Pandora's Box
A long time ago, I wrote Ad Libitum. ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR, FIVE, SIX, SEVEN
This is the sequel
Pandora's Box.
Jim/Blair, Alex/Naomi
( Chapters 1-3 ) ( Chapter four ) ( Chapter Five ) ( Chapter 6 ) ( Chapter 7 ) ( Chapter 8 ) ( Chapter 9 ) ( Chapter 10 ) ( Chapter 11 )
Jim made a decision to "out" himself as a Sentinel rather than allow two men to suffer. However, now that they're heading back to the states, the guys have to make some hard decisions about what they want their future to look like, because they can't go back to their old lives. Even worse, neither of them know the true meaning of the mystical battle Jim and Alex fought. Jim might have won the throne and Blair might have earned his title of shaman, but the universe is not done with them.
~12~
Getting off the plane at John F. Kennedy airport, Blair was caught off guard by the overly air-conditioned air, the scent of plastics, and the odor from a half dozen restaurants. Despite the fact that it was all normal, there was something about the place that felt wrong. Blair could feel it in the pit of his stomach. When he’d first started college, he'd walk into a classroom and everyone looked at him like he didn't belong there. Blair had not been an early bloomer, so he'd looked about thirteen. He’d spent his first year at college feeling this constant unease-like the kind he felt now. Even though no one in the airport was looking at him and judging him, he had that same queasy feeling that he’d had back in college. He was in the wrong place. He didn't know the rules, and he was going to make an ass of himself. He couldn't shake that feeling.
“Chief, are you okay?” Jim frowned at him.
“Peachy.” Blair didn’t even try and sound convincing.
Jim raised an eyebrow, but Blair could only shrug in response. He had no idea what was wrong. Jim slipped an arm around Blair, resting his hand against the small of Blair’s back. Usually they tried to be a little more discrete in public, but Blair needed the point of contact. As they joined the throngs of travelers, Blair moved even closer to Jim. They had lost their luggage along the way, so everything they owned was in one carry-on bag Jim had over his shoulder. Blair still kept looking around, sure he had left something behind.
“I've heard some good reviews on the steak place they have in here,” Jim commented as the river of people spilled out into the part of the airport with the shops and restaurants.
“I have a heart attack, and you offer me steak,” Blair said with a dramatic roll of his eyes. “Is there some hidden aggression that I should know about?”
“I figured I'd have the steak. I figured you'd find whatever rabbit food or algae they offered at the steak place.” Jim guided them toward the west. “Besides, Chief, I suspect that your heart attack had less to do with cholesterol than it did with….” Jim waved his hand in the air, toward the universe in general.
Blair glanced around, nervous about sounding crazy to anyone who might be listening. “Yeah, I got that feeling. I also get the feeling that the universe just hates me in general.” Blair made a face. Considering he’d had a heart attack, a shamanic battle, and a near-drowning experience all in the space of a few days, it wasn’t an unreasonable conclusion.
“The universe? No.” Jim sounded sure of that-more sure than Blair was. “Now Alex, she hates you,” he added.
“Man, that's like my stepmother. Actually, that's like your mother-in-law, or your stepmother in law. Whatever. Anyway, how about you not poke the feud?” he suggested. Blair expected Jim to go off about Alex attacking him or grabbing for power or maybe even Alex’s long, criminal past. He didn’t.
“No problem, Chief,” Jim said a little too easily. “Besides, I suspect we aren’t going to see them again for a while.” Moving ahead of Blair, Jim strode through the crowd, forcing people to yield way. Blair trotted behind. The steak place must be really good because Jim was really booking it. Blair glanced over his shoulder. Maybe they were running from someone rather than to somewhere; however, Blair couldn’t see anyone following. Mostly he saw harried businesspeople and cranky families all jostling for a better position in the crowd.
“Here we go.” Jim stopped outside a restaurant, and Blair had to admit that it smelled good. The scent of hot bread and cooking meat drifted out, only to be swept up by the airport’s ventilation system. “Smell that?” Jim asked with a happy smile before he headed in.
“You mean the smell of your arteries hardening?” Blair asked under his breath. Jim didn’t even bother answering.
Inside, the restaurant felt like a regular place-one you would find outside an airport. The only difference was that Blair had to thread his way through the aisle, careful not to trip over the suitcases and bags strewn at the side of every chair. Several of the diners looked worn down to nothing. Blair wondered if he looked as bad as the woman in the corner with deep-set eyes whose head was propped up on her elbow. She looked like one good push would send her face-first into her soup.
