Sentinel!Neal 7
Okay! Sorry for the hiatus, folks, but I was organizing a book sale at my library internship. I'm done now. (Well, the sale is going on again next week, but I'm done organizing it.) Anyway, you've got two parts tonight--this one is fairly short, but the next one is all one huge scene, and it wouldn't all fit.
Peter went to take a shower, leaving Neal to watch his program. He couldn’t figure out if Neal was really able to shake off the pain of the last few months and look forward happily to a better future, if he was putting up a front, or if he had some kind of Sentinel Stockholm syndrome. Neal ought to have been angry at him. Maybe it would be easier on Peter if he was.
When he came out of the bathroom, dressed in sweats and a t-shirt, he found Cyndi’s Kindle on his pillow.
“Got you something,” Neal said, not looking away from the TV.
Peter picked up the Kindle. On the screen was the title page of Sentinels and Guides for Dummies. “Well, that was easy,” he said. Apparently he could have solved their problem a long time ago if it had occurred to him to go to Amazon and type the word “Sentinel.”
“Uh-huh. Here’s an idea: why don’t you say ‘thank you’ and start reading, instead of angsting about it for another twenty minutes?”
“…thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
After taking a moment to figure out how to turn the pages, Peter started reading. He saw quickly that the book was meant for someone who, like him, knew next to nothing about Sentinels or Guides. However, the authors clearly never imagined that the working Guide would need such basic information-instead, they wrote for newly-identified teenagers looking to get an idea of what their lives would be like, the parents of those teenagers, or mundanes (“a term used by some Sentinels and Guides to refer to individuals who are not Sentinels or Guides,” the book helpfully explained) who were working, living, or otherwise associating with a Sentinel or Guide.
The first couple of chapters were an overview of how the senses worked, in mundanes and in Sentinels. The next one was about history. Peter was aware, of course, of the movement for Sentinel and Guide civil rights that started after World War Two-it was hard not to be, even if you weren’t a Guide-but he was surprised to read how bad things had been, not that long ago. Over on the other bed, Neal turned off the television and got under the covers. “Night, Peter.”
“Night.” He quickly turned off the device and shut off the light, still thinking about what he had read. It sounded like something out of the dark ages, but at the time Peter’s own father had been a teenager, Guides had no right to work as anything other than Guides, nor to choose what Sentinel they worked with. In those days, it was possible Peter could have ended up assigned to the FBI, after his compulsory military service was completed, but he wouldn’t married to Elizabeth, and-well, his Sentinel would have had even more power over him than he had over Neal. A sidebar noted that anthropologists studying Sentinels and Guides in non-industrialized countries had been at the forefront of the civil rights movement, proving that the way the US and Europe did things was neither natural nor necessary. Sandburg probably knew all about it-maybe that accounted for some of his visceral horror at what had to seem like a mirror image of the bad old days.
With that on his mind, Peter didn’t sleep well, but he slept. In the groggy light of the morning, Neal came back to the room with free lobby coffee, seeming obnoxiously chipper.
Peter tried to mentally delete the “obnoxiously” part. Neal was happy. That was good. Now that he’d slept on it, he thought he understood why Neal found yesterday’s developments so un-troubling. For Peter, the realization that Neal had been suffering needlessly for months had been a shock. But Neal knew exactly how much he had been suffering; for him, the new information was that it was going to get better. No wonder he was happy.
“According to the desk clerk, there’s a place six blocks that way that has great omelets,” he reported, pointing with one coffee cup as he handed Peter the other.
“Great.” It was also a good thing, he told himself, that Neal was apparently fully confident that Peter wasn’t going to yank his restaurant-picking privileges.
The omelets proved to be delicious, and the coffee almost as good as at Neal’s place-although it may have just come out especially well in comparison to the lobby coffee that Peter had drunk while getting shaved and dressed. Neal was chatty and relaxed over the meal, though there was something a little pointed in the way he steered the conversation toward innocuous topics. Didn’t want Peter ruining a nice meal with his “angst,” Peter supposed.
They met up with Sandburg and Ellison in their office at the police station. “Here,” Sandburg said, handing Peter a stack of books, one of which had his name on the cover, and all of which looked considerably more substantial than Sentinels and Guides for Dummies.
“Uh, thanks.”
“I want those back after you’ve had a chance to buy your own copies.”
“Okay,” Peter said meekly.
Neal looked at them. “Oh, good. You can start on those after you finish the one I got you.”
