Pandora's Box
Jan. 29th, 2011 11:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lit_galA long time ago, I wrote Ad Libitum. ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR, FIVE, SIX, SEVEN
This is the sequel
Pandora's Box.
Jim/Blair, Alex/Naomi
( Chapters 1-3 ) ( Chapter four ) ( Chapter Five ) ( Chapter 6 ) ( Chapter 7 ) ( Chapter 8 ) ( Chapter 9 ) ( Chapter 10 )
This having essays due Saturday night is really screwing with my Taming schedule. Anyway, here is more of the story. Jim has a plan, Blair is about to have another heart attack, and the move and countermoves are starting to really pick up.
~11~
“Oh man. Jim, trouble at three o'clock.” Blair cringed as he watched by half a dozen reporters converge on them. The airport Jim had chosen was a small one, and instead of standing in an air-conditioned hangar waiting for one of those retractable walkways, they stood in the muggy Mexican afternoon waiting for the airport guard to let down the chain that would let them walk to the plane. So far the guard wasn't letting anything down.
“Reporters,” Jim commented calmly. He sounded almost apathetic, which was surprising considering this was Jim and reporters-- two things that generally didn't go well together.
“Shit. Do you think Señor Padilla Rivera ratted on us?” Blared liked the man, but he couldn't figure out how else the reporters could have found them. Ever since they left the hospital, Jim had been doing his supersecret switching cars and watching behind them routine. He'd even booked the plane tickets under two names that Blair didn't recognize. And still, there were the reporters.
“If Padilla Rivera were going to turn on us, it wouldn’t be the reporters we'd have to worry about.” Jim gave the airport guard a quick look that Blair had no trouble interpreting. The guard was a government employee, and if Padilla Rivera had betrayed them, it was the Mexican government that was going to be coming after them. Guards and police sent by the nastier parts of it, anyway. At this point though, Blair's main concern was the nastier parts of the American government. He didn't have a lot of illusions about secret information staying secret, and he really didn't have any illusions about how far the American government would go if it thought Jim was a significant threat to security. He'd grown up protesting shitty government actions, so he knew the government could be one giant piece of shit.
Despite the fact that Blair kept his head down, one of the reporters spotted them. Blair could see them turn and start trotting across the concrete walk that led up to the runway. “Jim,” Blair hissed in desperation.
“Just be honest. Charm them,” Jim suggested. The tone was all off. Jim had been Blair's lover and his friend and his Sentinel for far too long for that carefully controlled voice to work. Unfortunately, Blair didn't have time to torture information out of Jim because the miniature mob of reporters was upon them.
“Señor Sandburg is it true you have found a temple?”
“Have you a comment on reports that you have found sentinels?” The first reporters peppered him with questions, and Blair pressed back toward Jim. Right now, he wouldn’t mind a little Mother Hen Ellison coming out, but Jim was just watching as more reporters closed in on them, trotting so their recorders bounced against their chests or hips—depending on where they had them strapped.
“Will you be involved in the archaeological expedition?”
One particularly bold reporter—a woman with short hair and a long face—stuck a microphone at Jim. “Señor Ellison, is it true that you are Sentinel? Have you come to visit Mexican sentinels?” The woman had a hopeful expression on her face, like she was getting the big scoop of the century. However Blair's heart rose up into his throat so that he couldn't even speak. Panic raced through him, and he might've started flailing except that Jim's hand settled on the shoulder, anchoring him to the earth even at the moment when Blair was ready to fly off.
“I came with Blair,” Jim answered calmly. At least it was an answer. The reporters thronged around Jim now, moving their microphones to catch his words instead of recording Blair's panicky breathing.
“Will you two be staying for the temple?”
“Is this the Temple of Huahuantli, Aztec god of warriors?”
“How many sentinels have you spoken to here in Mexico?”
The questions came so fast that Blair couldn't track them. He blinked at the reporters, his eyes going from one to another. He knew he had to look like an idiot, but his brain couldn't come up with excuses fast enough. How the hell had they gotten so much information? Either that, or how the hell were they jumping to such good conclusions. Usually when Blair jumped to conclusions he jumped in all the wrong directions. These guys had jumping down to an art.