Jim found a table, and Blair happily collapsed into the bench. “Ah, the smell of real food. That hospital food will kill you.” Jim opened a menu and lost himself in the choices. “They have fish,” Jim offered.
With a sigh, Blair grabbed the menu. Food wasn’t his top priority right now. If his stomach didn’t stop doing a jig, the food wouldn’t stay down no matter what he ate. Looking around, he studied his fellow passengers. If these people knew Jim was a Sentinel, a man who could hear their secrets, how would they react? Blair knew too much history to be as sanguine as Jim about this whole thing. The McCarthy era, the witch trials, the demonization of Jews… history was full of society hunting down minorities because they felt threatened.
“Chief, it will work out,” Jim said, a touch of the cranky in his voice as he put down his menu.
“You don’t know that,” Blair countered even as he wondered when he’d turned into the pessimist.
Jim put both his elbows on the table and leaned forward. “No, I don’t. But I know I wasn’t going to let those men die just to keep a secret. I also happen to think you and I can handle this better than Naomi and Alex.”
Blair snorted. Right now he’d love to shove this mess off on Naomi, even if her idea of handling things might include causing therapy-inducing levels of trauma on government officials. They deserved to meet Naomi in full warrior-queen mode. “So, what do we do now?” Blair asked.
“You're asking like I'm setting the agenda.”
“Up until now, you have.”
Jim looked absolutely shocked. “What?”
“Jim, come on man. You outed yourself to the press,” Blair hissed in a low whisper. He could hear his anger coloring his voice, but he was at the end of his metaphorical rope. “You took charge with the sentinels in Mexico. You decided to go all covert action on Alex, surrendering just so that you could get her into a better position. You made all those choices without even asking me. Trust me, I have not been driving this trip.” Blair poked his finger at Jim.
Jim caught his hand, and for a second, Blair struggled to pull back, but Jim held his hand, his face full of sympathy. “I didn't want to go to Mexico at all. If you recall, you're the one who said we had to challenge for power,” Jim said, his voice gentle.
“I may have started the engine, but I lost control the steering wheel back around Spokane.” Blair might've kept going, but the flinch of guilt on Jim's face made him stop. Yeah, Jim had made choices, but most of them were just him trying to not get buried by events that were spinning out of control. “Okay, maybe that wasn't entirely fair.”
“Actually, it was.”
Blair’s mouth fell open. “What?”
Shaking his head slowly, Jim let Blair’s hand go. “You're right. I've been charging ahead without really stopping to talk to you about how you feel, but you're the shaman. So what do we do from here?” Jim leaned back and looked at Blair. He wasn't fidgeting or tapping his fingers or doing that weird thing with his jaw that made it clear that he wanted to make the decisions and he was playing nice with Blair. And this wasn’t about Blair’s guide voice, and his ability to override Jim in the heat of the moment. No, this was Jim sitting back with more patience than Blair had ever seen.
“Right now?” Blair tried to think, but right now the only thing he really wanted was a bathtub. A big bathtub. A big bathtub and some place where he didn't have this nagging feeling of wrongness that clung to him.
“You're always telling me to follow my instincts, Chief.”
“Yeah, but that’s you. In case you haven’t noticed, I don’t listen to my own advice,” Blair pointed out. Jim gave him a dirty look, and he probably would have said something sharp, but the waitress saved Blair when she showed up to take their orders. Jim ordered the biggest steak on the menu along with a baked potato with a double order of sour cream, all the while looking at Blair. However, Blair was not even caring about Jim’s eating habits, not when he had way bigger fish to fry. The waitress gave them a smile and vanished, taking their menus with her.
“So tell me what your instincts are saying,” Jim said the moment the woman left the table.
“You're assuming I have them,” Blair said dryly.
“Sandburg!” Jim snapped. The couple at the next table looked over.
Blair ran his hands over his face as though he could scrub off the weariness. He totally recognized the irony here because he was the one always telling Jim to open up about the mystical side of being a sentinel, but Blair couldn’t describe his instincts. Right now, hiding in the nearest really deep hole sounded pretty good, but Blair didn’t know if that was instinct or paranoia. Or maybe it was both. “I don't know,” Blair admitted. “I just know that I feel….”
“Blair?”
