Chapter Text
Due to length, this story has been split into three parts.
The Dragon
by Mairead Triste
Aristide
Author's webpage: http://adult.dencity.com/terma/aristide/aristide.htm
Disclaimers: Jim and Blair and all things Sentinel belong to Pet Fly. Everything else is mine.
Rating: NC-17, for bad words, some horrific stuff, and homoerotic content.
Summary: Things get dangerous. Smut ensues.
General Groveling: Enormous thanks go out to Bone and Uncle Minotaur. They went far beyond beta-reading, and into the realms of-- oh, let's call it midwifery, and perhaps psychic healing. This wouldn't have been at all possible without their handholding and benevolence and impeccability. And patience. And fearlessness in the face of Manic!Author. This story is dedicated with love to both of them.
Feedback: If you're so inclined, at .
Apparently Mairead and Aristide have worked out their differences in my head and learned to get along-- this story was written by both of them. Also, the Sentinel universe seems to be the place I like to hang out and surprise myself in-- this is the first thing I've ever written that could be said to have an actual plot. Those of you staggering in shock are excused :-) I owe an enormous debt of thanks to Detectives Bob D. of the Haverhill Police Department, and Andy M. of the P.E.I. Police Department, for their assistance with research.
The Dragon - Part one
By Mairead Triste and Aristide
May, 1999
The room was dark; a cramped, narrow area at the best of times, now claustrophobically murky. The air itself was black with swirling clouds that seemed like the antithesis of vision, impenetrable not-space that would have horrified the man on the bed, if he hadn't already been past all caring. The needle lay discarded next to his upturned, open right hand; his lungs pulled for air in a desultory, slowing, hopeless rhythm.
There were bright, multicolored smears of chalk on his fingers, glowing like a garish neon rainbow in the cloudy light-- the only bright thing in the room.
And over him, floating; dark discord melting from one form to another as awareness dimmed slowly in his dismal, marbled eyes-- a soft Raphael cloud of strawberry blond hair, fading, fading; a dark thing, hungering.
"Hell opens for you."
Breath. Breath. Breath. One mouth gasping. Then a thin, reedy sound, an airless scream from a broken throat. His face became a rictus.
"This is my body, given for you and for many."
Something wet and clotted dripped on him.
"But watch out for the teeth."
He felt his heart stop, and knew for certain in that moment that there was mercy in the world, after all.
Darkness fell.
"His name was Gustave Letier," Jim said brusquely, ducking around one of the guys from the Coroner's office to examine and then bag a syringe that lay next to the corpse's hand. "Originally from Quebec. According to his sister he was some kind of up-and-coming artist in the French Canadian art scene up until four years ago, when his wife died in a car accident. Apparently after the funeral he quit painting and started drifting, and drinking, she thought. She says that he gave her this Cascade address two years ago, never answered her letters, called her twice a year without fail on her birthday and Christmas, and that's it."
Blair nodded, unable to look away from the man on the bed. There was an insipid vacancy that seemed to be common to all corpses, a vacancy that intrigued him as much as it repelled him-- this is what we come to in the end, my friend, great and small alike; one quick step over the edge between the promise of divine creation and a lump of meat. He swallowed, and found that his throat was dry.
The man on the bed (Gustave), he made himself think (this was Gustave), had something wrong with him that seemed cryptically worse than that common vacancy-- an echo of pain, an impression of torment that suggested, lump of meat or not, that somehow, somewhere, Gustave was still hurting.
Blair wiped his forehead and dismissed that particularly morbid notion, inwardly at odds with his own susceptibility, that vulnerability of feeling that aided him so well in other places, but only seemed to render him unsuitable for this part of the job, for dealing with a dead human being and looking only at that which needed to be seen.
Jim, as always, appeared to be unaffected by it; all business and details and arrangements and straightforward cop efficiency. Watching Jim's adept assessment of Gustave and Gustave's terrible little room, Blair had to wonder if he himself would ever reach that level of proficient neutrality through repeated exposure to these things, or if it would remain forever beyond him, excluded from the realm of possibility due to his own naturally empathetic nature.
Probably that second option. He swallowed again. And even though it made crime scenes into an ever-growing scrapbook of portraits of his own personal version of hell, he was glad of it.
He couldn't draw a deep breath. The room stank. The paper bag in his hands, bulging with its innocent load of sandwiches, suddenly seemed nauseatingly warm.
He'd planned to meet Jim for lunch after his morning class and a few office hours, but as he was wrapping up an ad-lib student conference Jim had phoned, told him that a body had been found, and that their lunch would have to be cancelled because he was currently at the crime scene and couldn't leave.
And Blair, thinking only about what a foul-tempered cretin Jim turned into when he didn't eat, offered to come by with some deli sandwiches-- not even considering what an absentminded dweeb he turned into when he didn't eat, or the fact that looking at dead people played hell with his digestion.
Now, sitting in the truck for a few stolen minutes outside the apartment block where he'd made Gustave's acquaintance, watching Jim mow through something huge and messy and drippy that had been advertised on the deli's blackboard as 'Carnivore's Delight', Blair found himself torn between stomach-churning bewilderment at how Jim could walk away from a corpse in order to stuff his face, and amused wonder over how Jim had managed to get barbecue sauce on his nose.
"You not eating, Chief?" Jim gestured at the white-wrapped package on the seat between them, Blair's untouched turkey-on-whole-wheat.
"You know I can't, man-- I forgot about the dead body thing. I've pretty much resigned myself to an afternoon of stomach rumbles and the starving stupids."
Jim chuckled a little and made some offhand comment, completely unintelligible due to a very full mouth.
"Right," Blair agreed pro forma, and waited until Jim swallowed to speak again. "How'd you get to his sister so fast?"
Jim nodded, drank thirstily from the can of soda perched on the dashboard, and thwacked himself in the diaphragm with a closed fist. "She phoned us, actually. Her birthday was last Tuesday. When he didn't call her she started calling him, and after three days of no answer she phoned the station and requested a check-in. Pedersen and Richards stopped by on their shift this morning, got no answer, and got the manager to let them in."
Blair watched Jim's hands, hands that had so recently been encased in latex gloves and poking at a dead body, now bundling wrappers, stray bits of lettuce and greasy napkins into a ball. When Jim belched enthusiastically, he jumped.
"Sorry, Chief-- didn't get any on you, did I? Anyway, when I got the news I came down, checked it out, and then called the sister-- Mrs. Giroux. She's coming down for the body sometime tomorrow."
He couldn't swallow, and he felt like he couldn't talk-- his throat was too dry. He reached for the can on the dashboard, helped himself, and grimaced a little at the sweetness of it. "Did you tell her he overdosed?"
Jim shook his head briefly, staring off into the distance. "Told her he was dead, that's all. I'm not sure about the O.D. angle. Something's weird about it."
Blair felt a warm tingle at the back of his neck. Jim's hunches always did that to him; as if he were in the presence of someone capable of low-grade magic. The Sentinel stuff always seemed... well, normal, natural; very much a part of Jim the human animal, but the cop stuff, the gut feelings and intuitions that Jim relied on to point him in the right direction-- that was wild. "Accident, you think, maybe; or bad drugs? I saw the needle right before you bagged it--"
Jim turned to him, blue eyes forthright and determined-- lunch break's over, kiddies; Detective Ellison is back on the case-- and Blair felt a small jump of excitement deep in his very empty stomach. "Yeah," Jim agreed blandly, "But I searched that room, what there is of it, and there's no drug apparatus anywhere, just booze. No tracks on his arms, except for the one spot. I'll have to wait and see what the M.E. has to say, but in the meantime I want to take care of some background, do some interviews..."
Jim trailed off, staring at him. It would have been uncomfortable if the close scrutiny had anything at all to do with him, but Blair knew better-- Jim was thinking, that's all; letting the details and questions and possibilities bounce around, and often when Jim did that he seemed to find Blair a handy thing to stare at.
"I don't know, Sandburg," Jim resumed after a short time, "There's something... not right, here. Something I haven't caught onto yet. My guess is that he was murdered."
He could have gone back to his office. He could have said that he was going back to his office and gone home instead, spent some time by himself. Meditation, mastication, matriculation, masturbation-- any or all of them would have been satisfactory, would have helped him somehow find room inside to house these things he'd seen. Quiet time, time to remind himself once again how very precious life is, and to focus on how much he appreciated that-- sentient and loving it; thanks for the chance, so glad to be here.
He could have, but he didn't.
Instead, he stayed with Jim. He stayed with Jim because at the bottom of things, after all was said and done, it was part of his job. A pretty gruesome part of the job, yeah, but-- work is work, after all, and...
And that was just so much bullshit. He stayed with Jim because, despite his own struggles with corpses and what they meant to him, despite the fact that he sometimes felt out of his depth, like frigging Boy Wonder standing impotently at Batman's shoulder (oh, how he hated that!), despite the voice in his head that suggested in no uncertain terms that, for this kind of thing, Jim was just fine on his own... Despite all these things, part of him wanted, needed to see what Jim saw.
He was Jim's partner. No question. And to be Jim's partner, to be as close as possible to what went on inside that thick, stubborn bullet-head (because God knows Jim would never think to like, actually tell him about it), he had to see what Jim saw. He needed that common experience. It was the partnerly thing to do.
It was also, he had discovered over time, the intelligent thing to do. Seeing what Jim saw meant that he got a chance to figure things out-- about police work, about himself; and especially about Jim. When he watched the man in action it was easy to pick up clues and pieces along the way about how Jim worked, how Jim thought; and ultimately, who Jim was-- facts he really didn't think he'd have gotten hold of any other way (except maybe with pliers and a cattle prod, and that was way beyond the call of duty).
And having those facts at his disposal was important, that had become evident-- because every so often it seemed to come down to a question of life or death (way too often, actually, but hell, nobody was making him stay, right?), and then it was all himself and Jim and the moment and what they had, whatever they had; Jim with his vest and his gun and his calls for backup, and Blair with what he had, the only thing he really felt he could count on, his only weapon: information.
