Work Text:
The Winter's Heart
by Brighid
Author's webpage: http://internettrash.com/users/livia/brighid/brighid.htm
Author's disclaimer: Not for profit, but for love. I'm setting them free. With tracking devices. = )
The Winter's Heart
by Brighid
Kai had always been different. When he was very small, and his mother still alive, it mattered not at all. Her warm smile, the soft smell of the flowers she kept in her rooms, wore in her hair, floated in her bath -- they enveloped him like an eternal spring, like sunshine in his heart. She would look where he pointed, and pick up long-glasses to see what he shared. She petted his head when he hummed the tunes the fieldworkers sang as they sheaved. She let him choose which flowers made her perfumes, which herbs graced her food. In the dark centre of her bright blue eyes, he always saw himself reflected there.
Years passed, and his mother's body grew and shifted, a new baby rocking in the bone cradle of her pelvis. He'd lie for hours, head to her belly, listening to his brother -- it was a brother, he assured her -- grow and turn. The baby's first, weak kicks were to the sound of his voice. When he pressed his face to the soft, stretched skin of her stomach, he felt a small hand pressing back. He told his brother stories, and promised to keep him safe, to love him as a big brother should.
Her pains came upon her early, sharply; he felt something tear inside her even as her maid pulled him away. He smelled the salty rush of her birth water flood, and the darker, copper reek of blood. He wailed the whole night through, his cries in uncanny time with his mother's, with the weak wail of his newborn, early-born brother. He smelled blood so strongly then that it curdled his stomach, made him sick. His mother's voice came to him, thin and light at dandelion fluff: Watch over your brother. Love him as I loved you. As I will always love you.
He fell to sleep to the last, faint beats of her struggling heart.
In the morning, when his father brought his brother to him with the news of his mother's death, he wanted to hate the small, struggling bundle, bluish-red and ragged still. But when he pressed his face down to kiss his brother, Corbin, as his father softly ordered, a small hand came up, touched him as if in recognition, and the struggling stopped. He didn't notice the small hitch in his father's breathing, the sorrow swallowed in stone -- he only had eyes to see his brother, small and dark-eyed and watching him with a trust that both swelled and broke his heart.
From that day forward, no one could separate the elder brother from the younger.
)0(
Blair Sandburg shifted in the chair he'd pulled up to Jim's desk, rubbing at his aching temples. Flu season was a fucking bitch, and it always was particularly virulent on campus. He'd stuck mostly to clear tea and water, but still his gut roiled uneasily, and he wished like hell he had some ginger candy or peppermint tea on hand right now.
The door to Simon's office opened, disgorging three detectives Blair half-knew on a "hey, how are ya?" basis, as well as Jim Ellison and Carolyn Plummer. He watched Carolyn with veiled interest. He liked her, well enough; respected her, even. He just couldn't figure out for the life of him what the hell had ever convinced Jim to marry her, or her to marry Jim. She was pretty, in a cool sort of way, like a society wife was, and she was intelligent and witty and dry and she didn't seem the sort of woman to need a husband like Jim at all. In the months he'd lived with Ellison, he'd long ago figured out that Jim was the sort of guy who needed to be needed. He was always doing little things, all gruff-like and defensive and on the sly, but doing things, all the same. "Here, Sandburg, stop borrowing my fucking socks, these were on sale at Costco." and, "Hey, Sandburg, I found this bookcase down at the Salvation Army store, can you believe it?" not to mention, "What do you mean you're taking the car in for an oil change? Christ, no wonder you're always broke. Didn't any of your mom's boyfriends ever teach you anything about cars?"
The man was a big ol' softie, provided you didn't point it out to him.
Not to mention, Carolyn struck him as a talker, someone who liked to draw boundaries and debate things all civilized and keep Robert's Rules of Order, and as far as he could tell, saying "Jim, we've gotta talk," was the surest thing to get the man down into a hole so fast there'd be six more weeks of winter. Jim didn't talk, he just did.
Not a match made in heaven, decided Blair. Not even in Las Vegas. What had drawn them together? He looked at her long, slim body in its businesslike suit, then at the broad range, elegant planes of his partner and thesis subject. Musta been the sex. Good sex mixed up a hell of a lot in the early stages of a relationship. He could see Carolyn being a good lay -- mature, intelligent women usually were. And Jim...