Sighing, Blair leaned back in his chair. “I feel wrong. There's something wrong, and I can't put my finger on it. It's driving me nuts.”
Blair expected Jim to completely dismiss his nebulous complaints, but instead Jim was nodding thoughtfully. “Welcome to the annoying side of this shit,” he said with a grim smile. Jim should not be thoughtful with this; it was actually freaking Blair out a little bit. Jim was supposed to be the one that talked about logic and being reasonable and evidence. Then again, Jim was the one who saw magical invisible animals. So maybe Jim wasn't entirely on the logic side of the fence.
Jim pursed his lips and rocked back in his chair. “If we were to go home to Cascade, would that feel more or less wrong?”
“Who knows?” Blair shrugged.
Leaning forward so that the front chair legs hit the floor, Jim announced, “Well then, let's head home.”
Blair frowned. Now that Jim said that, he was definitely feeling more wrong. He wanted to go home, but he couldn't.
“Blair?”
“Do you think I could track down Naomi so that she could give me a crash course on this whole shaman thing? I suck at it,” Blair said. “I seriously suck at it. And we are not talking the fun kind of sucking.”
The corner of Jim's lips twitched. “How about we keep your mother and sucking out of the same sentence?” Jim asked in a sarcastic voice.
Blair groaned as his memories supplied a visual to go with that joke. His mother's idea of playing dirty was way more dirty than Blair could really handle. He was going to be in therapy for a year after what he'd seen. He might respect his mother's lesbian choices, or heterosexual choices for that matter, but he sure as hell didn't want to see them. Ever. Not even if the world was ending and that was the only way to save it. “Mom’s got a mean streak,” Blair muttered.
A chuckle slipped out of Jim, and Blair glared at his lover. Jim held both hands up as though surrendering. “Stand down. I come in peace,” Jim joked, and Blair glared harder. Jim cleared his throat; the bastard was trying not to laugh harder. “So, we're clearly not going home,” Jim said. “We could head back to the Temple or we could go to Peru. I know there was a young shaman and training with the Chopek, so you might be able to get some help there. We could track down your mother, and hope that she stays dressed as we ask her for help. We could make contact with Jack Kelso and have him watch our backs before we head back to Mexico to help two sentinels there, or we could go to Bethesda and see their sentinels. We could call Simon and see if we could get some back up here as we tried to find the US press and get them interested in the story. We could call my father and see if he could give us permission to hide out at his place for a while-not really going to ground as much as staying out of the way for a while. For that matter, we could go to ground. You know I have the skills to take us off the grid if you really want to disappear. There are a lot of options here, Blair. Which one feels right?” Jim ticked off each option like each was equally possible. Disappearing into the underground or going to the press-he offered them all up like it was as easy as making a simple call. However, one of those options sounded even more stupid than the others.
“Man, walking into Bethesda feels like walking into the lion's den,” Blair said with a snort. “That might've worked out for Daniel, but face it, most of the time people walk in the lion's den, they end up dead. I'm not fond of dead. I've been there, and it wasn't that much fun.”
Jim's expression turned sympathetic. He reached across the table and rested his hand on Blair's. “I don't know, Chief. We've walked into a lot of lions’ dens in the past few years, and we've done pretty good.”
Frowning, Blair studied Jim, searching for some sign that he was joking, but Jim looked pretty damn serious. “You want to go to Bethesda?”
“Want?” Jim paused. “No.” Jim was emphatic about that. “However, that's the first option you mentioned. If your gut says we should go to Bethesda, we should.”
“When did you start trusting my gut?”
“I always trusted you. The whole reason I never had partners at work was because I didn’t trust them, but I pretty much trusted you from day one.”
“You thought I was a naïve kid,” Blair pointed out.
Jim didn’t bother denying that. He made a little half-shrug and grinned at Blair. “Yeah, that crossed my mind once or twice. However, it could just be that I’m a cranky, disillusioned old soldier. But things have changed. When you went to your shamanic rites, you were on the spirit plane, Blair. I could feel you.”
“Really? Cool.” Blair nodded, and Jim rolled his eyes.
“The first time we went to South America, back when Simon disappeared, you spent all this time explaining how mystical experiences were really just stories. They were myths to explain human experience.”
Blair cringed as he remembered that. “Man, I was full of shit.”
“Yeah,” Jim agreed. “You were. I didn't know how to talk to you, because you didn't….”
