Definition of Okay, a Sentinel story with Guide
epiphanies, by Glacis. Rated NC17
for adult content. No infringement to Pet Fly et al intended. Originally published in Crossroads (2000).
He really didn't expect it to feel like this. Blair Sandburg, confident
in his experiences with the world at large and the opposite sex in particular,
thought he knew what love felt like, and knew he knew what lust felt like.
This felt like getting whacked in the head with a brick.
Her name was
She was laughing at him.
That's when the brick hit.
Jim Ellison stared at the chair next to his desk where his partner would
normally be pecking away at his laptop. It was empty.
This was not the way the order of the universe ran.
True, he wasn't in the field. He hadn't zoned in ten months. The most
exciting thing liable to happen today would be Megan getting tired of H's
ham-handed attempts at flirtation and drowning the man in his coffee cup. And
he was well aware of the fact that Blair had a life outside the station.
Or, at least, that was what he told himself.
It was a little harder to accept that the kid had a life outside Jim.
He shifted in his chair, which was suddenly much too hard for
Sentinel-sensitive buns. Paperwork bored him at the best of times, and the best
of times did not include an empty chair. It included the sight, smell, and
sound of his Guide being irritating and distracting him from the humdrum of
quadruplicate forms on a computer screen.
His hand was outstretched toward the receiver before he realized he
didn't have a fucking clue what he would say to Sandburg if he did manage to
catch him at his desk. Come to the station, there's a pile of reports crying
out your name? I need you, I'm about to zone on a numb
butt? Come on down and watch Rafe try to get a melted
chocolate sprinkle out of an eighty dollar silk tie?
Excitement personified. As if the kid didn't have enough to do without
distracting a Sentinel with a terminally short attention span.
He had his jacket in his hand and was out the door before he figured out
that he was moving. Maybe Sandburg wanted to go out to lunch. It was almost
eleven. In fifty minutes or so.
They'd been seeing one another for almost a month before he'd let himself make the first move. Of course, his timing sucked.
For all Jim teased him about his breadth of experience and lack of discernment,
he didn't have a lot of practice reacting to something this earthshaking. He
hadn't even told Jim.
So the first move, when it came, shocked him a little. Even when he made it. At
Char didn't miss a beat. She laughed, a little, and he grinned back up
at her. At six foot in her bare feet, which she now was, he had a little way up
to look. It was okay.
More than okay. She had great tits.
And strong arms. His desktop was cleared and his shirts were on the floor and his fly
was open in a flash, and he laughed to himself at the bizarre notion that he'd
had any say at all in this past that first standing-on-tip-toes kiss. He made the
first move. She made the next six.
He loved it.
Loved her fingernails trailing through his chest hair, her hands pulling
his sac gently out of the waistband of his boxers, her fingertip running over
and over the head of his cock, her tongue teasing his and inviting it into her
mouth to play. His head was ringing.
Both of them.
He laughed again, into her mouth this time, and slid her capris down her thighs, over her calves and off her ankles.
She slid the condom out of his desk drawer -- how had she known about that? Oh,
right, the discussion last week on fertility rites and the separation of
sexuality from procreation and worship -- and rolled it on him. With her teeth.
It was a hell of a lot of fun. Better than being hit with a brick. A lot of the same side effects.
Jim didn't really have to think on the way over to the university. By
this point the truck could make it there on its own, like a horse finding the
stable when the rider has fallen asleep in the saddle. Being more reflective
than one might expect, given his carefully cultivated stoic exterior -- or dumbfuck look as he privately referred to it, something
he'd perfected in the Army to hide in plain sight -- he knew he should be
thinking about why it was so imperative that he go to Blair. It didn't feel
like a warning signal. That had happened, a time or two, when Sandburg was in
trouble. His skin would crawl, and he'd shift into Blessed Protector mode and
hunt the kid down and save his ass.
No, this was something different.
Ever since Blair had died on the grass, and Jim had brought him back,
there'd been this … connection somehow. If he'd been a fanciful man, and given
his odd shadow companion that showed up at strange times and growled at him, he
couldn't be blamed for considering himself one, he'd swear that he and Sandburg
had mingled souls. There had to be some explanation for the flash of bright
light and physical jolt he'd felt when the phantom wolf and the phantom jaguar
had melded. But he preferred to leave the metaphysical bullshit to his partner,
who was much better prepared to deal with all that. He just called it his
'itch'.
This didn't feel like the itch. It felt more like a scratch.
Deep, deeper than one thinks until the blood wells up, then stinging
like a son of a bitch. Right now the blood was starting to well. He didn't know
why. But he had a nasty suspicion whatever it was, was going to hurt like hell.
He pinpointed Sandburg's pulse from outside the building, and his
footsteps sped up. The beat was fast, tripping a little, surging with
adrenaline. Something was wrong. He had his gun in one hand by the time he got
to the top of the stairs, and his hand on the knob. It rattled, but didn't
turn.
Locked?
One foot raised automatically to bash in the
barrier between himself and his threatened Guide, when he heard it.
A giggle.
A strained voice hissing, "Shhhh!"
What?
Then his nose caught it. Sweat. Skin oils. A hint of pre-ejaculate. A tsunami of
pheromones.
His foot gradually lowered, along with the gun. Slightly unsteady on his
feet, he cranked up his hearing.
