Dr. Sandburg Finds a Sentinel

[lit_gal]

Dr. Sandburg Finds a Sentinel
Gen/Pre-slash


Dr. Sandburg has a good life working on alien contact at Stargate Command; however, now he has news that his holy grail might just be out there in the strangest place possible--earth. Even worse, James Ellison has become the center of a vicious race that has pit Blair and the Stargate command against a rogue CIA operative, the NID, and the Chinese government.  And Blair is not sure how to convince Ellison that he's with the good guys.


( Dr. Sandburg of SG-16 gets some news... )

( Dr. Sandburg gets his first look at his Sentinel, but Jim Ellison is not going down that easily )

( When O'Neill doesn't move fast enough, the spirit world gets involved )

( Jim has himself a hostage )

( It's time to do a little evading of the enemy )

"Okay, I know I'm hungry when McDonalds starts to look good." Blair eyed the yellow arches as they passed the exit. Jim seemed determined to get west as fast as he could, but he wasn't talking about where they were going, and Blair wasn't asking. Yeah, as far as captors went, Jim Ellison was on the benevolent end of the spectrum, but the more power Blair had, the more Jim had to be threatened of. Ignorance and rope were probably Blair's friends right about now.

Jim's only answer to Blair's complaint was a sigh.

"Come on. We have to eat at some point." Blair was wheedling, but he was willing to sacrifice dignity for a real meal. Last night had been MREs and this morning had been a big nothing for breakfast.

"I have power bars. Do you want one?"

"I don't know." Blair looked at Jim suspiciously. "Are you talking about an actually edible, semi-healthy granola bar or are you offering chemical-filled, fat-filled crap that tastes like cardboard?"

"You're complaining about the food your kidnapper is offering you?"

"Fuck, yes."

This time when Jim glanced over, he frowned so deeply that Blair awkwardly twisted to look for someone chasing them. Nope. "Okay, no cop cars, so what's up with that look?"

The first answer was a chuckle. "For someone who claims to have been a hostage before, you really don't know the rules here, Chief," Jim said. From Colonel Reynolds, that would have sounded like an accusation, but from Jim it was almost a term of endearment. Besides, for a hostage-taker, Jim really sucked at inducing terror.

"Rules are just social constructs created by the individuals within a society, and right now, we are a society of two in here."

"Rules are there to protect everyone," Jim contradicted him. "For example, if you're just trying to get me to untie you so you can make a break for it, that would be dangerous."

"Oh man. Give it up. I am not trying to get away."

"You should be." Jim said that like it was as obvious as saying the sky was blue.

"So, basically you're accusing me of being a bad hostage."

"If the shoe fits..." Jim almost looked like he might break out into a smile.

"It's a skill set I haven't tried to develop."

"I noticed."

"Fine. I suck at being a hostage. So, am I going to get some food now? Real food? If it offends your precious rules, you can chain me to the car seat or something."

"I don't have a chain."

Blair narrowed his eyes, wondering if Jim was being sarcastic. Sometimes it was a little hard to tell. "Improvise," Blair suggested.

That got an actual twitch out of Jim's mouth. Then he pulled his lips together, pursing them and shaking his head. "If you were anyone else, I'd say you wanted to wait until we're in a drive-thru so you could scream for help."

Blair let his head fall aback against the headrest. This guy had a fucking one track mind. "Initiating conflict just creates more conflict. I am not into conflict."

"That sounds like something you learned from a hippy mother."

"And a hippy anthropologist named Eli. So are we going to stop for food?"

"You're not going to let this drop, are you?"

"No."

Jim glanced over; the frown was back. "And if I told you that I would have to hogtie and gag you and put you in the trunk before hitting the drive-thru?"

"I would say get me something grilled, not fried, and get yourself some therapy for these insecurities you seem to have. Man. I'm going to keep saying this until you hear me. I am not trying to get away."

Gravel pinged against the bottom of the car as Jim pulled over to the side of the road. He flipped the hazard lights on and then twisted in his seat to really study Blair. "Why?" Jim crossed his arms and for the first time, Blair actually felt like he was being interrogated. Jim had a look on his face that promised to make Blair sorry if he lied. Luckily, Blair didn't need to lie.

"You don't deserve this." Blair said each word slowly and deliberately. "It isn't right. The NID are total asses, and O'Neill is not far behind. He outright refused to try and get the APB cancelled. Not cool. Totally not cool."

"It's the smart move, Chief. It limits my options." Jim didn't look happy about that, but he looked oddly willing to give O'Neill slack on the issue.