“I didn't understand how important it was to you,” Blair guessed. Jim made a lot of noises about being logical, but in the end, he trusted his gut more than most men. He trusted his guts and his magical invisible animal. “You probably should've told me that I was full of shit.”
Jim shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe I was trying hard to hold on to a friend, and telling him that he was so full of shit but his eyes were turning brown from it… it probably wouldn't have helped.”
Blair laughed. “Oh man, you have me there. I would not have appreciated the attitude.” Blair sighed and for a time, they both sat in silence. The rumble of the airport was muffled here, but Blair could imagine that Jim could hear thousands of voices, of heartbeats, of mechanical motors and conversations and footsteps. They lived in different worlds, and part of Blair felt a responsibility to those men at Bethesda, and another part wanted to hide Jim and his world from prying eyes. He couldn’t do both. “So, you think it's some sort of Freudian slips that I focused on Bethesda, huh?” he finally asked.
“Was it?”
Blair thought about all the problems they'd walk right into it they went to Bethesda. If the military read the Mexican articles when Jim and Blair were on a military facility, that wasn't just walking into the lion's den. That was walking into the lion’s den with ten pounds of T-bone steaks strapped to their bodies. Logically, they should both be running screaming the other way at the very suggestion, but that's not how Blair felt.
“This is all kinds of stupid,” Blair warned.
“So you want to go to Bethesda.” Jim's voice wasn't accusatory or angry, even though it should be.
“Want? Totally not. Man what I want to do is run the opposite way. What I want is to go home and take a two hour hot shower.”
“In that case, we'll have to stop at Home Depot on the way home so I can buy a new hot water heater.”
“Make it a really big one.” Blair spread his hands out indicate just how big of a hot water heater he wanted. But the humor faded quickly. “Maybe we can do that next week. Going home right now just doesn't feel like the right thing to do. Now that I've seen the Mexican sentinels, I'm feeling boatloads of guilt about the American ones. The data I was using to show they are Sentinels show they are Sentinels in trouble. And I've been trying to help from the other side of the country. In Mexico, I was right there. I could see the rash. I could see the way his eyes didn't focus right.” Blair rubbed both hands over his face. His eyes felt like they had sand in them, and the stubble scratched over his palms. “What the hell am I thinking? I'm trying to help those men when I'm sitting in Cascade.”
Blair sucked in a startled breath when Jim caught his hand and pulled it close to his heart. “Hey, you can't fix everything. If you try, you're going to rip yourself pieces, Chief.”
“I know.” Blair tried pulling his hand back away from Jim.
Jim tightened his grip and pulled Blair's arm across the table so that he could sandwich it between his hands. “I'm serious, Blair. You can't save everyone.” Jim spoke each word slowly and distinctly. “You know that in your head, Chief. But if you forget it, if you don’t believe that in your heart, I swear I will drag you away to have a nice hot shower and a lot of therapy.”
Blair snorted his disbelief. Jim wasn’t the biggest fan of therapy.
Jim still held Blair’s hand tenderly, but he glared hotly. It was an odd combination. “If you want go give the government a good hard jerk on the reins and make them change course with these Sentinels, I will back you up, Blair,” Jim promised. “But if you start having unrealistic expectations about yourself, you will be the one getting jerked back in line.”
“Okay, that’s sounding vaguely threatening.”
“Good,” Jim said firmly. “I may not be your commanding officer, but you’re my shaman, and you’re about to go to war, so if I have to pull you out of the line of fire and drag you to a shrink, I will.”
“You-“
“Try me,” Jim said darkly. His fingers traced gentle, lazy circles against Blair’s wrist, but Jim’s voice didn’t have an ounce of compromise in it. Blair was getting emotional whiplash from the mixed signals. “I’m going to go see about getting us transportation to Bethesda. If there are any friendly doctors up there that don’t think you’re a fruitcake, you might want to give them a heads up,” Jim suggested, his tone slipping into an easy banter as he stood up. He smiled down at Blair and then tousled Blair’s hair.
“Hey!” Blair protested, knocking Jim’s hand away. His hair was a big enough mess already. Jim smiled warmly.
“I’ll be back before the food shows up,” he promised before he strode across the restaurant floor. Sighing, Blair watched Jim’s very fine ass heading out the door. Obviously Blair had screwed up somewhere because he had the feeling he’d decided to go to Bethesda despite the fact that his brain was still clearly saying that was a bad idea. Worse, Jim had listened to him.