Rustling cloth. Hands moving along legs, hair swishing against wood and metal, a light
wet sucking noise as a mouth lost contact with more skin.
Well, shit. Sandburg was getting it on in his office. No wonder his heartbeat
was missing a stroke every once in awhile.
Against his will, almost without his knowledge, certainly without his
consent, his eyesight sharpened and compensated for the mottled glass in the
door. Opaque only to standard issue eyeballs, not Sentinel sight. An Amazon
sprawled across Sandburg's desk, and his best buddy was just about to nail her.
Her hands were clamped on the edge of the desk, his on her hips, and Jim
watched as Blair buried his head in the woman's neck and thrust home.
Nice hip action.
She had gorgeous legs.
He had an incredible ass.
Sweat broke out on Jim's forehead, and he tore his eyes away from the
sight, head swimming until he readjusted to normal vision. He was looking down,
and was surprised to see the bulge tenting out his slacks.
Her?
Or him?
Shakily, he put the gun back in his holster and peered one last time
through the mottled glass. Ignoring as best he could the athletics going on, he
memorized her face and turned on his heel.
Sandburg had just as shitty taste in women as Jim did himself. Jim had work to do. Fuck the reports. He had a background check to
run.
And a cold shower to take.
Deliberately blanking his mind, refusing to consider any of the
ramifications of the mid-morning activities or his reactions to them, he headed
back to the station.
Blair got home late that night. Not surprising, since his schedule had
been punted into orbit around the moon when he and Char had spontaneously
combusted. He opened the door to a completely darkened loft and nearly killed
himself falling over a jacket in the doorway.
Jim's jacket.
A bolt of pure panic shot through him. Jim never tossed his
jacket on the floor.
"Jim? Buddy? You okay?" Visions of Lash were dancing in his
head. A crazed psychotic slipped in and caught Jim unaware and killed him and
threw his jacket on the floor as a final triumphant sign of his victory. Sociopathic
equivalent of peeing on the chair leg.
It made as much sense as Jim throwing his clothes on the floor. More, actually.
"You here, Jimbo?" He felt along the wall until he came to a lamp, thankfully unharmed in
the struggle that must have occurred. He switched it on.
The whole loft looked normal.
Now he was really worried. First, some psycho manages to sneak up on his
Sentinel and force him to be untidy, and now there's not even any sign of a
fight. Chiding himself for being ridiculous -- Jim
couldn't be snuck up on, fer chrissakes,
he was a sentinel -- Blair crept up the stairs.
Jim was flaked out across his bed. Fully clothed.
Except for his jacket.
Shoes on the bedcovers? Now Blair was really freaked out. Something was definitely wrong.
"Jim?" he asked in a normal tone of voice.
No sign of life.
He gulped and raised his voice a tone or two, increasing the volume to
where even a sleeping sentinel should have no problem hearing him.
"JIM!"
"WHAT?!?" Ellison came up off the bed as if shot from a catapult.
Blair jumped back, nearly taking a backward header down the stairs and
fetching up hard against the wall. Jim stared at him, wild-eyed, from his
crouch on the far side of the bed. Forcing his heart back out of his throat
where it had leapt, Sandburg took a shaky step away from the wall and into the
room.
"It's okay, Jim. Whatever happened, it's okay. You're safe now. You're okay."
Jim stared at him. Blair opened his mouth for further Guide-toned
soothing, and his partner roared at him.
"WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG?"
Abruptly the shaking stopped. "I don't know, man, maybe it's the
fact that my normally so sensitive a pin dropping gets on his one nerve roomie is sleeping like a corpse and leaving his clothes on
the floor and wearing the ones he's not leaving on the floor into bed with him
including his shoes and doesn't any of this strike you as strange?"
Jim continued to stare at him. "Did you breathe at all during that
little monologue?"
Now it was Blair's turn to stare, with a shade of intensity that tipped
it right over into a glare. An irritated glare.
"What. Is. Wrong. Jim?"
The stare ceased as Ellison suddenly seemed to find the edge of his
bedspread fascinating. "Nothing," he muttered. "I was just
tired."
Blair took a deep breath, preparatory to blasting the man, then stopped. Jim did look tired. Exhausted,
in fact. Changing his mind mid-stream, he gentled his voice and took
another step into the room. "Are you okay, Jim? What happened? Is there
anything I can do?"
The eyes looking up at him had never seemed so
remote, even at the beginning, when Jim was trying to make him one with the
paint on his office wall. Finally, a gate seemed to shut, and the gaze swung
away.
"No, thanks, Sandburg. Nothing a night's sleep won't cure."
He sat on the edge of the bed and began methodically to strip. Blair
watched him for a moment, then offered softly,
"If you do need anything, you know? I'm here."
The movements hitched, then continued as if he
hadn't spoken. After another long moment, Jim finally nodded, and Blair turned
and went back downstairs. He swung by the entryway, checked the lock, and
absently hung up Jim's jacket. Then he switched off the light and felt his way
into his room.
What a totally weird day.
Jim stared at the computer screen and read the same two sentences
several times. In the four years he'd been partnered with Sandburg, he'd
watched the younger man do some innovative and creative computer work. He
couldn't call it hacking, since hacking on an official police computer was
illegal, and he was using every trick he could ever remember Sandburg using to
find out about The Woman.
