Pandora's Box
Feb. 21st, 2011 11:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lit_galPandora's Box.
Jim/Blair, Alex/Naomi
prompt: quid pro quo
Rated: ADULT (f/f and m/m)
( Chapters 1-3 ) ( Chapter four ) ( Chapter Five ) ( Chapter 6 ) ( Chapter 7 ) ( Chapter 8 ) ( Chapter 9 ) ( Chapter 10 ) ( Chapter 11 ) ( Chapter 12 ) ( Chapter 13 ) ( Chapter 14 ) (Chapter 15)
Well, I'm closing this one up. Jim and Blair are on their way, and now it's time to see who they might be leading.
Chapter 16
Blair watched the back of the driver’s head. His brain was spinning too fast for any sort of coherent thought. It really was.
“So, this is normal?” Bechtel demanded. Clark Bechtel. Sentinel number four. Actually, if Blair counted Jim and Alex, that would make him Sentinel number six. And he was as cranky as Jim had ever been. The only advantage so far was that Jim had glowered at Bechtel and Sims until both had given up any thoughts of slamming Blair into a wall. Blair was almost certain the others weren’t having any wall-slamming thoughts, but then again, he might be wrong on that. And in a bus this large, there was technically room for it.
“If this is normal, I’m eating my gun now,” Sims said in some sort of anti-Sentinel solidarity with Bechtel.
“It gets better,” Jim promised. He was turned around awkwardly in the seat so he could face the others. It was going to be a long and uncomfortable ride if he didn’t chill. “Blair would give you his speech about how great it can be, but he’s a little out of it right now. Chief, you okay?” Jim’s hand rested against Blair’s leg, and Blair tried to blink himself back to reality. They were leaving the hospital behind. They were heading upstate. Hell, they were catching a military bus up to one of Naomi’s old stomping grounds, a commune that preached love for all. The cognitive dissonance was making his head hurt.
“Fine. Reality is just…” Blair blew out a breath and shifted around to face the other Sentinels… “moving way too fast. But Jim’s right,” Blair said more firmly as he focused on the hope and the fear and the pain in the Sentinels going with them. “It’s bad now because you’ve been doing all the wrong things. But when you get control of it,” Blair whistled, “man, you can do amazing things. These senses are advantages.”
“They don’t feel like it,” Sims said.
“So far, no, they haven’t been. I’m guessing you haven’t been able to even eat comfortably,” Blair guessed from the fact that Sims looked like a refugee from a concentration camp. He looked worse than the one Sentinel in a coma. “But look at Jim. I have to put up with him shoving Wonderburger down his throat three times a week. I keep telling him that lifting weights does not take the cholesterol out of the blood, but does he listen? No. But he can do that because he has control of the senses. You can too. You can do incredibly things with the senses.”
“I can see how it would help,” Auden said. He was a heavy man, thick with huge hands. He looked like a mechanic, which made sense since he was one before his senses had dumped him in a hospital bed. “I could always feel and hear more than others. It’s what makes me such a damn good mechanic. I used to joke that engines whispered their secrets. But if we can’t get control of it—” His eyes drifted back to Hannah Morley.
The hospital stretcher fit into specialized fittings against the side of the bed, an IV dripping down into her arm. Doctors couldn’t understand her coma, but they didn’t hold much hope for her waking up. Even though her records said she was eighteen, she looked about fourteen laying there, her short brown hair matted and her skin papery thin. She’d passed out during basic training, and her long record of “recalcitrant” behavior such as staring into space and irrational complaining suggested she’d been having a lot of trouble before her final collapse.
“Yeah, that’s in all our futures,” Sims said, his fists opening and closing.
“No way,” Blair said firmly. “The hospital might have been pushing you toward that, but no fucking way is that going to happen. No way.”
Griffin smiled. He was the oldest of the hospital Sentinels, forty-three and a little less dramatic. “If believing makes it true, you seem to have enough belief for all of us.”
“He does,” Jim said fondly. “If I hadn’t been in the middle of a case with people’s lives on the line, I would have walked out into the woods or committed myself to a mental hospital when the senses first came on. Trust me, I know how it feels.”
“Do you?” Sims asked in a confrontational voice.
Blair blinked his eyes and leaned into Jim, letting his mind drift as he tried to reach that point of disconnect where he could see feelings and fear as clearly as he could see red or sky. Nothing happened except that a couple of Sentinels looked at him oddly and Lauren gave him a small smile.
Jim slung an arm around Blair, pulling him close. “I do. I was at dinner with an ex, and I thought someone had tried to kill me because the same spices I normally love burned my mouth. I lost a suspect because a glint of sun blinded me. I can’t even count the number of times I dropped my fucking weapon because I lost feeling in my hands and I was scared I would accidentally pull the trigger and I loosened up too much.”