“We’ve met with two sentinels,” Jim said calmly, and if Blair was panicking before, he was really really panicking now. His brain had turned into an over caffeinated crack monkey's creaming and running in circles.
“Were they at the temple?” One of the women asked, thrusting her microphone at Jim.
“I may be a sentinel, but Blair is the expert on them. You should ask him,” Jim said in a tone of voice that bordered between chastisement and apathy.
Blair was starting to get that feeling like this was all a dream. It was too surreal. It was too fucking weird. He'd had acid trips that made more sense than this. Okay so he'd only had one acid trip, but his one acid trip had definitely made more sense than this day. All the microphones turned toward him, and Blair took a second to glare murder at Jim.
“Señor Sandburg, where the sentinels at the temple?”
Giving Jim one last confused look, Blair turned to the reporters and tried to find his voice. Okay, Jim would not have pushed the reporters at him without some plan. True, Jim hadn’t shared his plan. And Blair was going to kill Jim for that. But there had to be a plan. Somewhere. Hopefully.
“The sentinels were at the hospital,” Blair said slowly, still not sure how to back Jim’s play here.
“Are they ill?” one of the reporters asked, the others fell silent. They were all listening, all looking at Blair. Blair could practically feel the metaphorical storm gathering around them. They were standing in the eye of it, but the winds threatened to crash into them the second the storm front moved.
“Sentinels sometimes have difficulties. The senses can grow too sharp, and something as simple as a car horn blaring can leave them in pain.” Blair stopped, still not sure how much he should say. He looked over his shoulder at Jim.
“Blinding pain,” Jim agreed calmly. “That’s why sentinels need a partner, someone to watch their backs when the modern world is too loud or too bright.”
The reporters’ microphones were back on Jim. “Is Señor Sandburg your partner?” “Are you confirming that you’re a sentinel?” “How painful would it be to hear a car horn?” “Are the senses always so difficult?” The questions flew so fast that Blair couldn't keep track of who was asking what.
“Whoa, hey,” Blair held his hands out toward the reporters. “It’s not like we have set in stone answers. This all kind of theoretical,” he said apologetically.
“Is not Señor Ellison a sentinel?” the woman with the short hair asked.
“Yes, I am,” Jim answered before Blair could come up with a good cover story. “But I have more control that most. I’ve had Blair to help me with them, and as far as I know, Blair is the only academic working on sentinels right now. He’s finishing a dissertation. I’m sure that if you were to contact Rainier university, you could get some background information on his studies,” Jim offered. It was like throwing chum in the water with sharks. Blair could feel the reporters building up to a feeding frenzy.
“Do the sentinels here not have control? Is that why you're in Mexico?”
“Was finding the temple an accident, or were you expecting to find it?”
“Has the Mexican government asked for your assistance?”
“How many sentinels are there?”
Blair could feel his heart pounding as they threw question after question at him. He looked over, but the plane was still on the far side of the runway and the guard hadn’t lowered the chain. He was, however, looking very interested. Too interested. Blair’s mouth was so dry that his tongue stuck to the top of it.
“Blair recently suffered a heart attack, and he’s not really up to questions. The medication probably isn’t helping,” Jim said with a fond smile as he slipped a hand around Blair’s waist.
“Are you feeling well?” One of the older men asked.
“Not really,” Blair said weakly. He wasn't sure if he could blame the heart attack, but he certainly wasn't feeling all that well. The reporters made sympathetic noises as the energy level seemed to drop a few notches.
“How many sentinels have you met with?” one of the reporters asked, but this time the others quieted to let Blair answer.
“Two so far. Well, three, actually, but only two of them were here in Mexico.” That wasn't technically true, but Blair was having trouble enough sorting out his own thoughts without trying to get into explaining Naomi and Alex to these reporters. He didn't understand Naomi and Alex himself, so he definitely was not up to explaining anything.
“Will they be okay?”
Blair's throat tightened as he thought of the one man who would not be okay. That man had died never understanding why his body turned against him. Even though Blair knew it wasn't his fault, he still couldn't control the guilt that rose.
