall, empty and just sitting there.

"Pull the sheet off your bed," he told the man before going out into the hall, looking around to see if the men in the black ops clothes were still around before grabbing the gurney and pulling it into the room. "Here, lay down on it," he told him, taking the sheet from his hand before helping him up. Once the man was lying down he covered him with the sheet and, with a quick glance out to make sure no one was about, pushed him down the hall slowly.

"Play possum," he hissed under his breath as he made his way to the front doors. Luckily they were on the first floor, in one of the emergency rooms, but unluckily there were two of those men guarding the entrance. "Shit."

He pulled the gurney into another hallway and towards the closed doors at the end of it. He opened them and the second he did he heard the fire alarms go off.

"Fuck," he swore, yanking the sheet off the man and helping him down quickly. "My cars not far, run."

They made it out to the parking lot and over to Jared's car fairly quickly, considering one of them had a sprained ankle, though when Jared glanced over at the stranger as he slid in to the passenger seat, he noticed blood on his hospital gown where he had apparently tore his stitches.

There were many cars coming and going, for which Jared was thankful, and as they pulled out of the hospital grounds he let out a sigh of relief.

They drove for a little while in silence before Jared pulled his car over to the side of a quiet road. "Okay, please tell me they weren't the police, I mean they didn't look like the police. You're not on the lam right? I didn't just help a criminal?"

The man cocked his head and frowned at Jared. "Lamb. Possum. The structure of your speech is very strange… and wrong. You substitute the names of animals for certain words."

Jared raised his eyebrows again and let out a long breath. "You're not… from around here are you? It's slang."

The stranger nodded at this in understanding. "Informal language."

"Yeah," Jared said with a slight smile. "Play possum means play dead. And to be on the lam, LAM, is to be on the run."

The man seemed to acknowledge that and he nodded. "Yes, I'm on the lam."

"From the police?"

"No, from the agency," the man explained. "He burned it all down, everyone was still inside. He wanted them destroyed, all of them, but he let me out. Told me to run."

Jared rubbed his eyes with his hand. "What agency?"

"The agency," the man told him. "Where we live… lived. He said I was different."

"Who did?"

"Our father. Our creator. Why did they want us all dead?" the man asked, showing the barest flicker of distress and sadness.

"What's your name?" Jared asked him as he leaned closer and took his hand.

"Jensen-point-four-point-one," the man said, looking down at the hand holding his as if he had never had someone do that before.

Jared looked at him stunned. "Okay, I'm gonna regret this, aren't I? You don't have any place to go, right?"

Jensen, whatever his name was, shook his head. "Right, well I guess I'll take you home with me then. Though we should get you to another hospital first."

"No, no more hospitals," Jensen insisted. "I must go undercover. I can show you how to stitch."

"Me?" Jared asked, his voice getting a little higher. "Dude, I'm a law student, I don't know how to sew up a person's skin."

Jensen cocked his head again. "I'll show you… dude," he added, looking to Jared as if to confirm his correct use of the word.

Jared's laugh came out as a relieved breath and he nodded. "Okay, let's go home."

Read Chapter Two of Twelve + Epilogue of Jensen.4.1