“That doesn’t sound like an advertisement for the wonders of Sentinel senses,” Bechtel said. He was in the next seat, the only one who’d chosen to sit anywhere near Jim. The words came out so softly that Blair barely heard them, but they were sitting in a bus full of Sentinels, so even Lauren who was sitting near Hannah in the back of the bus turned to look at him.
“The problems aren’t worth any advantage,” Sims agreed.
“I disagree,” Captain Griffin said firmly. “Detective, you wouldn’t be telling us to embrace these senses unless they worked. Do you have a few success stories?”
Jim wasn’t quick to answer, but then Jim never did brag about his own successes. That was Blair’s job.
“In Peru, his unit died, and he was left to hold a Chopec pass on his own. He could hear the enemy units, spot traps, and lead the local warriors so that he kept the drug dealers out of the area.” Blair noticed that as he talked, quite a few of them sat up a little straighter. Griffin and Lauren Hazlitt both had their mouths fall open a bit.
“Shit.” Satchel Lincoln breathed the word. He was quieter than the others, but Blair wasn’t sure if that was because he was the lowest ranking member of the service or because of some Sentinel pecking order Blair didn’t understand.
“Totally,” Blair agreed. “And in Cascade, Jim’s done amazing things. I got kidnapped by a serial killer, and he tasted water from a victim’s drain, identified trace elements, and found me about two minutes before I ended up dead. He can hear conversations two city blocks away, allowing us to track gun runners and bust drug dealers. He’s Cop of the Year because these senses make him a walking crime lab. He can see fingerprints and identify a suspect by traces of perfume or hear an unstable building long before anything happens. He’s amazing.”
“Enough, Sandburg,” Jim said.
“You may not want to brag on yourself, but you’re amazing,” Blair said firmly. Jim was looking incredibly uncomfortable, but maybe Blair had made his point with the others.
“You see fingerprints?” Lauren asked. “Can you see long distance as well?”
“Yeah,” Jim agreed. “I can see details at several miles out.”
“How much resolution?” she asked.
Jim looked at Blair, but Blair could only shrug. “Getting Jim to do scientific testing has not always been fun, and his ability varies depending on his mood.” Blair twisted around a bit. He hadn’t tried sitting backwards in a bus seat since he was ten. It had been more comfortable back then. Jim’s hand slipped around his waist, pulling him closer so that Blair leaned some of his weight against Jim. If they were trying for subtle on the gay front, Blair was giving Jim a D-minus.
“So, if he had a shitty day, he misses things?” Major Lauren Hazlitt seemed almost offended by that.
Jim was even more offended by her tone. “When I know that there’s nothing out there but some dumb test, I’m not likely to perform as well. I don’t miss things in the field.” His tone of voice made it pretty clear that another word and Jim was throwing her right off the bus. She dropped her gaze back down to Hannah.
“So, how do we get control?” Auden asked. Oliver Auden was twenty-six, and Blair just had a feeling that most people missed really seeing the man. He looked every inch the military mechanic, but something whispered under the surface. Blair met the man’s green eyes and tried to put a finger on it, but all he knew was that Auden would be the first to leave them. He’d be going back into the world, his head held high as he told everyone he was a Sentinel.
“You need a guide,” Jim said. Blair hadn’t wanted to go into that, not until they got everyone settled. Guide talk led to talk about the relationship, and Blair still didn’t know if Sentinels and guides had a sexual connection. He had a sample size of two to work with, and that didn’t lead to valid conclusions. Hell, he still didn’t know if they were looking for small-g guides, people to watch Sentinels’ backs or big-G Guides, people with some genetic or inherent power that matched a Sentinel’s own.
“What’s that?” Auden asked.
“A companion,” Blair said, picking up the spiel. Jim might be playing nice, but Blair could feel the tension from him. He wasn’t actually happy being around this many Sentinels even if no one set his instincts off the way Alex had. “Someone to watch your back. Someone you absolutely trust so that when you lose yourself in your senses, this person can call you back, distract your or help you refocus.”
“So, she’s going to die without a guide?” Griffin asked with a concerned look toward Hannah.
“Does that make you my guide?” Sims asked Blair at the same time. Jim’s fingers dug painfully into Blair’s arm for a half second as Jim pulled Blair painfully close.