Information that might make the difference in any given moment, in any given situation; information that might make the difference between he and Jim eating sandwiches in the truck, and he and Jim lying somewhere very much dead, two lumps of meat who used to be close friends.
So he stayed.
'Mom' Partido had many strange and amazing things on her walls, not the least of which was a large, velvet-framed analog clock whose hands rotated around a spindle that had been planted smack in the middle of Jesus' forehead. The hours were marked off in the gauzy circumference of His halo.
It was the ugliest thing Blair had ever seen; so ugly that he couldn't stop staring at it every chance he got.
Jim cleared his throat. "So let me see if I've got this right, Ms. Partido--"
"Mom!" she insisted sternly, almost lost in the depths of an overstuffed brown leather chair that contrasted strangely with her pale, nearly transparent skin, a tiny, fluffy-haired woman lost under the drape of a drab housedress. "You call me 'Mom', young man-- start calling me 'miz' and I'm going to think you're flirting with me." She laughed heartily, and Blair smiled, and he watched the light shine off her dentures while Jim grinned and glanced at his shoes and actually looked shy for a moment-- and oh, he was never going to let Jim live this one down.
"So Mr. Letier was your neighbor for the past two years," Jim said calmly, having recovered far too quickly for Blair's full enjoyment of the moment. "And you knew that he was a street artist, and he kept fairly regular hours--"
"Oh yes, very regular," 'Mom' interrupted, "I could set The Good Lord there by his ins and outs." She nodded at the clock, which drew Blair in again. "Out the door at ten each morning, nine on weekends, in at eight, every night. My niece, Charlene, took me down to that craft fair they have at the pier one weekend-- bought me those pictures--"
She nodded to a set of three framed paintings on the wall above her couch; one of a kitten in a field of daffodils, one of a bunny on a snowdrift, and one of a baby duckling nosing amongst pussywillows. All three animals appeared to be suffering from big-eye syndrome. Blair blinked at them, and reflected for a moment on the thought that matriarchal totems sure weren't what they used to be in the old days. "I saw him down there-- all set up with about a thousand different colors of chalk, drawing pictures on the street with a box out for money. Not real pictures, mind;" she sniffed a little, "not anything a person would want to look at-- just shapes and forms and big black lines through everything, black holding it all together."
She nodded at them conspiratorially, as if she were about to let them in on a juicy piece of gossip. "If you ask me, it's a wonder he didn't starve to death. Those pictures were... nasty."
Blair felt a stab of terrible, desolate pity. Gustave, shut away from his prior life and his art and his wife, lost to everything and making pictures for pennies on the street, pictures that nobody could understand and nobody wanted to look at; speaking pain in a language that nobody knew. He felt a chill grip him and he tightened his hands on his own knees, trying not to shiver.
"I told him he should take some lessons, maybe learn how to draw people that passed by, you know-- boys and their girlfriends, mothers and babies, that sort of thing." She shrugged, the movement almost imperceptible under her housedress. "Even ships or trees or any blessed thing-- anything would have been better than that ugly, nonsensical trash. I still see them in my dreams, sometimes-- that's how bad they were."
She shuddered, and seemed to curl in on herself. "Damn things gave me the horrors."
Ms. Partido lived in the apartment to the left of Gustave's. When they emerged into the dim hallway Blair took a deep and grateful breath just to see walls with nothing on them, then trailed along behind Jim past Gustave's door to the apartment on the right. The pitiful image that had sunk into him wouldn't leave his mind, and he was too busy staring at his shoes and trying to think of something else when Jim came to an abrupt halt. Blair collided gently with the solid wall of Jim's back.
"Sorry," he said automatically, "Wasn't looking."
Jim paused, one hand raised in preparation for knocking. "Chief?" His eyes were clear and direct, narrowed slightly in concern. "You okay?"
Blair nodded immediately. "Fine, man. Just thinking, that's all. You know-- all the pieces, all the details. Doing my cop impression, right? I'm cool."
"Yeah," Jim agreed, and looked away from him, staring at the door in front of them. "It's a hell of a thing."
Blair's shoulders relaxed all at once, a release of tension so abrupt it was almost dizzying. Yes, he'd said that he was fine, that he was cool, but the truth was... well, the truth was more like he was trucking on under a pretty heavy load that he couldn't seem to put down, doing a fairly good job of twisting himself into knots over the thought of what it might mean to be truly alone in the world. Not the sort of thing he wanted to bring up in the middle of a police investigation.
And Jim, looking away so carefully, full of that polite disinterest which seemed to be an integral part of the macho male communication package that Blair found endlessly fascinating (without ever making any real sense of); Jim had seen and heard him, and offered what solace he could.
It seemed like a terribly small thing to have occasioned such vast relief, but it did the job nicely anyway. When Jim finally turned back to him Blair gazed at him earnestly, trying to look politely thankful and like someone totally on top of it, burning in his britches to do some really serious investigative observing. "Yeah. Think whoever lives here has anything as ugly as that Jesus clock?"
Jim twisted his mouth a little, tongue in cheek, and then followed through with his knock on the door, the sharp rat-a-tat of Authority. "Sandburg, the only thing on the planet uglier than that clock is you when you've got a tequila hangover."
Blair smiled, and felt the last of the oppressive dismay lift away from him. It always blew his mind when Jim tried to take care of him like that-- it was just so fucking sweet.
The door opened.
Constanza DeLuca did not have a Jesus clock. As much of a relief as that was, Blair found himself a little ill-at-ease in her apartment anyway-- there was nothing on her walls, no knickknacks, no books; no mark of personality anywhere within the confines of the orderly and spectacularly clean room to suggest that an actual person lived here.
The woman herself matched the room-- spare and utilitarian, unadorned and impersonal. The 'Constanza' captured her dark hair and eyes, but that was all.
"I knew him, a little. Enough to say hello to. I think he borrowed milk from me once, brought me a new carton the next day. A neighbor. That is all."
Jim nodded at her. "I understand that he kept very regular hours. While he was home, did you ever hear anything unusual from his apartment? Raised voices, that sort of thing?"
She shrugged. It looked like it took some effort. "No raised voices, no. Sometimes he would sing-- the walls are very thin here. He sang in French, and it was always sad. Very sad. I think he was a very sad man."
Blair didn't experience any renewal of his pain for Gustave at these words, because he was too busy being quietly stunned at the glitter in her eyes when she spoke them-- the first sign of animation she'd displayed. He wondered if perhaps she'd known Gustave a little better than she had let on, if perhaps she'd tried and failed to do something about Gustave's sadness-- he wondered what Jim thought of it.
Jim said nothing, only stared at her silently while she stared at him. Blair felt a small spike of tension, fear that Jim had zoned out on something-- it had been a long, long time since that had happened. The hair on the back of his neck prickled.
He was about to clear his throat, to see if the sound would penetrate through to wherever Jim was hiding out, but before he could do it she spoke again. "You are good to do this, Detective; to do justice to this man. Let me give you some tea."
She turned to Blair, and just like that the shine went out of her eyes, and they were once again flat and dull. "Tea?"
"No thank you," he replied automatically, and waited for Jim to decline as well. He was still waiting when she stood, neat and correct and strangely blank in her denim jeans and high-necked blouse.
"Very well. Just for the Detective, then." She turned and left the room quickly.
Blair waited until she was out of sight, and then went over to where Jim was sitting, staring off into space at the spot the woman had occupied. "Jim?" he whispered as quietly as he could, "you with me, here? Hey, buddy, come on--"
He put one hand on Jim's shoulder, and at once Jim straightened and looked around at him, blinking almost as if he was sleepy. A zone-out, then, for sure. Blair felt a knot of worry nest deep into his stomach.
"Chief?" Jim had that look about him, the confusion and disconcerted embarrassment common to him in such moments. It had been a long time indeed since Blair had seen that look, but he remembered it well.
"It's okay, Jim. I think you zoned a little bit. It was just for a few seconds." He kept his voice light and unconcerned, deliberately casual, and squeezed the shoulder under his hand gently. "You're going to have to talk your way out of tea if you don't want to actually drink any. Good thing she didn't try to sell you life insurance while you were out there surfing the waves, man."
His hand fell away as Jim stood, refusing to meet his eyes. Blair saw a muscle bunched tight at the back edge of a clearly defined jaw, and his own spirits sank. Apparently casual and unconcerned wasn't going to cut it-- Jim had zoned, and now Jim was bound and determined to simultaneously get upset about it and ignore it-- everybody out of the pool, Detective Ellison's got himself strapped to the death-by-denial machine. Again. Goddamit.
Blair followed mutely as Jim headed towards the small, astringent kitchen that branched off the main room. His stomach rumbled, queasy with emptiness and frustration. Control-- Jim hated being out of control, he knew that, and that was understandable and comprehensible and reasonable but God it seemed like a waste of time and energy to him-- like getting upset about it was ever going to make it easier to stay in control? Not. Like the way he knew that Jim's impending session of silent constraint was counterproductive? Yup. You bet.
Like he couldn't do a fucking thing about it?
Not at the moment, he couldn't.
As always, when faced with this version of 'Mr. Hundred Percent', Blair indulged in a brief and compelling, but ultimately unsatisfactory fantasy of getting Jim locked in a room with a tape recorder and a hypo full of sodium pentothal. At least it allowed him to keep a straight face, rather than indulging in overtly pushy behavior and thus giving Jim an excuse to further isolate.
Jim planted himself in the doorway to the kitchen and cleared his throat. "Ms. DeLuca, excuse me-- thank you for your offer of hospitality, but we've got another appointment we need to keep." Past the leather-jacketed line of Jim's arm Blair saw her nod silently, her face never veering from neutral calm. There was one cup on the counter in front of her, and one of those steeping-spoons for making loose tea.