“One of the sentinels died,” Jim said, his voice soft, “but Blair managed to help the other two understand the senses.”
“So, do sentinels have all five senses enhanced as the mythology suggests?” That question came from the short-haired woman.
“Yes,” Jim answered.
“How enhanced?” She studied Jim in a way that made Blair twitch.
“You had coffee for breakfast,” Jim said. “Coffee with cinnamon. You wear J’Adore perfume but you didn’t have time to put any on this morning, and from the way your car looks, you were nowhere near here when you got the call about the story,” Jim said as he nodded toward the distant parking lot. “That is one very dirty car, Señora….”
“Bolaños.” She didn’t even try to hide her shock, and from the silence that fell across the small group of reporters, the others were equally shocked. Honestly, Blair was shocked too, but in his case the shock came from the fact that Jim was saying any of this. “My grandfather, he had a friend who could see things, taste them and smell them.”
Jim nodded. “Maybe your grandfather knew a sentinel.”
“Are there many?” one of the other reporters blurted out.
Jim looked down at Blair, clearly expecting him to answer. “Oh man, I have no idea. I mean, in the Middle Ages, having a power like that would lead to getting burned at the stake. Sir Richard Burton claimed that he met a Sentinel in Peru, so the New World might've had any number of sentinels at one time, but I have no idea how many are left. I spent a long time looking, and so far I’ve found a grand total of four.”
“And half are here?” The man who asked sounded shocked. “Does that mean you will come back to Mexico to continue to study sentinels?”
Again, Blair was shocked into silence. He wasn’t planning on it, but telling reporters that you were running in fear from their country seemed a little rude. Jim saved him from creating some international incident.
“There are potential sentinels at a hospital in the United States. Blair wants to visit them,” Jim said. He didn’t say that the Bethesda doctors had invited Blair to not come out for a visit. The engines on the plane grew louder as it started to taxi toward them. Rescue was in sight. Blair blew out a huge relieved breath.
“Totally. I really need to see them and check on their condition,” Blair said, echoing Jim’s words. “After that, we’ll just have to see what happens.” He gave the reporters his best smile. It was a weak and somewhat lopsided effort, but it was the best he could come up with under the circumstances.
“We’ve enjoyed our visit to Mexico, and we hope to come back again, both to visit the two sentinels we met and to visit the Temple of the Sentinels again. The temple is an amazing site. I hope that you all have a chance to see its beauty. The people of Mexico should be very proud of their history.”
That speech probably should've come from Blair, but he was glad Jim and made it. Blair could gather enough brain cells to put a coherent sentence together, much less give the reporters the soundbite they wanted for their news coverage.
“Now, we have a plane to catch,” Jim said apologetically. “Again, if you have questions, Blair is very available through Rainier, but I’m afraid that with his recent heart attack, he isn’t really up to an interview today.”
“No joke,” Blair said softly. Blair turned to the reporters and tried to find something gracious to say. “I really do feel like shit,” he offered. Yeah, he was failing on the gracious front. But hopefully the whole having a heart attack part of their trip would earn him a few sympathy points and maybe some forgiveness for the poor manners.
The reporters all made sympathetic noises, but Blair could already see their eyes shifting away as they mentally composed their stories. The airport guard dropped the chain, and Jim urged him toward the plane along with all the other passengers. They were heading back to the States. Jim had just managed to completely undo three years of secrecy in hiding, but they were headed back to the States.
They held back, waiting as the other passengers climbed up the portable stairs to the open hatch and disappeared inside the airplane. Blair stood at the foot of the stairs, his hand wrapped around the railing as though he was struggling the thought of climbing seventy steps. He was actually struggling to understand what the hell was it Jim's head.
“What was that?” he hissed.
“Think Jack Kelso,” Jim answered cryptically. Blair just stared at Jim, not understanding. After a second, Jim sighed and shook his head. “If you can’t convince people to keep a secret, tell everyone so it’s not a secret anymore. No one kills over secrets that a million people have bought in hardcover,” Jim said. Blair thought about Jack’s book, the book that uncovered all the CIA’s nasty little secrets.