Either he wasn't doing it right, or there wasn't a hell of a lot to find
out. Charlotte Castleac had no police record, no
parking tickets in the last thirty six months, no late bills, excellent credit,
and a good grade point average. She appeared to be just exactly what the
records said she was. Bright, law abiding, responsible, and if the DMV head
shot was anything to go by, surpassingly pretty. Jim had taken a close look at
her face, even when he'd been concentrating on her legs. And
Sandburg's ass.
Yeah. She was cute enough in an overgrown jockette
sort of way. So. What was she hiding? There had to be
something. Sandburg never went out with decent women with clean records. If he
did, Jim would have no way of tracking them.
The thought should have tripped him up, but he ignored it. Of course he
had to track the women Sandburg appeared to serious about -- he was responsible
for cleaning up after his partner's bad judgment. Just as Sandburg cleaned up after his own. Admittedly, he had shown a hell of a lot more
bad judgment than Blair had in the last few years. But the fact that all his
exes, with the exception of Carolyn, seemed to be assassins or psychos or Mafia
princesses, wasn't the point.
Sandburg was.
Or rather, protecting Sandburg was. And he couldn't protect the man if
he couldn't find out what he was protecting him from.
"JIM." Simon's stentorian bellow distracted him from his
search. He looked toward the office, and jumped an inch in his chair when he
saw his captain looming over him. Arching back to look up,
quite a distance up from his seat, into Simon's frowning face, he put on an
innocent look.
"Sir? No need to
shout." He even managed a mildly wounded tone. Simon didn't buy it.
"Oh, no? When I've
called your name five times from my office door to your desk? Hello, Ellison? Selective hearing? Anybody home?"
A large fist rapped gently on his bald spot. Jim's innocent look slackened with
shock.
"You what?" The demand for information came out in a whisper. First Blair sneaking
up on him last night, now Simon today. He cranked his hearing up
experimentally, then flinched as Simon's voice
reverberated in his head.
"What's wrong? Where's Sandburg?"
Jim shook the ringing echo out of his ears and frowned. "Why does
everyone do that?"
"Do what?" It was Simon's turn to look confused.
"Assume that anytime anything looks like it might be wrong,
Sandburg needs to fix it."
Simon shook his head. "Because he does," he answered
unarguably. Jim thought about arguing anyway, then
shrugged.
"University. What's up?" He pointed at the file in Simon's free hand, the one
that hadn't thumped his head. "I'm assuming you actually needed me, and weren't just checking my hearing?"
With a gusty sigh, Simon dumped the folder onto the desk top in front of
him. "I presume you'll tell me when you get around to it what's up with
your ears. Until then, I've got a nasty one for you. Antipersonnel
bombs going off in minority enclaves throughout Cascade. Modified
Molotov cocktails tossed into a Korean grocery store on a Wednesday evening,
during its busiest time. Nail bomb by the stage in a gay nightclub on the North
shore on a Friday night. Another nail bomb in a rap club
eight days later."
Jim nodded, grimacing a little as he opened the
file and looked at the carnage.
"You're primary on this, but it's a big one. Rafe
and H have done the prep work on the rap club and the gay club, and Megan did
the store. There were some indications with MO that the crimes are connected.
But they've hit a wall. I want you to see if you can dig anything up they might
have missed." Jim glanced up at him, and Simon nodded slightly. "Call
'em in when you can. And get Sandburg to help you
out. I don't like this being able to sneak up on you thang."
Jim nodded. Right. If he could ever unwind
Sandburg from the squeaky clean Amazon he'd be sure to bring him along. He
growled at the pictures, without really seeing them.
May was in the air, finals were on his mind, Char was on his body as
often as possible, and Blair should have been blissfully happy. He stared into
the fountain he could only now sit next to again without suffering from
flashbacks, and chewed thoughtfully on a spinach and feta pita. Picking through
the components of his life, he checked them off.
Classes. Good. Last meeting
with the diss committee went pretty well. Not that
much rewriting, and no screams yet about subject
anonymity. All papers on schedule and most source materials either in hand or
on hold, thanks to his friendly librarian.
Station. Okay. Not much
happening. School was eating his life lately, but that was the norm around this
time in the cycle.
Sex. Outstanding.
Char was brick-batting him on a pretty regular basis, and when his brain wasn't
drooling out his dick, they found an amazing number of topics to debate. They
clicked. It was good.
Loft. Cool. No fights
lately, not really there much. Char had an apartment. Not much happening,
really, at home. Leading to his final category.
Sleep. Who needed it.
Backing up, rolling a shred of spinach into a bowtie with his tongue to
keep in practice, he reviewed the list again.
Jim.
He nearly choked on the tied leaf, then crunched it and swallowed quickly.
Was something wrong with Jim? Brow wrinkling in thought, he made a mental count
of all the times he'd seen his partner in the last couple weeks. It hadn't been
many. He'd been distracted. But other than the one night about a week ago when
he'd tripped over Jim's jacket, nothing funky seemed to be going down. Jim was
sleeping okay, if the shadows under his eyes were any indication. Simon hadn't
called with any zone out problems, not that Jim had zoned in, like, forever.
Last time Blair had asked, Jim had said they'd been slow. Of course, that had
been almost two weeks, but Jim knew Blair was busy with school at the moment.
If Jim needed him, Jim would ask.
