Flesh and Blood and Heart
It is way past time for me to put my Moonridge story out there... I haven't wanted to edit and revise, but I'm in an editing mood, so I thought I'd share.
Flesh and Blood and Heart
Sentinel x Mag 7 (Tucson 7 AU)
Jim/Blair (established relationship)
2010 Moonridge story
A call reveals a truth about Jim's past that he's not ready for. Blair is enough family for him, so the thought that he's related to a con artist in Tuscon does not please him. Unfortunately for Jim, once you poke the Tucson 7, they're likely to poke back.
Curious about these Tucson guys? Check out Sunstroke, Insanity, and Faith (which introduces a very odd group of law enforcement officers/con men/vigilantes).
Chapter One
"Is this James Ellison?"
"No, actually I'm his roommate. Just a sec," Blair answered. He held the phone out. "Jim, phone."
Jim barely kept himself from snarling. Damn Blair for answering the phone during the fourth quarter, anyway. He gave Blair an unhappy look as he took the phone. The little shit didn‘t even bother pretending to be intimidated. "Ellison," he answered.
"Detective Ellison?" The voice asked.
"Yes." Jim focused on the voice. She sounded stressed.
"I don't know if you remember me, but I’m Laura Smitherson's older sister."
"Oh, of course," Jim lied. Grabbing a piece of paper, he wrote the name and shoved it at Blair. Blair glanced at it and scrawled underneath, "burglary-homicide, December, neighbor's ex-husband." Jim nodded. Now he remembered the case. It'd been an ugly one because the victim's wife and sister were both nurses at the local hospital where the victim's body had been brought in before anyone realized that they were on shift. Both women had been emotionally devastated.
"I probably shouldn't be calling you," she said. Blair turned the television off and then planted himself on the end of the couch, watching Jim curiously.
Jim slipped into a reassuring tone of voice. "If something is going on, you can tell me."
The woman laughed. "This is not that kind of a call, Detective. You were tested for the national bone marrow registry, right?"
Jim frowned. "Yeah," he agreed. "Sandburg talked most of the precinct into the testing." He recognized that he was sounding a little defensive about that, but this whole situation was starting to make Jim more than a little uncomfortable. Blair scooted close enough that their legs touched, but Laura Smitherson's voice was so soft that Blair wasn't going to be able to hear without Sentinel hearing. As much as Jim would love to give Blair his special senses, even if for just one day, so far it hadn’t worked. Jim poked his thumb upstairs--toward the phone extension next to their bed. Taking that as permission, Blair took off for the stairs. Maybe if Blair was listening in, he could figure out what the hell this woman was trying to say.
Laura sighed. "Okay, this is a total breach of confidentiality, but I feel like I owe you something. You really went out of your way for my family."
"Was there a problem with my test?" Jim could hear Blair's heart start tripping along faster.
"No, there's no problem... exactly." Jim's frown deepened. The woman sighed again. "Okay, I know this could get me fired, but you mentioned that you only had the one brother, Steven. But one of the doctors here is doing a genetic sampling test, and he didn't remove the names from the samples, which is technically a violation of confidentiality rules."
"Ms. Smitherson," Jim said tightly.
"Ms. Dalton, actually," she corrected him. Jim probably would have yelled, but he could hear the stress in her voice. Blair started making small muttering noises that even Jim couldn't actually understand, but from the tone, he was trying to get Jim to calm down. Taking a deep breath, Jim tried to find the sort of patience he normally saved for victims.
"Ms. Dalton, I promise that I can and will keep your name out of any paperwork, but if there's a problem, you need to talk to me."
She laughed. "If I didn't, you'd probably come track me down by this point, huh?"
"Very likely," Jim agreed. He glanced over as people poured off the sidelines and onto the field. Someone had won the game, and he didn't even care who.
"Detective, I was running some samples though the genetic sequencer and I noticed a close familial match." Jim hadn't realized how tense he was until he sagged down, panic turning to relief. They hadn't found some deadly disease lurking in his DNA; they hadn't found some genetic equivalent to a sign pointing at him with the word "Sentinel freak" in neon. The relief was so great that it took a second for Jim to process what Laura had just said.
"A match? Why were you running my DNA for matches?" Jim demanded.