“Oh shit.” Blair tightened his hand on the rail, and he still might have slid to the ground except Jim’s arm held him around the waist. “No one kills or kidnaps over a secret that’s in the national papers.”
Jim shrugged. “They might, but it’ll be messy.”
"Why the hell didn't you warn me?" he demanded, even if he was trying to keep his voice to a whisper.
"No offense, Chief, but you aren't exactly a good actor. I didn't want the reporters to think we were playing them, and that meant I needed you to actually be shocked when they asked about sentinels," Jim apologized.
Blair wanted to be angry, but he couldn't find the energy. Fear and uncertainty had sapped what little energy he still had. He stared out at the blue sky, the long, flat clouds and the distant mountains. What the hell were they doing? What happened to his nice, safe little world?
“Come on, Chief. We’re holding up the plane.” Jim urged him toward the steps, and Blair started climbing with leaden feet. They were going to do this. They were really going to do this.
“They’ll know,” Blair whispered. It was an obvious thing to say. Of course they would know. Having Jim confess to all the Mexican newspapers wouldn't keep the American government from figuring out that Jim was a Sentinel. It wasn't like Spanish was some mysterious language that no one could understand. And he even understood Jim’s logic. Too many people knew their secret to keep it strictly a secret, but not enough people knew about it to prevent the information from being valuable. If Jim was right, millions of people were about to discover the existence of sentinels as they read their morning paper, and that made it a lot less valuable as information. Still, Blair felt like he had to say it out loud. It was as though he had to say it in order to wrap his head around the truth of it.
“We’ll get through it together,” Jim promised, but his tone of voice had just a touch of worry, enough to let Blair know Jim was terrified.
Blair wrapped his arm around Jim so that they were awkwardly climbing the stairs with their arms entangled. “Yep, we’ll get through,” Blair agreed even though he could feel the wind from that metaphorical storm starting to brush against him. He just hoped they came through without any side trips to secret military bases or prison cells. At this point, he just didn’t know.
This is the sequel
Pandora's Box.
Jim/Blair, Alex/Naomi
( Chapters 1-3 ) ( Chapter four ) ( Chapter Five ) ( Chapter 6 ) ( Chapter 7 ) ( Chapter 8 ) ( Chapter 9 ) ( Chapter 10 )
This having essays due Saturday night is really screwing with my Taming schedule. Anyway, here is more of the story. Jim has a plan, Blair is about to have another heart attack, and the move and countermoves are starting to really pick up.
~11~
“Oh man. Jim, trouble at three o'clock.” Blair cringed as he watched by half a dozen reporters converge on them. The airport Jim had chosen was a small one, and instead of standing in an air-conditioned hangar waiting for one of those retractable walkways, they stood in the muggy Mexican afternoon waiting for the airport guard to let down the chain that would let them walk to the plane. So far the guard wasn't letting anything down.
“Reporters,” Jim commented calmly. He sounded almost apathetic, which was surprising considering this was Jim and reporters-- two things that generally didn't go well together.
“Shit. Do you think Señor Padilla Rivera ratted on us?” Blared liked the man, but he couldn't figure out how else the reporters could have found them. Ever since they left the hospital, Jim had been doing his supersecret switching cars and watching behind them routine. He'd even booked the plane tickets under two names that Blair didn't recognize. And still, there were the reporters.
“If Padilla Rivera were going to turn on us, it wouldn’t be the reporters we'd have to worry about.” Jim gave the airport guard a quick look that Blair had no trouble interpreting. The guard was a government employee, and if Padilla Rivera had betrayed them, it was the Mexican government that was going to be coming after them. Guards and police sent by the nastier parts of it, anyway. At this point though, Blair's main concern was the nastier parts of the American government. He didn't have a lot of illusions about secret information staying secret, and he really didn't have any illusions about how far the American government would go if it thought Jim was a significant threat to security. He'd grown up protesting shitty government actions, so he knew the government could be one giant piece of shit.
Despite the fact that Blair kept his head down, one of the reporters spotted them. Blair could see them turn and start trotting across the concrete walk that led up to the runway. “Jim,” Blair hissed in desperation.
