Day Ten - and Yes It Still Is (The Sentinel - gen, 360 words)
Because I wrote it last night, honestly, with Ye Genuine (and Sadly Infrequent These Days) Pen and Paper... but then got distracted by a special on the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Cold War, and never got back to the computer to post it.
Anyway, this is also for sentinel_thurs, and maybe just a bit, a tad, a skerrick early in the season, but given what you can hear in every damn shop in town, I don't think so. Jim Ellison wouldn't be able to wait two months before he cracked...
Jinglekill
Blair gazed at the carnage in something between horror and... awe.
"What did you do?"
Ellison shrugged, putting a brave and determinedly casual face on it. "Look Chief, the law is the law -"
"What law?"
"City ordinance against noise pollution... it wouldn't shut up, it was driving me nuts, okay?"
"Driving you... oh man, Mrs. Donatello-Down-the-Road is going to have a fit when she finds out."
"So don't tell her."
Blair turned big, round eyes on him. "You think we can keep this secret? Jim, you shot it, man!"
"She shouldn't have let it get so loud, then."
"It wasn't! And even if it was, oh oversensitive Sentinel, you shot it six times!!"
Okay, so four would probably have been enough.
"What are you going to tell the uniformed cops, that you thought it was a burglar, that you thought it was offering resistance or hiding a weapon?" Blair was on a roll, and rolled straight over anything Jim might have said. "Like what, plastic candy canes? Man, the throwback in you shouldn't be allowed to carry a gun at this time of year, but how do we explain this?"
Ellison didn't think pointing out who was the team obfuscator here was a good idea. "Don't see why we have to tell - and do you have to bring up the throwback thing again?"
"Jim, you shot her Singing Christmas Tree!!"
"Yeah, but -"
"Six times, man!"
"Yeah, but -" Jim sighed. It has seemed like a good idea to the Sentinel in his brain at the time - but claiming it was a Sentinel thing was going to get him in a heap of trouble with his Captain (even if Simon couldn't stand Jingle Bells muzak either), and probably a heap of tests on heightened reactions to every muzak version of every cheesy carol that Sandburg could find before he'd agree to file the whole thing under "need to know, and no one needs to know"...
But hell, both the Sentinel and the cop still thought the peace and quiet were... well, worth the overkill.
- the end -
The prompt, by the way, was 'overkill'.
Methinks Sandburg's beloved village watchmen were lucky, they didn't have to deal with the sensory onslaughts and cultural taste assaults that were the 1990s On TV :)
(And it is appalling - and shamefully heartwarming - how many of our Fannish Heroes one can see doing precisely the same thing, without the excuse of a throwback in the genes...