"You signed a consent form for your genetic material to be used in medical research."
"I did?" Jim cringed. Fuck. He needed to pay more attention to what he signed, but at the time, he'd been trying to rein in Blair who had been determined to browbeat Simon into donating with statistics on how African Americans were underrepresented in the bone marrow banks and how that could make finding a match more difficult for minorities. Jim had been fairly sure that Simon had been on the verge of blowing. Even if Blair was right that tissue matches were often difficult across races, Simon and Jim had come from the generation where racial equality had come from a sort of intentional blindness. Jim didn’t think of Simon as black, just as a damn fine captain. The Rangers had taught him a colorblindness since the only color in the army was green. Blair, however, was poking the racial button hard, and Simon had been close to giving Blair a piece of his mind. “I don’t remember signing that,” Jim admitted.
"Well, I was assisting with the tests. It’s pretty standard to run the DNA of test subjects to see if you have blood relatives and exclude them from the sample, but you said that you brother and your father were in Cascade."
"They are." Jim’s earlier relief was giving way to a duller sort of panic. Blair’s face appeared over the bedroom railing, staring down at Jim, the second phone still held up to his ear. “A kid?” he mouthed silently. Yeah, Jim’s brain had gone to the same place. It wasn’t like he’d been celibate when he’d been in the army.
“I just thought this result looked like a first degree relative. Maybe I'm out of line here, and if you tell me to mind my own-" Paula started equivocating again.
"What do you know?" Jim snapped the words out, his patience gone. Unless he was misunderstanding this woman, she was suggesting he had a kid out there he didn‘t know, a kid he‘d abandoned. His guts clenched at the thought of some ten or twelve or fifteen year old who believed that their father had left them. He'd made his share of mistakes when he'd been in the service. While he was better than most about using protection, he couldn't deny that there had been times he'd been too drunk or too horny to be as safe as he should have been. At twenty-two, it just hadn't seemed important. However, Jim never had would have left a child behind. Never. Not if he’d known.
“I have a record of a first degree relative in Tucson, Arizona.”
The breath left Jim as another possibility occurred to him. “I could be my mother,” Jim said slowly. He wasn’t sure how he’d feel about that. When his mother had walked out of his life, Jim had been desperate to get her back. However, as a grown man, he really didn’t want to open that emotionally messy can of worms. His mother had walked away from her family, and Jim was inclined to respect that choice and stay the hell away from her.
“It’s male,” Paula said, shooting down that hope.
"Are you sure?"
"Absolutely," Ms. Dalton answered. "Do you want the name?" Her voice rose, stress driving the tone higher, and Jim realized that she had good reason for stress. If he told anyone where he'd gotten this information, she would probably lose her job. But he'd never turned in the nurse who had first called Blair and illegally given him Jim's medical records, and Jim wasn't going to turn Ms. Dalton in, either.
"I would like the name, and I promise you that as far as I'm concerned, this is an anonymous tip that I will deal with quietly and discretely unless some other information independently reaches my desk," Jim promised. And that other information would be hitting Jim's desk just as soon as he could get his ass to the station. If he had a kid out there, he was not going to play deadbeat dad. Well, not anymore, at least.
"Ezra Standish," Ms. Dalton said. Ezra. Jim wondered which of his lovers had hated their son enough to give him a name like that.
"Thank you."
"Don't mention it. You know, like the old joke."
"You mean really, seriously, don't mention it?" Jim asked dryly. "I can do that. And thank you." The woman had really stuck her neck out for him, and Jim knew how much trouble she would be in if anyone ever found out.
"I owed you this one." Before Jim could deny that or point out that he had only done his job when he’d helped her family, Jim heard the phone line click off. He was left standing with the dial tone in his ear.
Jim hung up the phone and took a second to collect his thoughts. "I might have a son," Jim said softly. His brain couldn't quite make sense out of that thought. He remembered what it had felt like as a kid-to know that a parent didn't love you enough to stick around. And Jim had inflicted that on some son out there in the world. Hopefully the mother would have told him that she never contacted Jim-never warned him that he had a son. Hopefully the mother hadn’t done something stupid like tell the kid that his father didn’t want him. Jim could feel his fury rise at even the chance that she’d done that. No matter what the mother had told Ezra, Jim had some serious amends to make.