“Whoa,” Blair said, both to Sims and to Jim. Jim’s hands loosened, but Sims still had this disturbing expression of hope. “We know way less about guides than Sentinels. We don’t even know what makes a guide, but while a guide you trust can pull you back from the edge, you need to find your own unique guide to work with day to day. I mean, maybe two Sentinels who really knew each other well or who were in the same unit could share a guide…” Blair glanced at Jim. “Maybe. Maybe not. We really don’t know. However, as much as I can temporarily help, I am Jim’s guide. He is the only one I work with other than on an emergency basis.”
Sims’ expression was caught between anger and hurt, but Griffin cleared his throat to get Blair’s attention. “So, can you help Private Morley?”
Blair looked toward the back of the bus. “I hope so. If she’s not so far under that she can’t hear me, but no way do I want to wake her up here.”
“Why?” Lauren demanded. Yep, as ranking officer, she wanted to step up and take control. Fat chance of that happening with Jim around, though. Military ranks versus Sentinel pecking order were going to be a problem.
Blair sighed and looked around. “How many of you are uncomfortable with the vibrations in here?”
Sims and Bechtel raised their hands immediately. Auden was nearly as fast with Griffin, Al Diamond, and Satchel Lincoln following a second later. Lauren’s was the last hand up, but she raised her hand too. Jim was the only one to not raise his hand, other than Hannah, and the coma explained that.
“Exactly,” Blair said. “No way do I want to call her back just to put her in hell when she can’t control the touch well enough to ignore the vibrations.”
“Oh, I could ignore them,” Auden said, “but I’d rather just get someone to rotate the damn tires and check the bolts on the right side of the front axle.” He shrugged.
“Problem?” Blair asked. He noticed Jim already had his head tilted to the side.
“Not in the next few thousand miles or so,” Auden said, but I know machines, and having one not work right is a very annoying thing.”
“You must be a great mechanic,” Griffin said with undisguised admiration.
“Yes, sir,” Auden agreed. “So, how do I recognize one of these guides?”
Jim shook his head and seemed to refocus back on the Sentinels. “It’s someone you’re just drawn to, even if common sense tells you that you shouldn’t be. Once you start trusting that person, things change between you.” Jim let his voice trail off, not getting into the sexual relationship that might or might not be normal for all pairs or the guide voice that was definitely normal.
“Leading Seaman West,” Auden said. “He’s my guide.”
“You’re sure?” Blair felt a little out of breath. That should not be so easy. He’d been expecting… okay, he had no idea what he’d been expecting, but that wasn’t it.
“Yes, sir,” Auden said. “When West joined me, the man fucked up every engine he touched. I would have put anyone else on report and booted them off the unit, but I taught him every night, I checked every bit of work he did until I could trust him to get it right, and he’s turned into my best mechanic. I always pull a miracle off when he’s on shift with me. Right before I lost control of my senses, he was transferred to the USS John C. Stennis.”
“It sounds like you have your guide,” Jim agreed. “We’ll contact the USS John C. Stennis and see if we can make some arrangements for him to come out here. We may have to jump through a few hoops,” Jim warned.
“A few?” Griffin asked. “Detective, you’re going to have to prove to them that it’s worth changing regs to have Sentinels in the service, and the Service does love its regs.”
“It does, Captain,” Major Lauren Hazlitt said in a tone of voice that was clearly her enforcing her own authority, “However, I work in satellites, and I can promise you this: the military moves and they move fast when the situation changes. If we have the abilities that Detective Ellison has shown, we’re going to have to worry about making sure those regulations are fair. We don’t have to worry about the military refusing to make any new regs.”
Griffin nodded. “Yes, ma’am. I work field SIGINT, so I know what these senses could mean, but we can’t work unless we’re reliable.”
“Field SIGINT?” Blair whispered to Jim while Griffen and Bechtel and Hazlitt went off on a conversation that Blair couldn’t hope to follow. There was technical jargon and then there was the insanity of military people talking in words that weren’t really words.
Jim leaned close. “He works in the field, going close to enemy positions and recording enemy signals so they can be decrypted or translated. Dangerous work. You have to be pretty close to eavesdrop and your radio equipment makes you stand out like a sore thumb.”
“Not if you’re a Sentinel,” Blair pointed out.
Jim nodded. “That’s why Griffin is going to want to go back. He’s going to be better at his job.”
“Not before Auden goes back,” Blair whispered. Auden looked over and gave Blair a small smile before focusing on the three officers again. “What the hell did we get into?” Blair asked, resting his head against Jim’s shoulder as he watched the debate.
“More than we probably wanted,” Jim admitted quietly. It was more of a concession to Blair’s sudden panic than Blair expected. He’d half expected Jim to point out that Blair had been the one to insist they challenge Naomi for that damn throne. He’d expected Jim to put some of the blame on Blair and his insane competition with Naomi. Hell, Blair had gone undercover with armed car thieves after refusing both Jim and Simon only because his mother had told him he couldn’t. Yeah, he had mother issues. And his mother issues were tangled in his shaman issues.
