Eat Worms

“Hey Jim, it’s Derek… look , I don’t know what’s going on but… Blair’s here and he’s been hittin’ the stuff pretty hard.”

Jim frowned, rubbing his hand across his forehead and sighing softly into the receiver. The loft was dark around him and he could tell that Blair hadn’t been there all night. He knew something had been brewing for some time now, ever since the night Simon and Blair had found him in that god-awful warehouse with the fun-house electrics. The night that he had zoned on everything around him. The night Blair had kissed him, and he had not reacted too well.

“How many, Derek?” he asked as he turned to dig his keys out of the basket again. He had noticed that the Volvo was still in the parking lot, so that told him the kid had meant to take a cab home. Smart kid, damn bad night to be doing this.

“At least four so far. Max is taking a fifth to him now.” Derek sounded worried. Derek never sounded worried if it were beer or wine coolers… Blair was on the hard stuff. Very unusual.

“Ok, I’m on my way. Don’t let him go anywhere, all right?” Jim turned to put the phone on the hook again before leaving the loft and jogging down the stairs to his truck. As he drove, he thought about the last week. He and Blair had been quietly avoiding each other in the loft. They took separate cases, although Blair normally worked with Taggert while Jim tooled around with Conner.

He should have said something that night. He should have fixed it then. He should have told Blair… something. Instead, he had left Blair to his own devices and pretended that the kiss had never happened, therefore neither had the fight. After Simon had practically ripped Jim a new one for his attitude that night, Jim had worked hard to stay out of his partner’s way. But Blair wasn’t his partner so much anymore.

Derry’s was a little mom and pop pub, only a few blocks from home. Normally Jim would have walked there, but he was pretty sure that he would be half carrying his roommate home, so it would be easier to drive home in the truck. When he stepped into the place, he was met by Jerry, the club bouncer. Jerry was once a cop, old school, and knew how to handle himself. When he retired, he and his old buddy Derek opened the bar. It was a comfortable relationship.

Jerry pointed out the back corner and Jim leaned over the rail to catch a first glimpse of his partner. It was almost as bad as he thought it would be. Blair was wearing his most comfortable jeans, a dark blue Henley and a black and white flannel shirt. His hair was loose and free. His staple clothes from before Jim Ellison. Hell, except for the dark look of experience haunting his eyes, he could have passed as the young student Jim had first met four years ago.

But for some reason, Jim thought it had been a long time since the younger version of his partner had been seen in a situation like he was now – like some rush week at the Uni. He had four shot glasses in front of him, all rim down, and a fifth sat before him, filled with two fingers of liquor. From this distance, and the lime slices and salt shaker, Jim guessed that it would be tequila. He strolled over to the bar, keeping an eye on Blair but making no move to approach him yet.

Derek met him at the opposite end of the bar. “Please tell me he’s at least drinking good stuff?”

Derek snorted. “What would you be implying?”

So Blair was drinking Cuervo. That suits, considering the attitude he was effecting with the clothes, the hair and the dark corner he had hidden in. According to Derek, the young man had come in about two hours earlier, slapped his credit card on the bar, and said he would sign it when he could see again. A sure sign that he wanted to be left alone. Jim took his card out and placed it on the bar.

“Soda for me, and I’ll buy his bottle for the table. You can total out his tab.” Derek nodded and Jim turned towards his roommate. This was going to be an interesting talk.

As soon as he was even with the table, he forced himself to relax and paste a smile on his face. Blair didn’t look up, so Jim tried for a slightly less silent approach. “Mind if I sit here?”

Blair looked up, slice of lime in one hand and shot glass in the other, and squinted his eyes until Jim figured he had him sighted well enough. His pink tongue flickered out past wet lips and licked the webbing of the hand holding the lime, then he threw back the shot following it quickly with a solid bite of the lime, groaning as the liquid burned all the way down. “Gods…”

Jim took this as a good sign and slid into the booth opposite his friend. Blair glared in his direction for a moment, then flipped and slammed the glass down on its rim, signaling the end of the drink and the request for more. Max arrived with a glass, more lime slices, the bottle and a soda for Jim, then retreated to her other customers. The sigh she let out and the roll of her eyes told Jim he was on his own. He didn’t blame her. Blair glared at the bottle with distaste. He transferred the look to Jim, who sipped his drink in silence.

