FIC: What is Left: The Sentinel: J/B: Slash: FRT
Title: What is Left
Author: escargoat
Fandom: The Sentinel
Words: approx. 1,450
Pairing: J/B
Rating: FRT - mentions of both violence and sex.
Summary: Blair steals a moment to look upon his lover again.
Disclaimer: The Sentinel is owned by people and companies who are not me. I’m not making money, soy milk, turnips or otherwise being remunerated for this effort.
Warnings: Angsty separation and supernatural stuff resides within. NOT a death fic.
A/N: This was written in response to sentinel_thurs challenge #296 - Embers
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From Blair’s vantage point he can see the campfire slowly dying, and he feels tears prickle at his eyes. There was a time when he would have been sitting right next to the flames. His clothes would have been collecting wood smoke in their fibers so that Jim would eventually start bitching about the smell on their way home.
Blair had never taken the whining seriously. Jim loved camping and all the smells associated with it. The complaints were merely an excuse to rid both of them of their clothing the instant they got through the door so that they could spend a few minutes welcoming each other home properly.
If he closes his eyes, he can picture the way that Jim looked on those days perfectly. The hard body and passionate need had always been offset by the tenderest of looks.
But that was then. This is now, and now sucks.
It doesn’t surprise him that Jim has changed camping spots. Truthfully, he would’ve been shocked if he hadn’t.
He is surprised that Jim has taken company along in the form of Simon Banks. The shock is a pleasant one though. It is good to see that his lover hasn’t cut himself off from his friends.
Selfishly, he is also happy that it is only a friend that Jim brought along. If Blair was a better man, he would hope and pray for Jim to find somebody to take care of him. He’s never met anybody else that loved being in a relationship, a marriage more than Jim Ellison.
For all of his protestations otherwise, Jim doesn’t like being alone. He might survive just fine on his own, but it is with steady companionship that he thrives. Part of that can be attributed to Jim being a sentinel. Burton did mention a ‘companion’ in his monograph after all, but another part of that is just plain Jim. It is that piece of Jim that Blair misses the most.
As if he can hear that Blair is thinking about him, Jim pulls himself to his feet and does a visual sweep of the locale, his gaze settling directly where Blair has hidden himself. Blair isn’t concerned. He knows the limits of Jim’s sentinel abilities, and looking through solid rock is way beyond them.
It is pure cop instinct that is making Jim eye the area, and that instinct will soon be overridden by Simon’s captain’s bellow for more beer.
The instant that Jim turns away, Blair edges out a bit more from the outcrop of rock that is his protection. He doesn’t know whether he should be relieved or worried that Jim agreed to camp in a place with such an obvious surveillance point nearby. On the one hand it means that Jim’s life is good. It means that he feels no need to be paranoid about his or Simon’s safety.
The other hand… Blair doesn’t like to think about the other hand.
Of course, he doesn’t like to think about forearms much these days either.
Involuntarily, his eyes glance down to the red handprint that even now glows faintly on his left arm. Incacha’s handprint. Blair knows that if he looks closely enough, he can make out the dead shaman’s fingerprints where he had gripped Blair’s pale flesh while passing the way over.
Magic, for lack of a better all encompassing term, is always at its strongest when it involves blood. The strongest rights and rituals all include it. Of course human blood is the strongest, and the blood of a human shaman is rife with power. Incacha used his to bestow his calling on to his successor. It is because of that blessing that Blair is still alive.
It is also because of blood that he is no longer truly living. His life was taken away from him. What he does now is eat, breathe, and exist.
It is his own blood that caused his agony. Or rather it was the blood he received from his father, Naomi, bless her heart, could never hurt her son the way that his nameless, faceless father had in just one simple moment.
Blair hates his father. He knows that he shouldn’t, but he isn’t sure how he can ever stop. It was his father’s selfishness that took him away from Jim and made impossible to ever go back.
The only saving grace that keeps Blair from seeking vengeance against his father is that the man didn’t even know he had a firstborn child when he agreed to give that child to a demon in exchange for a his own debt of servitude. From what Blair could glean from him, he never intended to have one either.
But his father’s not knowing didn’t stop the deal from being valid, and Blair’s first few months in his new mistress’s tender care had been agony as she tried again and again to break him.
He wished that he had broken. At least he’d still be human. He wasn’t sure what he was now.
Oh, he knew what they called him. He’d heard the whispered mutterings of ‘guide’ often enough, but all that title was to him was another reason that he could never feel Jim’s arms around him again.
Brackett had been the first to call him a guide, but Blair’s demon mistress had been the first to whisper the name in fear. It would’ve been a shriek, but the chains wrapped around her throat had severely limited her vocal capacity.
Blair shuddered at the memory. The bindings that he had used to kill her were the ones that she had used to kept his hands manacled together. They had been put there by magic, and stronger magic, his magic, had blown them apart.
It was that same magic that let him feel the pulse of the earth. No matter where he went, if there was something living, he could feel its status. Feel if it was dying or healthy.
This power was why the forces of darkness hated him so. Most took a cloak of nature around them to mask that they had no rightful place in the world of man. Blair could feel that pain, that twistedness in his soul, and in turn his soul demanded that he help right the wrong that evil had perpetrated.
Everywhere he went his title was whispered in either fear or awe. Even the forces of good didn’t know quite what to do with him having thought that his kind had long since been hunted to extinction.
As for the forces of evil, he didn’t even want to know what the bounty on his head had been raised to; it was quite enough to know that there was one.
And it was also quite enough to know that as feared and hunted as he was by darkness, his sentinel would be doubly so. Blair had heard the hushed whispers that both sides tried to keep from him. The ones that speculated that if a true guide could still exist than surely not all sentinels had been destroyed.
He never let anyone know that he heard them talking, and he never once let on that he even had a clue what a sentinel was. Blair had a duty to Jim. The Guide was responsible for the Sentinel’s welfare, and Jim didn’t deserve to be pulled into Blair’s living hell.
Blair didn’t deserve it either, but it was a burden that he had to bear.
Still, it was a difficult load to carry, so he permitted himself the occasional glimpse of his former life. A few moments of gazing at his beloved never failed to shore up his reserves and remind him why he kept going.
With a shake of his head, Blair brought himself back from his musings. The campfire had dwindled down to embers as Simon and Jim had talked. The wood was still faintly glowing here and there, but neither man had moved to either stoke it or put it out entirely.
Without a sound, Blair pushed himself to his feet. His period of rest was over. It was time to move on before somebody noticed that he had stopped to linger in a place that should hold no significance. He permitted himself one last glance at Jim’s now darkened silhouette before he walked away.
Even was he forced his feet to move, he doused his own internal flame for the other man. Love, he’d learned, is truly a beacon shining for all to see, and he didn’t need anybody noticing his. So he’d learned to let it smolder instead of shine.
Embers could still warm a man if that was all he had left.