#jkdrabble

characters: jack kline x reader, dean winchester

warnings: angst lol obv, violence, death, cursing, political corruption but what’s new

a/n: let me know if you guys want another part to this. i really like the way it turned out

Jack was something entirely new to you.

He was bright smiles and curious, wandering eyes. He had pink cheeks and an optimistic view of the world; a world that had done nothing but beat him down.

But he was also ruthless.

You watched him as he held a knife over the chest of a wailing boy, much younger than he was. Your hand involuntarily covered your gaping mouth when he thrust the knife into the boy’s chest, silencing his pleas for mercy and alliances. Jack left the knife there when he lifted his wild eyes to meet yours, cheeks splattered with blood. His eyes were filled with tears and he was muttering something inaudible as he stumbled over the body.

You caught him when he fell into you, holding him upright as he looked for support in you. “I had to...I had to do it, I’m sorry.”

You’d watched him kill two people now, and you found that every day you spent with him, he became more and more of a mystery. There were days when you saw a boy who was weighed down by his emotions, a boy who had trouble controlling and containing them. But other days, all you saw was a killer, and all of those emotions were gone from his eyes. They were replaced with something much darker.

He allied himself with you early in the games after you both spent two nights alone, one of you terrified and the other hopeful, determined to leave the arena in one piece. He found you with an arrow lodged in your thigh and you could see in his eyes that he was contemplating putting you out of your misery. You passed out when he began trying to pull the arrow from your leg, telling you that he’d help you in exchange for your knowledge of the arena. You’d let darkness consume you, unsure of whether or not you would wake up again.

The first time you watched him kill, it was out of self defense. A girl had brought you to your knees in front of her, a wicked smile on her face as she stared at Jack.

“You should thank me,” she spat at him, eyes wild and face smeared with blood, “she’s one less person you’ll have to worry about killing after everyone else is gone.”

But he wasn’t looking at her. His eyes were trained on the knife held against your throat, and his wide eyes looked frantic as he held his own knife tightly in his left hand.

“Let her go,” he’d told her, his voice eerily calm, “and I’ll give you a head start.”

He wasn’t just ruthless. He was merciless, barely giving the other victims of the games a second thought. All he wanted was to survive.

But there were times when he showed you his humanity—times that made you realize that, in another life, he could have been innocent of the death that the games caused. This sick attempt at entertainment had corrupted the best of people. It had taken their humanity and twisted it into cruelty. And those who refused to conform to that cruelty paid for it with their lives.

There were some nights when you liked to watch him dream. He looked free in his sleep, as if he hadn’t killed children, one of them in cold blood. He looked happy in his sleep, and it was refreshing to see him that way. The burdens lifted off his shoulders when he slept, his dreams taking him away from the arena and to a better place where he was free of the Capital.

Your dreams weren’t so forgiving. You dreamt of death and blood; things that you had already seen in the arena and things that you knew would haunt you long after you left it behind.

He would wake you when he saw you having a nightmare, but the moments of relief were always fleeting when you realized that you were waking up to the very thing that trapped you within nightmare after nightmare. The only thing that made the nightmare bearable was Jack.

On the fifth day, Dean somehow found you enough sponsors to send you cream for the ugly infection spreading in your leg. You’d almost forgotten about the injury in the midst of the constant chaos that surrounded you, but it did wonders for the hole in your leg. The constant pain that you’d grown accustomed to died down to a dim ache and the relief you felt was immediate.

Don’t get too attached. DW.

The note that was on top of the gift reminded you of the harsh reality that only one of you was going to get out of the arena. And with the way things had been going with two careers still alive, it might not have been either of you.

You burned the note the second you got a moment away from Jack.

On the fifth night, the canon went off and the sky lit up with the face of the girl from District 1. She had been ruthless when you saw her in training and even more so in the arena when her life was on the line. That was probably why her counterpart from District 1 turned on her, deciding that the last two tributes would be easier to take down than her.

But when all of the violence and the death was stripped away, the girl had been kind to you. She had given you advice on how to throw a knife properly. She was a competitor who obviously hated the games as much as you did, which was refreshingly uncharacteristic of the careers. 

Jack didn’t find her death as upsetting. He’d barely indicated remorse at the fact that a girl had just been killed. To him, she was just one less person that he would have to kill himself. One less obstacle in the way of the endgame.

“I hope she didn't suffer,” you’d told him quietly, about ten minutes after her face and district had covered the sky like a storm cloud, “she was good. She never wanted this, not like the others.” 

Jack had just looked at you, blank. He was studying you, watching the rise and fall of your chest as your breathing began to even out after the canon had sounded and the slight twitch of your lips into a frown at the face that flashed across the sky. He was no longer interested in the other tributes; not after he realized the danger he had put himself in with you. With saving you and carrying you from the line of fire and into the safety of his arms. With loving you. 

Silence followed the sound of the canon, but sleep was a distant thought that night as you and Jack both reminded yourselves of what would come if you and he were the only ones left standing.