After a brisk debate on possible regulations that Blair tuned out on, the Sentinels seemed to fall silent. Sims slept with a pillow between him and the window. Blair wasn’t sure if that was improved control or just pure exhaustion. He’d been on the verge of a coma when Blair found him. Al Diamond, an ensign, and Petty Officer Auden were doing the best. They played a quiet game of gin across the back of Auden’s seat. Lauren had pulled a book out of a bag, and Blair was pretty sure she was mentally rewriting regulations. Jim would have final say on that, though. Daniel Griffin watched the landscape with an intensity that made Blair worry about zones and Bechtel continued to watch Blair until Jim had made Blair move another seat forward. The only one who Blair couldn’t pin down was Satchel Lincoln.
He was in logistics for the Navy, and as close as Blair could tell from the file, it seemed like that meant he cooked a lot. Cooked and cleaned dished. It wasn’t where Blair had expected to find a Sentinel, but then it wasn’t like he’d go back to a kitchen with his senses turned on. He stared off into space oddly.
“Lincoln?” Blair called softly. Jim looked up from his novel and watched as Blair moved out of the seat and into the aisle. Bechtel watched too, but Blair was trying to ignore that. Note to self, Sentinels in distress could get a little stalkerish around a guide. They were definitely going to have to have a rule or two about that.
“Sir?” Lincoln turned toward Blair, but Blair got the impression that Lincoln wasn’t actually looking at him.
“Just Blair, okay? I was raised by a hippy, so too much ‘sirring’ around me and my head might fall off.” Some of the others smiled, but Lincoln didn’t. He just gave a short nod. “Are you okay?”
“Fine.” The unspoken ‘sir’ almost hung in there air, right there next to the fact that Lincoln was lying. Blair moved closer, and Lincoln’s eyes tracked him. Because the eyes were so dark, it took Blair a second to realize that Lincoln’s pupils were blown.
“Your pupils…” Blair started to say.
“I’m not on drugs, sir,” Lincoln cut him off. “Sometimes they just get a little out of wack, but I’m not high.”
Blair reared back. Well, shit. “No way. I mean, you’ve gone from a hospital to a bus full of military officers. Even if I were stupid and made some idiot assumption, which I’m not making, you didn’t have a chance to get high.”
“Right.” Lincoln sounded defensive now.
Clearly he’d been accused unfairly in the past. It made senses once Blair stopped to think about it. African Americans got slammed for drug use way more than whites, and blown pupils were a pretty classic sign. How many people had assumed Lincoln was on drugs? How many had given him grief? Blair felt a flash of pure panic as he realized the sheer range of problems Sentinels were going to carry with them into this awkward transition. Everyone was watching now, everyone except Hannah in her coma and Sims who was still out cold.
“Sometimes one of the senses goes a little out of wack,” Blair said, mimicking Lincoln’s word choice. “What are you seeing right now?”
Blair waited, watching as Lincoln fought with himself.
“Hey, I have seen shit that you would call me crazy for. Do not even ask me about Mexico, because I am not admitting to the crazy down there unless you use torture, and if you try torture, I’m hiding behind Jim,” Blair said. Lincoln almost stopped frowning. Blair wondered if emotional hang-ups were a Sentinel thing or a soldier thing or just a human thing.
“The hair on your eyebrow,” Lincoln finally said. “I can see the shaft of the hair and where it vanishes into the pucker of the follicle and the texture of the skin with petals of dry skin flakes littered between the hair follicles.
Blair’s eyebrows went up, and Lincoln’s gaze followed with a minute adjustment. “The… what? Oh man. Okay, you definitely have the vision turned up a little high.”
Lincoln snorted. “It feels like I don’t have my vision turned on at all. I’m as good as blind when it goes like this.”
“How often does it go like this?” Blair asked. He so needed to start taking notes. He was never finishing his Sentinel dissertation because every new piece of information threw all his theories out the window. Jim’s vision never did this.
“Often enough that I had trouble getting through school,” Lincoln finally admitted, and from the bitterness in his voice, that was an old pain.
“Okay, let’s talk through how to fix this,” Blair said gently. He moved slowly forward until his hand hovered right over Satchel Lincoln’s arm and then he started talking him through an exercise to turn down vision. Life was changing, but considering that Naomi’s solution to this problem would have included mass meditation and a lecture on respecting your senses and getting in touch with why they were fascinated with eyebrows, Blair was glad he and Jim had won. Lincoln deserved better. True, Blair was starting to panic about winning, but he was glad they had.