“Derek called you, didn’t he? I thought you were on a stake-out.”

Jim nodded once before answering. “I was headed there; it was called at the last second. Raymond was picked up and booked. Caught in the act this time.”

“Good,” snarled Blair. “At least the paperwork will be short and sweet.”

Jim smiled gently. “I just got in the door when the phone rang… Derek said you’d been here a couple hours now.”

Blair nodded. “Wanted to take some time for myself when you weren’t around to worry.”

Jim sighed. “You want to talk about it?”

Blair mulishly shook his head in the negative, then mid-shake, changed his mind and nodded. Then finally his head stilled and he sighed as he poured another two fingers of tequila into his glass. Blair glared at Jim as he salted his hand and grabbed another lime slice, then he slammed it back and the glass down.

“No, I don’t want to talk about it.” Blair said belligerently. “But I will - talk about it that is for now - But I don’t want to be interrupted. This is not a ‘Jim fixes all Blair’s shit’ story, got it? This is me, talking, and you, listening. Got it?”

Jim nodded once. “Yep, I got it - you talk, I listen. And when you stop talking, I’ll take you home. Or if you finish the bottle first, we go home. Yes?”

Blair acknowledged this by pouring more drink and saluting him with it before saying paradoxically. “You, James Joseph Ellison, suck.”

Well that was pretty straightforward. Not exactly what Jim had been expecting, but it matched the mood that Blair appeared to be in. He opened his mouth to speak when Blair’s hand came up suddenly, one finger pointing at Jim. His eyes squinting against the smoke and the light, Blair growled, “You promised to listen, so listen. Means no talking, damn it.”

Jim clamped his mouth shut. He had promised, after all. Blair waited a beat, then nodded when he saw that Jim was complying. He sipped his drink for a moment, appearing to marshal his thoughts before continuing.

“You suck… the Dean at Rainier sucks… the school sucks… my mom sucks… Berkshire publishing sucks… the Academy sucks…” Blair gulped a large sip out of his shot glass and then peered into it. “Life sucks, generally speaking.”

Jim sipped his soda in silence. Blair glanced around the room. The belligerence had faded and now he was starting to get maudlin. He started to ramble, mostly to himself, but also to Jim,

“You know what sucks the most? Me. I suck. I suck because I failed. I failed to be a good son, so Naomi thought she needed to do something to help make me better. I failed as a student, so when the dean and the chancellor got the first chance, they dumped me. I failed to protect you from the press, so the publishing company thought they could walk all over me and not help restore my credit and standing in the community. I fail at being a cop, because the recruits at the Academy and the Officers on the beat sneer at my attempt to become one of them.”

Jim was becoming very uncomfortable throughout this little pity party. Did his partner really see himself as that much of a failure? He opened his mouth to say something, thought better of it, and snapped his mouth shut again. Blair didn’t seem to notice as he kept nursing his seventh shot of tequila. He was slowing down, sipping rather than slamming. The bottle was only half empty. Jim shifted in his seat while drinking his cola. Blair was pretty much totally ignoring him now, but at least he was still talking.

“My mom never wanted me, not really, I mean I never doubted she loved me but when she got tired of me, she threw me away. Oh, it was in the guise of going to college, but at 16?!? I should have spent a year and a half out in the world before going to school. But she was more than happy to let me start college early, anything to get herself free.”

Jim had to agree with this assessment. He had always thought it odd that Blair has started college so young. Blair continued his muttering. “The Chancellor hated me, she never wanted the ‘wunderkid’ at her school so as soon as she found a chance, she threw me away too. And the school backed her up, they threw me away… then I thought the Academy would be easy to do, I’d already spent over three years riding with you… but they had no use for me. They didn’t want me either.”

Jim watched as the glass was drained, flipped and slowly settled to the table. That had to be about it then. Last drink of the night. Blair stopped talking and just stared at the table top. Then he said so softly that if Jim hadn’t been a Sentinel there would have been no way he would have heard it, “No-one ever wants me, nobody at all..."

Jim stiffened in his seat and his eyes winced shut. He didn’t think Blair meant for him to hear the statement, but after the difficulties they had been having for the last week it was one hell of a gut shot.

