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Early summer, 1999
3 p.m., heading west out of Colorado Springs along Rt. 24...
In the new scheme of things, it seemed, Blair did all the driving. Even though Blair had gotten, by his own estimation, three hours of sleep the previous night, and that had been while holed up in a strip-mall multiplex, he hadn't dignified Jim's request for the keys to the rental Taurus with more than an eye-roll. Fine, whatever, thought Jim. Drive us off a cliff. See if I care.
He was fine, damn it. The way his hands trembled, the occasional moments when his heart would race, the way he felt awash in panic at the unexpected - a light turning yellow, the rumbling of a semi bearing down on them, a bird crossing their path too low - these were just the fading side-effects of this morning, when the Air Force had, quite by accident, turned him inside-out. He'd feel better soon.
Okay, so maybe he wasn't doing so great. Still, some masochistic impulse made him continue the argument he'd been attempting to have for the past 20 minutes.
"Really, Chief," he said, trying to sound reasonable. Calm. In control. "If a tenth of what Jack O'Neill and his people told us is true, we should be working with the SGC. Not picking up two-bit crooks in Cascade."
"Since when is Klaus Zeller a two-bit crook?"
"You know what I mean," Jim persisted. Please don't hold this against me, Blair. Please understand I have to fight you on this.
"You're the Sentinel of the Great City, not the whole friggin' planet." Blair's standard line; Jim still didn't have an answer to it.
The road reached a rocky apex, then dipped back into the forest. Towering pines and more delicate aspens pressed in, scattering sun and shade into the car in equal measure. A pair of dark squirrels raced through the thick upper branches of a spruce pine a quarter mile ahead, then dashed together down the trunk.
"Blair..." Jim started.
"Huh?" said Blair, darting Jim a quick glance as one of the squirrels raced across the road.
Shit, Blair hadn't noticed!
A hundred yards...
"LOOK AT THE ROAD! LOOK AT THE..."
The second squirrel seemed to time his crossing purposefully to intersect with their rear tires. Blair swore and accelerated, then glanced in the rear-view mirror. "I think we missed 'em," he said. "What's with those creatures, anyway? You'd think evolution would have selected for a little more common sense by now..."
Jim reached forward to brace himself against the dashboard. Shit shit not now shit... "Stop the car!"
"Uh, sure," said Blair, pulling off onto a conveniently-placed stretch of gravel. "What's wrong? You gonna be sick or something?"
Jim had his seatbelt off and the door open before Blair could bring the car to a stop, and was half out as Blair cut the ignition. As Jim gained the ability to leave the confines of the car, though, his need to flee dissipated.
"Jim?" Blair was in front of him, crouching in the gravel, his hands - the left still bandaged - encircling Jim's wrists.
"You okay?"
Jim nodded. "Of course... it's just..."
"Hey, empathy for rodents, I can dig that," said Blair. "Wanna stretch your legs a little?"
Jim looked up at Blair, blinking. Legs? Stretch them? Yeah, he could do that. He let Blair haul him to his feet, then - danger! Without quite even realizing he was moving, he lunged forward and pushed Blair before him to the ground.
A tractor-trailer rumbled by. Had that been it?
Blair squirmed out from beneath him and rose quickly to his feet, shaking out his left hand as he scanned first the road, then the trees above and behind them, looking for the threat. Finally, he looked down at Jim.
"For the love of Pete, would you get a fucking GRIP, Ellison!" he hissed.
"A fucking grip, eh?" Jim said, rising finally. "Where do you buy those?"
Blair shook his head and brushed at his pants. "Sorry, man," he said with a sigh. "You okay now?"
"Been better."
"Wanna get further from the road?"
Jim looked at the Taurus; Blair had been able to pull a good 20 feet off the pavement, and had angled the car such that it was obviously parked; it could stay where it was for a while. Beyond the gravel, the terrain dipped slightly into the forest, and he thought he heard a brook not far in. "Yeah, let's take a walk," he said. "Clear my head."
Since he had some idea of where he wanted to head, Jim took the lead. As he expected, about 200 feet in, the forest yielded up a small stream. With something between a sigh and a groan, Jim sank down onto a moss-covered rock on its bank. Blair plopped down onto a patch of grass next to him and began examining pebbles and then pitching them into the water.
"I'm sorry, Sandburg," Jim said after a moment. "How's your hand?"
"Fine," said Blair. "Sorry for snapping at you back there. Feel better here?"
"Not sure I know what 'better' is supposed to feel like."
"Like you don't think you have to save me from trucks up on the road doing the friggin' speed limit?"
"I said..."
"Yeah, I know, sorry," said Blair. "But, man, you have GOT to reach some sort of equilibrium or we're never going to make it back to your truck in Moose Jaw."