“What’s that?” Sandburg wanted to know.
“Sentinels and Guides for Dummies,” Neal said.
Sandburg nodded. “Good choice.”
“Hey!” Neal snapped.
Ellison moved to take a step closer to his Guide, but Sandburg fended him off. “Oh, sorry. I wasn’t trying to be catty; it actually is a good book. Very basic, obviously, and it oversimplifies some things, but it’s pretty accurate.”
“It had four and a half stars on Amazon,” Neal said.
“Did you get to page 84 yet?” Ellison asked.
“No,” Peter said. He’d stopped somewhere around page 76. “Why?”
“You’ll see.”
Now Peter was curious, but Ellison wouldn’t say anything more about it. It couldn’t be a sex thing; the sex chapter was toward the back of the book.
Next, Sandburg turned to Neal and handed him an envelope. “The Department’s paying your per diem. That covers you Tuesday through Sunday; if you haven’t gone back to New York by Monday, we’ll get you more.”
“Uh,” Neal said, looking at Peter. “You know Peter’s not actually going to let me starve, right?”
“Don’t argue with him, kid,” Ellison advised.
Neal apparently decided to ignore his advice. “I’m not sure if I’m even allowed to accept this.”
Peter wasn’t sure, either-Neal wasn’t supposed to be paid by anyone else while he was working for the Bureau, but the work he supposedly did for June was okay, since it was on an in-kind basis. He supposed since they were calling it a per diem, it would fall under the same exception. “I think it’s okay,” he decided. “If the Bureau finds out about it and has a problem, we’ll deal with it then.”
Neal shrugged, said, “Okay,” and put the money in his wallet.
“How are you feeling?” Sandburg asked him.
“Good.” Neal smiled brightly. “Really good. I want to thank you-you helped a lot yesterday, not just, you know, in the room, but the advice for Peter, too. I think if you can fill him in on what you did yesterday, that’s going to make a big difference.” He turned to Peter. “The biggest thing was that he just talked to me about adjusting my dials. I don’t know why that helped-he wasn’t saying anything I didn’t already know-but it helped, a lot. You can do that, right?”
“Sure,” Peter said. “Definitely. I don’t know why it would help either, but it seems easy enough.”
“It is easy,” Sandburg said. “And it helps because-well, first for the same reasons guided meditation techniques help; for anybody, it’s easier if you can just concentrate on what you’re doing and not on what the next step is. And it works especially well for Sentinels because they respond neurochemically to Guide voices. It’s one of the most basic things Guides do.”
And Peter hadn’t been doing any of it.
“Okay,” Neal said, looking at Peter and then back at Sandburg. “See? We’re learning already. The talking thing and the touching thing are probably enough, really, but if they have some more tips for us, we’ll be golden.”
“Eh.” Sandburg held up his hand. “You’re right that we want to help, and I’m glad you asked, but this--” His sweeping gesture indicated Peter, Neal, and the whole mess between them, “-has been handled in an ad-hoc way long enough. I’m not going to enable that by wading in with a lot of half-assed advice.” Neal started to apologize, but Sandburg waved him off. “Not a problem. I got you two an appointment at Rainier this afternoon.”
“Rainier?” Neal asked.
“The local college,” Peter said. “They have a Guide training program, I think.”
Sandburg winced. “They have the best Guide education program in the country. Don’t call it ‘training,’ please; that word means something else to people who know anything at all about Guide history.”
Right; Peter knew from Sentinels and Guides for Dummies that until fairly recently, Guide “training” had meant something more like dog training than professional training.
“They have an academic department in Guide Studies, but the Sentinel-Guide clinic is world-renowned,” Sandburg said. “They have instructors for both Sentinels and Guides, counseling, Sen-Med specialists, everything-a real holistic approach. Today, they’re just going to meet with you and start figuring out what services you need, and come up with some kind of a long-term plan.”
Ellison added, “It’s a pretty big deal. People don’t usually get appointments on a day’s notice, but Sandburg knows everybody over there, and he called in a lot of favors.”
“Not that many favors,” Sandburg said. “But I do know everybody. My academic work is in Anthropology/Guide Studies, and we went to the clinic for years after I started working with Jim.”
“Years?” Neal said. “You know we’re only here for a week, right?”