"We need to go to the station. I want to see if we can find anything on Ezra Standish out of Tucson, Arizona." Jim looked up, and Blair was hanging over the rail looking as shell-shocked as Jim felt.
“You got it,” Blair agreed. He came running down the stairs at breakneck speed, his backpack already hanging from one hand. Jim was moving slower. He felt like an old man. He might have a son.
“Jim, you okay?” Blair was unexpectedly in front of him, a palm resting on Jim’s chest. Here Jim was, upending their lives with some potential child-hell, some potential teenager or near-teenager, and Blair was worried about him. No accusations. No blaming. No worries about how this would impact them financially. Jim looked down at Blair, at the confusion and worry on his face.
Reaching up, Jim stroked a hand over Blair’s cheek. “I love you,” Jim confessed. He didn’t say it often enough, he knew that.
Blair looked even more worried. “Totally. I know that. Man, you know I love the shit out of you, too,” he offered back. Jim smiled. Blair might have a reputation for chasing women down at the station, a well deserved one because he’d chased everyone from the head of forensic science to the donut girl before he’d landed in Jim’s bed. However, Jim was fairly sure that he had caught a pretty limited number of the ones he chased. The man’s idea of sweet-talk certainly wouldn’t have impressed Carolyn. Jim just reached out and caught Blair in a hug and held him tightly. “Oh man, this is freaking you out, isn’t it?” Blair asked, his words muffled against Jim’s chest.
“No,” Jim insisted. Blair’s only answer was a soft chuckle.
“Hey, we’ll deal with this like we have ever other problem.”
“Together?” Jim asked. He let Blair go so the man had some breathing room.
“I was going to say one step at a time, but then, I’m not the mushy one,” Blair said with a teasing smile.
“Watch it, short stuff,” Jim warned.
“Yeah, yeah.” Blair moved closer, wrapping his arms around Jim and giving him a hug before he turned and headed for the door. “This is going to be so wild.”
“Only you, Chief,” Jim said, thinking of how his ex-wife would have reacted to this news. It certainly wouldn’t have been with this sort of amused energy, that’s for damn sure. Carolyn was an intelligent, articulate, sexually exciting woman, but she had a huge button marked “betrayal” and anything that came close to hitting it sent her into orbit. This would definitely have hit her button. Jim pulled his coat down off the rack and shrugged into it, following Blair out the door. Maybe that’s why he never could make it work with Caro: they were too much the same. Jim knew for a fact that he wouldn’t be this good natured if some woman showed up on their door step with little Blair, Jr. He’d probably act like an ass for at least a week. Luckily for Jim, Blair was a better man than he was.
Chapter Two
Jim stared at the computer screen and tried to figure out exactly when his life had gotten so strange. He'd like to blame Blair, but he was pretty sure this mess pre-dated Blair.
"Oh man, if that is your son, you started like..." Blair whistled, "seriously young. Terrifyingly young. There's a woman out there who is so very guilty of pedophilia."
Jim glared, but he had to admit that Ezra Standish was a little old to be Jim's son. He was five years younger than Steven and nine years younger than Jim, but he had a police file long enough to make a career criminal proud. Suspicion of securities fraud, illegal gambling, check forgery, illegal wire tap, gambling, and a dozen other charges, not a one of them stuck, not even one very odd case of stalking where the target had been a suspected Mexican drug lord. Jim couldn‘t figure out why anyone would want to stalk a drug lord. As a police officer, Jim could feel his blood pressure rise just looking at the records. This was a career criminal, and the police couldn't get anything to stick. Jim knew how frustrating that was. Standish's was fairly clean in Tucson--one case of firing a weapon inside city limits and that odd stalking of a drug kingpin. Even those had disappeared with no record of them ever going to trial.
"Either that nurse can't read a DNA test, or this is some con I just don't understand." Jim leaned back in his chair and stared at the screen.
Blair leaned over the back of Jim’s chair. "He doesn't look like someone who would get tested for the bone marrow registry."
"Not unless someone had a gun at his head," Jim agreed. That made it even more likely that this was a con of some sort.