Jim/Blair, Alex/Naomi
prompt: quid pro quo
Rated: ADULT (f/f and m/m)
( Chapters 1-3 ) ( Chapter four ) ( Chapter Five ) ( Chapter 6 ) ( Chapter 7 ) ( Chapter 8 ) ( Chapter 9 ) ( Chapter 10 ) ( Chapter 11 ) ( Chapter 12 ) ( Chapter 13 ) ( Chapter 14 ) (Chapter 15)
Well, I'm closing this one up. Jim and Blair are on their way, and now it's time to see who they might be leading.
Chapter 16
Blair watched the back of the driver’s head. His brain was spinning too fast for any sort of coherent thought. It really was.
“So, this is normal?” Bechtel demanded. Clark Bechtel. Sentinel number four. Actually, if Blair counted Jim and Alex, that would make him Sentinel number six. And he was as cranky as Jim had ever been. The only advantage so far was that Jim had glowered at Bechtel and Sims until both had given up any thoughts of slamming Blair into a wall. Blair was almost certain the others weren’t having any wall-slamming thoughts, but then again, he might be wrong on that. And in a bus this large, there was technically room for it.
“If this is normal, I’m eating my gun now,” Sims said in some sort of anti-Sentinel solidarity with Bechtel.
“It gets better,” Jim promised. He was turned around awkwardly in the seat so he could face the others. It was going to be a long and uncomfortable ride if he didn’t chill. “Blair would give you his speech about how great it can be, but he’s a little out of it right now. Chief, you okay?” Jim’s hand rested against Blair’s leg, and Blair tried to blink himself back to reality. They were leaving the hospital behind. They were heading upstate. Hell, they were catching a military bus up to one of Naomi’s old stomping grounds, a commune that preached love for all. The cognitive dissonance was making his head hurt.
“Fine. Reality is just…” Blair blew out a breath and shifted around to face the other Sentinels… “moving way too fast. But Jim’s right,” Blair said more firmly as he focused on the hope and the fear and the pain in the Sentinels going with them. “It’s bad now because you’ve been doing all the wrong things. But when you get control of it,” Blair whistled, “man, you can do amazing things. These senses are advantages.”
“They don’t feel like it,” Sims said.
“So far, no, they haven’t been. I’m guessing you haven’t been able to even eat comfortably,” Blair guessed from the fact that Sims looked like a refugee from a concentration camp. He looked worse than the one Sentinel in a coma. “But look at Jim. I have to put up with him shoving Wonderburger down his throat three times a week. I keep telling him that lifting weights does not take the cholesterol out of the blood, but does he listen? No. But he can do that because he has control of the senses. You can too. You can do incredibly things with the senses.”
“I can see how it would help,” Auden said. He was a heavy man, thick with huge hands. He looked like a mechanic, which made sense since he was one before his senses had dumped him in a hospital bed. “I could always feel and hear more than others. It’s what makes me such a damn good mechanic. I used to joke that engines whispered their secrets. But if we can’t get control of it—” His eyes drifted back to Hannah Morley.
The hospital stretcher fit into specialized fittings against the side of the bed, an IV dripping down into her arm. Doctors couldn’t understand her coma, but they didn’t hold much hope for her waking up. Even though her records said she was eighteen, she looked about fourteen laying there, her short brown hair matted and her skin papery thin. She’d passed out during basic training, and her long record of “recalcitrant” behavior such as staring into space and irrational complaining suggested she’d been having a lot of trouble before her final collapse.
“Yeah, that’s in all our futures,” Sims said, his fists opening and closing.
“No way,” Blair said firmly. “The hospital might have been pushing you toward that, but no fucking way is that going to happen. No way.”
Griffin smiled. He was the oldest of the hospital Sentinels, forty-three and a little less dramatic. “If believing makes it true, you seem to have enough belief for all of us.”
“He does,” Jim said fondly. “If I hadn’t been in the middle of a case with people’s lives on the line, I would have walked out into the woods or committed myself to a mental hospital when the senses first came on. Trust me, I know how it feels.”
“Do you?” Sims asked in a confrontational voice.
Blair blinked his eyes and leaned into Jim, letting his mind drift as he tried to reach that point of disconnect where he could see feelings and fear as clearly as he could see red or sky. Nothing happened except that a couple of Sentinels looked at him oddly and Lauren gave him a small smile.
Jim slung an arm around Blair, pulling him close. “I do. I was at dinner with an ex, and I thought someone had tried to kill me because the same spices I normally love burned my mouth. I lost a suspect because a glint of sun blinded me. I can’t even count the number of times I dropped my fucking weapon because I lost feeling in my hands and I was scared I would accidentally pull the trigger and I loosened up too much.”