“Just be honest. Charm them,” Jim suggested. The tone was all off. Jim had been Blair's lover and his friend and his Sentinel for far too long for that carefully controlled voice to work. Unfortunately, Blair didn't have time to torture information out of Jim because the miniature mob of reporters was upon them.
“Señor Sandburg is it true you have found a temple?”
“Have you a comment on reports that you have found sentinels?” The first reporters peppered him with questions, and Blair pressed back toward Jim. Right now, he wouldn’t mind a little Mother Hen Ellison coming out, but Jim was just watching as more reporters closed in on them, trotting so their recorders bounced against their chests or hips—depending on where they had them strapped.
“Will you be involved in the archaeological expedition?”
One particularly bold reporter—a woman with short hair and a long face—stuck a microphone at Jim. “Señor Ellison, is it true that you are Sentinel? Have you come to visit Mexican sentinels?” The woman had a hopeful expression on her face, like she was getting the big scoop of the century. However Blair's heart rose up into his throat so that he couldn't even speak. Panic raced through him, and he might've started flailing except that Jim's hand settled on the shoulder, anchoring him to the earth even at the moment when Blair was ready to fly off.
“I came with Blair,” Jim answered calmly. At least it was an answer. The reporters thronged around Jim now, moving their microphones to catch his words instead of recording Blair's panicky breathing.
“Will you two be staying for the temple?”
“Is this the Temple of Huahuantli, Aztec god of warriors?”
“How many sentinels have you spoken to here in Mexico?”
The questions came so fast that Blair couldn't track them. He blinked at the reporters, his eyes going from one to another. He knew he had to look like an idiot, but his brain couldn't come up with excuses fast enough. How the hell had they gotten so much information? Either that, or how the hell were they jumping to such good conclusions. Usually when Blair jumped to conclusions he jumped in all the wrong directions. These guys had jumping down to an art.
“We’ve met with two sentinels,” Jim said calmly, and if Blair was panicking before, he was really really panicking now. His brain had turned into an over caffeinated crack monkey's creaming and running in circles.
“Were they at the temple?” One of the women asked, thrusting her microphone at Jim.
“I may be a sentinel, but Blair is the expert on them. You should ask him,” Jim said in a tone of voice that bordered between chastisement and apathy.
Blair was starting to get that feeling like this was all a dream. It was too surreal. It was too fucking weird. He'd had acid trips that made more sense than this. Okay so he'd only had one acid trip, but his one acid trip had definitely made more sense than this day. All the microphones turned toward him, and Blair took a second to glare murder at Jim.
“Señor Sandburg, where the sentinels at the temple?”
Giving Jim one last confused look, Blair turned to the reporters and tried to find his voice. Okay, Jim would not have pushed the reporters at him without some plan. True, Jim hadn’t shared his plan. And Blair was going to kill Jim for that. But there had to be a plan. Somewhere. Hopefully.
“The sentinels were at the hospital,” Blair said slowly, still not sure how to back Jim’s play here.
“Are they ill?” one of the reporters asked, the others fell silent. They were all listening, all looking at Blair. Blair could practically feel the metaphorical storm gathering around them. They were standing in the eye of it, but the winds threatened to crash into them the second the storm front moved.
“Sentinels sometimes have difficulties. The senses can grow too sharp, and something as simple as a car horn blaring can leave them in pain.” Blair stopped, still not sure how much he should say. He looked over his shoulder at Jim.
“Blinding pain,” Jim agreed calmly. “That’s why sentinels need a partner, someone to watch their backs when the modern world is too loud or too bright.”
The reporters’ microphones were back on Jim. “Is Señor Sandburg your partner?” “Are you confirming that you’re a sentinel?” “How painful would it be to hear a car horn?” “Are the senses always so difficult?” The questions flew so fast that Blair couldn't keep track of who was asking what.
“Whoa, hey,” Blair held his hands out toward the reporters. “It’s not like we have set in stone answers. This all kind of theoretical,” he said apologetically.
“Is not Señor Ellison a sentinel?” the woman with the short hair asked.
