Jim and Blair would be much happier if they stayed with Pet Fly, but unfortunately for them, I have a bad habit of taking them out of the toybox and hurting them.
---

To hear Sandburg tell it, it was easy. He likes to make things sound
easy, but they're not; they never are, or at least not as easy as he
makes them sound. We were investigating an abandoned warehouse, close
to where Lash had once held him captive, and I could tell he was a little
shaky about that--and then I realized that the shaking wasn't all him.
The earthquake hit, and the building shifted above us, and he looked
up with a shocked expression on his face as the sounds became audible
to him. I was already moving, because I could hear the building starting
to fall, and knew I had to get us somewhere out of its path.

So we ended up in the building's bomb shelter, which wasn't entirely
safe but it was sure as hell safer than the collapsing warehouse above
us. "You OK?" I asked, when the world stopped moving, running my hands
over him, checking for damage.

"I'm fine, I'm fine, stop that or I'll smack you. Can we get out of
here?"

Get out of there we did. Not too hard, considering--we could have been
trapped, all ways out could have been blocked, but they weren't. That
was easy. Not as easy as Sandburg will tell you it was, but it was.
Once outside, we made our way to my truck, and discovered it was dented
and dusty, but most unharmed. We knocked some chunks of concrete off
of the roof and hood and hopped in.

The police radio told us where we were needed, and where we could get
to, and we were off and running. He turned on NPR, and then we both
looked at each other and I could see him getting shaky again. All those
jokes about Los Angeles falling into the ocean--they'd become, well,
jokes, part of our culture, something harmless and silly to say. And
now...well. After a minute, he inhaled deeply, smirked and said "Hey,
now they can film a remake of 'Escape from L.A.' on site."

I shouldn't laugh when he says things like that, but I always do, and
that time was no different.

While I was in the middle of laughing, we hit the roadblock.

It wasn't a roadblock the police radio would have told us about. It
was the black-sedan and black-helicopter type of roadblock, the kind
we'd planned and prepared for avoiding--and we ran straight into it.
It made a certain kind of sense. In the mess of a major quake, who would
notice we were gone? And if they did notice, who would suspect?

I reached over and squeezed his hand just before they opened the doors
and pulled us out of the truck. We'd get through this. We'd have to.

They put me in a dark room, alone, and turned on the white noise generators.
Sometimes, it occurs to me that I really do love Sandburg. The Master
of Obfuscation himself had carefully noted the effects of Lee Brackett's
generator, and carefully noted that I had to use special earplugs to
help control my hearing, but had carefully failed to note that he'd taught
me to filter out white noise when necessary.

I could also tell that they'd put a subdermal transmitter under the skin
of my upper arm. Probably a GPS locator. I could sense its operation,
and it made me vaguely ill--which could come in handy. I didn't touch
it, didn't even indicate that I'd noticed it.

So I was alone and blind and--they thought--deaf and *located*. I clapped
my hands a few times, sharply, and got a sense of the size of the room:
about eight-by-ten, high-ceilinged, one-way glass along one side which
meant they'd turn on the lights eventually. Small privacy screen around
a toilet and sink. Then I sent out my hearing, looking for Blair. I
knew he was close--I've been able to tell his general location, and he
mine, ever since the day he died at the fountain, but I had trouble
pinpointing.
I finally found him when he started talking. "Jim, Jim, I know you can
hear me. You there? Gotta map the place, OK? Figure out how to map
it, and hey Jim, wouldn't it be nice to line all these guys up in a row
and use them for target practice? I'm sure they've got white noise
generators
on you now, right? Thought of everything, didn't they?"

He was silent only when he slept, and even then I could hear his heartbeat
and breathing, now that I had his location pinpointed. "Jim, I thought
of something. I bet you can map the place by sound, Jim. The bat echo
trick. I'll keep talking so you can use that to help, OK? Sound good?
Today's topic: ways to make your Sentinel scream during sex. Way number
one--"

I'd already thought of that way of mapping, and had been using it, but
it was easier with his voice and with the increased activity of the
daytime--if
it was daytime. It was the light-cycle, at least, because they turned
on the overhead lights in my room, and I dialed down my sight against
the brightness of the florescent bulbs.

About halfway through the light-cycle, two guards came in, followed by
a man in a suit. I listened to the door hum as it opened: electronic
lock, then--no keys to steal. I'd have to think of something else.
I looked up at the man in the suit and grinned involuntarily. He just
*looked* like a government agent: slightly ill-fitting clothes, nervous
but hiding it behind thin lips and an expressionless face. It occurred
to me that Brackett would have been invaluable to these
people--good-looking,
open-faced, charming: everything this man was not. If Brackett hadn't
been such a bastard, actually, Blair and I might have welcomed his
companionship.
He would have been useful in this situation, with that labyrinthine mind
of his.