This is the sequel
Pandora's Box.
Jim/Blair, Alex/Naomi
( Chapters 1-3 ) ( Chapter four ) ( Chapter Five ) ( Chapter 6 ) ( Chapter 7 ) ( Chapter 8 ) ( Chapter 9 ) ( Chapter 10 ) ( Chapter 11 )
Jim made a decision to "out" himself as a Sentinel rather than allow two men to suffer. However, now that they're heading back to the states, the guys have to make some hard decisions about what they want their future to look like, because they can't go back to their old lives. Even worse, neither of them know the true meaning of the mystical battle Jim and Alex fought. Jim might have won the throne and Blair might have earned his title of shaman, but the universe is not done with them.
~12~
Getting off the plane at John F. Kennedy airport, Blair was caught off guard by the overly air-conditioned air, the scent of plastics, and the odor from a half dozen restaurants. Despite the fact that it was all normal, there was something about the place that felt wrong. Blair could feel it in the pit of his stomach. When he’d first started college, he'd walk into a classroom and everyone looked at him like he didn't belong there. Blair had not been an early bloomer, so he'd looked about thirteen. He’d spent his first year at college feeling this constant unease-like the kind he felt now. Even though no one in the airport was looking at him and judging him, he had that same queasy feeling that he’d had back in college. He was in the wrong place. He didn't know the rules, and he was going to make an ass of himself. He couldn't shake that feeling.
“Chief, are you okay?” Jim frowned at him.
“Peachy.” Blair didn’t even try and sound convincing.
Jim raised an eyebrow, but Blair could only shrug in response. He had no idea what was wrong. Jim slipped an arm around Blair, resting his hand against the small of Blair’s back. Usually they tried to be a little more discrete in public, but Blair needed the point of contact. As they joined the throngs of travelers, Blair moved even closer to Jim. They had lost their luggage along the way, so everything they owned was in one carry-on bag Jim had over his shoulder. Blair still kept looking around, sure he had left something behind.
“I've heard some good reviews on the steak place they have in here,” Jim commented as the river of people spilled out into the part of the airport with the shops and restaurants.
“I have a heart attack, and you offer me steak,” Blair said with a dramatic roll of his eyes. “Is there some hidden aggression that I should know about?”
“I figured I'd have the steak. I figured you'd find whatever rabbit food or algae they offered at the steak place.” Jim guided them toward the west. “Besides, Chief, I suspect that your heart attack had less to do with cholesterol than it did with….” Jim waved his hand in the air, toward the universe in general.
Blair glanced around, nervous about sounding crazy to anyone who might be listening. “Yeah, I got that feeling. I also get the feeling that the universe just hates me in general.” Blair made a face. Considering he’d had a heart attack, a shamanic battle, and a near-drowning experience all in the space of a few days, it wasn’t an unreasonable conclusion.
“The universe? No.” Jim sounded sure of that-more sure than Blair was. “Now Alex, she hates you,” he added.
“Man, that's like my stepmother. Actually, that's like your mother-in-law, or your stepmother in law. Whatever. Anyway, how about you not poke the feud?” he suggested. Blair expected Jim to go off about Alex attacking him or grabbing for power or maybe even Alex’s long, criminal past. He didn’t.
“No problem, Chief,” Jim said a little too easily. “Besides, I suspect we aren’t going to see them again for a while.” Moving ahead of Blair, Jim strode through the crowd, forcing people to yield way. Blair trotted behind. The steak place must be really good because Jim was really booking it. Blair glanced over his shoulder. Maybe they were running from someone rather than to somewhere; however, Blair couldn’t see anyone following. Mostly he saw harried businesspeople and cranky families all jostling for a better position in the crowd.
“Here we go.” Jim stopped outside a restaurant, and Blair had to admit that it smelled good. The scent of hot bread and cooking meat drifted out, only to be swept up by the airport’s ventilation system. “Smell that?” Jim asked with a happy smile before he headed in.
“You mean the smell of your arteries hardening?” Blair asked under his breath. Jim didn’t even bother answering.
Inside, the restaurant felt like a regular place-one you would find outside an airport. The only difference was that Blair had to thread his way through the aisle, careful not to trip over the suitcases and bags strewn at the side of every chair. Several of the diners looked worn down to nothing. Blair wondered if he looked as bad as the woman in the corner with deep-set eyes whose head was propped up on her elbow. She looked like one good push would send her face-first into her soup.
