wave 8. story 3
Wave 8
Who wrote me? Maaaaa, Starwatcher, Snycock, or Tommyboybbi
Take a guess, post a comment, feed the authors. Reveals will be on August 20th.
Story 3
Gen
Revisionist History
It’s funny how things look different in retrospect. When a certain point in life is reached, when things have settled and relaxed. When a cause for celebration is nothing more than making it through a rough day and ending up in a warm place. When a rough day is a metaphor for Life and a warm place is a matter of perspective.
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Blair stood very still, looking up into the vast cloudless twilight sky. The air was tepid, with a heavy, tangent breeze that manhandled his hair and rippled his clothing. He blinked rapidly a few times, quelling the tears that pooled in his eyes unbidden, but not unwelcome. He breathed in deeply, slowly, appreciatively.
Jim was several yards away, fidgeting…an incongruous movement for him.
The sounds of the picnic breaking up below them drifted up on the air. Tired children filled with too much junk food and giddy from running amok for hours, begged equally tired parents to stay just a few more minutes. Gentle chiding, some yelling, a few muttered curses made up the responses. Goodbyes, good wishes, plans made to get together more often and not just at department sanctioned events. Kids and picnic leftovers bundled into cars and then tires crunching over gravel, making their way to the road that led back to Cascade.
It had been a good day, full of the pleasures of simply being alive, even if they’d had to drag each other to the annual summer picnic.
Jim, literally, by snapping shut the book Blair had his nose buried in and pulling him by a fistful of shirt down the stairs and out to the truck and physically tossing him in, ignoring Blair’s squawked protests and girly whining about a little bit of bruised flesh and tugged chest hair, stating emphatically that if he was being coerced to attend, then by god, Blair was going too.
Blair, a bit more metaphorically, by being the coercer, and then duping Jim into participating in the games and actually having a good time, because dammit, if he was being forced to participate well then he could damn well stop being a dick about it and join in the celebration.
The tastes of cold beer, hot dogs topped with the works, and no less than three different kinds of potato salad still lingered on Jim’s tongue. His muscles ached a bit, protesting the bizarre use they’d been put to during gunnysack and three-legged races with Daryl and several giggling daughters of various members of Major Crime. And a wheelbarrow race that’d ended with him bowled over in an ungainly heap, sprawled half-on, half-off Blair, who’d taken the brunt of the crash and the full impact of a face-first landing in a mud puddle.
Jim smiled, remembering Blair’s spluttered emergence from the muck, spouting mud and slanderous remarks about Jim’s lack of co-ordination.
Jim glanced over his shoulder and watched the parade of taillights snake down off the mountain, mesmerized for a few moments by the dots of red and occasional blink of headlight whites as curves were negotiated.
“Don’t zone,” Blair warned, sotto-voiced as he continued stargazing.
“Nah,” Jim responded leisurely with a smug grimace. But he still shook himself.
The overlook was on the backside of the mountain. In Jim’s youth it’d been a Lovers’ Lane, accessible by a dirt road from the state park below. Now there was only a footpath, seldom used, overgrown with weeds and brambles. The view was gorgeous during the daytime, showcasing peaks and valleys of the Cascades. And it was more spectacular at night with no city lights to compete with the sky.
Jim checked below one more time, to be sure their co-workers, friends and family, were safely on their way. He moved closer to Blair then, and stood next to him. He looked out over velvet black silhouetted treetops swaying gently against the deep gray-blue light of evening. A few minutes more and the last shreds of twilight faded, leaving a canopy of brilliantly dazzling stars overhead.
Blair acknowledged Jim’s presence next to him by shrugging his shoulders and jutting his chin toward the heavens.
“How far can you see, Jim?” he asked. He closed his eyes for a moment and lowered his head. When he looked up again, it was at Jim, not the sky.
Slightly ruffled by the question, Jim peered upward, narrowing his eyes and consciously dilating his pupils. He studied the cosmos briefly, then stammered, “Blair, Chief, I don’t think I ---,”
“It’s not a test, Jim,” Blair replied with an exasperated chuckle.
“Oh,” Jim answered with an exhaled breath. “Sure.” But he wasn’t sure at all. He looked at the sky again, trying hard to ignore the expectant buzz that permeated Blair.
Blair nudged Jim with his shoulder, good-naturedly. “What do you see, Doofus? Here?”
Jim gave him a sour, sidelong glance, just as Blair reached up and tapped his chest and then briefly rested the palm of his hand over his heart.
Blair dropped his hand a second later, and they both felt the imprint it left behind, as they looked skyward.
Taking a deep breath, Jim once again viewed the expanse of sky, using ordinary senses, including the one Blair had requested. Seemingly infinite, the universe opened itself to him, pulling him into its mysteries.
“Makes you feel kind of insignificant, in the scheme of things, huh? Humbled,” Jim observed in hushed tones.
“Insignificant? No way, man!” Blair retorted exuberantly. He rounded on Jim, his legs and arms elastic in his excitement, his eyes huge and round and full of wonder. One arm shot out toward the sky, its hand waving, the other hand slapped Jim’s chest. “You? Me? We’re it, man. In all the vastness of time and space, the whole kit-n-caboodle, there’s no one else like us. That’s significant, that’s major, Jim, that’s, that’s---,” he petered out, his mouth still working, but at a loss for words after only blurting out a mere two dozen or so, most likely some sort of record for him.
“What’s going on Sandburg? What’re you babbling about?” Jim asked. His brows furrowed and he grabbed Blair’s hands, pinning them between his own tense fists.
“It’s time to move on, Jim. To get past it all, to celebrate, you know?” Blair whispered. “Today is the first day of the rest of our lives, right? Corny, yeah, but---,”
“You died, Chief.”
“I’m alive, Jim.”
“I mistrusted you.”
“I gave you good reason.”
“Alex.”
“Iris.”
“Not the same, Chief, not by a long shot.”
“Maya?”
“You might have to throw in a few more to even things up.”
“That’s just it Jim, I don’t wanna keep score anymore.”
“I read the diss after you asked me not to.”
“You read an unedited introductory chapter of a fraudulent piece of garbage.”
Blair’s voice cracked a little over the word fraudulent but other than that his voice was grimly steady, and strained, as if he’d spoken the words hundreds of times and never wanted to say them again.
Jim snorted, and stifled a chuckle, which came out as a rueful, hollow sound, completely mirthless. He shook his head, not sure if he was ready to capitulate. He loosened his hold on Blair’s hands, but didn’t let go.
There’d been a distance between them for so long now…since Alex. A gap they both looked into every day and avoided, never widening, never shrinking. They went through the motions of daily existence, doing what they had to, making nice. Could it be as simple as ignoring what had happened between them and moving on?
Jim guffawed, causing Blair to jump. Nothing was ever simple with Sandburg.
“You’re just going to re-write our past here, is that it Chief?”
“The victors always write history, Jim. Everything we’ve done, or not done, or screwed up, or did right, all of it, man, it’s all brought us to where we are right now. We’re together, and stronger for what we’ve been through. We win. It’s time to celebrate, Jim.”
The moon, not yet risen, lightened the horizon with a luminous glow. The stars dimmed momentarily and then brightened once again, refusing to be blotted out, bolstered by their own brilliance.
Jim let go of Blair’s hands and wrapped an arm around his shoulder, pulling him in close to his side, where he belonged. He nodded once, quickly, and looked up again, seeing the infinite possibilities.
The End