With that settled satisfactorily, Blair ended the internal dialog and
looked up to see Char smiling down at him. Ho, boy.
It was gonna be a hot afternoon.
The first indication Jim actually paid attention to that his senses were
fucking up royally was when he tasted the accelerant used in the bombs at the
grocery store.
With his fingertips.
He'd swiped two fingers lightly over the residue left at the impact site
of one of the fiery missiles, eyes sweeping the area for anything the forensics
team might have missed. At the first contact with the mildly greasy stuff,
every taste bud on his tongue tried its damnedest to curl up and hide. He was
spitting air before he realized what he was doing, eyes watering from the acrid
taste. Standard instinctive reaction to a crappy taste.
Except for one thing.
He hadn't tasted anything.
Absently, he wiped his hand on his pant leg, and instantly the fire
singeing the hair off his tongue muted. He froze.
That was not supposed to happen.
He glanced around wildly, hearing reaching out for his normal grounding,
the steady metronome of Sandburg's heartbeat.
It wasn't there. Of course. He hadn't had a
chance to talk to Blair about the case. Every time he turned around, Sandburg
was grabbing a different book or notebook or disk, muttering under his breath
about this paper or that presentation or the other exam. He seldom came home at
night, and when he did stagger in at
It had been a damned long two weeks.
Getting longer by the minute.
Shaking off the strange sensation, determined to ask Blair about it the
next time he saw his Guide, Jim went on sniffing around. He didn't find
anything of further interest at the site. But at least he wasn't
tasting hallucinations, either.
Three more days and he could sleep again. Blair stared blearily at the
green goop in the tall glass that appeared before him, and wondered when algae
shakes would come with caffeine. He barely heard Jim's greeting, responding
with a grunt that only the truly kind hearted could call human.
It had been a long two weeks. And it wasn't over.
Casting about for a topic of conversation, Char lurking in his
subconscious and with his higher reasoning powers still hiding under the
pillow, he asked Jim absently, "You know when you asked me about Lila if
I'd ever found anyone who I thought might be the one?"
A thundering silence met his rambled question. He looked across the
table through the hair falling in his face and wondered what on earth was up
with Jim. He looked like somebody'd sucker punched
him.
"Jim?" A niggle of worry jolted
Blair a little closer to consciousness. "You okay?"
The pale face didn't move, but the chin dipped and rose in what could pass for
an affirmative nod.
"Cool. You sure? I gotta
get a hair cut, man, I'm starting to feel like
Medusa." He blew the irritating curls out of his face and looked a little
closer at his partner. "You sure you're okay, Jim? You look like
shit."
Jim nodded again. "Drink your seaweed, Sandburg." He sounded
raspy.
"You getting a cold, or something?"
Blair obeyed the command and stuck his nose in his shake. Not bad. Not bad at
all.
"Must be it. Gotta go." Jim scraped his plate and
stacked it in the sink. "You be by the station
today, chief?"
"Dunno, man," Blair managed, sucking
down the last of his protein and licking his lips. "Got office hours this
morning and I'm proctoring this afternoon. Paying back some favors, and if I
don't have some time for my students pretty soon they're gonna
rent out my office. You need me for anything important?"
Jim paused, then ducked his head a little as he
headed for the door. "No. Nothing important."
Blair stared at the door as it shut behind his partner's back. That had
been weird. Before he could pinpoint what it was about the exchange that had
bothered him, the tinny buzz of his alarm clock jolted him back to awareness of
the time, and he flew into his room to get dressed. It wasn't until several
hours later, making notes from a sociology journal while keeping a gimlet eye
on a class full of freshmen to discourage unauthorized pooling of information,
that it hit him.
Jim hadn't washed his plate.
On his way to his car, planning vaguely on talking to Jim that night but
not really sure what to say, he was waylaid by Char. Taken to her apartment.
Thoroughly laid. Several times.
Crashed out in the aftermath, wound around her while she nuzzled at his
curls, he wondered what he'd have to ask, anyway. Why are you not being so
clean these days? You didn't wash a plate, let me take
your temperature? Deciding he was being an idiot, he shrugged it off and
nuzzled her back.
Surely, after everything they went through the last time Jim didn't talk
to him, the big guy wouldn't make the same mistake twice. If there was anything
wrong, Jim would tell him.
Finding a time to communicate with his partner when
Blair was awake, present, and coherent was proving to be impossible. Jim's hand kept reaching for the phone, but whenever he had the time to
try to reach his partner, some idiot always came up to ask a stupid question or
was standing too close for him to talk out loud into the phone. The last
thing he needed was Rafe or H or somebody hearing him
telling Sandburg over the phone that his days were turning into one long acid
trip.
He was having a hard enough time hiding it from Simon. If the Cap knew
what was going on, he'd pull Jim off the streets in a heartbeat. And with
nothing to think about but how far Sandburg was drifting away from him, Jim
would very quickly go nuts.
Not that he was completely sane at the moment. Who would be, if they
were seeing sounds? He tore his eyes away from the neon green and orange
glowing around the earpieces of H's headphones. Music was the worst. The radio
in his truck had been glowing bright blue for days. It clashed with the paint
job.