Jim found a table, and Blair happily collapsed into the bench. “Ah, the smell of real food. That hospital food will kill you.” Jim opened a menu and lost himself in the choices. “They have fish,” Jim offered.
With a sigh, Blair grabbed the menu. Food wasn’t his top priority right now. If his stomach didn’t stop doing a jig, the food wouldn’t stay down no matter what he ate. Looking around, he studied his fellow passengers. If these people knew Jim was a Sentinel, a man who could hear their secrets, how would they react? Blair knew too much history to be as sanguine as Jim about this whole thing. The McCarthy era, the witch trials, the demonization of Jews… history was full of society hunting down minorities because they felt threatened.
“Chief, it will work out,” Jim said, a touch of the cranky in his voice as he put down his menu.
“You don’t know that,” Blair countered even as he wondered when he’d turned into the pessimist.
Jim put both his elbows on the table and leaned forward. “No, I don’t. But I know I wasn’t going to let those men die just to keep a secret. I also happen to think you and I can handle this better than Naomi and Alex.”
Blair snorted. Right now he’d love to shove this mess off on Naomi, even if her idea of handling things might include causing therapy-inducing levels of trauma on government officials. They deserved to meet Naomi in full warrior-queen mode. “So, what do we do now?” Blair asked.
“You're asking like I'm setting the agenda.”
“Up until now, you have.”
Jim looked absolutely shocked. “What?”
“Jim, come on man. You outed yourself to the press,” Blair hissed in a low whisper. He could hear his anger coloring his voice, but he was at the end of his metaphorical rope. “You took charge with the sentinels in Mexico. You decided to go all covert action on Alex, surrendering just so that you could get her into a better position. You made all those choices without even asking me. Trust me, I have not been driving this trip.” Blair poked his finger at Jim.
Jim caught his hand, and for a second, Blair struggled to pull back, but Jim held his hand, his face full of sympathy. “I didn't want to go to Mexico at all. If you recall, you're the one who said we had to challenge for power,” Jim said, his voice gentle.
“I may have started the engine, but I lost control the steering wheel back around Spokane.” Blair might've kept going, but the flinch of guilt on Jim's face made him stop. Yeah, Jim had made choices, but most of them were just him trying to not get buried by events that were spinning out of control. “Okay, maybe that wasn't entirely fair.”
“Actually, it was.”
Blair’s mouth fell open. “What?”
Shaking his head slowly, Jim let Blair’s hand go. “You're right. I've been charging ahead without really stopping to talk to you about how you feel, but you're the shaman. So what do we do from here?” Jim leaned back and looked at Blair. He wasn't fidgeting or tapping his fingers or doing that weird thing with his jaw that made it clear that he wanted to make the decisions and he was playing nice with Blair. And this wasn’t about Blair’s guide voice, and his ability to override Jim in the heat of the moment. No, this was Jim sitting back with more patience than Blair had ever seen.
“Right now?” Blair tried to think, but right now the only thing he really wanted was a bathtub. A big bathtub. A big bathtub and some place where he didn't have this nagging feeling of wrongness that clung to him.
“You're always telling me to follow my instincts, Chief.”
“Yeah, but that’s you. In case you haven’t noticed, I don’t listen to my own advice,” Blair pointed out. Jim gave him a dirty look, and he probably would have said something sharp, but the waitress saved Blair when she showed up to take their orders. Jim ordered the biggest steak on the menu along with a baked potato with a double order of sour cream, all the while looking at Blair. However, Blair was not even caring about Jim’s eating habits, not when he had way bigger fish to fry. The waitress gave them a smile and vanished, taking their menus with her.
“So tell me what your instincts are saying,” Jim said the moment the woman left the table.
“You're assuming I have them,” Blair said dryly.
“Sandburg!” Jim snapped. The couple at the next table looked over.
Blair ran his hands over his face as though he could scrub off the weariness. He totally recognized the irony here because he was the one always telling Jim to open up about the mystical side of being a sentinel, but Blair couldn’t describe his instincts. Right now, hiding in the nearest really deep hole sounded pretty good, but Blair didn’t know if that was instinct or paranoia. Or maybe it was both. “I don't know,” Blair admitted. “I just know that I feel….”
“Blair?”
