Blair was walking up the stairs in the darkened loft. He could see the sun and the blue sky
through the window, but inside, everything was black and softened around the edges. His senses
were acting up; he could hear Jim's breathing above him. He could smell Jim everywhere, like a
veil across his own face.
*It isn't real,* Blair said to himself, his own voice clear and chiming inside his ear. *I must be
dreaming all of this....*
Jim was sitting on the edge of the bed, holding a paper heart in his hands. In the dark, Blair
couldn't see it very clearly, and Jim wasn't looking at it at all. He was looking at Blair,
expectantly, waiting for him to speak.
*Jim,* he wanted to say, *I think I'm having this crazy dream. What's up with the lights?*
But instead, when he opened his mouth, what came out was, "I have all these feelings. I get
mixed up."
Plaintive and beseeching, Blair knew immediately that they weren't his words. He would never --
not to Jim. He worked damn hard to hold his focus, to operate like a scientist, a partner, a
grownup. Grownups acknowledged their feelings, defined them, used them to best effect, and
exorcized whatever couldn't be used. A professional man, a man upon whom lives depended,
Blair Sandburg couldn't, would not, allow himself to be *mixed up.*
Nor would he appeal to Jim to fix it for him. That was his place, to keep his head together. Jim
was not his therapist, his father, or his rabbi. He would straighten it out himself. He wouldn't
dump it in Jim's lap.
Not his words. Someone else's, welling up like freshwater out of Blair's dream-body.
"You've been through a lot," Jim said, and the neutrality in his voice was comforting somehow.
"It's going to get better. Things will change."
He believed it. Jim said it, and Blair believed it completely, hook, line, and sinker, he would have
bought *stock* in it. The last couple of years had been a series of highs and lows, fear and
ecstasy, strength of purpose and a crippling sense of ineffectiveness, but it wouldn't be this way
forever. Jim, steady, capable, pragmatic Jim -- he couldn't be wrong about this.
Blair let out a long breath of relief. He wanted to thank Jim, but instead what he said was, "But
maybe I don't want things to change. Maybe if things change too much, you won't be around
anymore."
Not Blair's words. Because he trusted Jim; Jim would always be in his life, one way or another.
Jim could never leave him. After all this time, there was no way to separate, no more division
between what was Jim's life and what was Blair's. Things changed, but Jim Ellison stayed --
Blair's partner, Blair's friend, Blair's Sentinel, Blair's reward for being a good person and a good
student, smart and warm and personable and creative. He *deserved* Jim. Taking Jim out of the
picture -- that was more than a change. That would be a reversal, one that negated everything.
Someone else speaking through him, and suddenly Blair felt that other consciousness, a horrible
and alien sense of fear and hopelessness taking up space inside him. Life without Jim. Waking,
sleeping, eating, meditating, writing -- and always wondering where Jim was, how Jim was.
Always wondering -- what had changed -- what had gone wrong with his calculations, how he
could possibly have misjudged their situation so badly.
Panic rose through him, the claw-grip of a full-bore nightmare. And Jim, stupid bastard, powerful
and inflexible Jim fucking Ellison, was smiling silkily up at him, pacifying him with that smooth
voice, saying, "I'm not going anywhere. We'll always be able to be friends, and that's not going
to change."
With horror, Blair realized that it was even worse than not speaking in his own words; Jim was
looking right at him, and he was seeing *someone else.* There was no scientist reflected in Jim's
blue eyes, not even a partner, not even a goddamn grownup. He was seeing -- what? The neo-
hippie with the flyaway hair, champion of lost causes, eternal college student -- seeing a ball of
*feelings* and theories and intuition, untempered by harsh experience? Blair reached down and
ripped the paper Jim held out of his hand. Pink construction paper, blocky lettering in magic
marker. It said *Blair.* Blair crumpled it up before he read the rest. He didn't want to see it,
couldn't live with the sight of it. It didn't belong to him. It wasn't his, it was no part of him.
"What if I want you to be more than just my friend?" Blair growled out, when what he really
wanted to say was, *Jim, man, what's happening to us?*
And it wasn't Jim looking at him, couldn't possibly be Jim gazing up at him with such unbearable
serenity in his eyes, such sensible evenness. Not the Jim Ellison that Blair knew, not his Jim.
Because he'd seen Jim's face when there was a fire lit an inch below the surface, the way Jim's
eyes roared with challenge and smoked with hunger. The real Jim Ellison -- Blair knew how he
felt. He knew what worlds Jim contained, and knew that those lost continents were his to
explore, whenever he chose, whenever the time was right. But now, in Jim's eyes, Blair could
only see ocean. "Blair," he said, his voice mild and malleable, offering nothing to hold onto, "so
much has happened to you. I think your emotions are a little confused right now."