Blair almost got smacked in the sternum by Jim's elbow when Jim reached for his pocket, and he took a hasty step back. "I'm going to give you my card. I'd like you to give me a call if anything occurs to you about Mr. Letier..." Blair stopped listening to the standard spiel. He'd heard it enough times already. He stepped to the door and put one hand on the knob in preparation for their departure, chewing the inside of his bottom lip and wondering whether he was right, whether she really did know something.
If she did, well, she could just hang onto it for a while longer. Blair felt woefully unprepared for this kind of frustration-- it had, after all, been a long time since he'd been through this. Whether she knew something or not, Jim was about to walk away from her because his senses had had a hiccup, and while that was not Jim's fault or Blair's fault or anybody's goddamn fault at all it was still just totally stupid...
He suddenly found himself caught in a jaw-cracking yawn, exhausted even though it was only late afternoon. He felt all the pressures of the day and the scene and the case and the Sentinel situation bear down on him; taking up his attention in a way that usually started sparking thoughts, but right now only made him tired. He would talk to Jim about it, really-- he'd put on his miner's helmet and go spelunking for Jimnuggets just as soon as he'd had some rest and some food and some time to let it all settle. In the meantime, it would be academically interesting to see how Jim responded to not being prodded at.
He studied Jim's profile, still aggressively locked into his 'just the facts; ma'am' face. Probably take me to the emergency room on general principles, he thought, relieved as inroads of amusement helped to leaven the flavor of exasperation that had soured on his tongue. Could be cool, actually-- oh man, that nurse, Sheila, was her name Sheila?...
When they finally emerged from the building into the hazy sunlight, Blair blinked in sleepy appreciation of the brightness and the clean air, and had to forcibly stop himself from talking about it. He would have bet money that Jim would say something to him, some jibe about his silence, but Jim never said a word all the way to the station, only drove with an absorbed concentration that betrayed nothing about what might be going on behind those shuttered, intent features.
Blair sighed. It looked like Sheila was going to have to fend for herself this evening.
The next day he'd meant to cut over to the station right after his noon meeting, but he'd ended up in an unfortunate wrangle over budget cuts and textbooks and about ten million piddly-ass stupid details, all because Dr. Milner had snapped his femur while skiing during Christmas break.
Dr. Milner's leg was pretty tragic for Dr. Milner, since apparently there were complications; but it was no fucking picnic for Blair either, because with Milner gone, Dr. Hauntauk took the vacant seat on the approval and review boards. And, apparently, for no real reason (but obviously acting according to the dictates of some arcane logic only decipherable by ancient professors who looked like a shriveled and mean version of Mister Wizard), Dr. Hauntauk hated his guts.
He arrived home chilled to the bone, soaking wet, irritated beyond belief and with barely ten minutes to spare before Jim was due home. In the five seconds it took him to get the door unlocked and toss his keys in the basket, he made a lightning-quick calculation, negotiated with himself about it, and closed the deal. He would light a fire first, then start dinner prep, then he would run for the shower. By the time Jim walked in the door the loft would be warming up and dinner would be cooking; and Blair would be out of the immediate vicinity and well on the way to getting the icicles out of his blood. It was a good plan. A fine plan. A plan simple enough to keep his mind focused on the small details of action when every particle of him just wanted to haul ass for that shower and start boiling himself.
As if to reward him for his maturity and benevolence the fire caught at the first match, his memory of a crock of beef-and-lentil stew stored in the back of the fridge proved to be authentic rather than wishful, and he managed to avoid biting the tip of his tongue off between his wildly chattering teeth until he got himself ducked into scalding water, at which point the immediate threat of permanently rendering himself mute diminished significantly. He was out and dry and dressed when the door opened and Jim walked in.
"Hey," Blair called over his shoulder as he rummaged in the cupboard for bowls; "dinner's almost ready. Sorry I didn't get to the station today; but man you would not believe the day I had. You remember that professor I told you about a couple months ago? Last semester? Hauntauk-- the guy who I thought was gonna have an embolism right in my office when I told him what I thought of his theory on the evolution of language and its bearing on modern ideologies... Jim?"
His mouth had been moving a mile a minute when he turned around with the bowls in hand, but Jim was already gone. Vague shuffling noises came from the room upstairs. Other than that the only sound was the faint crackling of the fire, and a muted 'whuff' from the burner under the pot of stew.
"Jim?" He didn't yell it. He just said it. There was no answer.
He took the stairs slowly, making sure to create plenty of noise on his way up. Jim was sitting on his bed, barechested, a wet sweater piled in a crumpled ball at his feet. His saturated workboots had been untied and loosened, but not removed.
His face was utterly, completely blank.
Blair's hands tried automatically to curl into fists, but couldn't-- he realized belatedly that he was still carrying the bowls. He set them down carefully and then walked towards Jim, something cold and fearful knotting in the pit of his stomach. Sound or smell-- it had to be. When Jim zoned on sight or touch or taste he didn't look like this-- hell, Blair couldn't think of a time when he'd ever seen Jim look quite like this. This was bad. Whatever it was, it was bad.
Sound, then. Sound first. "Hey, Jim," he began quietly; "looks like you got pretty wet out there. Don't tell me-- all the boys in blue are out sick, and Simon had you directing traffic all day..."
He reached out, an unconscious behavior. Nothing he said made a single bit of difference to Jim's vacant look until Blair's hand settled gently onto his shoulder. Even then Jim didn't snap out of it, but his eyes fluttered once and he dragged in a deep, slow breath-- eerily reminiscent of a stalled machine starting up again, sluggish and unwilling.
"Jim?" He heard the note of alarm in his own voice and stopped there. Calm-- he had to be. Nothing else would do any good for either of them. "Jim," he began again, soothing this time and easy; "hey, man-- come on back now, okay? I've got--"
He broke off abruptly. This wasn't Jim working his way out of a zone-- his face was twisting, filling up slowly with something that looked terrible, some unknown, cold horror that looked like a nightmare was working on him from the inside out. Blair gasped.
He hadn't even realized that he'd backed away, but when Jim shook his head and looked up at him Blair found himself already by the stairs, one hand curled around the banister in a deathgrip.
"Chief?" Jim was Jim again, blinking a little but definitely all there. "What the hell happened to you-- Jesus, Sandburg, you're dead white--"
Blair was able to let go of the banister, but he couldn't quite bring himself to step forward. Not yet. "Jim, you just had some kind of... it wasn't a zone, you weren't zoning, but you... you were gone, man, just plain gone. And then you looked like you were having a bad dream--" He couldn't continue. The shock and terror of that moment couldn't possibly get moved past his vocal cords-- if it did, it would come out as a scream, and neither one of them needed that.
Jim's eyebrows went up, and he looked around in apparent confusion. "I came up here?" He sounded almost affronted. He turned to Blair. "I don't remember coming up here."
Blair's fear deepened, but he kept his features carefully clear of anything but concern as he finally moved forward, went to Jim, and sat down gingerly next to him. "Something's going on, Jim; and there's... we've gotta make sure we figure it out, but we can-- we can deal with it. You'll be okay--"
"Take it easy, Sandburg," Jim interrupted, sounding so grumpily normal that Blair felt momentarily lightheaded. The switch was that fast. "Just because I had a deeper-than-average zone out doesn't mean you need to start getting ready to put me in a home."
Blair bit down on an angry expostulation, reminding himself firmly to stay calm, at least for the moment. Of course Jim would think that he was overreacting-- as far as Jim was concerned he'd just zoned his way up the stairs, nothing more to it. Blair would have to tread carefully, or they'd just end up arguing and nothing would get resolved. "I'm not going to put you in a home, Jim, but we have to talk about it. We'll just... talk about it." He wasn't about to bring up the idea of tests, not at this particular point.
Jim rubbed his face with both hands, and for the first time Blair noticed that the other man's arms, back and chest were rashed with goosebumps. "Can we talk about it after I've had a shower and some food? I feel like I haven't eaten in a week."
This earnest question brought the stew back to his mind, probably boiling away to sludge down there even as they spoke. He stood. "Yeah-- like I told you when you came in, I've got dinner under control. Ready when you are."
It was amazingly, astoundingly difficult to just pick up the bowls and go, to leave Jim alone when only minutes ago he'd looked like a man lost in the depths of a private hell. Blair comforted himself with the knowledge that Jim certainly wasn't about to go anywhere except to the bathroom for a shower, and that once Jim was clean and warm and fed and relaxed he'd be much more malleable.
As soon as Blair reached the kitchen, he turned the stew down to a bare simmer. Malleable. Yeah, he was going to need all the malleable Jim could give him, and then some. The kitchen was warm with steam but his own hands were ice-cold, shaking a little with the residual traces of his own reaction.
He ignored it, and buried himself in the business of dinner preparations with desperate determination. His own mind was too quick to judge in this case, too unsure and uncertain not to make an immediate, cognitive leap to possible explanations and causes-- and, quite disturbingly for one usually so optimistic; the places his mind wanted to leap to were dark with fear and apprehension.
His hands would not stop shaking. He sighed.
Very dark indeed.
Jim passed the tests.
Every one of them. No sweat.
Blair didn't want to think about what that meant. Not just yet.
"Are you done with me now, Chief?" Jim sounded a little tired and of course slightly annoyed, but that was normal-- normal Jim, with no recurrences of anything unusual all through dinner and through the tests after that-- nothing since what had happened upstairs. Blair sighed.
"I want to cover all the bases, Jim," he began. Jim rolled his eyes but sank back into the couch cushions, arms crossed defensively, mouth wry with that weary and long-suffering tolerance that sometimes made Blair want find a stick and start beating him with it. "I need to know what you did today, where you went and what happened-- I'm... you're gonna have to tell me everything, Jim-- there might be something there; you never know."
He chopped his own words off at that point. His head was pounding, and he suddenly feared that he'd stop making any sense at all if he kept babbling. So-- Jim's turn to talk. His turn to think. There had to be something, some clue or signal, anything to indicate what had gone wrong earlier, what had sent Jim into the black.
