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The very first time he’d come face to face with Blair Sandburg, the man had infuriated him to the point of laying hands on him, forcing him up against a wall and making threats against him. The whirlwind rage swirling through Jim waited for Sandburg to back down, for the grifter to realise that his grift wasn’t going to work, for fear to show on that youthful face. What Jim got was a poke in the sternum, and an insistent demand to be taken seriously.

So it wasn’t a grift, then. The mad professor was sincere enough in the craziness, Jim would give him that, but that was all that Jim was giving. He broke away, whatever this guy was saying ringing in his ears but not his mind…

A lot of things happened after that, months passed, and Jim could do without everything ringing in his ears yet again. He shut his eyes against the way the world rocked, trying to get to his feet. He got as far as his knees before vertigo made him try to uselessly dig his fingers into the grit of the sidewalk. ‘Get up,’ he told himself, ‘get up, there are things you’ve got to do’. Things like using his senses to look for the bomber who was very likely nearby and revelling in the damage to the old Woodville’s Building, the screams of people evacuated barely in time, the sound of sirens and shouting emergency personnel.

And speaking of shouting, there was Blair. “Jim! Jim!” Jim opened his eyes; everything lurched sickeningly as Blair dropped to his knees in front of him. “Jim, are you okay?”

“I’m okay,” Jim growled.

“You’re so okay you’re down on your knees in the road! What’s going on?”

He was going to fall – or the sidewalk was going to slide out from under him. Jim’s hand flailed and latched onto Blair’s arm.

“Vertigo,” he said, swallowing back nausea. He shut his eyes again.

“The shock wave,” Blair guessed. “You’re okay otherwise?”

“Yes,” Jim gritted, while headache beat out a drumbeat tattoo.

“Okay, just breathe, Jim. I want you to breathe…” – like Jim wasn’t breathing anyway, but he knew what Blair meant, those slow steady breaths in through the nose, out through the mouth, while Blair sat still and the warmth of his arm in Jim’s hand seemed to be the only thing around him that didn’t pitch and bounce. Painfully slowly, noise became just noise and the world was able to be looked upon. Jim could move his head and function.

“You’re okay?” Blair said, far too loud.

“Sandburg, can you hear me?”

Blair lifted one hand to his left ear. “Maybe I have a little ringing in the ears. Man, that was loud.”

Jim could stand now, and he did, his eyes scanning the people around them, looking for someone – someone just a little too interested, just a little too excited. He stooped to haul Blair to his feet. “I dunno, Chief. You want to breathe, maybe?”

That got him a grin, and some rolled eyes, before the two of them looked at the chaos around them, and got back to work.

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Naomi was quite something - what sort of something, Jim never was quite clear on. From her first appearance in the loft – the sage, the cooking, the goddamned furniture rearranging, the ‘accidental’ dropping of the word, pig – she confused the hell out of him. She could not be as scatter-brained as she looked – this giggly, perfumed gadabout had never raised the man that Jim knew. Everything that Blair was couldn’t have just sprung from the mystery of his father.

The longer she spent with them, the more he saw elements that must have formed his friend. Never mind the surface, the big eyes and the high cheekbones. The facile, friendly chat, the quick grasp of facts, the determined approach in pursuit of a goal displayed far more important traits that Blair had directly from his mother. But if either of his parents had approached Simon the way that Naomi did, the man Jim was in his twenties would have died of mortification on the spot, and the man he was now would never have forgiven her.

Blair had a more generous nature. Jim liked Naomi, admired her even, not least for her performance in the back of that van as a big-time criminal, which had been perfect in its arrogant self-assurance, but maybe she’d been channelling the belief that she knew best there too. Blair, Jim had noted, wasn’t as good as actor as his mother. He’d lie himself blind, but you knew he was lying. Too self-conscious. Still, he liked Blair for his easy-going spirit rather than his acting ability. Which capacity was more important day-to-day after all, especially for Naomi and her occasional tendency to try to run her son’s life?