“Yes, I am,” Jim answered before Blair could come up with a good cover story. “But I have more control that most. I’ve had Blair to help me with them, and as far as I know, Blair is the only academic working on sentinels right now. He’s finishing a dissertation. I’m sure that if you were to contact Rainier university, you could get some background information on his studies,” Jim offered. It was like throwing chum in the water with sharks. Blair could feel the reporters building up to a feeding frenzy.
“Do the sentinels here not have control? Is that why you're in Mexico?”
“Was finding the temple an accident, or were you expecting to find it?”
“Has the Mexican government asked for your assistance?”
“How many sentinels are there?”
Blair could feel his heart pounding as they threw question after question at him. He looked over, but the plane was still on the far side of the runway and the guard hadn’t lowered the chain. He was, however, looking very interested. Too interested. Blair’s mouth was so dry that his tongue stuck to the top of it.
“Blair recently suffered a heart attack, and he’s not really up to questions. The medication probably isn’t helping,” Jim said with a fond smile as he slipped a hand around Blair’s waist.
“Are you feeling well?” One of the older men asked.
“Not really,” Blair said weakly. He wasn't sure if he could blame the heart attack, but he certainly wasn't feeling all that well. The reporters made sympathetic noises as the energy level seemed to drop a few notches.
“How many sentinels have you met with?” one of the reporters asked, but this time the others quieted to let Blair answer.
“Two so far. Well, three, actually, but only two of them were here in Mexico.” That wasn't technically true, but Blair was having trouble enough sorting out his own thoughts without trying to get into explaining Naomi and Alex to these reporters. He didn't understand Naomi and Alex himself, so he definitely was not up to explaining anything.
“Will they be okay?”
Blair's throat tightened as he thought of the one man who would not be okay. That man had died never understanding why his body turned against him. Even though Blair knew it wasn't his fault, he still couldn't control the guilt that rose.
“One of the sentinels died,” Jim said, his voice soft, “but Blair managed to help the other two understand the senses.”
“So, do sentinels have all five senses enhanced as the mythology suggests?” That question came from the short-haired woman.
“Yes,” Jim answered.
“How enhanced?” She studied Jim in a way that made Blair twitch.
“You had coffee for breakfast,” Jim said. “Coffee with cinnamon. You wear J’Adore perfume but you didn’t have time to put any on this morning, and from the way your car looks, you were nowhere near here when you got the call about the story,” Jim said as he nodded toward the distant parking lot. “That is one very dirty car, Señora….”
“Bolaños.” She didn’t even try to hide her shock, and from the silence that fell across the small group of reporters, the others were equally shocked. Honestly, Blair was shocked too, but in his case the shock came from the fact that Jim was saying any of this. “My grandfather, he had a friend who could see things, taste them and smell them.”
Jim nodded. “Maybe your grandfather knew a sentinel.”
“Are there many?” one of the other reporters blurted out.
Jim looked down at Blair, clearly expecting him to answer. “Oh man, I have no idea. I mean, in the Middle Ages, having a power like that would lead to getting burned at the stake. Sir Richard Burton claimed that he met a Sentinel in Peru, so the New World might've had any number of sentinels at one time, but I have no idea how many are left. I spent a long time looking, and so far I’ve found a grand total of four.”
“And half are here?” The man who asked sounded shocked. “Does that mean you will come back to Mexico to continue to study sentinels?”
Again, Blair was shocked into silence. He wasn’t planning on it, but telling reporters that you were running in fear from their country seemed a little rude. Jim saved him from creating some international incident.
“There are potential sentinels at a hospital in the United States. Blair wants to visit them,” Jim said. He didn’t say that the Bethesda doctors had invited Blair to not come out for a visit. The engines on the plane grew louder as it started to taxi toward them. Rescue was in sight. Blair blew out a huge relieved breath.
“Totally. I really need to see them and check on their condition,” Blair said, echoing Jim’s words. “After that, we’ll just have to see what happens.” He gave the reporters his best smile. It was a weak and somewhat lopsided effort, but it was the best he could come up with under the circumstances.