"I went to the station," Jim commenced diffidently, apparently resigned to the program at this point. "I swapped insults with a couple of flatfoots who had the gall to ask me where the missus was, and then I had a donut. Then I got some coffee. Then I had another donut. Then--"
"Jim," he muttered warningly, and Jim turned to him, maddeningly polite, mock-inquisitive. "Will you please stop yanking my fucking chain over this? I'm worried, man; I mean, you didn't see what you looked like before--"
"Yeah, Sandburg, okay," Jim capitulated tersely, one hand raised; "don't talk about it anymore-- you're gonna rupture something. Okay." Another sigh, and he leaned back, staring intently at the ceiling. "The Letier case-- there is something going on there, Chief; I'm pretty sure about it. Forensics swept his bedding and found a total of five hairs that definitely didn't belong to him-- strawberry blond, not one of them under twenty inches long. That's where I spent this morning-- I was with Serena down in the lab, asking her all the questions I could get her to answer. Then I did some paperwork and ate some lunch, talked on the phone with Serena again. In the afternoon I went back to Letier's apartment building, asked around to find out if anybody'd seen a long-haired strawberry blond around. No soap. Then..."
Blair's jaw clenched as Jim trailed off, anticipating another possible zone-out, but the other man was apparently just thinking, blinking curiously up at the ceiling as if he'd just seen it move. "What is-- what happened, Jim?" The back of his neck prickled.
Jim turned his head and looked at him, that questing, introspective stare that meant something, somewhere, was cooking. "When I stopped in to see Ms. DeLuca, she gave me some tea." His mouth twisted. "It was terrible tea-- some Venezuelan shit, she said, I think, or something like that..."
"You think?" Blair found himself gripping the couch cushions too tightly, and he made his fingers uncurl. "Jim, first of all, unless you're tucking into a big dish of egg fu yung, you hate tea. Secondly, when you're interviewing someone in the course of an investigation, you don't think they said anything-- you always know! I've seen you report word-for-word to Simon--"
"Cool your jets, Sherlock," Jim mumbled dryly; "She insisted on the tea as a thank-you gesture, and then I just stopped listening to her for a minute because I was busy trying to force my tastebuds into vacation mode so I wouldn't puke on her kitchen table."
Blair shook his head. "The other day, when we were there and you decided to leave so suddenly, I swear it seemed to me that she knew something-- that woman is just too strange, you know?"
Jim shrugged, and went back to staring at the ceiling. "I got kind of an idea that maybe she'd angled for a chance to offer Letier a reason not to be so depressed, and he hadn't taken her up on it. Other than that I doubt that she's dyed her hair black and lopped ten inches off it in the recent past, so I'm not really interested in her."
Exactly the same impression he'd gotten, as far as Gustave. Blair's neck prickled again. "Yeah, but-- I don't... why didn't you tell me about the tea right away? I mean, Jim, we don't have any idea what could have been in there. What if that's what caused it-- what happened upstairs? There could have been anything in there, man."
Jim swung around to him sharply, almost an accusatory look. Blair leaned forward. "I'm not saying that she, like, did it on purpose or anything," he continued, "just that-- well, Venezuelan tea, who knows what could be in it? We don't know what you're allergic to, Jim, or what any given substance might do to your senses--"
"Yeah, well, I didn't tell you about it right away because I didn't even think about it at first." Jim sighed, and Blair felt something tighten in his chest-- that wasn't like Jim, not at all. He was wondering exactly what he should say, if anything, when Jim continued. "No need to worry about it now, Chief-- I didn't swallow more than two sips of that crap, and I'm certainly not going to go begging for seconds." Jim sounded incredibly tired, and even in the dim light Blair could see deep shadows, smudges almost like soot under his eyes.
Time to wrap this up. He had a headache that felt suspiciously like an adrenaline hangover, and that broad, flat feeling of tension in his shoulders that he got every time he had to try to pry information out of Jim. He'd ask for a more detailed picture tomorrow. "So, nobody had seen a strawberry blond around..." he prompted.
"No. Not that they'd admit to, anyway; although there's a couple people who just might be worth talking to again. I finished up the interviews, went back to the station and made some notes, and then I came home." Another sigh, this one the deepest yet. "Are we done now?"
"Yeah." Jim was done, that much was true. Jim was done, and Blair needed some time alone to think. He stood up ready to head for his room, intent on taking some notes and checking some references while the details were still fresh in his mind.
"G'night, Jim."
Jim nodded in his general direction, getting to his feet in a gingerly way that seemed to have more of an arthritic old man in it than Jim 'Rambo' Ellison. Blair frowned. Jim must be really exhausted, if he was moving like that.
But then the other man was up, staring down at Blair from his customary height advantage; even smiling a little, the magnanimous bastard, now that Blair had put his fun-with-science kit away.
"Good night, Chief."
Blair blinked worriedly into the darkness, and listened to the faint swish-squeak of Jim going for another marathon round of tossing and turning. His thoughts spun like a panicked rat on an exercise wheel, as if somehow, if he just put out enough energy, the magic pellet of a solution would appear to him and all would be well.
Mindrat. Running its ratty little ass off without ever generating an ounce of forward momentum, terrified to stop.
Blair pushed his head deeper into the pillow, trying to put the brakes on that particular line of thought since it was worse than useless, and too close to the bone to be amusing. His own fucking analogies were beginning to scare him.
He didn't manage to slow it down, not really, but at least he was able to start at the beginning, put together a fairly linear list of all the things, large and small, that added up to this one big family-size serving of dread that was currently sitting in his stomach on top of the stew, keeping him awake.
Jim had passed the tests. All of them. Flying colors.
That was when theory number one went out the window.
Well, not really out the window, not totally, but definitely removed from the top contender spot. It was a relief because he didn't want to have to go with theory number one, but it was also somewhat distressing because... well, because he didn't really have a theory number two.
Now he was just lost.
And he couldn't talk to Jim about it-- there was too much that Jim didn't know; too much that Blair didn't want Jim to know about the link between heightened senses and insanity. He'd actually mentioned it once, casually; and now he was thankful that Jim hadn't pushed for details, because he probably would have given them.
He could have given quite a convincing little outline, in fact; the data was there, culled in bits and pieces-- spotty, definitely; but presenting a pretty disturbing picture when taken altogether. The darker side of his research, his clandestine little sidebar that he'd hidden from everyone, even mostly from himself. He made the notes and checked the source material and drew the conclusions because it was part of the picture and he wanted the picture to be complete, but he'd never wanted it to be part of his picture, not his deep, thorough, and essentially loving (despite the inevitable academic aridity) portrait of Jim.
So Blair knew the score-- insanity was a common occurrence, whether because the heightened senses drove people insane, or because insanity itself somehow bred an increase in sensitivity. Either way it seemed frequent enough to be almost an innate conclusion, but...
But every instance on record that he'd been able to track down had been very clear on one thing-- when the insanity sets in, the senses go totally out of control. Usually enough to utterly incapacitate the subject. Out. Of. Control. Permanently.
And there was Jim, passing test after test with dismissive calm and barely-veiled impatience; Mr. Control himself, poster-boy for the control freak brigade. It was a relief, for sure; Blair knew he'd probably be shouting hallelujahs right now if he hadn't been so weighted down with the memory of Jim's haunted, tormented face and the terrifying knowledge that Jim was counting on him--
His throat tightened. Jim was counting on him, and there was no theory number two.
Sure, there was the tea thing; but the more he'd thought about it the more implausible it seemed. There was nothing, nothing in any of his research-- it was just a blank, a frigging ton of words and reports and black squiggles on a white page that all came down to the same thing-- namely, that he was lost.
Now there was only this dread, perfectly centered in the middle of a big amorphous mess of the unknown, just to make it show up better.
Blair burrowed deeper underneath his covers, bringing himself as much comfort as he could. He listened with unhappy concern to the restless movements above, so similar in nature to the restless squeaks and shuffles that spun on inside his own head.
Restless running, running, running. Never get to sleep. Not like this.
Fuck you, rat.
Sandburg's Law: the best laid plans of mice and men are frequently fucked up beyond belief due to circumstances way beyond anyone's control.
As mantras went, it pretty much sucked the root. As an apt description of the events of the day, however; it was almost poetry.
First thing this morning he'd told Jim that he wouldn't go in today, that Karen Ferguson could handle his morning class for him so that he could be with Jim in case... in case of something, but Jim had pulled out The Voice of Command and informed him that no, he did not need a nanny; and no, Blair was not going to play nursemaid at the expense of his students; and finally, if anything went wrong that he would call.
Of course Blair had fought him on it, and of course the more Blair argued, the more stubborn Jim got.
In the end Blair had given in-- if he'd kept at it, it was very likely that Jim would get so entrenched in his obstinate groove that he'd fall back on the 'surly and silent' treatment-- and that seemed like too high a risk to take for the comparative return. And, after all, it was only one class; one class and then Blair could cancel the rest of his meetings and his office hours, and arrive at the station by 11:00 at the latest.
That was the plan, anyway.
And he'd been damn proud of his plan at first; he'd almost smiled while watching his students file out quickly-- every face bore a stunningly similar look of repressed delight as he let them go a whole ten minutes early. He packed up while he watched them go, got his jacket and his materials and his backpack and his keys ready to hand while he surreptitiously checked out all those happy faces.
But then there had been another face, the last face; and there was nothing happy about it, nothing at all. Courtney Gier waylaid him as he was about to sweep out of the room and book for his car, stopped him cold with her pinched, nervous, and very unhappy face.
She was a good student, usually-- she'd missed the past two classes but normally she was right on top of it (in a shy and hesitant kind of way); one of the brightest he had. He didn't want to brush her off.
And so he didn't, but he wasn't exactly patient with her either; and that made the fuck-up even worse because when she finally spilled out what she needed to see him for it came out in a torrent, in a flood; and he'd ended up holding her hair with one hand and rubbing her back with the other while she leaned over his deskside trash barrel and vomited up a story about date rape and the terrible reason behind those missed classes, along with a plentiful quantity of bile.