“We went to the clinic every day for a couple of months,” Sandburg said. “After that it was weekly appointments, then monthly. I’m not sure what they’ll come up with for you-depending on what the issues are, they might be able to refer you to somebody in New York. Whatever the plan is, they’ll liaise with the FBI about it-if your immediate supervisor doesn’t know that the Rainier Sentinel-Guide Clinic doesn’t play around, they’ll go up the chain until they find somebody who does. You’re done slipping through the cracks in the system. If their professional opinion is that you need to stay here receiving services for a while, the FBI will not only agree to it, they’ll be thanking them for it.”
“Peter’s married,” Neal pointed out. “It’s not like he can just drop everything and deal with this full-time.”
“I hope that’s not necessary,” Peter said, “but if it is, El and I will work it out.”
Sandburg said, “That’s not a unique issue. In about seventeen percent of Sentinel-Guide pairs, at least one of them has a spouse or long-term partner other than their working partner.”
“That many?” Peter was surprised.
“Yes. I know the popular perception is that Sentinels and Guides are these tight dyads that don’t need anybody else, but really, only about two-thirds of pairs that consider their partnership permanent are also romantic or sexual partners; most of the rest either have or would like to have a romantic relationship with someone else. And about half of pairs are in temporary working partnerships-yours would be in that category, statistically. Some of those are married or in long-term relationships with other people, some aren’t but are looking for one, some are looking for a Sentinel or Guide who will be both a working and romantic partner, some are open to either, and some aren’t looking for anything. Just like everybody else, really.” Sandburg shrugged. “It’s a little more complicated for us, but human relationships are messy for everyone. There might be some parts of your situation that the people at the clinic haven’t seen before, but Burke being married isn’t one of them.”
“That’s good to know,” Peter said.
“So that’s also not something that the two of you-or the three of you-need to work out on your own,” Sandburg added. “The clinic has people who focus just on helping people in triadic or quadratic relationships balance things out. They’ll probably want to talk to your wife,” he added. “On the phone, at least.”
“That’s not a problem, is it?” Neal asked him.
Peter shook his head. “I’m sure she won’t mind. Elizabeth likes Neal,” he added to the other two.
“That helps a lot,” Sandburg said.
“She does?” Neal asked.
“Yes,” Peter said.
Neal grinned. “People like me,” he said.
“I like you, too,” he added, wondering if he’d ever said that. Neal had mentioned several times, including last night, that he asked Peter to be his Guide because he liked him. Peter couldn’t say the same-he agreed to be Neal’s Guide because he didn’t have a lot of choice-but he did like him.
Neal grinned some more. “I like you too, Peter.”
Peter went to take a shower, leaving Neal to watch his program. He couldn’t figure out if Neal was really able to shake off the pain of the last few months and look forward happily to a better future, if he was putting up a front, or if he had some kind of Sentinel Stockholm syndrome. Neal ought to have been angry at him. Maybe it would be easier on Peter if he was.
When he came out of the bathroom, dressed in sweats and a t-shirt, he found Cyndi’s Kindle on his pillow.
“Got you something,” Neal said, not looking away from the TV.
Peter picked up the Kindle. On the screen was the title page of Sentinels and Guides for Dummies. “Well, that was easy,” he said. Apparently he could have solved their problem a long time ago if it had occurred to him to go to Amazon and type the word “Sentinel.”
“Uh-huh. Here’s an idea: why don’t you say ‘thank you’ and start reading, instead of angsting about it for another twenty minutes?”
“…thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
After taking a moment to figure out how to turn the pages, Peter started reading. He saw quickly that the book was meant for someone who, like him, knew next to nothing about Sentinels or Guides. However, the authors clearly never imagined that the working Guide would need such basic information-instead, they wrote for newly-identified teenagers looking to get an idea of what their lives would be like, the parents of those teenagers, or mundanes (“a term used by some Sentinels and Guides to refer to individuals who are not Sentinels or Guides,” the book helpfully explained) who were working, living, or otherwise associating with a Sentinel or Guide.
The first couple of chapters were an overview of how the senses worked, in mundanes and in Sentinels. The next one was about history. Peter was aware, of course, of the movement for Sentinel and Guide civil rights that started after World War Two-it was hard not to be, even if you weren’t a Guide-but he was surprised to read how bad things had been, not that long ago. Over on the other bed, Neal turned off the television and got under the covers. “Night, Peter.”