“We’ve enjoyed our visit to Mexico, and we hope to come back again, both to visit the two sentinels we met and to visit the Temple of the Sentinels again. The temple is an amazing site. I hope that you all have a chance to see its beauty. The people of Mexico should be very proud of their history.”
That speech probably should've come from Blair, but he was glad Jim and made it. Blair could gather enough brain cells to put a coherent sentence together, much less give the reporters the soundbite they wanted for their news coverage.
“Now, we have a plane to catch,” Jim said apologetically. “Again, if you have questions, Blair is very available through Rainier, but I’m afraid that with his recent heart attack, he isn’t really up to an interview today.”
“No joke,” Blair said softly. Blair turned to the reporters and tried to find something gracious to say. “I really do feel like shit,” he offered. Yeah, he was failing on the gracious front. But hopefully the whole having a heart attack part of their trip would earn him a few sympathy points and maybe some forgiveness for the poor manners.
The reporters all made sympathetic noises, but Blair could already see their eyes shifting away as they mentally composed their stories. The airport guard dropped the chain, and Jim urged him toward the plane along with all the other passengers. They were heading back to the States. Jim had just managed to completely undo three years of secrecy in hiding, but they were headed back to the States.
They held back, waiting as the other passengers climbed up the portable stairs to the open hatch and disappeared inside the airplane. Blair stood at the foot of the stairs, his hand wrapped around the railing as though he was struggling the thought of climbing seventy steps. He was actually struggling to understand what the hell was it Jim's head.
“What was that?” he hissed.
“Think Jack Kelso,” Jim answered cryptically. Blair just stared at Jim, not understanding. After a second, Jim sighed and shook his head. “If you can’t convince people to keep a secret, tell everyone so it’s not a secret anymore. No one kills over secrets that a million people have bought in hardcover,” Jim said. Blair thought about Jack’s book, the book that uncovered all the CIA’s nasty little secrets.
“Oh shit.” Blair tightened his hand on the rail, and he still might have slid to the ground except Jim’s arm held him around the waist. “No one kills or kidnaps over a secret that’s in the national papers.”
Jim shrugged. “They might, but it’ll be messy.”
"Why the hell didn't you warn me?" he demanded, even if he was trying to keep his voice to a whisper.
"No offense, Chief, but you aren't exactly a good actor. I didn't want the reporters to think we were playing them, and that meant I needed you to actually be shocked when they asked about sentinels," Jim apologized.
Blair wanted to be angry, but he couldn't find the energy. Fear and uncertainty had sapped what little energy he still had. He stared out at the blue sky, the long, flat clouds and the distant mountains. What the hell were they doing? What happened to his nice, safe little world?
“Come on, Chief. We’re holding up the plane.” Jim urged him toward the steps, and Blair started climbing with leaden feet. They were going to do this. They were really going to do this.
“They’ll know,” Blair whispered. It was an obvious thing to say. Of course they would know. Having Jim confess to all the Mexican newspapers wouldn't keep the American government from figuring out that Jim was a Sentinel. It wasn't like Spanish was some mysterious language that no one could understand. And he even understood Jim’s logic. Too many people knew their secret to keep it strictly a secret, but not enough people knew about it to prevent the information from being valuable. If Jim was right, millions of people were about to discover the existence of sentinels as they read their morning paper, and that made it a lot less valuable as information. Still, Blair felt like he had to say it out loud. It was as though he had to say it in order to wrap his head around the truth of it.
“We’ll get through it together,” Jim promised, but his tone of voice had just a touch of worry, enough to let Blair know Jim was terrified.
Blair wrapped his arm around Jim so that they were awkwardly climbing the stairs with their arms entangled. “Yep, we’ll get through,” Blair agreed even though he could feel the wind from that metaphorical storm starting to brush against him. He just hoped they came through without any side trips to secret military bases or prison cells. At this point, he just didn’t know.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2011-01-30 08:15 am (UTC)This whole thing has really caught him off guard.
And wow! What to go Jim was his quick thinking and honesty.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-03 03:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-30 08:15 am (UTC)So good!
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Date: 2011-02-03 03:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-30 06:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-03 03:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-01 03:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-03 03:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-08 09:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-16 11:39 pm (UTC)