Jim was probably hell on wheels in the sack. He didn't talk much, but he said a lot with his hands, and the thought of what those hands might say in bed kept Blair awake some nights. Every now and again, he caught the older man watching him, sniffing around him, and they would share this fleeting... awareness of one another, but it always passed, or got pushed aside by good sense.
Blair pushed the thoughts aside now, stood carefully in consideration of his stomach and head, waved to Carolyn, smiled at Jim. "Hey, man, what are we doing this afternoon?"
Carolyn waved, kept going. Jim smiled back, stopped alongside him. "We're going to go and re-interview a list of witnesses on the Fayette carjack and kidnap to see if the original interviewers missed anything, or anyone's got anything new. We want these fucking charges to stick so the little punk-ass is using a walker the next time he tries to take someone's SUV and three-year old." He wrinkled his nose slightly. "Except, maybe it'll just be me, because you smell sour, like you've gone off or something, and that's how Johnson smelled right before he..." and Blair's gut heaved and his mouth watered and he was off and running to the bathroom.
He heard Jim come in behind him, push gently into the unlatched stall as he was so thoroughly sick he was surprised he still had shoes on at the end of it. Jim just pulled his hair back out of his face, patted his shoulders reassuringly a couple of times, and got him a paper cup of tepid water when he was sure he was finally through.
"Even my mother doesn't hold my head," Blair pointed out raspily, when he felt like he could talk again, when his sides had stopped aching so much that it hurt to breathe. "You hold Carolyn's head when she puked?" he asked curiously, his mind going back to its previous track.
Jim snorted. "Carolyn always locked the door, the few times she allowed herself to be ill," Jim said drily. "Besides, she's always had short hair, she never needed the help." He offered a hand up, pulled Blair slowly to his feet. "I'll drive you home, go do the follow-up questions. If you're well enough tomorrow, I'll bring you here first, to pick up your car." He shot Blair an ominous glance. "You puke in my truck, you better hit the garbage can, because Nil-Odor is a goddamned lie when you're a Sentinel."
Blair grinned weakly, let Jim walk him to the bullpen, let Jim shoulder his backpack, let Jim be needed. He felt a vague sort of pity for Carolyn, who seemed so painfully self-sufficient. Needing someone, sometimes, was good.
)0(
When Corbin was in his twenty-second month, his wet-nurse's milk dried up, and they tried to wean him to solid food alone, but he would barely eat at all, not even from the hand of the older brother he was usually so biddable for. A new wet-nurse was found, a young woman with hair like autumn leaves, and a baby whose head was soft and downy, like the dark lambs in the spring. The day she came to them, Kai watched as his little brother snugged into the wet-nurse's lap, his mouth round and pink on her nipple, sucking slowly, sleepily, even as the three-month baby suckled forcefully at her other breast. He felt alone, suddenly, bereft. The ghost-scent of flowers lingered everywhere, haunting him, and he toed the soft carpet of the nursery floor, fighting an urge to cry.
"Come here, then," she said, and her voice was a smile -- not sunshine, like his mother's, but like chestnuts popping in the hearth, like ginger beer bubbles. "Come here, Kai," she repeated. He moved slowly to her side, knelt by her knee, on the same side as her own son. "You feel all alone, don't you, my handsome boy?" she said softly, and he nodded, head still bowed.
"Well, I'm here because I've more milk than a milch cow, but that needn't be the only reason I'm here," she said firmly, her voice alone lifting his chin, making his eyes meet hers. "I am Nana, now, to you as well," she said firmly. "And I'm here for you as much as for the little raven, here," she said, nodding towards his dark-haired brother. "And this little piggy is Bowen, my son and no one else's." She shifted, so that the baby pulled free from her nipple with a wet little plop. Kai watched in fascination as his face screwed up, his small hands curled and uncurled like starfish, but the infant didn't cry, just watched and waited.