Which capacity was more important after the year of hell and fuck-ups? Jim watched Blair’s face in the restroom mirror as he washed his hands at the basin. He looked less drawn than he had in front of the television cameras – and Jim still had no particular conviction about Blair’s acting abilities. The grief and humiliation had been real enough, just as real as Blair’s generosity and forgiveness. Lucky for Naomi that those traits ran deep in Blair.

Lucky for Jim, too.

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Blair had always been an anxious flyer, but he dealt with it because a man did not get to see the world without being willing to get on an airplane. The usual coping skills weren’t serving him well now – every little vibration, every little swoop of turbulence made light-headed fear expand in him to his core. He was not going to think about the fact that he was in a narrow aluminium shell that was held 30,000 feet in the air by lift, weight, drag, and thrust against all the force that gravity could exert.

(Hey, Blair knew how to face his fears and remind himself that there was a reason that a plane usually stayed up when it should.

It just wasn’t helping.)

And there was the skill of the pilots and the engineers on the ground, and the air-traffic controllers, which was actually a lot of people to potentially get things wrong… and he was not doing this. This plane was not going to crash and burn – unlike a big chunk of Blair’s theories about what sentinels were. He tried to take a breath, but it caught in his throat and he hacked gracelessly into his hand and determinedly didn’t think about the medical bills waiting for him in Cascade either. There were a lot of things that he was trying not to think about right now.

His coughing hadn’t woken Jim, who was crammed into his seat and slumping off to the side the way that only an exhausted, six-foot, sleeping sentinel could. Despite the armrest between them, he was a warm, awkward weight against Blair, and Blair squirmed, trying to shift Jim without actually waking him. Jim needed the rest, and the silence between him and Blair when he was sleeping wasn’t actually awkward as all hell, unlike most of their waking silences since this whole mess began.

Blair wasn’t successful in not disturbing Jim – he flinched awake, and their eyes met a moment before Jim muttered, “Sorry,” and tilted himself the other way in the too small seat.

“It’s okay,” Blair muttered back and wished he could sleep too. The plane bounced, hardly anything to mention, and Blair shut his eyes and clenched his hands in his lap. He had to bring them up to his mouth because he started to cough again.

Jim turned back to him. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine” Blair croaked irritably.

“You don’t sound fine.”

“Oh, now you’re concerned about my well-being.” Kind of hard to miss the flinch and the grinding jaw, and Blair fidgeted in guilty embarrassment. “Sorry, sorry. The air’s dry, you know?”

“Canned air is always crap,” Jim said, and shut his eyes again. He sighed, and said, “I know you have stuff you have to say, but not here, okay?”

“Stuff,” Blair said with soft bitterness. There was surely a lot of that. Dying. Coming back, and that was exactly what he’d done, ‘near’ death explanations be damned. Alex aiming a gun at him and Jim’s dazed denial. “No,’ he told her, but there was no conviction to it. Jim might have been as worried about the break in their kissing as he was about Blair’s life, so far as Blair could tell. Where was all that concern for Blair’s well-being then?

Watching Jim spiral more and more into an instinct that neither of them understood could have driven Blair crazy too, and considering that made him want to punch his hand into the plastic tray folded in front of him. He’d watched Alex carried away with his hands jammed into his pockets and held in fists. He’d listened with his hands clenched into those same fists as Jim rhapsodised about the lost answers he’d found in the pool.

When they finally talked about that stuff? ‘I nearly died. Megan nearly died,’ maybe he’d say. ‘Was that all laid out in front of you too? Would that have been worth going back into the temple for?’ He remembered that calm, fervent light in Jim’s eyes, and wondered if he wanted to know the answer. Yeah, crash and burn.

And on that thought, the plane shuddered again – nothing major – and terror blocked Blair’s throat. Stupid, needless panic made him clutch at Jim’s arm, before shame made him try to relinquish it almost as quickly. But Jim had reached across and one big hand rested over Blair’s hand – Jim’s warmth below and above his cold hand, steadying Blair despite himself.