“Night.” He quickly turned off the device and shut off the light, still thinking about what he had read. It sounded like something out of the dark ages, but at the time Peter’s own father had been a teenager, Guides had no right to work as anything other than Guides, nor to choose what Sentinel they worked with. In those days, it was possible Peter could have ended up assigned to the FBI, after his compulsory military service was completed, but he wouldn’t married to Elizabeth, and-well, his Sentinel would have had even more power over him than he had over Neal. A sidebar noted that anthropologists studying Sentinels and Guides in non-industrialized countries had been at the forefront of the civil rights movement, proving that the way the US and Europe did things was neither natural nor necessary. Sandburg probably knew all about it-maybe that accounted for some of his visceral horror at what had to seem like a mirror image of the bad old days.
With that on his mind, Peter didn’t sleep well, but he slept. In the groggy light of the morning, Neal came back to the room with free lobby coffee, seeming obnoxiously chipper.
Peter tried to mentally delete the “obnoxiously” part. Neal was happy. That was good. Now that he’d slept on it, he thought he understood why Neal found yesterday’s developments so un-troubling. For Peter, the realization that Neal had been suffering needlessly for months had been a shock. But Neal knew exactly how much he had been suffering; for him, the new information was that it was going to get better. No wonder he was happy.
“According to the desk clerk, there’s a place six blocks that way that has great omelets,” he reported, pointing with one coffee cup as he handed Peter the other.
“Great.” It was also a good thing, he told himself, that Neal was apparently fully confident that Peter wasn’t going to yank his restaurant-picking privileges.
The omelets proved to be delicious, and the coffee almost as good as at Neal’s place-although it may have just come out especially well in comparison to the lobby coffee that Peter had drunk while getting shaved and dressed. Neal was chatty and relaxed over the meal, though there was something a little pointed in the way he steered the conversation toward innocuous topics. Didn’t want Peter ruining a nice meal with his “angst,” Peter supposed.
They met up with Sandburg and Ellison in their office at the police station. “Here,” Sandburg said, handing Peter a stack of books, one of which had his name on the cover, and all of which looked considerably more substantial than Sentinels and Guides for Dummies.
“Uh, thanks.”
“I want those back after you’ve had a chance to buy your own copies.”
“Okay,” Peter said meekly.
Neal looked at them. “Oh, good. You can start on those after you finish the one I got you.”
“What’s that?” Sandburg wanted to know.
“Sentinels and Guides for Dummies,” Neal said.
Sandburg nodded. “Good choice.”
“Hey!” Neal snapped.
Ellison moved to take a step closer to his Guide, but Sandburg fended him off. “Oh, sorry. I wasn’t trying to be catty; it actually is a good book. Very basic, obviously, and it oversimplifies some things, but it’s pretty accurate.”
“It had four and a half stars on Amazon,” Neal said.
“Did you get to page 84 yet?” Ellison asked.
“No,” Peter said. He’d stopped somewhere around page 76. “Why?”
“You’ll see.”
Now Peter was curious, but Ellison wouldn’t say anything more about it. It couldn’t be a sex thing; the sex chapter was toward the back of the book.
Next, Sandburg turned to Neal and handed him an envelope. “The Department’s paying your per diem. That covers you Tuesday through Sunday; if you haven’t gone back to New York by Monday, we’ll get you more.”
“Uh,” Neal said, looking at Peter. “You know Peter’s not actually going to let me starve, right?”
“Don’t argue with him, kid,” Ellison advised.
Neal apparently decided to ignore his advice. “I’m not sure if I’m even allowed to accept this.”
Peter wasn’t sure, either-Neal wasn’t supposed to be paid by anyone else while he was working for the Bureau, but the work he supposedly did for June was okay, since it was on an in-kind basis. He supposed since they were calling it a per diem, it would fall under the same exception. “I think it’s okay,” he decided. “If the Bureau finds out about it and has a problem, we’ll deal with it then.”
Neal shrugged, said, “Okay,” and put the money in his wallet.
“How are you feeling?” Sandburg asked him.
“Good.” Neal smiled brightly. “Really good. I want to thank you-you helped a lot yesterday, not just, you know, in the room, but the advice for Peter, too. I think if you can fill him in on what you did yesterday, that’s going to make a big difference.” He turned to Peter. “The biggest thing was that he just talked to me about adjusting my dials. I don’t know why that helped-he wasn’t saying anything I didn’t already know-but it helped, a lot. You can do that, right?”
“Sure,” Peter said. “Definitely. I don’t know why it would help either, but it seems easy enough.”
“It is easy,” Sandburg said. “And it helps because-well, first for the same reasons guided meditation techniques help; for anybody, it’s easier if you can just concentrate on what you’re doing and not on what the next step is. And it works especially well for Sentinels because they respond neurochemically to Guide voices. It’s one of the most basic things Guides do.”