That morning had been bad. He'd slowed for road work and gotten
distracted. A jackhammer was revving up, and while for some odd reason the
noise hadn't given him a headache, there had been the strangest bright purple
haze around the tool he'd ever seen. He hadn't heard the horn honking behind
him, either, but his knuckles, wrapped around the steering wheel, had started
to smart, as if they were sunburned. He'd looked down and seen the faintest
green wash across them. Looking up, he realized it was reflected from the traffic
light, which had turned green.
So, now he was seeing sounds and feeling sights and tasting smells. Not
that it was consistent. It kept switching on him, at the oddest times. Whatever
he touched, whatever he smelled, ended up coating his tongue. It was
disgusting.
He knew he was in trouble. Knew he had to talk to Blair. But in order to
talk to Blair, he had to find Blair. And every time he found Blair,
Blair was up to his eyeballs in That Bitch.
Four times, now. Twice in his office, once in the student lounge very
late at night -- or early in the morning, depending on how one looked at it --
and once at her apartment. He'd broken down and tracked them to her place. Then
he spent all night in the truck staring up through a two inch gap in her shades
and eavesdropping shamelessly.
Jim was pulling double shifts, working the hate crimes case, and Blair
was … distracted. It wasn't a good situation.
At
Blair dropped off the final draft of his last paper for the term and
fought the urge to do a Rocky victory dance in the lobby of the Anthro building. Grades were in, his papers and exams were
done, and he had two whole weeks of freedom stretching in front of him. He
could catch up with Jim, spend time with Char … sleep.
It sounded great.
He was feeling slightly guilty, as if he'd somehow neglected his
Sentinel lately, but Jim hadn't complained about it, and there wasn't anything
he could actually point to that was causing the guilt. Wondering if it was some
sort of genetic holdover he'd learned subconsciously from Naomi about pair
bonding, or some remnant of culturally dictated Jewish guilt that had
previously been undiscovered in his psyche -- and where his legendary ability
to detach had gone -- he shuffled his books into his pack and headed out.
Stepping lightly toward the parking lot, he was bushwhacked by a woman
with love on her mind. The last two nights the most he'd had time for was some
hurried conversation and a smooch or two in the student union over Jolt before
heading back to work. Deciding to give the next evening over to re-introducing
himself to his partner, he gave in to the urgings from south of his belt buckle
and followed Char to her car.
Jim had been fine up to now. One more night wouldn't kill him.
Acting on information from eye witnesses, and a scrap of fabric from a
custom made suit that Jim had managed to identify in one of the few moments
when his senses weren't on a rocket ship to Mars, Cascade's finest had
surrounded a small printer's shop in a quiet suburb just outside the city.
Somebody wasn't quiet. Somebody'd squealed.
The criminals were waiting for them, armed with armor piercing bullets
and semi-auto rifles to fire them. Jim knew they were there. Knew they were
armed. Tried to tell Simon before the troops moved in.
Couldn't get the words out past a tongue that was
suddenly overwhelmed with the taste of gun oil and explosives.
His arm moved, defensively, pulling Simon down, and he flinched at the
sensation of cloth under his fingers as it screeched in his ears. Everything
moved in slow motion, and he stared desperately at his boss, trying to tell him
without being able to spit out a word that it was a trap, they were in danger,
keep his head down, keep his ass covered.
Simon didn't read minds.
He didn't notice Jim's desperation, nor his
frozen immobility, until the attack was under way. Until the
firing started, and they were pinned, and Jim wasn't moving. Until Megan
had body blocked H out of the way of a storm of bullets, and Rafe had gone down to lay writhing on the grass. Until
Taggart slid sideways in a dive to keep himself from
being cut in half, screaming "BOMB!" as he dove, and until the front
windows of the house blew out and the bastards responsible ran from the back.
Captain Banks was a good commander and a solid tactician. The back was
covered. The people responsible for the bombings were captured by the B team, a
wall of SWAT and Homicide cops with support from the Hate Crimes Task Force. It
was a damned good thing there was a B team. Major Crimes was in utter disarray.
And Jim Ellison couldn't do a fucking thing about it. He was too busy
shaking, feeling every screaming red particle of sound from the explosions
shredding his skin from his bones.
Torn between the blank eyed quivering mess that was his finest detective
and the sprawled form bleeding into the grass in front of the burning house,
Simon made a split second decision. Running toward Rafe,
he intercepted Connor, catching her arm in a solid grip.
"Go get Ellison. Take him home. Find Sandburg. Go."
She didn't even pause. Throwing a concerned glance over her shoulder,
she ran directly to the spot where Jim Ellison sat hunched over in a ball.
Banks watched just long enough to see her put her arm around Jim's shoulders,
and turned to see what was happening with Rafe. Henri
had already bellowed for an ambulance, a call that was picked up by a uniform
with a radio, and Simon could hear the sirens in the distance. H's hands were
red with blood where he'd bunched up his jacket and was pressing it directly
into the wound at the top of Rafe's thigh. Simon
knelt and laid a gentle hand at the side of Rafe's
neck.
His pulse was strong, racing, skipping a beat here and there, but not
fading out. He looked down and met Rafe's eyes, wide
open now and glazed with shock and pain.
"It's gonna be
okay, son," he reassured gently, and Rafe nodded
once before passing out. The paramedics hit the trio like a cyclone, and Simon
hoisted himself into the back of the ambulance for the ride to the hospital after
the initial flurry of activity died down.