It sucked everything out of Blair at once. He didn't know Jim. He didn't know himself. He
didn't know why he'd come here or what he had thought he could ever say to Jim. Almost two
years, and so much had happened to him, evolving him into something that Blair couldn't define
at all. He was emotional. He was confused. He was terrified.
Blair began to stumble backwards, away from this thing that was not the Jim he'd put his trust in,
the one he had been following all this time, not even the slightest bit mixed up or confused,
because Jim's path had to be the right path. That Jim was gone, and he was alone in the loft with
a stranger, and all the familiar things around him, his home, looked threatening and out of place.
Jim stood up as if to follow him, and Blair heard himself yell, heard both simple anger and a
strange spiral out of control in his voice as he cried out, "You think I'm just a *child*?"
Words seemed to come out of Jim's mouth, garbled and staticky. Blair heard, *Not mature* and
*Still real* and he put his hands up over his ears, knowing that it was a silly and childish way to
avoid an idea -- anyway, ideas were good, Blair's whole life was about mastering one idea after
another, wasn't it? -- but unable to stop himself.
He stepped back, and there was nothing under his heel. He was at the top of the stairs, and even
though Jim reached out to grab his arm, it was too late, and Blair felt himself pitch backwards into
blankness.
He woke up out of breath and almost paralyzed with the intensity of it. Then he began to laugh,
nervously at first, then out of sheer, life-affirming relief. It was *over.* It was done.
Stacey, Blair remembered then. Those had been Stacey's words, overheard just a few days ago
and lurking around in the stew of his subconscious only to be kicked up to the front by an unlikely
firing of neurons as his brain sifted through its memory banks deciding what to keep and what to
toss. *Weird.*
"Chief?"
"Come in," he said automatically, and Jim took him up on the offer. "What time is it?"
"Don't worry, you haven't overslept yet," Jim chuckled.
Blair managed to read the dim blue glow of the clock face as the sleep-fog cleared out of his eyes.
Four-ten. "What are you -- oh, man, was I keeping you awake? I was having all these crazy
dreams...."
Jim shrugged an took a drink from something he was holding. "You and the rest of Cascade. It's
just one of those...loud nights."
"You should wear your--"
"It's no big deal, Sandburg. I'm not tired."
Blair sat up in bed, wondering if only a crazy person would be feeling the need right now to run
some kind of test on his roommate to make sure he was...really his roommate. It was hard to tell,
in the darkness, with Jim leaning against the doorframe, his inner fires all banked and his control
firmly in place. Blair wouldn't really be able to *know* that it had been nothing but a dream, not
until he could check it out.
Yeah. Crazy. Because of *course* it was a dream -- what else would it have been? Something
about Stacey's words, or maybe just something about her emotional dependence on Jim's
approval, something had struck a chord in his subconscious mind, and he'd acted out a fantasy, a
fear of losing Jim's respect. Dreams could do that, could be a dry-run for something you feared,
your deep mind trying to prepare you for something you consciously believed was so unlikely as
to be absurd.
Unlikely that Jim could ever go away. Unlikely that he would ever look down on Blair like that,
mistaking his empathy for immaturity or his eccentricities for callow unworldliness. Unlikely that
either of them would ever forget that there was a bond between them that was more than a
friendship, and much more than a crush.
"You think I'm just a child?" Blair heard himself say, and it was wholly disorienting, knocking
over his sense of dreaming and reality like a kicked sandcastle. Was that his voice? Had he
spoken aloud? Was that his fear? Was he here at all, or some strange half-waking intermediary?
Everything seemed to spin, inside Blair's head and outside it.
"What?" Jim said, half intrigued and half annoyed. "Of course I don't. What are you talking
about?"
And then he remembered, as clearly as if he'd spent all day replaying it in his memory. "You said
I had a way with children because I wasn't that far removed. I heard you say it." Of course.
Heard it, then forgotten it -- or maybe not.
He could see Jim's mouth twitch in a faint smile. "Jesus, Chief, that was a month or more ago.
You been hanging onto that all this time?"
"Trust me, no one's more surprised than I am," Blair muttered.
"Well, if it bugged you so much, you could've just said something."
Blair shrugged and smiled back at him, an affable sort of *you know me* gesture. Which didn't
make much sense in context, because normally Blair *did* say something. Normally Blair talked
about everything, hashed endlessly over whatever offhanded comment Jim came up with, its
meaning, its ramifications. Blair Sandburg was not the suppressed-memory type.