Not an unheard-of situation, by any stretch. Not something he hadn't seen a dozen times before, unfortunately (not that it ever got any fucking easier to deal with, however). Not even something that should have kept him for any length of time, considering that the campus had a staff of people whose job it was to deal with situations just like this, except...
Except for the fact that in the aftermath, when he tried to help her and she tearfully explained to him that she had no parents, no siblings, no family to call at all; no real friends because the other girls thought she was weird because she studied so much; and yes she would go to the student clinic and the counseling center and everything else she was supposed to do but she just didn't want to feel alone anymore; Blair realized with a horrid, sinking sense of dismay that he couldn't just ditch her.
As soon as they hit the clinic he left her in the hands of a nurse and excused himself for a moment, mouthing soothing promises in an attempt to assuage her sobbing panic about how he'd be back right away. He had a bit of panic of his own by then, pulled so awfully in two different directions and wondering who the hell he was going to blame if something bad happened to Jim while he was otherwise engaged-- besides Courtney's rapist Tom Attersley, of course; who was going to be in a world of fucking hurt if he had anything to say about it...
He tried Jim's cell-phone first, but there was no answer. His subsequent call to the station served two purposes-- he reported the rape, first of all, and got that ball rolling; but his inquiry into Jim's whereabouts wasn't nearly as satisfactory. Out investigating the Letier case, hadn't checked in, currently not answering the radio, that was about the sum of it.
Blair switched off his phone and stood quietly for a moment with his eyes closed tight, fighting off the urge to hurl the instrument into the nearest wall in frustration. Damn Jim for being off-line, for being unreachable, for being so fucking insistent about Blair not staying with him-- it was all very well for Jim not to take it seriously but there was something wrong, alright, something badly, dangerously wrong, he had seen it... and he could feel it. His heart was pounding almost out of control.
He tucked the phone into his pocket to remove himself from temptation, and just breathed for a few seconds. He could do this. He could take care of Courtney for a while, keep on the station to keep hailing Jim on the radio, and keep trying the cell at twenty-minute intervals.
For a moment, for a tight, craven, terrible moment of self-pity he wished with all the power in his heart that he'd never heard of Sentinels, or Rainier U., or even fucking Cascade. He should have stuck to driving a rig-- nothing on him but the horizon and the road, and responsibility for a burden that, even with ten tons dragging at his axles, would be easier to carry than this.
And of course, he questioned himself. He questioned himself as the afternoon stretched out and time after time he failed to get in touch with Jim. He questioned himself and felt pressure in his mind, pressure in his fingers as Courtney squeezed down on them. After a while, his hand went numb. The rest of him didn't.
The only thing that allowed him to keep on keeping on as things went from bad to worse, as Courtney eventually had to be sedated and Jim still did not answer his goddamn cell, was his conviction that as soon as Jim materialized once again out of the ether, he would get some answers.
Blair emerged from the campus counseling center at a little after six p.m. He stopped outside the doors, looked at the sky, and breathed. At this hour there was nobody around to see him standing there like someone gazing at imaginary flying saucers, but even if there had been he didn't think he would have been able to bring himself to care. His hand ached, and his heart ached, and worry had chewed itself a nice, vicious hole in the pit of his stomach; and he was just going to stare up into freedom and blameless blue for a few moments, doing what he needed to do.
He didn't feel much better for it when he finally brought his head down and headed towards his car, but at least he didn't feel worse. Nausea seemed to be developing into a theme, here-- no food and too much terrible coffee, too much of someone else's pain blended with the acid of his own apprehensions, too much everything.
He got in the car and closed the door, and had a silent, serious debate with himself over whether the possibility of reaching Jim was really worth the risk of disappointment and increased fear if he once again got no answer. He grimaced, but reached for his phone.
The moment he touched it, it rang.
"Jim?" His breath caught in his throat.
"Hey, Chief; I tried you at home, but there was no answer." The world swam in front of his eyes for a moment-- fine, Jim sounded fine. "I just called to tell you not to hold up dinner for me-- I'll be late."
"Is it the case? Is everything okay?" He wanted to trust the relief that had swept him, but his mind clung stubbornly to an image of Jim's face melting into terror, and the cold, creeping awfulness of it refused to be dispelled entirely.
"Calm down-- I told you, everything's fine." Abruptly Jim's voice dropped to a soft murmur. "It was just a couple of zone-outs. I know what you said you saw, but really-- everything's been normal since then. Been working the case all day, and no problems. It must have been a blip on the radar, Chief; that's all."
Yeah, like he'd ever take Jim's word for it about his state of existence. "Are you still at the station? I'm in the car right now-- I can be there in--"
Jim cut him off with a chuckle. "No, I'm not at the station, Ms. Nightingale. Just go on home."
"But Jim--"
"Look, Sandburg;" Jim's voice slid pretty quickly from amusement to testiness, something so essentially normal that for a moment relief clambered back on top of the pile of emotions wrestling inside him. "I don't need you cramping my style. I told you-- I'm fine. Now you just go on home and take full advantage of this golden opportunity to play that shit you call music, and I'll see you when I get in."
Cramping his style?
Blair felt a sharp, burning pain blossom deep in his chest, and just like that he knew, he knew exactly what was going on, without having a single clue about where the knowledge came from. "You're with Constanza DeLuca, aren't you?"
Jim whistled softly. Blair felt it as stinging pressure against his ear. "I'm impressed. You must have passed that correspondence-school detective course while I wasn't looking."
Blair closed his eyes.
"Don't worry," Jim continued, back to a murmur. "I told her if she ever tried to make me drink that tea again I'd bust her for possession of unlicensed toxic materials. We're just going out to dinner."
And even though he'd known about it, still, it stunned him with how much it didn't make sense. She was... there was nothing about her at all that... out to dinner with... what the hell?
A stray thought occurred to him, a bright, slender hope. He worked hard to keep the optimism out of his voice. "Jim, I know you can't talk right now, but I gotta know-- is this part of the investigation? Are you trying to get her to cut loose with more information on Gustave?" He took a deep breath. Even that would be unlike Jim, but not anywhere near as much as the thought of... the alternative.
A moment of silence, and his hopes rose. When Jim spoke again, however, the curt warning in his voice put an end to all thoughts of Jim playing Mata Hari. "I told you last night, Sandburg; there's nothing there. Nothing."
Blair's hand curled so tightly around the phone that for a moment he thought it might snap. He'd worried himself sick today, and he'd been through hell, and he might not have proof but he knew danger when it pulled on his pantsleg and suddenly he was furious, ready to let go of all this benefit-of-the-doubt crap and just let Jim have it. He took a breath in preparation for informing Jim exactly how much their definitions of 'nothing' differed, but Jim cut in before he could speak.
"Look--" the tone of warning was gone, but all that was there now was something strange and cool and not even remotely friendly. "It's practically six-thirty, and I've done what I could for the day. I'm off the clock. I'm going to dinner. Don't wait up."
And then Jim was gone.
Unbelievably, but indubitably. Gone. Hung up. Off to dinner.
With that... weird woman.
Blair dropped the phone in his lap and covered his face with both hands.
Gone in every goddamn sense of the fucking word, apparently.
Keep an eye on Jim. Watch him. That's the ticket.
Nothing else he could do, really. What did he have, after all, but a memory of one horrific moment and a bunch of vague, unrealized fears?
He had his eyes and ears. Normal issue, true; but perfectly serviceable nonetheless. He knew how to pay attention and gather data, and he knew how to work with whatever he gathered. He had a brain and he wasn't afraid to use it.
He had all these things at his disposal, no question. His 'keep an eye on Jim' plan maybe wasn't the best he could have hoped for, but it was essentially sound.
Except for one small but critical flaw: there was no Jim to keep an eye on.
Not after dinner, not after the cleanup of all dinner materials. Not after the game, not after he'd tried and failed to get interested in three different books; not even after several stultifying hours of grading.
It would have been enough to make him suspicious, if he hadn't been pretty firmly entrenched there already.
It was all very well to remind himself that Jim didn't really get hung up on looks, or that one man's meat was another man's poison-- all these arguments got whacked off at the knees when he reflected on her eerie lifelessness; the way the ominous non-impact of her dull gaze contrasted with that quick and furious glitter... and the way the thought of her with Jim just made his fucking skin crawl.
Blair slept on the couch-- despite Jim's 'don't wait up' directive, it was easy enough to explain away as having fallen asleep after the game. He reinforced the subterfuge by leaving the lights on, by neglecting the pens, highlighters and ungraded papers scattered over the coffee table, and by keeping the TV on with the sound muted-- a poor form of company, but perhaps better than none.
He got himself settled-- as settled as he could be, anyway, since exhaustion and agitation were busy battling for supremacy, and let his eyes roam aimlessly for a few minutes. Soon enough he zeroed in on the TV and stared blankly at the flickering screen; sleepily surprised at his own resentment when he found himself detesting the charmed smiles of the late night movie's happy ending.
He was very grateful to Karen Ferguson's libido. Three months ago she'd gotten itchy pants and flung herself into a whirlwind affair with some businessman she'd met (with a cabin, in the mountains, she'd confided to him gleefully;) and persuaded Blair to teach her classes for two weeks. Now she owed Blair big-time.
The last he'd heard the businessman was busy nursing a broken heart, but Karen was still fairly perky and bristling with sacral energy and happy to work off some of her debt. He gave her the details quickly over the phone, got his keys and his pack, and headed off to the station.
He felt better. Even though Jim had not come home, even though the situation remained the same, even though he'd woken up with his neck muscles locked into one hot and unforgiving nodule of pain; the brilliance of the morning sun on his face seemed to dispel the worst of what he'd gone through the night before. It had occurred to him as he showered that perhaps most of his reaction had been spillover from the stress of what had happened with Courtney, but honestly, he found himself uncharacteristically indifferent as to why he felt better; he only cared that he did.
