Jim and Blair's Excellent Terminator Adventure
Carrying on posting stories that have been shared with mailing lists but not previously posted, this one was posted in a Gen version on the sentinelangst list, but there's a slash version up at 852 Prospect. Or you can read it here: those of you who don't read slash may find you can take it - it's about as non-graphic as you can get! In three parts behind the cuts here and in the next two entries, or else go here to read it at the slash archive.
Jim and Blair's Excellent Terminator Adventure
by Sheffield
Sunday evening
"Blair Sandburg?"
He took off his spectacles and had a closer look at the grim-faced sex god who had just flung his office door open. Not scary so much as sinister: shades, jeans, a blue sweater and a black leather jacket - the guy's whole appearance screamed "cop" with a capital K.
"Come with me if you want to live," Mr Sexy-but-Sinister said coldly, holding out a hand.
Blair stood up, shrugged on his jacket, and went.
Naomi was going to kill him.
Half an hour earlier
Office hours meant exactly that. Office hours. If only he had an office, instead of a disused store-cupboard out of the way of departmental foot traffic in a basement corridor the co-eds referred to as "spider central". Still, it cut down on the number of students interrupting his research just to whinge about their grades. If they made it to his door, they tended to have the kind of problems he'd rather know about than not.
Although the down side was it meant there was little in the way of back up down here when Really Weird Shit started happening.
Like now.
I mean to say, lightning? You don't get lightning indoors, right? But he hadn't imagined it, any more than he'd imagined that whole "creaking start to a horror movie" noise, and he certainly hadn't imagined the telephone box that had materialised about six feet away from him, in just about the only telephone-box-materialising-out-of-nothing sized space in the whole damned room.
Okaaaaaaaaaay then. A telephone box just materialised in his office. With lightning. Moving swiftly on, and remembering not to go mad...
He stepped out of the booth and gave himself a thumbs up.
At which point Blair Sandburg - the one sitting behind his desk minding his own business, not the one jumping out of telephone boxes - passed out in an ungainly heap.
"Whaaa?"
"Dude!"
"What? What? What?"
"Dude! Cool it! It's only me. You. Well, kinda you only not, because we're from, like, this whole alternate reality kinda deal."
"Why don't you let me explain it, Chief?"
This was another guy, maybe ten years older, in jeans and a leather jacket, with something about him that screamed "cop" with a capital K.
"Hi Blair," he said gently, taking off a pair of shades to reveal blue, blue eyes. Cold fingers started playing the piano up and down Blair's spine and he had to take a deep breath to prevent the words "hubba hubba" leaking from his mouth.
"My name," the sex god continued "is Jim Ellison and this is my partner, a version of you from another reality. We came to give you a message - um, you haven't gone mad, by the way - but in about half an hour a guy looking like me is going to show up in your office and ask you to go with him. You really, really need to do what he says. OK?"
Visions of what he would like Ellison's double to ask him to do started dancing in front of his eyes and he remembered he was hyperventilating.
OK? Oh OK.
"This must be some new definition of the word 'OK' that only occurs in your reality, right? NO I AM NOT OK AND WHAT'S GOING ON AND WHO ARE YOU
GUYS AND..."
"Told ya!" the Other Blair said cheerfully. "Look, Blair - I can call you Blair, right? You're going to be targeted by this psycho, right, and the only thing that can save you is your own personal hero here," Blair looked at himself and decided quickly that he was Ur-Blair and the weirdo in the phone booth was Blair #2 - and was he really that much of a flake?
"And you can't have mine," Blair #2 said firmly.
"Can't have your what?" UrBlair said, knowing exactly what he was being warned to keep his hands off. No drooling, he told himself sternly.
"My Jim. Oh, sorry, haven't introduced you. Blair Sandburg (this reality), meet James Jim Ellison (my reality). The one from your reality will show up in about half an hour and rescue you from your own personal psycho killer, OK?"
"But please don't give him a hard time, and make sure you do exactly what he tells you, when he tells you. It's for your own good," Jim Ellison said.
Blair#2 snorted and then said firmly "If you only remember one thing from this conversation, make it this: when this is all over, remember to pay it forward."
The telephone booth beeped.
"Hey, dude, time," Blair #2 said, pointing at his watch.
"But-"
"Jim, you can't protect us ALL. Let his own Jim turn up in the nick, all right?"
"Yeah, I suppose."
The two of them moved back towards their telephone booth and UrBlair heard Blair #2 say "You know, that conversation made a whole lot more sense, this time around."
More psycho sound effects and a little more lightning, and the telephone box disappeared.
Blair sat down at his desk and opened his journal. He picked up a pen.
And then put it down again.
Some activities you don't record, just in case your psychiatrist ever demands to read your journal and you wind up in the rubber room. And, anyway, if an unknown sex god turned up wanting to save him from psychos, who was he to complain?
He snuck a copy of the latest Harry Potter out from the stack of books on his desk and tried to wait patiently for someone to arrive - his rescuer, or else the men with the white coats.