Of course, it was entirely possible that this situation was of his making.
It's the sort of thing that he would do. I hadn't heard his voice anywhere,
but that didn't mean he wasn't running the show from behind the scenes.
I had to take that into account.

I used the voice of the man in the suit to fill in some details of my
echo-map, and otherwise ignored him. After a while, I looked up at him
and said, "I don't know what you guys injected me with, but my arm hurts,
and I feel kind of sick." I touched the site of the transmitter briefly
to indicate what I meant. He frowned and called for someone to let him
out.

I ate some of the food the guards had brought, after carefully checking
it for drugs, and considered the one-way glass as a means to an escape
route.

The man in the suit came back the next light-cycle, and the next. I
played progressively sicker and stopped using the arm with the transmitter
in it. They'd know about some of the weird allergies and reactions I
had from the dissertation; how were they to know that this wasn't a
previously
undiscovered side effect of Sentinelism? On the fourth cycle, when the
man showed up, I looked up from my fetal position on the floor and said
"You guys have got to talk to Sandburg about what you gave me. He'll
know how to deal with it."

He blinked at that, and I let my eyes go wide. "You haven't talked to
him. You haven't told him I'm sick." I let the shock in my voice slide
into anger. "I swear, if you've killed him--" I climbed to my feet,
keeping my arm dangling, and headed for him. The guards held me off,
and the man in the suit frowned and called to be let out, after giving
me a hard look. I struggled with the guards and then deliberately vomited
on them.

They dropped me on the floor and followed the man in the suit out the
door. I lay on the floor of my cell, smell dialed to nothing, my face
in my own vomit, to wait and listen.

After fifteen minutes, I heard what I wanted to hear: a hospital gurney
being wheeled down the hallway towards me. I pretended to pass out,
and continued listening. Two orderlies, accompanied by two guards, came
in and lifted me onto the gurney, where they strapped me firmly. I woke
up and fought them a little, sluggishly, thinking all the while that
my Covert Ops fellows would have been damn proud of this performance.
This was better than the one I treated Colonel Oliver and his friends
to.

Once in the hospital area, I let them put in an IV and then let every
muscle in my body relax, as though I were sleeping. They cleaned me
up and left me alone with a pair of guards. I continued listening.

There--they were moving Blair. From the echoes in his voice, I'd known
he wasn't in a room with one-way glass, so they were moving him to an
interrogation room now. I breathed steadily and evenly, and waited.

"Blair Jacob Sandburg."

"Yes," he said, his voice a little hoarse from talking to me for the
past four days. They offered him a sip of water, which he didn't take.

"Mr. Sandburg, we've read everything you've ever published on Sentinels,
and we have your dissertation..."

I tuned it out, mostly, only drifting back in to the conversation
occasionally.

"...allergic reactions?"

"His reactions are unpredictable. He has severe allergies to a number
of things, and is highly sensitive to substances most people don't react
to. I believe that this is a manifestation of a compromised immune system
due to stress, exposure to exotic disease pools, and extended contact
with a number of toxic materials during his stint in the Army."

"So it's unrelated to his sentinel abilities?"

"I told you--my dissertation was a fraud."

"Mr. Sandburg, I do wish you'd tell us the truth..."

After a while, the talking tapered off, and then I heard them taking
him back to his cell. I was out of the bed, IV ripping out of my arm
as I moved towards the guards. I dropped the first with a punch and
caught his semiautomatic rifle as he went down, firing it into the other
guard. I took the clips out of their handguns and out of the second
semiauto, then headed for Blair. He'd know I was coming, feel my movement
along the connection between us.

I ran through the halls, the tile cool against my bare feet, following
the map in my head, using my eyes only to scan for enemies. I thanked
Blair over and over for forcing me to take a week's vacation and spend
it blind, navigating only by sound. But then, he probably had something
like this in mind when he'd done that.

As I got close to him, I heard the unmistakable *thump* of him falling
against someone, and then the shift and slide of fabric and skin--and
then a gun firing, once. I rounded the corner and saw him pulling the
rifle from the body, a handgun in his other hand, and a guard who
had...well...not
so much of his head left. "Chief!"

"I just killed a guy, Jim."

"Yeah. Now, let's get the fuck out of here."

Get the fuck out of there we did. There was a bad moment in the ventilation
shaft, when the alarms went off and that hurt, hurt horribly, but Blair
got me through it. We made it to the hangar, and I heard myself thinking
"This is too easy, too goddamn easy, easier even than Sandburg would
make it sound, *fuck* they were expecting this and they're letting us
do it--" and as I was thinking it, I shot out the controls of every chopper
there except the one Blair had gotten running. I hopped in and smiled
at him, glad to see him, glad to be with him, and we took off.