It was going to be a close one, but it could have been so much worse.
And it could have been a lot more personal. The first rounds had missed him by
an inch. If Ellison hadn't pulled him out of the way … he hoped like hell
Sandburg would be able to do something. Jim was in a bad way.
A groan from the head of the gurney brought him back to the present.
Jim wasn't the only one.
Thank god he could walk, even if he did look like a zombie. Megan coaxed
softly and pulled with all her strength to steer Ellison toward her car and
manhandle him inside. He was shivering, almost convulsing. His skin was pasty
and covered with sweat, and he was clumsy, sense of balance completely shot.
But the thing that got under her skin the worst was his eyes. They were
completely blank.
Jim Ellison had checked out. Nobody at all was home.
It frightened her, and spooked her. It was unnatural. If this was part
of the whole sentinel business, she wanted no part of it. It reminded her much
too much of that psychotic bitch Barnes down in the jungle. What she couldn't
understand was where the hell
Blessing the god of mechanic works that the lift was running, she
muscled Jim into the elevator and out at his floor. By the time they got to the
door of his flat she was panting like a racehorse. He wasn't all that much
taller than she was, but he outmassed her by twice.
It was a struggle. She had to search through his pockets to find his keys, and
she was alarmed to be able to feel the cold seeping from his limbs even through
the material of his slacks.
By the time she got him inside the flat and perched on the end of the
sofa, she was quietly frantic. Ellison was in shock, and she couldn't do a
bloody thing about it. Wrapping him with the cover from the back of the sofa
and cranking up the central heat, she reached for the phone. Thanking Jim
silently for his over-developed sense of order, she read Blair's office number
off the directory on the inside of the handset, and let it ring twelve times.
Just as she was getting ready to cradle the phone, the line clicked over.
"Anthropology department." Perky. Hopefully smarter
than she sounded.
"This is Inspector Megan Connor with the Cascade police department.
I'm trying to contact Mr. Blair Sandburg. I called his office but it was
transferred to you. This is a matter of some urgency. Can you assist me?"
Rapid fire, but with the distinct enunciation she'd been forced to adopt since
coming to the States. It was amazing how often Americans couldn't understand
the Queen's English. Happily, this one did.
"Oh, yeah! Megan. Blair's mentioned you. You call him Sandy, right? I think that's
cute. No, anyway, Blair's not in his office right now. I saw him heading off
with Char an hour or so ago. They're probably over at her place. You got her
number?"
Megan swallowed what she was originally going to say and satisfied
herself with a simple, "No. May I have it?"
"Sure!" The girl rattled off a number and Megan stamped it on
her brain. With a muttered "Thank you you've been so kind good-bye"
she disconnected and dialed the new number.
It rang nearly a dozen times before an extremely irritated female voice
picked up.
"What?"
Taking her cue from the woman, Megan disposed of the niceties and got
down to business. "Is Blair Sandburg there, please? This is Inspector
Connor. This is an emergency."
Dead silence for a moment, then a swift indrawn breath and the rustle of
the phone being passed over. Megan heard a muffled, "Blair, honey, it's an
inspector, says it's an emergency." Blair's voice, when he came on the
line, was tense with worry.
"Megan? Is that you? What's wrong? Is it Jim? What's
happened?"
Her throat felt tight. Staring at the man slowly going catatonic on the
sofa, Megan forced out, "Come home,
"On my way." The line went dead. She shakily replaced the receiver on the rest and
sat down next to Jim, tucking the ends of the warm material closer around the
shuddering body.
"Make it fast,
The sex had been as phenomenal as usual, but for some weird reason Blair
had found himself distracted. Cuddling next to Char, waiting for his pulse to
drop back down to normal from somewhere in the stratosphere, he tried to sort
through the muddle of mush that was his brain and figure out what on earth
could possibly distract a man when a woman was in the middle of turning him
inside out.
He hadn’t gotten very far into his musings when he realized Char was
talking to him.
"-know it’s probably much too soon to talk about this. But I feel like
we’ve got this connection going. It’s almost, I don’t know how to explain it, mystical I guess. I have to know how you’re feeling. Where you want to go with this. I guess what I’m asking is,
will you be mine?" She was smiling down at him as if he was the answer to
every paradox ever expounded by the wise men. Or women, considering her
particular religious bent. He had a wild feeling that he’d ended up on the
roller coaster without a seatbelt, and his stomach was still at the station.
"Are you asking me to marry you?" The words just popped out.
Her face glowed even more, and he opened his mouth again, without a clue what
might fall out. Saving him from himself, the telephone rang.
She ignored it.
He started to twitch.
The glow dimmed a few watts.
"Aren’t you going to get that? It could be important." It
hadn’t been what he was expecting -- or expected -- to say, but it worked. She
gave him an impatient look, glow fading further, and rolled off the bed to
stalk over to the phone.
Yanking the handset off the cradle, Char growled, "What?" then
didn’t say another word until she turned slowly and extended the receiver
toward him. She had the strangest expression on her face, confusion and
concern, loss and disappointment all mixed up with hope and the last remnants
of that glow. "Blair, honey, it's an inspector, says it's an
emergency."
The bottom fell out of his world. The one thing his brain could think of
was completely unthinkable. He wasn’t aware of moving, but he found himself
across the room and speaking into the phone.