Blair leaned in and hit the down arrow key to see the next page of charges. Ezra had been in Chicago for nearly five years, and the Chicago PD were seriously incompetent if they couldn't get something to stick on someone with this many arrests. Standish must have a memorial plaque in booking. Blair whistled in admiration. "So, what's the plan?"
"Nothing."
"What?” Blair’s voice went up an octave. “No way. Come on, don't you want to know what's going on?" Blair turned on Jim, his expression caught somewhere between shock and disbelief.
"Nope, I really don't."
“Man, he’s a first degree relative.”
“No, Sandburg, he isn’t.” Jim reached over and closed the records window. “I don’t know what happened in that lab, but clearly he’s not my son.” Jim shifted in his seat.
For long seconds, Blair just looked at him. “Emotional roller coaster, huh?” he asked softly. Jim glared back.
“No.”
Blair shook his head disbelievingly, but he also backed away so that Jim could turn his chair to face his desk. Shit. He should be happy to know that he hadn’t abandoned some kid, but Jim just felt unsettled. On the drive over, he’d come to terms with the idea of having a son. He’d mentally practiced introduction speeches, and now what he had was a con artist.
“Jim?” Simon walked in from the hall, a stack of paper in his hand. “I thought you and Sandburg were watching the game. You have a lead?” Simon walked over to Jim’s desk.
Pushing himself back, Jim stretched his back and suddenly realized how late it was. “Turned out to be nothing, sir. I just wanted to look something up.”
“One of Sandburg’s long shots?” Simon gave Blair a suspicious look.
“Hey, my longshots payoff,” Blair defended himself. Then he flinched. "Sometimes,” he added wryly.
“I never said they didn’t, Sandburg. Hell, sometimes it annoys me how often your crackpot ideas turn out to be right. I sit up at night and get ulcers over it.” Simon’s tone didn’t exactly make that sound like a compliment, but Blair beamed. Simon shook his head.
Simon turned his attention to Jim. “Since you’re here, I need to clarify some of your reports before they go up to the DA. You want to do it now or tomorrow?”
“Might as well take care of it now. I’m not going to be able to sleep,” Jim said. Simon and Blair both looked at him with some concern. Simon might not know what had happened, but he knew something had. He was also a good enough friend to not push matters, which is why Jim would rather spend time with Simon than Blair tonight. He might respect Blair’s habit of talking things through, but right now Jim felt a little emotionally raw. Worse, he felt stupid for being emotionally raw. How the hell do you get emotionally attached to a son that doesn’t even exist, and yet Jim could feel the harsh strains of loss pulling at him, and he’d never handled that emotion well.
“I can drive you home if Sandburg wants to take the truck back to the loft,” Simon offered. Considering that reviewing paperwork could take hours, it really wasn’t fair to ask Blair to hang around.
“I won’t even make you wash it, Chief,” Jim said with a smile, reaching for the truck keys.
“Hey, I have lots of work of my own. You two have fun with the red tape. I’m just going to amuse myself.” Blair pushed past Jim and sat down in his chair with an innocent expression on his face. Jim opened his mouth, on the verge of telling him to back off whatever weirdness was going on with Ezra Standish, but he didn’t.
The man had some sort of relationship to Jim, and he figured Blair knew just as well as he did that there was only one reasonable explanation. Jim’s mom had a third son. Ezra the career criminal and con artist was Jim’s half-brother. The last thing Jim needed in his life was some confidence man trying to take advantage of Jim’s police connections, but for Blair, family was important. His mother and Jim were the only family he really had.
Jim’s father had been downright shitty when he’d finally figured out that Blair was Jim’s partner at work and in bed, and Steven had pretty much stuttered through some big speech about how he was happy for Jim and then he’d never called back. Oh, when his dad had figured out that cutting off Blair was the same as cutting off Jim, he'd backed off. He'd issued dinner invitations that included Blair and made all the polite noise. However, whenever Blair showed up with Jim for dinner, there was this awkwardness the descended on the room. Every time Blair went to the house with Jim, he had this hope that things would be better, and every time, William Ellison screwed up. Jim couldn’t blame Blair for wanting to find one supportive family member; however, he didn’t think some career criminal who didn’t even know them was a good place to start. As far as Jim was concerned, he loved his family, but he didn’t want them around. He didn’t need his father or his brother or his mother with her other son.