“You’re a terrible flyer,” Jim said, with no particular judgement. He shut his eyes once more. “Hold on if it helps.”

Blair didn’t know if it did. He held on anyway.

Chapter Text

Blair knew that he could be – well, energetic. Restless sometimes. Twitchy if you wanted to get derogatory about it, especially when in comparison to Jim, who made calm stillness an art form. Professional calm. Exasperated calm. A dangerous stillness that Blair had seen a few people provoke and that always presaged some sort of attack, whether physical or verbal. He’d provoked it once or twice himself, and thinking about those occasions always stung.

Jim wasn’t always calm. Other times he had his own vibrant energy, for work, for physical action, for focus on a decision. For violence, and Blair had a complicated relationship with how he felt about that.

He just liked watching Jim move, and he wasn’t always fussy about the circumstances. Like now, Jim folding laundry, the reach and stretch of his arms. The man could fold fitted sheets into a neat , angled package while standing with the fabric held wide in his arms like the strangest of cat’s cradle games; it was something that Blair found both akin to magic, and endearingly, pointlessly Jim.

“You going to help with this? Jim asked. “I am not folding your boxers as well as my own.”

“Take your own stuff out and I’ll put mine away later.”

Jim shook his head, but he smiled. “Laundry is something that happens to other people for you, isn’t it?”

“Hey, I love laundry!” Blair protested.

“Yeah sure.” And they chorused together, their words caught in the same rhythm, “You (I) can watch me (you) doing it for hours.”

“I will grab that shirt,” Blair said. “Nobody cares if my boxers are wrinkled, but the shirt, yeah. Not my look.”

He came alongside Jim, and the back of his arm rubbed against the back of Jim’s as they both reached into the basket at the same time. Jim stilled, and Blair glanced alongside at Jim’s stiffening shoulders. That was new. “Sorry,” Blair said, and meant it if a casual touch created that awkward tension in Jim, before he shook his shirt out.

“No plans for finding anyone who’ll care about your wrinkled boxers, eh, Chief?” There was an odd tone to it, not Jim’s usual joshing about the train wreck of the Sandburg love life, and Blair might not be a sentinel but his ears pricked up all the same.

“There’s been a lot on recently,” he said. Evaded. Deflected. Why say straight out what Jim must know, surely he knew. Blair wasn’t in the mood for easy lays, and relationships meant explanations, which meant – well, lies, in a post-diss world, and poisoning his start with any woman who’d be worth the wooing. Or man for that matter.

“Yeah.” Jim had reached the smaller items – boxers, his socks which were always meticulously paired. “Look, Chief, there’s something I have to say.”

Never mind the metaphorical ears, the literal hairs on the back of Blair’s neck rose. Any variation of ‘we have to talk’ boded nothing good. “Sure, man,” Blair said out loud, even while within there was a panicked chant of ‘I thought we were good, I thought we were good at last, I thought…’ Anxiety rose in him, a dizzy, choking feeling. “Well, come on, Jim, say what’s on your mind,” he bit out. Jim, having spoken his momentous words, now apparently had nothing to say. His face in the night time lights of the loft was drawn, but focused, yes, and ready.

Jim still didn’t speak. Instead he turned to Blair and put his hands on his shoulders, which only ratcheted Blair’s anxiety into the stratosphere. “Hey, hey,” he joked, because anything he joked about was absolutely definitely not going to come true. “You’re not dying, right?”

Jim rolled his eyes, which was encouraging in its way, and then he took a breath and bent and kissed Blair. Blair watched him coming but when Jim’s mouth touched his, his eyes shut in pure reflex. It was almost chaste, a dry press of lips to lips, until the end. No tongue, but the barest nibble and tug on Blair’s bottom lip instead.

Jim straightened. “Not, uh, not quite what I wanted to say.” He looked a little unsteady, and Blair put up his own hands and laid them over Jim’s to press them even more firmly against his shoulders. Jim could lean on him, could press Blair down and hold him steady too.

“It’s not a bad start,” Blair said. “If you wanted to say more, I guess I could listen.”