And Peter hadn’t been doing any of it.
“Okay,” Neal said, looking at Peter and then back at Sandburg. “See? We’re learning already. The talking thing and the touching thing are probably enough, really, but if they have some more tips for us, we’ll be golden.”
“Eh.” Sandburg held up his hand. “You’re right that we want to help, and I’m glad you asked, but this--” His sweeping gesture indicated Peter, Neal, and the whole mess between them, “-has been handled in an ad-hoc way long enough. I’m not going to enable that by wading in with a lot of half-assed advice.” Neal started to apologize, but Sandburg waved him off. “Not a problem. I got you two an appointment at Rainier this afternoon.”
“Rainier?” Neal asked.
“The local college,” Peter said. “They have a Guide training program, I think.”
Sandburg winced. “They have the best Guide education program in the country. Don’t call it ‘training,’ please; that word means something else to people who know anything at all about Guide history.”
Right; Peter knew from Sentinels and Guides for Dummies that until fairly recently, Guide “training” had meant something more like dog training than professional training.
“They have an academic department in Guide Studies, but the Sentinel-Guide clinic is world-renowned,” Sandburg said. “They have instructors for both Sentinels and Guides, counseling, Sen-Med specialists, everything-a real holistic approach. Today, they’re just going to meet with you and start figuring out what services you need, and come up with some kind of a long-term plan.”
Ellison added, “It’s a pretty big deal. People don’t usually get appointments on a day’s notice, but Sandburg knows everybody over there, and he called in a lot of favors.”
“Not that many favors,” Sandburg said. “But I do know everybody. My academic work is in Anthropology/Guide Studies, and we went to the clinic for years after I started working with Jim.”
“Years?” Neal said. “You know we’re only here for a week, right?”
“We went to the clinic every day for a couple of months,” Sandburg said. “After that it was weekly appointments, then monthly. I’m not sure what they’ll come up with for you-depending on what the issues are, they might be able to refer you to somebody in New York. Whatever the plan is, they’ll liaise with the FBI about it-if your immediate supervisor doesn’t know that the Rainier Sentinel-Guide Clinic doesn’t play around, they’ll go up the chain until they find somebody who does. You’re done slipping through the cracks in the system. If their professional opinion is that you need to stay here receiving services for a while, the FBI will not only agree to it, they’ll be thanking them for it.”
“Peter’s married,” Neal pointed out. “It’s not like he can just drop everything and deal with this full-time.”
“I hope that’s not necessary,” Peter said, “but if it is, El and I will work it out.”
Sandburg said, “That’s not a unique issue. In about seventeen percent of Sentinel-Guide pairs, at least one of them has a spouse or long-term partner other than their working partner.”
“That many?” Peter was surprised.
“Yes. I know the popular perception is that Sentinels and Guides are these tight dyads that don’t need anybody else, but really, only about two-thirds of pairs that consider their partnership permanent are also romantic or sexual partners; most of the rest either have or would like to have a romantic relationship with someone else. And about half of pairs are in temporary working partnerships-yours would be in that category, statistically. Some of those are married or in long-term relationships with other people, some aren’t but are looking for one, some are looking for a Sentinel or Guide who will be both a working and romantic partner, some are open to either, and some aren’t looking for anything. Just like everybody else, really.” Sandburg shrugged. “It’s a little more complicated for us, but human relationships are messy for everyone. There might be some parts of your situation that the people at the clinic haven’t seen before, but Burke being married isn’t one of them.”
“That’s good to know,” Peter said.
“So that’s also not something that the two of you-or the three of you-need to work out on your own,” Sandburg added. “The clinic has people who focus just on helping people in triadic or quadratic relationships balance things out. They’ll probably want to talk to your wife,” he added. “On the phone, at least.”
“That’s not a problem, is it?” Neal asked him.
Peter shook his head. “I’m sure she won’t mind. Elizabeth likes Neal,” he added to the other two.
“That helps a lot,” Sandburg said.
“She does?” Neal asked.
“Yes,” Peter said.
Neal grinned. “People like me,” he said.
“I like you, too,” he added, wondering if he’d ever said that. Neal had mentioned several times, including last night, that he asked Peter to be his Guide because he liked him. Peter couldn’t say the same-he agreed to be Neal’s Guide because he didn’t have a lot of choice-but he did like him.
Neal grinned some more. “I like you too, Peter.”