His mother. Hell, he hadn’t indulged in fantasies about finding his mother since he was seventeen years old. He could still feel a twinge of pain at that thought, but he knew that trying to divert Blair would just lead to long discussions about emotional constipation, and Jim really wasn't up for that particular speech. “Don’t get in too much trouble,” Jim said as he started toward Simon’s office. Simon looked at them oddly, obviously trying to figure out what was going on. After a half-second, he followed Jim. In Simon’s office, Jim sank down into his normal chair.
“So, what’s the kid up to this time?” Simon asked, swinging the door shut. The squad room was quieter at night, but Blair seemed so hooked into the gossip vine that anything said with the door open did seem to drift back to him. Sometimes Jim wondered if Blair didn’t have the Sentinel hearing the way he seemed to know everything.
“Why do you think Blair would be up to anything?” Jim asked, raising an eyebrow. Simon was his oldest friend and a damn good captain, but Blair was his partner, and he had Jim’s loyalty. Jim cringed as he remembered his reaction when he’d thought Blair was hitting on a visiting professor from Africa. Well, his loyalty would be with Blair when he wasn’t being an insecure jackass, at least.
“Are you going to tell me he isn’t?” Simon challenged him.
Jim sighed. “We got a tip that I might be related to someone in Tucson,” Jim said, glossing over the details. Simon was smart enough to not ask for details.
“Really?” Simon sat down and looked over the desk. “Is he a Sentinel?”
Jim was so shocked that he couldn’t come up with an answer right away. "Why would you assume he was?"
"Because Blair looks like the cat that just figured out how to get the bottle of cream open. Besides, you two always say this is some genetic thing. If this is some relative, wouldn't there be a chance?"
Leaning back in his chair, Jim rubbed a hand over his face. Shit. That hadn't even occurred to him. Blair had done one or two subtle tests to check Stephen, and he was either normal or the genes were dormant, but if Jim had a half-brother, there was a chance that he could have the gene-assuming that the Sentinel stuff was from his mother's side.
Jim thought back to her. In his earliest memories, she was always smiling. She had this devilish smirk as she snuck him a cookie behind his father's back. It was like Jim and his mom were co-conspirators in whatever adventure she had planned. He still remembered the day that she lied to the school, saying he was sick so she could take him to the zoo for the opening day of a brand new baby tiger exhibit. Jim had missed some big state test, and when he went back to school, he'd bragged about seeing the tigers and even getting to go behind the exhibit and see the long hallways where the employees had fed the cats. He'd been six or seven.The school had called his father making all these noises about responsibility and attendance. His father had thrown a fit, yelling in that barely controlled voice he'd used before things got really bad. His mother had sat in her favorite chair with a drink in hand, absorbing all his father's anger.
Standing in the hallway, Jim had peeked around the corner, crying because his mother was in trouble. He'd felt like it was his fault, and he remembered being afraid that he was going to throw up on the floor. He was that upset. But right in the middle of his father's tirade, his mother had looked over toward him and winked. She hadn't cared about the trouble-they'd had their day of fun. But no matter how much Jim tried, he couldn't remember anything that would suggest she had extraordinary senses.
"Jim?"
Jim looked up to find Simon looked at him with some concern. "Just lost in some memories, Simon."
"Because of some relative you don't know?” Simon leaned back in his chair. “I have lots of third cousins I don't know, Jim. None of them make me get an expression on my face like someone just shot my puppy."
With some effort, Jim cleared his expression and slipped into the sort of neutral mask he used when he went undercover. So much for Simon being a good enough friend to not push for information.
"Shit, Jim, that isn't what I meant, for you to close yourself off. We're friends. What the hell is going on here?" Now Simon leaned closer, his gaze flicking to Blair on the other side of the glass wall. If Jim didn’t talk, Simon was going to try and get information out of Blair, and Jim would rather avoid that.
Guilt forced a grimace out of Jim. "It's more than a relative, Simon. I have some pretty reliable source that thinks it's a brother."
Simon reared back, not even bothering to hide his shock. "A brother? How reliable is this source? And who is this mysterious brother of yours. No offense, Jim, but when you past shows up, it's rarely pretty."