"Do not say that to O'Neill," Blair begged. "After I gave him grief about backing you into a corner, I would be facing death by sarcasm if O'Neill knew he was right and you were weirdly okay with this out of some soldiers' code."

Jim's almost smile made another appearance. "Listen, Tania, you're going to be facing more than sarcasm."

"Patty Hearst jokes. Nice." Blair pulled against the ropes around his wrists.

"I assume," Jim kept right on going, ignoring Blair's interruption, "that someone has told you that you are ethically obligated to try and escape."

"I'm an anthropologist. Our ethics require lots and lots of things. Lots. Shitloads, even. You should ask Colonel Reynolds because he has threatened to lose me in the middle of some swamp if I talk to him about preserving cultures and respecting others' cultural identities one more time. However, escape is nowhere in my professional ethics."

Jim shook his head and turned to stare out the front window. The day was gray and clouds pressed down into the forest on either side of the ribbon of road. Blair wondered what the world looked like to a sentinel, but Jim's silence didn't invite interruption, and for several minutes they just sat. "I know what I want, Chief," Jim said slowly. "I understand my goals. Tell me what you want. Convince me that you really don't mind sitting in that seat tied up."

"Honestly? Okay, I do mind the being tied up part. It's not all that comfortable because my nose itches and I talk with my hands and this is amazingly annoying. However, I'm an anthropologist. I do what makes my hosts more comfortable. When I was studying the tree people of Indonesia, I climbed up these huge trees, and the wind would blow, and the limbs would shiver under my hands, and man, I was so scared I thought I was going to pee myself. I am way more comfortable being tied up here than I was doing that, but I got the job done."

"You shouldn't go into your missions, Chief."

"That was before I joined the military." Blair sighed. Of all the hard-headed people he'd worked with, Jim was the worst. Well, maybe the second worst because Daniel had some stories about Jack's hard-headedness that made Blair's hair curl. He'd long ago stopped trying to win the fight of who had the crankiest colonel because Daniel always beat him with stories about O'Neill, but Blair thought he might have a new horse in that race. It didn't matter what he said, Jim just kept circling back to the same assumption--that Blair was military--that Blair would follow military codes. "Man, you are just annoying," Blair concluded.

That earned another laugh from Jim. "The man I kidnapped, threatened, and tied up thinks I'm annoying."

"Yeah, yeah, I suck as being a hostage," Blair agreed amiably. "But I'm one hell of an anthropologist and this is me doing what I do. I fit into any role you have room for in your little culture, and if the only position open is as hostage, that's okay. I'm going to do my thing."

"Which means?" Jim looked over. The sharp look was back in his face again.

Blair smiled sweetly at him. "I'm just here to help point out the obvious. That's what the government does--they pay me to work with people and figure out how to listen to what they're really saying and then point out the obvious."

"And what's the obvious, Chief?"

Blair opened his mouth, but then he stopped... he just froze. The expression on Jim's face was intense, so this was not part of their banter. For a second, Blair looked out into that gray world and tried to collect his thoughts. Jim was ex-military, and he had military frames of reference and expectations. That was a culture Blair understood. Threats and assessments. Allies and enemies and bystanders. Collateral damage, and the fact that someone pursuing you was going to try to turn your best friends against you—no hard feelings. Maybe this would have shocked Blair more the first year he'd been at SGC before he'd seen so much—NID conspiracies and idiot politicians and sex-crazed aliens oh my. It was a twisted version of being over the rainbow, and Jim was asking him to describe the colors on that rainbow.

"There's something monumentally freaky on the horizon," Blair admitted slowly, "and it has a lot of people scared. They're doing threat assessments and looking at their exposure, and they are badly freaking. Panicked people make horrible choices, and the NID is burning some pretty big bridges." Blair frowned as something occurred to him. "O'Neill might be acting like more of an ass himself because he's pretty determined to get to you before the NID does. He is like... whoa... seriously in hate with the NID. Which is kinda mutual."

"So, he's the benevolent dictator trying to ruin my life for my own good as opposed to the evil dictator doing exactly the same thing?" Jim was sounding a little less than convinced.

Blair didn't give a fast answer; Jim deserved something more. "O'Neill would want to offer you a position. Sometimes when people are in danger of getting swept up into the NID, our group is just a safer place to be. But it's not like he's going to make you. Our work..." Blair stopped. This was hard. How did you get across to someone just how dangerous the universe was when you couldn't legally reveal that aliens were constantly on the brink of turning earth into one big slave pit? Usually Blair dealt with the other half of the problem—explaining to people who lived in one big slave pit that it was possible to live free without the goa'uld hovering over in big-ass mother ships.