As he headed for our closest cache of escape materials, I found a small
toolkit in the chopper and used it to cut out my transmitter. Blair
set the chopper down about five miles from our hideout, and we jogged
the rest of the way there. The first thing we did once we reached the
cabin was to cut out his transmitter. Then we showered, shaved, and
dressed. The old Jeep we had in the shed was already packed: money,
some canned food, fake passports and other identification, and we drove
to a nearby truck stop and duct-taped Blair's transmitter to the underside
of one of the rigs before heading south, towards Mexico. After twenty
miles, we took an exit and taped my transmitter to a Saturn with Texas
plates, then turned around and headed for Canada.

We made it to the border, and through, without being stopped. When we
reached Edmonton, we booked two flights for each of us: one going to
Houston, and one to Miami. Then, because we hoped like hell that that
Saturn was headed for Texas, we got on the Miami flight. Once in Miami,
we booked a flight to Lima--using different, still fake, passports--and
stole a cell phone, which I used to call our lawyer in Cascade and tell
him to send out the videotapes and letters he was keeping for us.

In Lima, we rented a hotel room--paid for a week, in advance--and slept
for sixteen hours straight. We hadn't dared to sleep on the flight--I
was monitoring communications, and Blair was monitoring me--and so when
we got there, we'd been on the run for almost thirty hours, and awake
for almost forty-eight. I woke up with Blair's mouth warm on my cock,
and I could sense how desperate he was to reconnect us, to find life
in the middle of this goddamn mess. He'd killed a man for the first
time less than three days ago, and he was searching for human contact,
for an affirmation of life.

I remembered the first time I killed someone, and how I'd found my
affirmation
in a hand job behind the base mess hall. I was twenty-two, and scared,
and now Blair was thirty, and scared. I pulled him up until he was next
to me, and reached down into the duffel bag for lube and condoms. (The
way we'd figured it, if we were on the run, we might not have time to
buy supplies. Boy Scouts to the bone, we'd put lubricant and condoms
in all of our scattered caches.) I didn't take much time preparing him,
but then, he didn't need it--he wanted this, badly, and he raised himself
on his hands and knees, back arched, head down, so goddamn fucking sexy
and so goddamn fucking hurt--the last bit of the enthusiastic grad student
I'd met subsumed, finally and forever, by Blair the warrior, Blair the
practical, Blair the cop, Blair the hunted, Blair the killer. Blair
the Guide.

I kissed him between his shoulder blades and slid into him, wrapping
one arm around his chest and leaning back so that he was sitting on my
thighs as I knelt behind him. "Please," he said, softly, his voice broken,
and I began to move slowly. "No," he said, and I stopped and felt the
connection between us spring to life. "Hard, Jim." His voice was still
soft, but the fierceness beneath it was evident. He was hard himself,
now, hard and tough and no longer innocent of anything, and I could sense
the need in him to feel that loss of innocence.

So I pushed him back onto his hands and knees and fucked him, hard, digging
my fingers into his hips and feeling the tension in him, growing, moving
through him until it broke--he broke--and we both came. Afterward, he
held me for a while, then dragged me into the bathroom to shower with
him. As he washed my back, he suddenly said, "I wish I hadn't had to
kill him, but I'm not sorry I did."

"I wish you hadn't had to kill him, either."

He laughed. "But you're not sorry I did?"

"Hell, no."

"Good."

We rinsed off and stepped out of the shower, shaved, and went out to
buy hiking gear, which we repacked our supplies into. Then we bought
a ramshackle truck and headed for Chopec territory, using the illegal
road Cyclops oil had cut into the jungle years ago. Once there, we'd
be as safe as we could possibly be; no one the Chopec didn't want in
their land lived very long.

Once there, we could take the time to plan. Once there, perhaps Blair
would regain some of his patented enthusiasm.

But as I looked at him beside me, his short dark hair brushed back, his
eyes closed, and his hands resting lightly on his knees, I didn't think
so. "Stop it, Jim," he said, his tone sharp.

"Stop what?"

"Stop thinking 'yet another thing Blair's given up for me.'" I flinched,
then grinned wryly at him as he opened his eyes. "I chose this freely.
This is who I am."

"Yeah," I said, knowing what he meant, remembering dog tags that smelled
of fuel and oil and Blair, and the way he'd looked at me and told me
he was my partner, with the chain tangled around his fingers. "Yeah,
Sandburg, I know."



### The End ###


laura jacquez valentine -+- http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/~jacquez
Unused Steven Seagal Movie Title: RENT TO OWN
Jesus is a meme. -+- http://www.memepool.com/