"You could drug me."
Blair gaped up at him. "You can't be serious."
Jim didn't know whether he was or not. To wake up back in the loft, with all of this behind them...
"I'm not even going to start on why that's not going to happen, Jim," said Blair. "Drug you? With what? For two days? You steal an anti-grav unit from the Air Force or something, so that I can haul you around?"
"Well, a beer or something might be a good start."
"Don't have one of those with me either. Think I'd drink it myself if I did."
That startled Jim. Blair was supposed to be the steady one right now. "Are YOU okay?" he asked.
"Sure," said Blair. "My best friend is falling apart in front of me, but I'M fine." He threw a handful of stones into the stream.
"Beside you," said Jim. He let himself slide down onto the grass next to Blair, so close their arms touched. "He's falling apart beside you."
Blair was very still for a long moment. "What are you thinking?" he finally asked.
"I don't know," said Jim. Why had he had to touch Blair just now?
Since leaving the Cheyenne Mountain Complex, he'd been avoiding thinking directly about what had happened that morning. He'd labeled it his "breakdown," and despite his earlier urgings that they return to Stargate Command he fervently wished that he'd never have to see anyone associated with it again, save Sandburg. In the middle of his shame, though - and perhaps the object of his most intense feelings of disgrace - was how he'd felt once Blair had appeared, a, a saving presence conjured out of thin air, stopping the voices and the images and filling him with such a feeling of, of - of something that he would never be able to name. Was it a yearning for that feeling that was driving him now?
"Maybe I should get a teddy bear," he said, not realizing how odd the words sounded until he heard them aloud himself. What on earth would Blair think now?
"Oh man!" said Blair with a laugh, bowing to grind his head into Jim's shoulder and then pulling back. "Would you like me to tell you how you feel? What's going on in your head? Feel free to correct me if I get something wrong."
"Okay," said Jim, shifting to face him. "Take a shot."
"You're afraid you're never going to be normal again."
"Haven't been normal in four years, Chief. But, no, I'm not afraid of feeling like - this - for forever. The psyche heals."
Blair chuckled. "Glad to hear that."
"Next guess?"
"Ummm... you have no clue what's going on, you're just reacting to stimuli, and if I don't like it I can just get some knee and elbow pads?"
"Closer," said Jim. "Good idea on the gear. Put shin pads on your list, too."
"And a helmet."
"And a helmet," Jim amended. "Hockey or football?"
"I was thinking bike, so that I'd get some use out of it later."
"You don't own a bike."
"Stop changing the subject. When I get $300 together that my car doesn't eat I'm getting a bike."
"You changed it first," said Jim.
"Right, whatever you say," said Blair. "Okay, so if half of what's going on with you is just you going with the flow, what's the other half?"
Jim looked away. There was a rustling... just more squirrels. "I don't know how to say this," he said.
"You're embarrassed by how hard Ular's memories hit you."
"No, not really," said Jim. "Like I said before, I needed to let myself react to get at them as much as I could."
"But you didn't need to relive Danny's death... so you're embarrassed that your mind pulled that up out of nowhere?"
"Maybe," said Jim. "But, well, it wasn't exactly out of nowhere. I'd been thinking about him all week. Don't know why. Sometimes it's like that, ya know? You go for two, three months hardly thinking about things at all, then they're on your mind all the time for a while."
"I hadn't realized you thought about him that much."
How could he describe this right? "He was... well, he was pretty much family. All I had, sometimes."
"I'm sorry," said Blair.
"It was a long time ago."
They sat silently for a few moments, then Blair ventured, "How do you feel about - needing me to get yourself back to the here-and-now?"
Close, but not quite on the mark, and Jim didn't know how to get Blair closer. "I'm glad you showed up when you did."
"Is that all?"
"Yeah."
Another minute passed.
Blair lay back in the grass. "I'm beat," he said. "Okay if I try to get a little shut-eye?"
"Sure, go for it," said Jim. Disappointed, and relieved.
In a minute, Blair's breathing had evened into sleep; he must have been exhausted.
Well, sitting and watching over Blair while he slept was something he could probably handle. He extended his awareness, his senses of sound and sight and smell, and felt the forest around them, heard the scurry of small animals and the babble of the stream, smelled composting leaves and, perhaps, the faint tang of tar from the road above. But nothing dangerous. And nothing dangerous would get past him. This, he knew. Was this, then, the essence of being a sentinel?
Perhaps he was not meant to protect the world, or even The Great City. Not all the time, at least. Right now, his tribe was shrunk, perhaps, to hold just himself and Blair. At present, enough.
Would it be so bad if things never got back to normal?