Reflexively he leaned forward and placed his hand on top of Blair’s where it was still resting on the table and said, “God, Blair, no. That’s not true…”

But when he opened his eyes to meet Blair’s he saw that nothing he said was going to get through – the booze had conquered his young friend and he was slumped over the table out cold. Jim sighed and took that as his signal, standing and grabbing the bottle, placing the stopper back in and handing it to Max on her way back to the bar. “Keep this for us?”

She nodded and Jim smiled as he turned his attention back to his drunk, dejected, inebriated… and dead to the world friend. Taking the nearest arm, he pulled the unresisting man out of the booth, hoisted him on to his shoulder and headed out to the truck that was parked only a few feet away. “Easy Chief. I got ya, just relax.”

After stuffing the smaller man into the passenger seat and belting him in, Jim climbed in the driver seat and began the short trip home. But his mind wouldn’t leave anything that Blair had said in his drunken ramblings alone. ‘In Vino, veratis’, or more like ‘in booze, truth’. Blair probably told Jim more about his past and honestly how he was feeling tonight than he had ever told him in the four years they had known each other. Why did that scare him?

Hell if he was going to tackle things that scared him, he might as well wonder why that kiss in the warehouse had scared him so much. It wasn’t like it had been the end of the world, it had been a kiss. Rather nice one actually. Yeah, he’d been zoned half out of his mind and woken up to someone holding him and kissing him, but seriously – who the hell did he think it was? Who in his life would consistently go that far to help him? Conner? Yeah right. There is no way Conner would have laid a lip lock on him to bring him out of a zone, she had barely been able to do it while they were undercover for a case.

Okay, so there was that one moment just before he opened his eyes, where deep inside something in him had known and cried out that it was wrong, but what the hell was it? Some memory or teaching from his father? It wasn’t even as if one kiss was going to make him gay… no matter how much better it had been than any other kiss he had ever had before… well shit. So what if he was? Well, besides the obvious… not that many of those were all that valid anymore either. And it wasn’t like he woke up afterwards and said "You know what? I think I like men more than women now, and it's all Sandburg's fault for kissing me in the warehouse."

Jim pulled up in front of their home, parked and shut off the truck before moving around to pull Blair out and onto his shoulder again. The kid was still out, but grumbled a bit here and there to let Jim know he was still alive. At some point he was sure he heard something that sounded like a small complaint along the lines of being old enough to climb stairs. Jim’s answer was to lock the truck and head inside for the elevator.

The near silent ride up in the box was punctuated with good natured grumbling from his partner and he resisted the urge to swat the tempting expanse of ass that spread out from his right cheek. One well placed smack… but no, that wouldn’t have exactly been fair to the schnockered thirty-something young man who was hanging over Jim’s shoulder.

Reaching the third floor, Jim used his key to open the apartment door and carried his charge into the dark loft, kicking the door shut behind him. Turning and locking the door, he scanned this way and that, weighing his options.

The last words Blair had uttered at the bar before succumbing to the Cuervo were still very clear in Jim’s mind, as was the expression on his face from when Jim had pushed him away the week before at the warehouse. Well before Blair had locked it all down and walked out that is. Jim knew they would need to finish the discussion they had started, but not now, not with a head full of tequila and a heart full of pain. Blair wouldn’t want that, and frankly Jim didn’t think he could handle it either.

Right now what they needed the most though was rest. And where better to rest than in a warm, soft bed with cool, clean sheets in an airy loft. Jim smiled as he trudged towards the steps that led to his bedroom, and ultimately his bed. Let the curly-haired moppet wake up there and wonder what the hell happened the night before. It might make for the perfect opening for their conversation.

Most importantly, he could wake up and know that he wasn’t being thrown away by his Sentinel again. Not for something as simple as a kiss. Not for doing his best. Not for being there when Jim needed him, wanted him there the most.

Jim undressed his drunken roommate to his boxers and t-shirt, and then busied himself setting out the things he knew Blair would need desperately in the morning. The glass of water with the two Tylenol on the bedside table, and the lined garbage-pail strategically where Blair wouldn’t miss it when he woke up. Then he undressed and crawled into bed himself, sighing happily as he snuggled up to the warm bundle that made up his Guide. He was very glad to be where he was, although how Jim was going to explain this when they woke up, he had no clue. But surely it all would work out, right?

-end-