“That doesn’t sound like an advertisement for the wonders of Sentinel senses,” Bechtel said. He was in the next seat, the only one who’d chosen to sit anywhere near Jim. The words came out so softly that Blair barely heard them, but they were sitting in a bus full of Sentinels, so even Lauren who was sitting near Hannah in the back of the bus turned to look at him.
“The problems aren’t worth any advantage,” Sims agreed.
“I disagree,” Captain Griffin said firmly. “Detective, you wouldn’t be telling us to embrace these senses unless they worked. Do you have a few success stories?”
Jim wasn’t quick to answer, but then Jim never did brag about his own successes. That was Blair’s job.
“In Peru, his unit died, and he was left to hold a Chopec pass on his own. He could hear the enemy units, spot traps, and lead the local warriors so that he kept the drug dealers out of the area.” Blair noticed that as he talked, quite a few of them sat up a little straighter. Griffin and Lauren Hazlitt both had their mouths fall open a bit.
“Shit.” Satchel Lincoln breathed the word. He was quieter than the others, but Blair wasn’t sure if that was because he was the lowest ranking member of the service or because of some Sentinel pecking order Blair didn’t understand.
“Totally,” Blair agreed. “And in Cascade, Jim’s done amazing things. I got kidnapped by a serial killer, and he tasted water from a victim’s drain, identified trace elements, and found me about two minutes before I ended up dead. He can hear conversations two city blocks away, allowing us to track gun runners and bust drug dealers. He’s Cop of the Year because these senses make him a walking crime lab. He can see fingerprints and identify a suspect by traces of perfume or hear an unstable building long before anything happens. He’s amazing.”
“Enough, Sandburg,” Jim said.
“You may not want to brag on yourself, but you’re amazing,” Blair said firmly. Jim was looking incredibly uncomfortable, but maybe Blair had made his point with the others.
“You see fingerprints?” Lauren asked. “Can you see long distance as well?”
“Yeah,” Jim agreed. “I can see details at several miles out.”
“How much resolution?” she asked.
Jim looked at Blair, but Blair could only shrug. “Getting Jim to do scientific testing has not always been fun, and his ability varies depending on his mood.” Blair twisted around a bit. He hadn’t tried sitting backwards in a bus seat since he was ten. It had been more comfortable back then. Jim’s hand slipped around his waist, pulling him closer so that Blair leaned some of his weight against Jim. If they were trying for subtle on the gay front, Blair was giving Jim a D-minus.
“So, if he had a shitty day, he misses things?” Major Lauren Hazlitt seemed almost offended by that.
Jim was even more offended by her tone. “When I know that there’s nothing out there but some dumb test, I’m not likely to perform as well. I don’t miss things in the field.” His tone of voice made it pretty clear that another word and Jim was throwing her right off the bus. She dropped her gaze back down to Hannah.
“So, how do we get control?” Auden asked. Oliver Auden was twenty-six, and Blair just had a feeling that most people missed really seeing the man. He looked every inch the military mechanic, but something whispered under the surface. Blair met the man’s green eyes and tried to put a finger on it, but all he knew was that Auden would be the first to leave them. He’d be going back into the world, his head held high as he told everyone he was a Sentinel.
“You need a guide,” Jim said. Blair hadn’t wanted to go into that, not until they got everyone settled. Guide talk led to talk about the relationship, and Blair still didn’t know if Sentinels and guides had a sexual connection. He had a sample size of two to work with, and that didn’t lead to valid conclusions. Hell, he still didn’t know if they were looking for small-g guides, people to watch Sentinels’ backs or big-G Guides, people with some genetic or inherent power that matched a Sentinel’s own.
“What’s that?” Auden asked.
“A companion,” Blair said, picking up the spiel. Jim might be playing nice, but Blair could feel the tension from him. He wasn’t actually happy being around this many Sentinels even if no one set his instincts off the way Alex had. “Someone to watch your back. Someone you absolutely trust so that when you lose yourself in your senses, this person can call you back, distract your or help you refocus.”
“So, she’s going to die without a guide?” Griffin asked with a concerned look toward Hannah.
“Does that make you my guide?” Sims asked Blair at the same time. Jim’s fingers dug painfully into Blair’s arm for a half second as Jim pulled Blair painfully close.