Like bred like, and the relief of being out of yesterday's gloom (in combination with a cresting wave of cheer that lifted him when he saw Jim's truck in the station's parking garage) was enough to loosen his neck muscles to the point of only vague stiffness by the time he headed for the elevators.
And at first, at his first sight of Jim slumped at his desk-- unshaven and nodding over his morning java, looking about ten percent awake and dressed in the same rumpled clothes Blair had seen him in yesterday morning; he actually wanted to laugh. He would have bet Jim's pension that there'd been some serious ribbing going on-- there was no way the guys would have passed up such an unheard-of opportunity. He'd have to manufacture a chance to pump Taggart about it--
The humorous elements of the situation faded, however, as shockingly fast as if they'd been slapped out of him, the moment Jim looked up and met his eyes.
Jim saw him, and flinched.
"Sandburg." Jim's voice sounded rough, the way it sometimes did when he'd spent too long in the interrogation room bellowing at someone. Just the sound of it made Blair's throat ache in sympathy.
Jim's raw reaction to his presence had surfaced and vanished all in an instant, but the substance, the impact of it was enough to shove a cold splinter deep into Blair's chest as all the fears of last night came flooding back, crawling up his throat to lie bitter on his tongue like old, overcooked coffee.
"Hey, Jim," he said calmly, determined to keep everything as serene as possible until he had some idea of what he was dealing with. He sat down and busied himself with some of the papers and notebooks in his pack, knowing that if he didn't keep himself occupied he'd end up staring, and that probably wasn't the best idea right now. Peripheral vision was enough to tell him that Jim hadn't looked at him again, had in fact decided to put down his cup and hang onto the edge of the desk and stare straight ahead. Blair could see his hands, muscular and prominently veined with tension, shaking just a little. "How was your dinner?"
"Fine." Terse, but no longer unfriendly. Not anger, then.
From the corner of his eye he noticed Jim picking up his cup again, and he lifted his head.
Now there was a man trying desperately hard to keep it all together, to make it all look normal.
Not doing the world's greatest job, either.
"Jim," he heard the sorrow in his own voice, heard it and regretted it because it was a pretty sure way to make Jim clam up, but right now he couldn't help himself, "what's wrong with you, man?"
And with liquid, scary speed Jim got it all together, eyes shuttered but lit with a false warmth that went no deeper than the bright surface, smiling gently. "Just tired, hotshot. Need my coffee." He took a sip to demonstrate.
There was a goddamned ocean of pain and fear behind that mellow shine in Jim's eyes. And Jim was asking him to stay blind to it.
Right. Uh-huh. Every fucking day.
At that moment the tense, grudging pain in Blair's chest shifted and re-formed, and an ugly conflict smoothed away and vanished as he finally stopped fighting himself.
He was on his own. The ease of it surprised him. He smiled back at Jim, smooth and eager. "Well, drink up, then; you've got to fill me in on everything I missed." He grabbed his own coffee cup and stood, backing towards the pot while he let that smile just sink into his face, just like it was natural. "I want my money's worth out of that correspondence course, Jim."
He got his coffee. His own hands didn't shake at all.
Mrs. Giroux had the same fair hair as her brother, and the same large build. Her long face was tense and drawn; something that Blair didn't find surprising, under the circumstances.
"I let go of him, sometime about a year after he left." Blair had brought her a cup of water, and her hand shook with a faint but visible tremor as she took a sip. "Before that, I thought, maybe, that he would recover-- that he would see things and go places, and then come back... well, not healed, you know; but sound."
Jim shifted a little in his chair. "I understand that the loss of his wife was a severe blow to him."
She frowned. "Terrible. To all of us." Her voice had thickened, and for the first time Blair could hear a trace of French in her accent. "Leila was my best friend, my dearest friend since childhood; and losing her like that-- so senselessly--" She cleared her throat. "Terrible to all, but of course for Gustave it was the worst. She was... Leila was everything to him."
Her face tightened and she bowed her head. Jim telegraphed to him with a silent look, and Blair stood immediately and went to the back of the interview room to get a box of tissues. He put them down next to her wordlessly, then sat down one chair over, ready to move in if she looked like she needed it.
Jim leaned forward, and his voice dropped to an oddly gentle register. "Mrs. Giroux, I only have a few more questions for you-- you've been very patient and I'm sure you'd like to move on with your arrangements, so I'll be brief. The last time your brother called you, did he happen to tell you that there was anyone new in his life?"
She appeared to be flatly puzzled by the question. "Anyone new? A woman? You mean a new woman in his life?" Jim nodded. "Oh no--" her voice thickened again. "That... is not possible. When he spoke on the phone to me, all he ever said about himself was that he missed her, that he couldn't paint because the canvas was too permanent-- more permanent than Leila had been, and that cut him. Why do you... what is it that makes you think that?"
Jim shifted again, and Blair made a mental note to put a bug in Simon's ear about requisitioning some more comfortable chairs for the interview room-- Jim always ended up looking like a grade schooler denied bathroom privileges if he had to sit there too long. "Some evidence was found in his room-- in his bed, actually. A few hairs-- very long and light red in color. They weren't--"
Jim stopped abruptly. Mrs. Giroux had crumpled in on herself, and Blair guided the tissue box into her groping hand. "I didn't know..." she began, but all that followed were a few quiet sobs.
Blair got up and refilled her cup of water. By the time he got back to the table, she'd gotten herself together; and looked unhappy but resigned. "I didn't know-- wait; here, I'll show you." Her large hands winnowed through her purse, and surfaced with a small gold object that looked almost like a pocket watch.
"She was my dearest friend, as I told you," her hands shook as she fumbled with the clasp, "and before her funeral I took some of her hair-- I asked Gustave if he wanted a keepsake as well, but he never answered me. He must have taken a piece, and couldn't tell me. Of course he would have." The round box opened to reveal a small picture fitted into one side, and on the other a delicate thin coil of pale copper. Blair drew close, mesmerized by the snapshot-- two little girls, probably five years old or so, smiling in the sun with their arms around each other. One was blond. One was red-haired.
One of them was now dead.
Sorrow and fascination backed up in his throat. He tried to imagine what it would be like to know somebody from childhood, to know their whole history as closely and intimately as your own, only to see them die in a pointless accident. That would be... awful, was the sole and insufficient word that echoed through his mind. Just awful.
It often hit him like this, the hidden advantages of a life lived on the move. Isolation over intimacy, singularity over belonging, yes; but-- look how much pain he'd saved himself. Unimaginable-- he had no frame of reference. Even despite his advantages, despite the protection of his lack of roots, he still felt dangerously compromised-- just the thought of how he'd feel if he lost Jim, for example...
He glanced over at Jim, and his breath caught audibly. Jim was so white his eyes almost seemed to glow, and his lips were pressed together in a thin and bloodless line. "Jim?" It came out before he could stop it-- not the best thing to do in the middle of an interview, but Jesus, Jim looked like he was going to have a heart attack...
"Blair!" one word, spoken loud and on the edge of panic, and Blair opened his mouth to start dealing, to probe the wound and damn what they were supposed to be doing right now, but before he said a word Jim was up and out of his chair, headed toward the door. Blair jumped up so fast that his chair toppled backwards.
Jim turned when he reached the door. "Excuse me for just a moment." The panic was buried now, locked down tight but Blair knew it was still there. "Chief, stay here. Take care of Mrs. Giroux. I'll be right back."
And with that responsibility laid on his shoulders, Blair only watched as Jim slipped out of the room. He felt numb, his fingers were numb as he picked up his chair.
"Is he... is the Detective alright, Mr. Sandburg?"
He turned to her and smiled, hoping that it was a reassuring sort of smile and not a fucked-if-I-know sort of smile. "Well, he's been... I'm sure he's fine. We're handling lots of cases right now, you know? I'm sure he'll be back soon."
She still held the open locket in her hands. It caught his eye, and without thinking, he spoke. "Mrs. Giroux, I want to make sure that we cover all the bases--" His mind was suddenly leaping, dashing, darting from possibility to possibility while his voice stayed low and calm and modulated. "May I have a few, like maybe, three strands of hair from that piece in your locket? I just want to be sure..."
She looked puzzled again, but she nodded warily. "Yes, if you think it's really necessary..."
He kept his smile in place. "If you don't mind." He felt terrible, keeping her blind like this when it was her brother who had been lost, but what could he tell her, after all, except a bunch of suspicions that sounded like lunacies?
There was a plain white envelope on the back table with 'receipts' scribbled across the front, discarded next to some loose papers and pens abandoned after some earlier meeting. He scooped it up and opened it while she picked out a few long strands from the coil, then thanked her and put the hair in the envelope and the envelope in his pocket while he watched her put the locket away.
Then he sat with her and encouraged her gently to talk, listened to her stories and her reminiscences and her sad memories while he counted the seconds until Jim came back through the door. It didn't take long. The man who walked into the room appeared to be about as far from panic as it was possible to get. Mrs. Giroux looked relieved.
Blair kept his silence as Jim apologized and muttered something about a bad lunch, told her he had no further questions and thanked her for her time, and told her that he'd walk her out.
Blair listened carefully as he trailed along behind them, but neither Jim nor Mrs. Giroux mentioned anything about hair or evidence.
He didn't mention it either.
Jim stuck to the 'bad lunch' story, and remained fixed at his desk in dismal silence, scowling at various pieces of paper with every indication of having settled in for the day. In some ways, it was a relief. It gave Blair a chance to 'take a walk'.
He wandered the hallways aimlessly for a few minutes; planning, theorizing, testing out stories and fabrications and ideas-- he needed help, there was no question about that, but there was also no question that he'd have to be fairly creative in going about getting it, if he didn't want to end up either out of a job or in some psycho ward.
A burning sense of low-grade panic welled up in his chest-- the inner directive to find the answers, solve the problem, to make things right. He ducked into the men's room and locked himself in a stall until it passed-- he couldn't possibly hope to be effective with that flaming gilt-edged grail of 'help Jim' itching in his blood. He breathed deeply until he was calm, promising himself that sometime soon he'd sit down and think over exactly what all this shit meant.