Sighing, Blair leaned back in his chair. “I feel wrong. There's something wrong, and I can't put my finger on it. It's driving me nuts.”
Blair expected Jim to completely dismiss his nebulous complaints, but instead Jim was nodding thoughtfully. “Welcome to the annoying side of this shit,” he said with a grim smile. Jim should not be thoughtful with this; it was actually freaking Blair out a little bit. Jim was supposed to be the one that talked about logic and being reasonable and evidence. Then again, Jim was the one who saw magical invisible animals. So maybe Jim wasn't entirely on the logic side of the fence.
Jim pursed his lips and rocked back in his chair. “If we were to go home to Cascade, would that feel more or less wrong?”
“Who knows?” Blair shrugged.
Leaning forward so that the front chair legs hit the floor, Jim announced, “Well then, let's head home.”
Blair frowned. Now that Jim said that, he was definitely feeling more wrong. He wanted to go home, but he couldn't.
“Blair?”
“Do you think I could track down Naomi so that she could give me a crash course on this whole shaman thing? I suck at it,” Blair said. “I seriously suck at it. And we are not talking the fun kind of sucking.”
The corner of Jim's lips twitched. “How about we keep your mother and sucking out of the same sentence?” Jim asked in a sarcastic voice.
Blair groaned as his memories supplied a visual to go with that joke. His mother's idea of playing dirty was way more dirty than Blair could really handle. He was going to be in therapy for a year after what he'd seen. He might respect his mother's lesbian choices, or heterosexual choices for that matter, but he sure as hell didn't want to see them. Ever. Not even if the world was ending and that was the only way to save it. “Mom’s got a mean streak,” Blair muttered.
A chuckle slipped out of Jim, and Blair glared at his lover. Jim held both hands up as though surrendering. “Stand down. I come in peace,” Jim joked, and Blair glared harder. Jim cleared his throat; the bastard was trying not to laugh harder. “So, we're clearly not going home,” Jim said. “We could head back to the Temple or we could go to Peru. I know there was a young shaman and training with the Chopek, so you might be able to get some help there. We could track down your mother, and hope that she stays dressed as we ask her for help. We could make contact with Jack Kelso and have him watch our backs before we head back to Mexico to help two sentinels there, or we could go to Bethesda and see their sentinels. We could call Simon and see if we could get some back up here as we tried to find the US press and get them interested in the story. We could call my father and see if he could give us permission to hide out at his place for a while-not really going to ground as much as staying out of the way for a while. For that matter, we could go to ground. You know I have the skills to take us off the grid if you really want to disappear. There are a lot of options here, Blair. Which one feels right?” Jim ticked off each option like each was equally possible. Disappearing into the underground or going to the press-he offered them all up like it was as easy as making a simple call. However, one of those options sounded even more stupid than the others.
“Man, walking into Bethesda feels like walking into the lion's den,” Blair said with a snort. “That might've worked out for Daniel, but face it, most of the time people walk in the lion's den, they end up dead. I'm not fond of dead. I've been there, and it wasn't that much fun.”
Jim's expression turned sympathetic. He reached across the table and rested his hand on Blair's. “I don't know, Chief. We've walked into a lot of lions’ dens in the past few years, and we've done pretty good.”
Frowning, Blair studied Jim, searching for some sign that he was joking, but Jim looked pretty damn serious. “You want to go to Bethesda?”
“Want?” Jim paused. “No.” Jim was emphatic about that. “However, that's the first option you mentioned. If your gut says we should go to Bethesda, we should.”
“When did you start trusting my gut?”
“I always trusted you. The whole reason I never had partners at work was because I didn’t trust them, but I pretty much trusted you from day one.”
“You thought I was a naïve kid,” Blair pointed out.
Jim didn’t bother denying that. He made a little half-shrug and grinned at Blair. “Yeah, that crossed my mind once or twice. However, it could just be that I’m a cranky, disillusioned old soldier. But things have changed. When you went to your shamanic rites, you were on the spirit plane, Blair. I could feel you.”
“Really? Cool.” Blair nodded, and Jim rolled his eyes.
“The first time we went to South America, back when Simon disappeared, you spent all this time explaining how mystical experiences were really just stories. They were myths to explain human experience.”
Blair cringed as he remembered that. “Man, I was full of shit.”
“Yeah,” Jim agreed. “You were. I didn't know how to talk to you, because you didn't….”