So, what HAD he wanted to say to Blair, during those few moments when he'd almost felt he could say anything? I need you? I love you?
Because, of course, he DID love Blair, as much as he'd ever loved Danny or anyone. As much as he wished that he'd been granted the ability to save Danny - well, if he could only bring life back to one person, he was glad it was Blair.
But he guessed there were things you just couldn't tell another person. Amend that. There were things that some people could talk about, but he wasn't one of those people, and didn't want to become one either. Nothing against them or anything. But he was the man he was.
Still, something nagged at his mind. How large was the step from loving to being in love?
Okay, mental exercise time. Could he imagine himself screwing Sandburg?
No.
What if it was, ya' know, okay? What if H and Rafe were shacked up? What if nobody would care?
Well, he could imagine SLEEPING with Blair - after all, if he drifted off right now, they'd be sleeping together. Though to do so at this instant would seem a betrayal of his duties as the watcher, the sentinel, in his admittedly exaggerated state of wariness, it didn't feel wrong otherwise. The way he'd felt those few minutes when Blair had held him this morning - what would it be like to feel that every night?
But... he didn't need it every night. Like codeine or something - when you needed it, you took it, but that was all. Not just because you didn't want to get addicted - you just didn't take more than you needed to. And you didn't know when you were going to need it, you were just glad it was there when you did. What an analogy for Blair Sandburg! And, pushing things a bit further - though codeine was probably off-limits, Blair didn't seem to be going anywhere.
Anyway, as he'd learned with Carolyn, simply sleeping with someone didn't guarantee the sort of closeness a part of him seemed to be craving. Nor did sex, for that matter.
Again, what ABOUT sex? If his tribe, hell, the whole world, had only two people in it - if it was just him and Sandburg - would they, well, get it on? How much sense did it make to exclude making love to half the world because of, ya know, plumbing?
Naw. There was a reason his own privates were easily accessible. If it was all the same to the universe, he'd just as soon leave Blair out of it. And of course there was the little matter of finding women in general, and certain women in particular, rather attractive, even if recent circumstances had drawn his energies elsewhere.
Great. That was settled. It was safe to love, to cherish and, maybe, be cherished, and leave it at that. Maybe in a less, well, homophobic world he'd come to a different conclusion, but then, maybe not.
Blair stirred and exhaled loudly, then sat up. "Wow, I feel 100% better," he said.
"You weren't asleep long."
"Long enough," Blair replied. "Power naps. Gotta love them." He stretched and bent his head down to his left shoulder, then his right. "Yup, I'm good to go. How about you? Get any thinking done?"
"As a matter of fact, yeah."
"Any conclusions?"
"Yeah."
"Do I have to take another nap, or do you want to go ahead and share them now? I think the bugs'll come out eventually and I'd just as soon be in a motel by then."
Jim was glad they were no longer touching. "I've decided you'd make a lousy wife." That didn't come out right.
"Spouse, Jim. Or partner. Come on, man, it's 1999."
Jim laughed. "Don't you want to know what the hell I'm talking about?"
"I think I have a pretty good idea," said Blair. He sighed. "Remember Lash? Remember when I told you you were my Blessed Protector? What do you think I was feeling? What do you think I still feel? Do you remember when I got that dose of Golden? Remember h-holding me in the garage downtown?" He turned away from Jim. "How do you think I felt then?"
"But you almost died. I didn't help you."
"You did. Trust me, you did."
Oh.
"Is that why you stuck around?"
Blair let out groan. "Are we back to that again? And, have I ever told you how self-centered that question even is? Maybe you should ask why YOU'VE stuck with ME."
Touche'. But still... "It's a weird feeling, Chief."
"For you more than most people," said Blair. "No, scratch that. I've lost friends through kindness before, man. It's hard. It takes a certain sort of bravery to stick around, after you've been out flat in front of someone. And, if you don't flee, you end up a little, well, smitten for a while."
"Smitten?"
"Hell, I know I was."
"No shit."
"You get over it."
"Oh, good."
Smitten. What a word. Well, it beat others.
"Anyway," said Blair. "Welcome to the human race."
- - - - - - -
Fifty feet above, Chatterer ran a circle around Big Tail. "Chase me! Chase me!" the squirrel twittered.
"Naw, I'm waiting for those two down there to go back to their car so I can dodge their wheels again," said Big Tail.
"They've been down there a long time," said Chatterer. "Wonder what they're talking about."
"Dunno," said Big Tail. "Think they'd be happier if they just chased each other up and down trees for a while."
"Agreed!" said Chatterer.
"Ah well," Big Tail said after a bit. "I'm tired of waiting." Chirping out squeals of glee, they were off.
*** The End ***