Jim gave a dark laugh. That was too true for comfort. "And it's not pretty this time, either. He's a con artist, a felon who would be in jail if the cops in Chicago or Tucson had two active brain cells still firing,” he admitted.
"And your source?"
"Doesn't have any reason to lie, Simon.” Jim rubbed his hand over his face. “Shit. I would just as soon ignore this whole mess, but I'm afraid that Blair is going to want to poke it until a happy family reunion falls out."
Simon nodded and worked his fingers as if he wanted to holding a cigar. "So, will one?" Simon sounded oddly neutral about the idea.
"He's a white collar criminal. Securities fraud, forgery, gambling-of course, recently he seems to be branching out. Tucson has him with a weapons violation and a case of stalking, so who knows what he's into."
"Stalking?"
"Stalking a Mexican drug lord, no less," Jim said with a wry expression.
Simon gave a bark of laughter. "Well, he does have the Ellison habit of overachieving. What? He couldn't start with an ex-girlfriend like the rest of the stalkers?"
Shaking his head, Jim rubbed his face again. It was like this was a really odd, tofu-inspired dream and he just couldn't pull himself free of it. "Something like that. None of it makes sense, Simon. I mean, sure, my mother could have given birth to another son, but his police record doesn't make one bit of sense. There's no reason for a career white-collar criminal to start carrying a weapon. If he did, and if he fired it inside city limits, there's no reason for the Tucson cops to cut him any slack. The only thing that would make any sense is if he's a bigger player than he looks like, someone who can buy off the police."
"Someone who might be big enough to take an interest in a Mexican drug lord?" Simon asked in a tone of voice that meant his police instincts were kicking in. Jim had the same thought-that his brother might be a bigger player than he looked on paper. Now that Jim had a chance to say all this out loud, it made sense.
"I don't want to think about it, Simon." The more Jim talked to Simon, the more convinced he was that this was a problem-potentially a huge problem. "And Blair is out there trying to find out something about him." Jim looked through the blinds and looked at Blair madly typing away on the computer. Jim had more faith in Blair's ability to scrounge information from informal sources than he did in any official records.
"Are you comfortable having him poke a hornet's nest? He has a bad habit of attracting hornets."
"I noticed," Jim said dryly. "But if I told him to drop it, he'd just keep digging and hide it from me. I'd rather he do his poking when I'm around to keep him out of trouble."
"Or get pulled into the trouble with him,” Simon warned.
"Considering that this Ezra might be my brother, I think any trouble is my fault."
"Ezra?" Simon’s eyebrows went up.
"It's a pretty stupid name," Jim agreed.
"Very. So, does he have a last name to go with that first name? Calhoun or Hollingsworth the Third, maybe?"
"Standish."
"Ezra Standish.” Simon thought about that for a second, and Jim knew he was filing the name away. More than one person would be digging into Ezra Standish’s past. “He sounds like the main character from one those novels my ex-wife was always reading,” Simon finally commented.
"It does, doesn't it? What are the odds it's a pseudonym?"
"If it is, he's breaking a pretty basic rule of the con-he's going to stick out like a sore thumb with a name like that." Simon drew in a long breath and got that expression that meant he was thinking about something important. "Would you mind if I did a little poking around?"
Jim studied his captain. "This isn't your problem, Simon."
"It feels like someone is trying to set up a friend. That feels like my problem," Simon quickly retorted.
Jim nodded. Blair might be out there looking for evidence that Ezra was a good man, a brother that Jim could embrace. But if this was some sort of con-a scam to use Jim's connections-then Simon would find that quicker than Blair. Jim loved Blair, but the man did try to find the good in everyone, and Jim… well he was either mature enough or cynical enough to believe that some people were just evil. "Thanks, Simon," Jim said.
"Right now we need to review these files. The new DA is about to drive me to drink." Simon pulled a drawer open and pulled out a huge stack of files. The problem with Ezra Standish would have to wait until later. Right now, Jim and Simon had criminal files to deal with so that criminals didn't get off on some technicality. If Ezra Standish were ever to come to Cascade and fire a gun in the city limits, Jim would make sure he didn't get off, but right now, he had about a dozen other criminals to nail to the wall. With a grim determination, Jim opened the first file Simon handed him.