“I didn't understand how important it was to you,” Blair guessed. Jim made a lot of noises about being logical, but in the end, he trusted his gut more than most men. He trusted his guts and his magical invisible animal. “You probably should've told me that I was full of shit.”
Jim shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe I was trying hard to hold on to a friend, and telling him that he was so full of shit but his eyes were turning brown from it… it probably wouldn't have helped.”
Blair laughed. “Oh man, you have me there. I would not have appreciated the attitude.” Blair sighed and for a time, they both sat in silence. The rumble of the airport was muffled here, but Blair could imagine that Jim could hear thousands of voices, of heartbeats, of mechanical motors and conversations and footsteps. They lived in different worlds, and part of Blair felt a responsibility to those men at Bethesda, and another part wanted to hide Jim and his world from prying eyes. He couldn’t do both. “So, you think it's some sort of Freudian slips that I focused on Bethesda, huh?” he finally asked.
“Was it?”
Blair thought about all the problems they'd walk right into it they went to Bethesda. If the military read the Mexican articles when Jim and Blair were on a military facility, that wasn't just walking into the lion's den. That was walking into the lion’s den with ten pounds of T-bone steaks strapped to their bodies. Logically, they should both be running screaming the other way at the very suggestion, but that's not how Blair felt.
“This is all kinds of stupid,” Blair warned.
“So you want to go to Bethesda.” Jim's voice wasn't accusatory or angry, even though it should be.
“Want? Totally not. Man what I want to do is run the opposite way. What I want is to go home and take a two hour hot shower.”
“In that case, we'll have to stop at Home Depot on the way home so I can buy a new hot water heater.”
“Make it a really big one.” Blair spread his hands out indicate just how big of a hot water heater he wanted. But the humor faded quickly. “Maybe we can do that next week. Going home right now just doesn't feel like the right thing to do. Now that I've seen the Mexican sentinels, I'm feeling boatloads of guilt about the American ones. The data I was using to show they are Sentinels show they are Sentinels in trouble. And I've been trying to help from the other side of the country. In Mexico, I was right there. I could see the rash. I could see the way his eyes didn't focus right.” Blair rubbed both hands over his face. His eyes felt like they had sand in them, and the stubble scratched over his palms. “What the hell am I thinking? I'm trying to help those men when I'm sitting in Cascade.”
Blair sucked in a startled breath when Jim caught his hand and pulled it close to his heart. “Hey, you can't fix everything. If you try, you're going to rip yourself pieces, Chief.”
“I know.” Blair tried pulling his hand back away from Jim.
Jim tightened his grip and pulled Blair's arm across the table so that he could sandwich it between his hands. “I'm serious, Blair. You can't save everyone.” Jim spoke each word slowly and distinctly. “You know that in your head, Chief. But if you forget it, if you don’t believe that in your heart, I swear I will drag you away to have a nice hot shower and a lot of therapy.”
Blair snorted his disbelief. Jim wasn’t the biggest fan of therapy.
Jim still held Blair’s hand tenderly, but he glared hotly. It was an odd combination. “If you want go give the government a good hard jerk on the reins and make them change course with these Sentinels, I will back you up, Blair,” Jim promised. “But if you start having unrealistic expectations about yourself, you will be the one getting jerked back in line.”
“Okay, that’s sounding vaguely threatening.”
“Good,” Jim said firmly. “I may not be your commanding officer, but you’re my shaman, and you’re about to go to war, so if I have to pull you out of the line of fire and drag you to a shrink, I will.”
“You-“
“Try me,” Jim said darkly. His fingers traced gentle, lazy circles against Blair’s wrist, but Jim’s voice didn’t have an ounce of compromise in it. Blair was getting emotional whiplash from the mixed signals. “I’m going to go see about getting us transportation to Bethesda. If there are any friendly doctors up there that don’t think you’re a fruitcake, you might want to give them a heads up,” Jim suggested, his tone slipping into an easy banter as he stood up. He smiled down at Blair and then tousled Blair’s hair.
“Hey!” Blair protested, knocking Jim’s hand away. His hair was a big enough mess already. Jim smiled warmly.
“I’ll be back before the food shows up,” he promised before he strode across the restaurant floor. Sighing, Blair watched Jim’s very fine ass heading out the door. Obviously Blair had screwed up somewhere because he had the feeling he’d decided to go to Bethesda despite the fact that his brain was still clearly saying that was a bad idea. Worse, Jim had listened to him.