But not right now. Blair left the bathroom and made his way to the forensics lab, and sighed with relief when he saw Serena there, communing with something under a microscope. He cleared his throat and reviewed his story one more time, checking for holes.
He'd prepared a busy-but-friendly smile for the occasion, and he offered it as soon as she turned around and saw him. "Blair? I was just about to come looking for you."
Her eyes were concerned. His smile slipped a bit. "Looking for me? Why?"
She glanced around, but everyone else in the lab was on the other side of the room, gathered around some machine that hummed and clicked and whirred. She waved him closer, and he stepped forward until he stood shoulder-to-shoulder with her at the microscope.
Her gaze bore into him, dark and anxious. Her voice was low. "What the hell is going on with Jim?"
He kept his face under control with difficulty. "What do you mean?"
"I mean, he just called me and told me that these hairs from the Letier crime scene are supposedly from a woman who died four years ago, and have nothing to do with the case. I tried to explain to him but he cut me off, and told me to close the file."
Blair kept his own voice soft. "Explain to him? Explain what?"
She studied him for a moment, and Blair suddenly knew how her evidence slides felt. "He told me some story about Gustave Letier having taken the hair from his wife's head as a keepsake," her voice had dropped to a whisper. "But these hairs weren't cut off, they were pulled out. Because of that, they've still got tissue attached at the root. Fresh tissue; at least, relatively fresh. I can't be totally precise on that, but I can tell you for sure they weren't pulled out four years ago."
That sent things spinning in a new direction. He thought about it for a moment. Obviously, the approach he'd intended to take was now superfluous, but just because Serena had noticed Jim's odd behavior didn't mean that she was ready to listen to a bunch of wild theories. He assessed her, solid and staunch in her white coat, a believer in science, as he was himself.
As he had been, before all this shit started.
He returned her gaze levelly, and mustered up all the truth he could earnestly tell. "Look, Serena; I don't know what's wrong with Jim-- he's... well, he's not talking to me, you know? But I want to help him-- I'm trying to help him. I came down here because I wanted to ask you about something--" he pulled the envelope from his pocket, fighting off the rising tension in his stomach. So far she only looked concerned and maybe a little inquisitive-- and he had to take this chance.
"These are from that woman Jim was talking about-- the one who died four years ago. I want to know if they're the same as the ones from the crime scene--" he trailed off as she took the envelope out of his hands eagerly, opened the flap, and groped absently for her tweezers. He kept his silence and resisted the urge to shift from foot to foot while she withdrew one strand at a time and held each up to the light.
"These were cut," she murmured decidedly, "but that means there's no root, of course. Because of that I can't do a straight DNA comparison-- the most I'm going to be able to give you is whether the blood type matches up, and I'll have to do a mitochondrial DNA test to determine that. It's going to take me a few days."
He sighed quietly, and muscles magically unknotted themselves as relief flooded through him. Almost home free-- now if he could only get away without having to answer a lot of pointed questions...
As soon as she'd laid out the hairs on a clean sheet of white paper she turned to him with a look of careful scrutiny, and his hopes for an easy getaway evaporated. "Simon doesn't know about this?"
He just shook his head. There was no real way to lie about that.
To his amazement and renewed relief, she only nodded and turned away, saying quietly, "Give me your cell-phone number. I'll be in touch." She slid a small piece of paper along the worktable without looking at him, and he scribbled down his number and a scrawled 'thanks'.
He put the paper on the counter next to her elbow, and left the lab without looking back.
Jim wouldn't look at him. Except for that, it might have been a typical evening at home; dinner, dishes, some shared congenial downtime watching the game while Blair graded and Jim cleaned his gun-- standard recreation in the Ellison/Sandburg household. Jim talked to him normally enough-- not about the case, no; but about everything else that made up the general gist of their conversation-- Brown and Rafe's current scheme to slip Taggart an Ex-Lax milkshake; the Jags' chances of going to the playoffs; Simon's latest strategy for getting Darryl interested in something besides police work-- topics so mundane that Blair might have been persuaded to believe that the problem was all in his mind, except...
Except that Jim wouldn't look at him. Jim talked to his dinner plate, to the TV screen, to his gun; mouthing words to the ether while Blair struggled with the urge to insert himself irrevocably into Jim's line of sight-- a struggle he lost, but when he insinuated himself directly between Jim and the TV, Jim only talked to the wall above his head, and told him that he made a better door than a window.
By the time the game was over Blair felt fairly desperate, but as he watched Jim zap off the television he was favored with a sudden inspiration.
"Hey, Jim?"
"Yeah?" Jim's gaze remained firmly fixed on the cleaning supplies he was gathering up.
"I'm, um... I'm all caught up on my grading-- how about a few hands of poker? You'll need the practice if you want to make good on those threats the next time you play Simon." An excellent plan-- Jim would have to look at him, unless he wanted to get taken to the cleaners as a result of the patently outrageous Sandburg bluffing program.
Jim never even paused, but replied in a perfectly calm voice as he headed to the cupboard to replace his materials. "Can't, Chief-- maybe another time. I'm going out."
Out? Out? Blair winced as a soft feather touch of dismay brushed light pain at his temples. "Uh, Jim, man, it's like, eleven o'clock-- you're going out now?"
No answer. Blair waited for Jim to come back from the kitchen, pondering the best way to ask the questions that had suddenly filled up his throat, but when Jim returned he bypassed the couch entirely and headed up the stairs to his room.
Blair sat, cold and uncomfortable and burdened by nameless fears; listening unhappily to the sounds of Jim changing, to vague shuffles and clicks, to the quick, cutting zip of what he guessed to be Jim's travel bag. He closed his eyes.
What could he say, after all? Even at the best of times Jim didn't take Blair's remarks about his love life very well-- and this was more like the weirdest of times. It was one thing to offer tentative observations, or to record his private conjectures about Jim's unerring instinct for self-destructive relationships; but it was another thing entirely to consider the possibility of confronting Jim with the full extent of his suspicions-- and Blair didn't much care for the thought of being evicted. Not right now.
And so he said nothing. He opened his eyes when Jim came downstairs, automatically registered the evidence of tense, white knuckles clenched around the handle of the travel bag, and pressed his lips tight together to keep in all persistent but treacherous remarks.
Jim paused and nodded at him, a gesture that might have been amicably casual if it were not for the fact that he never looked up from the floor. "Bye, Chief. See you tomorrow."
Blair didn't answer. He curled his empty fists closed on nothing while Jim walked away, ice in his veins and a tight restless dread in the pit of his stomach. No, Jim wouldn't see him tomorrow-- unless Jim got over whatever it was that made him think that Blair had suddenly transformed himself into Medusa, that is.
The quiet snick of the closing door sounded like a confirmation.
Within the boundaries of the small, spare room, things shifted in and out. Empty air took up what space it could, whickering around amorphous objects that surfaced and vanished, each one a momentary flicker of suffering. Once a twisted, black shape crawled across the ceiling, but it too vanished quickly enough, leaving only a faint mist and a dim echo of a forlorn whisper.
One thing, one shape remained, small and squat and compressed into a vacant corner, melting freely and chuckling to itself. Claws clicked together like the rattle of dried bones.
And aside from that, silence: no heartbeats with which to measure timeless time. The shape remained, huddled under folded layers of shadow, tracing a blurred, greasy mark along the wall over and over in idiot redundancy.
Waiting for darkness to fall.
Three days of limbo. Blair did his best to keep it together. There really wasn't much for him to do other than watch Jim avoid looking at him, and say a polite goodbye every evening when Jim took off for his nightly dose of Constanza. Maddening.
Fear crept up incrementally, stealing upon him one small piece at a time until the morning of the third day, when he walked into the station and saw Jim's pale, harrowed face. All of a sudden Blair felt like fear had swallowed him whole and was now slowly digesting him; soft, squeezing fingers of some loathsome, invisible hands wrapped around his temples as he realized with an abrupt shock that Jim was not 'going through a bad patch', Jim was not 'having a few weird problems'; Jim was actually fading away. No doubt about it. There were deep, livid shadows under his eyes, his cheeks looked sunken, and his skin had a strange, greyish tinge that contrasted horribly with the wine-red color of his shirt.
As usual, the shirt collar was open. As usual, Blair did a quick visual scan for any evidence of marks. It always made him feel ridiculous and slightly guilty, but he looked every morning now-- he couldn't help it, really.
And as usual, there was nothing. Nothing at all. So much for all those Vampirella comics he'd hoarded in his youth.
He was almost to the desk when his cell-phone rang. Blair stopped where he was and fished it out of his pack, never taking his eyes off Jim. He knew that Jim knew that he was there, but also as usual, Jim hadn't looked at him.
"Blair Sandburg."
"Blair, it's Serena. I got those test results back-- different blood types, no question about it. The crime scene hair is A positive, the ones you gave me are O negative. Two different people, but in color and texture they appear to be identical." Her voice dropped to a murmur. "I don't know how long I can sit on this-- obviously, a crime has been committed somewhere. Are you any further along--"
A spark of thought whirled through his mind, and he interrupted her smoothly. "Hey, man-- that's great news. I think we're finally getting somewhere, you know? I'm ready to go."
A moment of silence, and then she cleared her throat. "Okay, so you can't talk. I get it. I'll hang onto it for a while, Blair; but you be careful, okay? I'm worried about you."
All kinds of worry going on-- at least he was in good company. "Yeah. I'm sure we'll be fine. Thanks for all the work you put in on this-- I'm looking forward to it. See you soon."
He hung up, and walked the rest of the way to the desk. His heart pounded a little, but he hoped that Jim would put it down to excitement, if he was even listening. "Hey, Jim." He slid his pack to the floor and sat down.