“Whoa,” Blair said, both to Sims and to Jim. Jim’s hands loosened, but Sims still had this disturbing expression of hope. “We know way less about guides than Sentinels. We don’t even know what makes a guide, but while a guide you trust can pull you back from the edge, you need to find your own unique guide to work with day to day. I mean, maybe two Sentinels who really knew each other well or who were in the same unit could share a guide…” Blair glanced at Jim. “Maybe. Maybe not. We really don’t know. However, as much as I can temporarily help, I am Jim’s guide. He is the only one I work with other than on an emergency basis.”
Sims’ expression was caught between anger and hurt, but Griffin cleared his throat to get Blair’s attention. “So, can you help Private Morley?”
Blair looked toward the back of the bus. “I hope so. If she’s not so far under that she can’t hear me, but no way do I want to wake her up here.”
“Why?” Lauren demanded. Yep, as ranking officer, she wanted to step up and take control. Fat chance of that happening with Jim around, though. Military ranks versus Sentinel pecking order were going to be a problem.
Blair sighed and looked around. “How many of you are uncomfortable with the vibrations in here?”
Sims and Bechtel raised their hands immediately. Auden was nearly as fast with Griffin, Al Diamond, and Satchel Lincoln following a second later. Lauren’s was the last hand up, but she raised her hand too. Jim was the only one to not raise his hand, other than Hannah, and the coma explained that.
“Exactly,” Blair said. “No way do I want to call her back just to put her in hell when she can’t control the touch well enough to ignore the vibrations.”
“Oh, I could ignore them,” Auden said, “but I’d rather just get someone to rotate the damn tires and check the bolts on the right side of the front axle.” He shrugged.
“Problem?” Blair asked. He noticed Jim already had his head tilted to the side.
“Not in the next few thousand miles or so,” Auden said, but I know machines, and having one not work right is a very annoying thing.”
“You must be a great mechanic,” Griffin said with undisguised admiration.
“Yes, sir,” Auden agreed. “So, how do I recognize one of these guides?”
Jim shook his head and seemed to refocus back on the Sentinels. “It’s someone you’re just drawn to, even if common sense tells you that you shouldn’t be. Once you start trusting that person, things change between you.” Jim let his voice trail off, not getting into the sexual relationship that might or might not be normal for all pairs or the guide voice that was definitely normal.
“Leading Seaman West,” Auden said. “He’s my guide.”
“You’re sure?” Blair felt a little out of breath. That should not be so easy. He’d been expecting… okay, he had no idea what he’d been expecting, but that wasn’t it.
“Yes, sir,” Auden said. “When West joined me, the man fucked up every engine he touched. I would have put anyone else on report and booted them off the unit, but I taught him every night, I checked every bit of work he did until I could trust him to get it right, and he’s turned into my best mechanic. I always pull a miracle off when he’s on shift with me. Right before I lost control of my senses, he was transferred to the USS John C. Stennis.”
“It sounds like you have your guide,” Jim agreed. “We’ll contact the USS John C. Stennis and see if we can make some arrangements for him to come out here. We may have to jump through a few hoops,” Jim warned.
“A few?” Griffin asked. “Detective, you’re going to have to prove to them that it’s worth changing regs to have Sentinels in the service, and the Service does love its regs.”
“It does, Captain,” Major Lauren Hazlitt said in a tone of voice that was clearly her enforcing her own authority, “However, I work in satellites, and I can promise you this: the military moves and they move fast when the situation changes. If we have the abilities that Detective Ellison has shown, we’re going to have to worry about making sure those regulations are fair. We don’t have to worry about the military refusing to make any new regs.”
Griffin nodded. “Yes, ma’am. I work field SIGINT, so I know what these senses could mean, but we can’t work unless we’re reliable.”
“Field SIGINT?” Blair whispered to Jim while Griffen and Bechtel and Hazlitt went off on a conversation that Blair couldn’t hope to follow. There was technical jargon and then there was the insanity of military people talking in words that weren’t really words.
Jim leaned close. “He works in the field, going close to enemy positions and recording enemy signals so they can be decrypted or translated. Dangerous work. You have to be pretty close to eavesdrop and your radio equipment makes you stand out like a sore thumb.”
“Not if you’re a Sentinel,” Blair pointed out.
Jim nodded. “That’s why Griffin is going to want to go back. He’s going to be better at his job.”
“Not before Auden goes back,” Blair whispered. Auden looked over and gave Blair a small smile before focusing on the three officers again. “What the hell did we get into?” Blair asked, resting his head against Jim’s shoulder as he watched the debate.
“More than we probably wanted,” Jim admitted quietly. It was more of a concession to Blair’s sudden panic than Blair expected. He’d half expected Jim to point out that Blair had been the one to insist they challenge Naomi for that damn throne. He’d expected Jim to put some of the blame on Blair and his insane competition with Naomi. Hell, Blair had gone undercover with armed car thieves after refusing both Jim and Simon only because his mother had told him he couldn’t. Yeah, he had mother issues. And his mother issues were tangled in his shaman issues.