"Megan? Is that you? What's wrong? Is it Jim? What's
happened?"
Her voice sounded as if it was coming from a great distance to reach
him. "Come home,
"On my way." He didn’t think. Didn’t explain. Just dove for
his clothes, grabbed his keys and his pack and flew out the door. Vaguely he
heard Char saying something behind him, but he couldn’t make out the words.
They were unimportant. Everything was unimportant except getting home as fast
as he could get there.
Jim would have said if he’d needed Blair. Wouldn’t he? If he would, then
why the hell was it Megan calling, instead of Jim?
His mind painted scenarios from hell all the way across town. Parking
aslant across two spaces, not giving a shit if he got another ticket, he tore
into the building and headed for the elevator. It took way too fucking long to
get to the lobby, and adrenaline propelled him up all three flights of stairs
and dumped him, panting, at his front door. His hands were shaking too hard to
get the key in the knob.
"Please, please, please, be okay, Jim, please be all right, hang
on, man, I’m coming --" He didn’t even know he was praying.
The door opened before he could ram the key home. Megan stood in the
doorway. She was white as a sheet.
Blair’s knees swayed. "He’s not dead."
"No, Sandy, no!" She pulled him inside. "But he’s …" She waved at the couch.
Shit. Zone out, magnitude eleven. Jim had never
zoned this hard. He wasn’t dead, but he sure as hell looked like he was.
Not aware of what he was saying, just knowing he needed to get to work,
in private, right now, he patted and crooned and pushed Megan out the door.
"I got it, Meg. Thank you. I’ll take care of it. I’ll take care of
Jim."
As the door closed in her face, she told him forcefully, "Call me
if you need anything. I’ll go let Simon know he’s okay."
Blair paused in the act of shutting the door. Staring up at her, he
swallowed to get enough spit in his dry mouth to talk. "Thank you, Megan.
I mean it. Let Simon know … he’s not okay yet, but he will be."
Please god.
She nodded, and he shut and locked the door. In the space of an instant
he was up against Jim’s side, talking quietly to him, trying to pull him back.
As he reached out and ghosted his hands over the Sentinel’s arms, he noticed a
very strange thing.
"Jim, it’s okay, man, you got to come back
to me now." Jim didn’t give any evidence of hearing the words. Instead, he
shivered, as if he was cold, as if Blair’s voice was somehow rubbing against
his skin. But Jim wasn’t reacting to the comforting hands Blair was running up
and down Jim’s forearms. So Blair shut up and concentrated on the tactile
response.
He lightly pinched Jim’s arm.
Jim crumpled his face as if he was tasting
something awful. The only time Blair had seen that particular expression was
when he’d coaxed Jim into tasting a bite of chocolate covered pineapple a
friend had brought home from a trip to
Jim hated pineapple.
Carefully not touching him, Blair scrabbled in his pocket and came up
with a half stick of peppermint gum. Waving it under Jim’s nose, he watched
carefully.
Jim whimpered and covered his ears.
Holy shit.
Major zone with evidence of cross-wired senses. This was so not good. Not only was Blair’s normal avenue for
reaching his Sentinel cut off, since he couldn’t very well turn his words into
smells, but he hadn’t the faintest fucking idea what to do with a Sentinel in
the middle of what looked to be an exceedingly bad trip.
Absently patting him, thinking perhaps he could be the tactile
equivalent of chocolate, Blair thought hard. Okay. So it was usually his voice
he used to reach him. Couldn’t do that because Jim was
hearing smells, not sounds. Tasting touches. Not seeing a damned thing,
sight completely off-line from what he could tell.
At a total loss, desperate to reach his partner and without a hint of an
idea how, Blair toed off his shoes, climbed onto the couch, and enveloped Jim
in a full body hug. If nothing else he could give his partner some sort of an
anchor, until he could figure out how the hell to reach him and pull him back
from wherever he’d gone.
The explosion had ripped his skin from his body, leaving him a burning
mass of exposed nerve endings with a mind shying away from the insanity that
had replaced his reality. When the world settled back down around him, the
white had faded to gray, and he wasn’t seeing anything.
His ears hurt with the acrid tang of cordite and the copper sweet of
blood. He didn’t know how he was hearing them, but he was, and it hurt. Trying
to shake his head and clear it didn’t work at all, it just made him dizzy.
Suddenly the taste of honeydew melon and powdered sugar coated his tongue.
Connor?
Someone who tasted of light and spice and strength was pulling him away
from the sound of the blood. He tried to help, but the world was pitching
sideways, and every step he took the ground was a different distance away from
the bottom of his foot.
Everything was shifting with each moment, and he was drifting,
rebounding from one strange sensation to another, tasting the cold as it
prickled his skin, hearing every screech of metal and rubber with the intensity
of a cheese grater against his skin, smelling the words she was saying that had
no meaning as they coated his tongue.
He was lost. Confused. Jumbled
up in a world of pain and running colors and slick walls that his fingertips
slid away from every time he heard them. It made no sense.
He made no sense.
He had to warn, had to protect, had to speak. But his mouth couldn’t
form words, too busy spitting out the distractions of
hands on his arms and air currents against his face. He had to break out of the
maze but the landscape kept shifting and he had no idea where he was or where
he had to go.