"Is this about the crazy dreams?"
Damn Jim's overdeveloped detective-brain. Blair shrugged again, and thought about lying, but
when push came to shove, found that he didn't have it in him. Not tonight, not to Jim. "I had this
dream about Stacey. Sort of about Stacey. I guess -- I guess it was more like, Stacey was
talking, but -- Oh, forget it. Forget it, I just want to get a little more sleep before my first class."
"Okay," Jim agreed comfortably. "I had a weird dream earlier tonight, too, actually. I was back
in Vice, and I was stationed in the middle of the woods. My job was to scare the scavenger birds
away from the bodies of these seven dead prostitutes that were just lying there in front of me."
"You win. That's way freakier than my dream."
Jim got that low, gruff tone in his voice that always signaled an admission that he normally
wouldn't make of his own free will. "Part of why I left Vice -- I had a lot of nightmares back
then. Funny, because you would think that Major Crimes.... Oh, who knows? Dreams are
dreams. They never make any sense."
Blair yawned wide enough to make his jaw pop slightly. "Sounds almost like a fairy tale -- forest,
ravens, seven dead sisters."
"Some fucked-up fairy tale. But then, I guess if fairy tales are supposed to teach us what to fear
and how to cope with our fears, then they probably should be getting more fucked up as the
world does."
"I don't know that the world is all that much more-- Whoa, hang on, earth to Jim Ellison. Excuse
me, was that a little Jungian analysis of oral folk culture, there?"
Usually when Blair called Jim on his surprisingly vast store of impractical knowledge, Jim
blustered it off with something self-deprecating, some kind of, *Me? You're the guy who gets his
mail sent to the Ivory Tower, Darwin; I'm just along for the ride.*
"I had to read a little Bettelheim in college," Jim said coolly.
"Oh, man. I am *so* in love with you."
It might have been the wrong thing to say, but somehow it didn't seem to be. Jim just smirked at
him until it was suddenly Blair and not Jim at all who was a little nervous, and he launched into
the first words that came to mind to break the silence. "Of course, Bettelheim's out of fashion
now. He's a little *too* Jungian. I mean, I'm a Jungian, but I have a sense of *perspective*
about it. These days, you'd have to read some Marina Warner or Jack Zipes, or personally I'm
into Cashdan, I think he's doing some cool work with the psychology of folklore that doesn't--"
"Chief. Go to sleep, would you?"
"I hear that. Goodnight, Jim."
When he was gone, it occurred to Blair to wonder why he hadn't tried harder to tell Jim about the
dream. It was interesting, wasn't it? That maybe some part of Blair had identified with Stacey;
after all, other men Blair's age were getting married and having kids and starting careers, and
Blair was years behind them, still in school, still dating women he had absolutely no interest in
having a relationship with, dicking around with a dissertation that he was beginning to suspect
could never safely be published at all, still dragging his feet over this business of Jim, playing it by
ear as though he had all the time in the world.
But things changed. People changed. And Jim was older, he was a guy with a 401k plan, a guy
who owned his own place and had been down the aisle once already. There was a gulf between
their experiences -- in some ways, yeah, between their maturity levels. Maybe. It would've been
interesting to ask Jim what he thought of the dream, anyway.
Slightly abashed, it occurred to Blair: he'd never had the guts to do what Stacey did. With a lot
more hope of success than she ever had, with more of a support network than she could possibly
have had, Stacey had just...asked him. Just used her vocabulary -- a twelve-year-old's
vocabulary, infinitely inferior to Blair's -- to get across the salient points: *I want you, I'm afraid
of losing you, I want to be enough for you in your eyes. I am not your friend; I feel something
bigger than that, something not as easy to pin down.*
Words Blair had never actually spoken. Sure, he told himself it was all *implied,* that the words
didn't have to be spoken after everything they'd done for each other. But on the other hand,
maybe he was just a rotten coward who needed a little kid to do his own talking for him, even
inside his own head. Hell, he hadn't even had the courage to discuss it with Jim as a hypothetical,
to reveal the details of his dream.
*Nice work, Mr. Share-Your-Feelings. Serve you right if Jim laughed in your face the next time
you tell him he can't keep things all bottled up.*
Blair knew the buzzwords, the language of formal psychoanalysis, and practically every holistic or
alternative branch of therapy to boot -- courtesy of that year and a half in the 31 flavors of
counseling that followed David the Terrible. Funny how he didn't even remember the man's
name anymore -- Naomi took to calling him David the Terrible after he was gone, and it was the
only way Blair ever thought of him after that -- but he remembered everything he ever learned
about opening up, processing, and healing your emotional wounds. All of it, some useful, some
ridiculous, some a little of each.