"It's important to you. I understand that, Blair. I know what I accomplished in my covert ops days. Even if I had a chance to tell my younger self to stay the hell away from this whole mess, I wouldn't. The work I did was too important and the lives I saved are worth more than the hell the damn job has put me through." He paused. "Is putting me through."

Blair smiled, really appreciating that Jim had given him an 'out' on that one. "Jack O'Neill would give you an honest opinion. Sure, he would fight like hell to try and convince you that we were the right group to work with."

"And how creative would this convincing be?" Jim asked dryly. He sure didn't mention Chinese water torture or electro-shock treatments, but his tone made it pretty clear he was considering it.

Blair smiled. "Man, I grew up hating the system. My mom has a picture of me when I'm like three and she's put this sign in my hand and we're at an anti-government protest. 'Jack-booted sons-of-bitches' is one of the nicer terms she used for cops, and soldiers generally got called 'baby-killers'."

"Sandburg, maybe we can deal with your mommy issues later," Jim said, and Blair narrowed his eyes. That was almost a Reynolds-level shitty thing to say.

"My point," Blair said sharply, "is that Daniel dropped off the face—he disappeared for a year," Blair changed his metaphor mid-sentence when he realized it technically wasn't a metaphor. "And this was after he called me from some payphone saying he had a short-term military contract. I came up with all kinds of conspiracy theories. Then he comes back and not only tells me I was right about conspiracy theories but asks me to slam through my dissertation and come join the covert ops world. I was ready to haul him to a fucking deprogrammer. I had my mom looking around for someone willing to kidnap him so we could undo whatever mind-fuck the government had put on him. I was freaking out."

"But you ended up joining," Jim finished for him. It wasn't the dramatic conclusion Blair had been going for, but at least Jim was actually listening.

"Man, two seconds after they finished reading me into the program, I signed my life away with so many non-disclosure agreements that I basically agreed that they have a legal right to bury me fifty feet under the jail if I open my mouth too big."

"They usually do that the other way around... make you sign the papers and then read you in."

"Yeah, well sometimes the science end of things—we know you military types like your rules a little too much, so Daniel played a little fast and loose with the paperwork to make sure I got read in first. He knew I'd never sign my life away without seeing inside Pandora's box, and he knew that military officers have this almost pathological love for rules, so they wouldn't let me look in the box without signing the papers, so we just got a little innovative."

Jim's eyebrows went up. "So, he lied?"

"Obfuscated," Blair said with a shrug. "Sometimes you have to get a little creative when you're forced to work with people who would take the rule book home and make slow, passionate love with the thing if they could get away with it."

"Eric has got to just hate you," Jim said sadly.

"Oh man, you have no idea," Blair agreed softly. "Sometimes the geeks and the soldiers can get a groove going, but the only groove we have is the one in his carpet from pacing as he tries to figure out ways to get me the hell off his team."

Jim sighed and looked at him, his expression utterly unreadable, which was odd. Blair actually found the guy was normally way more expressive than either Reynolds or O'Neill. "So, your willingness to stay with me—you think you can talk me into surrendering to O'Neill?"

"I think I can talk you into talking to O'Neill," Blair corrected him. No way was he going to get caught using loaded words like 'surrender'. Jim was already so tense he was about to grind a tooth into dust.

"So you're just considering this," Jim gestured toward the car, toward Blair's tied hands and his bare feet, "part of your job?"

"We were told to convince you to talk, even if it's only to call in. O'Neill is doing it his way, and I'm doing it mine." Blair actually thought that was a pretty good spin to put on his report when he got back to the mountain. "As far as I'm concerned, this is actually nicer than most of my assignments. Well, except for the fact that I am hungry. We're passing all these places, so there has to be some place we can stop. Seriously, if it makes you feel better to put me in the trunk for a while, go for it, but I'm hungry."

"Enough!" Jim said with a laugh as he held up his hand to stop Blair. "Fine. You win. But Blair, do you remember what I said about how dangerous things could get if it turned out you had tricked me into putting my trust in the wrong place?"

"No calling for help. Got it," Blair agreed. "Actually, I'm probably getting overtime pay for this, and I don't even have to hike cross-country with a huge pack. Trust me, I'm not in any hurry for you to make up your mind here... well, just as long as in the end you do give O'Neill or General Hammond a fair chance to make their case." Blair looked at Jim. "Promise," he offered. Jim shook his head, but he reached for the rope in the backseat, so Blair figured the man was going to change the restraints. Hopefully Blair would get the use of his hands back because his nose was really itching now.