Faces jumped at him through the darkness, then faded as he was touching
their names. Voices screamed at him, whispered at him, moaned through him, but
disappeared as soon as he caught a whiff of them. He was touching tastes,
smelling sounds, hearing touches, tasting colors, and seeing nothing. He was
bombarded.
Lost.
Through the darkness of the puzzle, the confusion of his senses, he
tasted a familiar sound.
Blair’s heartbeat.
Drawn to it from desperate need and equally desperate recognition, he
focused on it to the exclusion of all the rest of his warped reality. He attached
himself to it, concentrating completely on it. He lapped at it, reveled in it. Drowned in it.
Finally realized it was an actual taste, and not cross-wired hearing,
when he heard the moan rumbling along behind the wet warm skin under his mouth.
His senses snapped back on-line with a force that left him dizzy. His
Guide was pinned beneath him on the couch, and Jim was lapping at the pulse
point at the base of his throat. His hands held Blair’s wrists out to his sides, his legs straddled Blair’s thighs. Their groins were
pressed together and their hips were moving in counter-rhythm against one
another.
Off balance didn’t begin to describe it.
The protective instincts that had been stymied by the zone roared out
just long enough for Jim to croak, "Sandburg? You okay? With
this?"
Dazed, dilated indigo eyes blazed up at him. A strong hand caught the
back of his head and pulled their lips together. As Blair’s tongue swept
through and conquered his mouth, Jim decided if Blair wasn’t okay with it he
was doing a damned fine job of faking it, then his brain went back on vacation
and his body took over the proceedings.
It was faster than hoped for and better than expected. Blair came in his
pants as Jim was fighting to get them off, and Jim came all over Blair’s hand.
Sandburg was more coordinated than a Sentinel still fighting the effects of
having his body turn on him. Neither one of them softened
after the first round, and the second was slow enough to actually allow
a few intelligent words to pass between them.
Not many.
Enough.
"Are you okay?" Jim panted against Blair’s neck, spitting out
stray curls and burrowing through cotton, wool and denim to get to sweet sweaty
skin.
"Define okay," Blair mumbled as he mastered essential hand-eye
coordination and managed to strip Jim down to one sock and a rucked up tee shirt. Jim tried to do the same and nearly
strangled his Guide with too many shirts, then nearly scalped him when Blair’s
long hair got caught up in the neck band of one of those shirts.
"Gotta cut this shit," was cursed into sweaty, twisted cotton
as Blair finally wrenched his head free and fastened his mouth on the closest
part of Jim he could reach – his collarbone.
"Don’t care if you’re as bald as I’m getting, Chief.
Long as you’re okay with this" was muttered into an armpit as Jim slid
semen-slick hardness over the equally wet erection below him.
"Fuck okay." As convulsions jerked Blair through his second
orgasm, his head tilted back and his eyelids clenched shut. Jim’s mouth dove
unerringly back to the reddened skin at the base of Blair’s throat, latching on
and sucking hard as he came.
This time when the world turned white, he let it.
Blair rubbed himself lazily against the furnace passing for his
passed-out partner, and shuddered. If Char had been a brick, Jim was a whole
fucking wall. For all the sex he’d been getting in the last several weeks,
regular and mind-blowing as it had been, it couldn’t hold a candle to this.
Must be love.
Or insanity.
Maybe both.
When he finally got his breath back, difficult to do since he didn’t
want to let go of Jim long enough to even breathe, much less lose that
wonderful blanketing heat, he made a decision. Wriggling under Jim’s deadweight
just far enough to snag the cell phone, he punched in Char’s
number. Now he had the answer to her question. He didn’t think it would come as
any surprise. Not the way he’d peeled out of her apartment like his ass was on
fire when Megan had called.
The mental image a possible reason for his ass being on fire stopped him
for a moment, and he grinned down at the crown of Jim’s head, where the flaked
out man lay with his cheek plastered against Blair’s sweaty chest. He was
looking forward to that.
Before his wayward thoughts could distract him completely from the task
at hand,
"Char. This is me." His voice stuck.
"Is your roommate all right?" She was gentle. He didn’t know
quite how to respond to that. So he went with the truth, rough as it was.
"Yeah, he’s okay now. Uhm, Char, I’m
sorry. We, uh, we’re not going to be able to go out anymore. I’m, well, I’m
taken." If not at the moment, then damned soon.
He almost grinned at the thought, but her voice brought him up short.
"I kinda figured that out when you left
as I was proposing to you."
Shit. He didn’t know what to say. He heard her sigh over the line.
"Good luck, Blair. Next time you see me on the quad,
do us both a favor and walk the other way. ‘Kay?"
There was a click, and he said quietly, "Okay" to the dial
tone ringing in his ear.
Stretching to put the phone back on the table, he realized that Jim had
shifted. Looking down at the groggy cerulean eyes
staring up at him, he tapped the end of Jim’s nose lightly.
"We have to have a little discussion about this tendency you have
not to tell me when your world is imploding, Jim."
Jim made a valiant effort to appear as if he was capable of rational
thought, then gave it up as a bad deal and nodded obediently before crashing
out again. Staring down at the peaceful face, rubbing the faint lines of stress
from between the fine brows with one gentle fingertip, Blair grinned. Tugged the afghan around their naked shoulders to ward off the
chill starting through the loft as evening approached. Hugged his Sentinel tightly. And promised,
"Later. It's okay."
fin