He'd had nightmares, that year when he was eleven, and one of the counselors taught him about
lucid dreaming. You go back in after a nightmare and you play the whole scene over again --
except on your terms. Say what you should have said, end it the way you chose to end it. It had
cured his nightmares, when he was a child. And since the subconscious never really got any older
or more immune to deception...it could just as easily work now.
It was worth a try. He was going back to sleep anyway.
It came together slowly, the details of the darkened loft forming gradually so that it seemed the
stairs materialized just ahead of Blair's feet. But the sound of Jim's heartbeat and the smell of Jim
came quickly, so strong that it almost made him dizzy. By the top step, it was all there, exactly
like Blair remembered. Jim, sitting there, waiting for him with the paper heart in his hands.
"I need to tell you something," Blair said. It was just a test, to see if his voice would obey him. It
did.
"Shut up," Jim said, almost pleasantly.
"No, Jim -- you gotta listen to me. I'm serious, I--"
"You're always serious."
"Jim--"
"I know. I already know, Sandburg."
The Jim that came out of his subconscious was every bit as annoying as the real version. Oddly
heartwarming, actually. "I don't care if you know or not. I mean, of *course* you know --
you're nothing but a piece of me, a mask -- you're something I want to say to myself, but can't
picture *myself* saying. The point is, this is not about *me* talking to *you.* I just want to say
it. I just -- want to put it in words."
"You already did. Look." Jim held out the pink heart, and reluctantly, Blair took it from him and
unfolded it. There was no magic marker this time, just Blair's own ballpoint scrawl, the same
writing Jim must have seen a million times in notes on the refrigerator, all over his paperwork, in
open notebooks tossed on top of the television. It said, *Blair Loves Jim.*
"I didn't write this."
"Let it go, Blair."
"Just let me say it, Jim! God, it's my lucid dream, and you won't even let me get a word in
edgewise!"
Suddenly, Jim reached out and grabbed him by the wrists, holding his hands still, the heart still
clasped tightly in them. "Do you think your pretty words mean a fucking thing to me? Here?"
"What the hell do you mean, it doesn't mean anything to you? This is what I do, Jim -- this is
who I am! I explain things; isn't that what you want from me? Isn't that what you've always
wanted from me?"
"This isn't who you are. You think it is, but you're wrong. Listen. Listen."
Somewhere, far away, Blair could hear a slow, sad moaning that made him shudder with
sympathy. Another voice joined in, and a third, and he realized they weren't human moans at all.
It sounded like a pack of wolves. "I don't -- Jim, I don't understand. What are you telling me?"
"I'm not telling you anything. This story can't be told."
"I'm a scientist, goddammit. I'm your partner, I'm an adult, I'm a human being. We have words,
we use words. *Drink to me only with thine eyes* isn't *literal,* Jim, it's a poem, it's *words.*
We're the storytelling animals -- we pass on our experiences through language, it may be the only
thing that sets us apart, the way we assign meaning to events that don't inherently have--"
"Blair Sandburg. *Shut up.* Shut up. Don't talk to me." His hands moved roughly up Blair's
forearms, leaving gooseflesh behind as they went. The howling of the wolves was meltingly
beautiful, lulling Blair into a strange calm state. His hands opened, and the paper fluttered
unnoticed to his feet.
The room seemed to be getting darker -- no, not darker, but his vision was becoming more
opaque, details blurring into each other until his eyes couldn't fasten on to any one thing, not even
Jim's familiar blue eyes. "What's happening to me?" he asked breathlessly.
"You can't see well. You track by sound and scent."
"I'm a *human being.*"
"Turn the light out. I want your tongue and your teeth. I'm deeper in you than the sound of your
voice. You can talk to the ravens and the seven dead sisters, but the only way out of the forest is
by walking. Fuck paper, Blair; you've given me enough paper to last a lifetime. I want this now."
His hand settled on Blair's chest, over his heart, and Blair bowed his head, lulled into passive
silence by the strange cadences of Jim's voice. They stood that way, dream-time passing
immeasurably, one of Jim's hands on his arm, the other against his chest.
And then his hand moved again, reaching up to catch hold of Blair's ponytail, and Blair felt
himself fall in a dream for the second time that night, but forward this time, collapsing on top of
Jim. Half blind, his hands found Jim's face easily, and his mouth found Jim's even more easily.
Jim's teeth were sharp, but the taste of him was exactly right, precisely Jim, and Blair pressed
harder into the kiss, until he couldn't think and his whole body was a howl.