After a brisk debate on possible regulations that Blair tuned out on, the Sentinels seemed to fall silent. Sims slept with a pillow between him and the window. Blair wasn’t sure if that was improved control or just pure exhaustion. He’d been on the verge of a coma when Blair found him. Al Diamond, an ensign, and Petty Officer Auden were doing the best. They played a quiet game of gin across the back of Auden’s seat. Lauren had pulled a book out of a bag, and Blair was pretty sure she was mentally rewriting regulations. Jim would have final say on that, though. Daniel Griffin watched the landscape with an intensity that made Blair worry about zones and Bechtel continued to watch Blair until Jim had made Blair move another seat forward. The only one who Blair couldn’t pin down was Satchel Lincoln.
He was in logistics for the Navy, and as close as Blair could tell from the file, it seemed like that meant he cooked a lot. Cooked and cleaned dished. It wasn’t where Blair had expected to find a Sentinel, but then it wasn’t like he’d go back to a kitchen with his senses turned on. He stared off into space oddly.
“Lincoln?” Blair called softly. Jim looked up from his novel and watched as Blair moved out of the seat and into the aisle. Bechtel watched too, but Blair was trying to ignore that. Note to self, Sentinels in distress could get a little stalkerish around a guide. They were definitely going to have to have a rule or two about that.
“Sir?” Lincoln turned toward Blair, but Blair got the impression that Lincoln wasn’t actually looking at him.
“Just Blair, okay? I was raised by a hippy, so too much ‘sirring’ around me and my head might fall off.” Some of the others smiled, but Lincoln didn’t. He just gave a short nod. “Are you okay?”
“Fine.” The unspoken ‘sir’ almost hung in there air, right there next to the fact that Lincoln was lying. Blair moved closer, and Lincoln’s eyes tracked him. Because the eyes were so dark, it took Blair a second to realize that Lincoln’s pupils were blown.
“Your pupils…” Blair started to say.
“I’m not on drugs, sir,” Lincoln cut him off. “Sometimes they just get a little out of wack, but I’m not high.”
Blair reared back. Well, shit. “No way. I mean, you’ve gone from a hospital to a bus full of military officers. Even if I were stupid and made some idiot assumption, which I’m not making, you didn’t have a chance to get high.”
“Right.” Lincoln sounded defensive now.
Clearly he’d been accused unfairly in the past. It made senses once Blair stopped to think about it. African Americans got slammed for drug use way more than whites, and blown pupils were a pretty classic sign. How many people had assumed Lincoln was on drugs? How many had given him grief? Blair felt a flash of pure panic as he realized the sheer range of problems Sentinels were going to carry with them into this awkward transition. Everyone was watching now, everyone except Hannah in her coma and Sims who was still out cold.
“Sometimes one of the senses goes a little out of wack,” Blair said, mimicking Lincoln’s word choice. “What are you seeing right now?”
Blair waited, watching as Lincoln fought with himself.
“Hey, I have seen shit that you would call me crazy for. Do not even ask me about Mexico, because I am not admitting to the crazy down there unless you use torture, and if you try torture, I’m hiding behind Jim,” Blair said. Lincoln almost stopped frowning. Blair wondered if emotional hang-ups were a Sentinel thing or a soldier thing or just a human thing.
“The hair on your eyebrow,” Lincoln finally said. “I can see the shaft of the hair and where it vanishes into the pucker of the follicle and the texture of the skin with petals of dry skin flakes littered between the hair follicles.
Blair’s eyebrows went up, and Lincoln’s gaze followed with a minute adjustment. “The… what? Oh man. Okay, you definitely have the vision turned up a little high.”
Lincoln snorted. “It feels like I don’t have my vision turned on at all. I’m as good as blind when it goes like this.”
“How often does it go like this?” Blair asked. He so needed to start taking notes. He was never finishing his Sentinel dissertation because every new piece of information threw all his theories out the window. Jim’s vision never did this.
“Often enough that I had trouble getting through school,” Lincoln finally admitted, and from the bitterness in his voice, that was an old pain.
“Okay, let’s talk through how to fix this,” Blair said gently. He moved slowly forward until his hand hovered right over Satchel Lincoln’s arm and then he started talking him through an exercise to turn down vision. Life was changing, but considering that Naomi’s solution to this problem would have included mass meditation and a lecture on respecting your senses and getting in touch with why they were fascinated with eyebrows, Blair was glad he and Jim had won. Lincoln deserved better. True, Blair was starting to panic about winning, but he was glad they had.