"Chief. Morning." Jim handed him his coffee cup without looking up from the file he was studying. Blair noticed with a strange, deep, twisting pain in his stomach that even Jim's hands were different now- more spare, and the fingernails that had always been kept so neatly clipped now looked as if they'd been bitten. He had a sudden urge to take one of those hands with his own, to hold on and not let go until Jim gave it up and told him what the fuck was going on here, to grab on and somehow squeeze the truth out of him--
He took his coffee cup, instead. "Thanks, man." He kept his voice calm with an effort. "That was Karen-- Karen Ferguson? From the University? She's been trying to put together a meeting of all the student teachers, sort of a retreat-and-meet thing. So she actually pried some money out of the administration, and we're all going up to a lake in the mountains for the weekend-- most of us are future faculty anyway, so we might as well get started drawing battle lines now, you know?"
Jim nodded absently, and turned a page. Blair could see a pulse beating behind the skin of his temple. "Sounds wild, Sandburg. Academic overachievers let loose on an unsuspecting patch of nature-- this is one of those things where you're going to come home and squirm for a straight week because of the mosquito bites on your ass, right?"
Stupid as all hell, but it actually brought a lump to his throat-- he missed Jim; missed his smile and his annoying comments and his steady, unshakable gaze; he even missed his scowl, as weird as that was. Blair swallowed. "Yeah. You know how it is-- women in the woods; they must reconnect with their Aphrodite roots or something--"
"Right." Jim sniffed, and tapped his own coffee cup three times with a bitten nail. "Well, have a great time-- and do me a favor and try to stay out of the way of any stray terrorists or drug czars or mad bombers who might be running around up there, okay? I've got one hell of a cold that's settled in, and all I need is to go slogging off into the forest to look for you."
Blair felt his eyes widen, but of course Jim was still deeply enraptured by his file. "You have a cold?"
Jim sniffed again, pointedly, as if presenting evidence. "Yeah. A cold. And don't try to give me any of your weird remedies either, Sandburg. Simon still hasn't let go of that whole peyote thing." He turned another page. "So-- you're off to the woods?"
And just like that, Jim expected him to drop it. Blair bit down on his bottom lip, trapping the words that wanted to rush out, and stood. "I'm leaving tomorrow, right after class. I won't be back until late on Sunday." He hesitated, coffee cup in hand, trying not to fidget with it. "You didn't... did you have any plans for this weekend? Did you need me around for anything?"
Jim shook his head minutely, running his finger along a line of text. "Nope. Go get bitten. I'm doing fine, here."
"Right." He didn't imbue the word with all the sarcasm he would have liked to. He just said it, and walked away.
Funny-- when he'd come up with this scheme, there had been certain parts of it that his mind just glossed right over, as if the actual execution would somehow magically take care of itself, if only he kept all the rest of the details handled. Ridiculous.
Like climbing this fucking building, for one thing-- as if that would just kind of happen, as if he'd somehow find himself standing triumphantly up on the roof just as long as he made sure that he'd packed his flashlight and the proper number of sweaters.
Blair looked up at the fire escape, and then looked very quickly back down at his shoes. He took a few deep breaths.
And he was supposed to be so brilliant. Right. Darwin meets Dirty Harry. Christ.
In the end it was the dual spurs of curiosity and protectiveness that got him moving, that sank their provoking little needles deep into his stomach and overrode the flutters already there. Blair settled his pack firmly on his shoulders, wiped the fear-sweat from his palms, then climbed gingerly up onto the closed lid of the dumpster he'd rolled into position. He had actually taken hold of the bottom rung of the ladder when it occurred to him that his hair was blowing wildly into his eyes, so with a sigh of relief he let go, and slid back down to the ground. He unshouldered his pack and dug around for a rubber band, ignoring the way his hands were shaking.
When he'd left the loft some five hours ago, Jim had been camped out on the couch, once again cleaning his gun-- something he seemed to do with alarming frequency these days. He'd barely acknowledged Blair's farewell noises. Blair had been much too pumped to do more than get his stuff and go, and the rest of the evening had passed in a haze of doubts and fears and frenetic, unprofitable activity-- he'd gone to his office and tried without success to settle down to the routine of essay review, tried and failed to eat dinner, and finally ended up pacing the stacks at the University library.
And even that familiar haunt had provided no real relief. The smell of old books, usually so comforting to him, had actually been unnerving-- a dry, arid smell, one that reminded him too much of locked rooms and secrets. He hung on grimly until the library closed at half-past ten, and then drove slowly home, making sure to park on the next street over.
And now it was a bit past eleven-- pretty much the witching hour for Jim, if the pattern remained true. Jim's truck was still parked in his spot, and he'd seen lights on in the loft when he'd circled the building.
His hair wasn't going to get any more secure. It was time. Blair reshouldered his pack and climbed back up on the dumpster, and grabbed for the ladder before he had any time to think about it.
"Jim. Jim. Jim... Jim." It was his mantra-- the only one he could come up with in this tense, paralyzed moment, the only one that seemed to do the job. Before he knew it he was on the roof, an alien landscape of gravel and strange, jutting shapes and dizzying gusts of icy air. He had to force his hands to move to pull his pack off, fighting all the time against the urge to crouch down as low as possible-- it felt like at any moment the wind was going to slap him off this roof like a piece of confetti.
The night sky above him was deep, velvet black, a huge expanse that seemed to weigh on him, making him struggle for air-- no romance in these heavens, not here; not for a speck lost on a cold and windy rooftop in the middle of an ocean of small and indifferent lights... Blair looked down and gasped for air, stared at his shoes until the feeling passed.
It took him a few minutes to get his bearings, to work out exactly where to find what he wanted; and he was hampered by the dire imperative to move quietly-- an imperative entirely at odds with his feet, which seemed to want to stumble around senselessly every time he took a step. By the time he approached the skylight above Jim's room, he was almost crawling.
He came to a complete stop five feet away and sat down, huddling into his jacket for warmth. This was the sticking point-- if Jim had his senses up he'd know Blair was there, no question; and this was pretty much the last possible chance to turn back and slip away-- unless of course Jim had already sensed him.
Blair closed his eyes for a moment, and waited until his teeth had stopped chattering. Then he took one last, quick glimpse of the unforgiving sky overhead and inched forward, doing everything in his power to modulate his breathing to normal levels-- he couldn't do much about his runaway heartbeat. He tried to prepare himself as best he could-- for this kind of intrusion, for the maddeningly blank possibility of what he might see, for the potential chance that he'd end up staring straight into Jim's accusing eyes.
He touched the glass before he did anything else. The chill bit into his fingers, a forceful and sharp reminder that this was all real, that he had brought himself to this place. He welcomed the frozen pain as some bizarre form of expiation, and pressed his whole hand flat into it before he edged up the last few inches, and looked down.
One quick glimpse was enough to assure him of a few things-- that Jim was definitely at home, that apparently Jim had company, and that Blair himself had somehow neglected to consider the effect of looking down through a skylight, or the fact that doing so might make him a little queasy. He pulled away and sat up and fought with his breath, eyes closed. Over and over he saw a brief flash of shapes under blankets, slow-moving; one hand raised up into the pillows-- Jim's hand, raised and questing as if it were the hand of a drowning man. He had to work to stop himself from shivering, cold with half-reasoned fears even though he was warm with mortification of... well, spying like this.
He got his breathing under control, curled his fingers tight around the sharp edging of the skylight frame (won't fall, you won't fall, you're not gonna fall...), and looked back through the glass.
And froze in utter shock right where he was, unaware of his icy hands or the wind or even the height he looked down from as the blankets rolled back, thrust by an impatient arm.
Jim wasn't in bed with Constanza DeLuca. Jim wasn't in bed with some stranger with a storybook-romance cascade of strawberry blond tresses.
Jim was in bed with Blair.
With hellish, arctic clarity he absorbed everything in one staggering moment-- the look on Jim's face; a look of mixed terror and ecstasy on those well-known features, so strange-- so very strange... Jim's head thrown back as he rode, impaling himself on the unseen organ, moving faster every moment. And under that, under Jim, the strangest thing of all; the thing that made Blair feel like his heart might just give up and burst under the strain-- himself; sweating and shivering and arching upwards, staring at Jim with a flat and malevolent hunger that masqueraded as a travesty of lust.
It was killing him to watch; his whole body shook with the panicked pain of it, and yet he couldn't look away. The shock was universal-- it defined his world. Above that was only dull surprise at himself for watching so calmly, for sitting anchored to this rooftop as if shrieking off into the night wasn't even an option.
That thing down there, the thing that looked like him-- eerily, exactly like him-- the reality of it shook in his bones, chewed at his heart as he watched Jim seize up and spasm-- even through the glass he could hear horrified and desperate moans that made his testicles crawl back up into his body. That thing. That thing was fucking Jim's ass and wearing Blair's face.
He choked, and suddenly knew for a fact that he was going to do it, was going to scream bloody murder after all, but suddenly that terrible, rapacious face was mercifully shielded from view as the thing rolled Jim over as easily as if he were a ragdoll. Blair gagged on his own cry, shocked again into utter immobility as all the excruciating clarity of the scene was lost under a black, shifting mist; something that emanated from the mockery of his own bare spine and shoulders, unfurling like some indistinct insectile wings, spreading like poison over the expanse of the bed.
And then he couldn't watch any more. His vision seemed to be going dark, and with one last-ditch thought of what might happen if he passed out and tumbled through the glass into that ghastly blackness below, he pushed himself away. He stumbled a few steps, far past any attempt to quiet his movements, and then was totally and convulsively sick, falling to his hands and knees in the gravel with a distinct sense of gratitude that he was still here to feel this pain, to feel the agony of his stomach ripping free and his palms shredding away because it meant that he wasn't there, not there in that dark room below, suffering... Suffering what Jim was suffering.
When the sharpest pains were over there was a long, quiet interval where the only sounds were his own terrified sobs and the high, keening whistle of the nighttime wind; a dreadful sound that made him think of wings, dark wings spread to catch the cold air, black feathers dry as dust.
He put his head down under his arms and closed himself away from it, and waited for the world to come back.