A single drop of milk hung, like a pearl, from the tip of her swollen teat. "Taste it," she said, softly, and he did, leaning in, letting it fall on his tongue, letting it explode through him, echo in him like nothing had since the night his mother died. He recognized it, even at seven, as a sort of magick, a sort of binding, but it was a kindly one, a loving one. He looked up into her eyes, the colour of beechnuts, and they were kind and bright and full of sparks. He glanced down at Bowen, with his wide, blue gaze of a newborn. "We four are family," she said softly, tying up the magick with the right words, rightly said.
Corbin continued to nurse placidly, and Bowen went back to her breast with wolfish vigour, and Kai sat down so that his head rested on Nana's knee, and together they rocked in the nursery.
Within the year, Kai had two small shadows, one walking, one toddling unsteadily, and Nana stayed even when Corbin had no more need of her milk. She managed the nursery and the children, taking them on long trips through Kai's father's lands, teaching them the names of trees and flowers and forest beasts. She taught them music and letters and maps and medicine. If his mother had been the bright lightness of spring, Nana became the sure solidness of autumn, crackling like leaf-fires and savoury like tart apples.
The same fierce devotion that bound him to Corbin grew to include Bowen. They had four good years together in the safe world of the nursery, until, at last, Kai's father finally remembered he had a son of manling years. When he appeared at the schoolroom doors, grave-faced and stern, with orders for Kai to pack his things and move out of the nursery wing, it seemed to Kai the beginning of the end of everything.
Corbin's sobs followed him down the hall, and Bowen's silence haunted him throughout his lonely dinner in his new, cold rooms.
)0(
Blair watched the evening news and somewhere in the middle of the sports report found himself swallowing a sigh. 11:21, and Jim was still out, on a work night, even. He shook his head, wondering if it was a bed and breakfast deal, or if Jim was going to put in an appearance tonight. He'd found that with Jim, the odds ran fifty-fifty, on the rare occasions that Jim trooped out into the dating scene.
Blair sighed again, the scientist in him beginning to piece together a pattern in his subject, and it was one he didn't particularly like, considering the subject was also his friend. Dinner tonight with Wendy was just sort of the capstone to the whole freaking whitened sepulcher that was, as far as Blair could see, Jim's love life. The man hardly ever dated. Hell, the few times he'd dragged Jim out, the older man had muttered and complained and just generally whined. The only time he'd really sparked anything was that crazy-assed fuck up with Laura nee Jane, whose main interest was getting off with rocks when not getting Jim's rocks off. And that had been based on the bizarre compulsion of biochemistry, which translated into feeling, but mostly, endorphin-high feelings, not gut-level, emotional bond feelings.
He shook his head. He wasn't knocking good old-fashioned rut; it had its place. But it seemed kind of sad that it was the only place Jim ever seemed to go. He flipped off the television, went over to the stereo, dropping in something light and Celtic, and daringly, after ten o'clock curfew. Hell, he was tempted to go to the john and flush the toilet, just for the hell of it. He wandered over to the kitchen, still mulling over the whole Jim and dating thing. He started humming a little musical take-off, How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria, but Ellison didn't quite fit no matter how he tried. He set the kettle to boil, started rummaging around for tea. Probably should go for herbal at this time of night, but he could smell the broken orange pekoe in its little woven reed box, and hell, he had thinking to do. He grinned, remembering how Jim had squawked the first time he'd seen gepa brand's prices, but once he understood the whole 'fair trade' policy, he'd been surprisingly cool about it. Jim could be like that.
So, there'd been Laura. And then that Fibbie chick, Kimuru, undercover with the Yakuza. Again, a bucketful of Jim-hormones masquerading as passionate intensity over some woman who he didn't really know, and he didn't have a freaking chance with in this life. He stuffed leaves into the reed tea ball, stopped, added a second measure, enough for two and a pot, and set the ball in the brown betty. Jim had tried to play it pretty cool, but her shade of lipstick was kind of obvious on him -- especially since it was Blair's turn to do their laundry that week.
And now, Wendy Hawthorne. A shark in thirty-dollar pantyhose. A pain in the ass. An Ice Princess, as far as Blair could tell. And moving back to New York, god help them. It was like Jim's dick was hardwired for lost causes. He picked women who were either wildly, freakishly bad or utterly unavailable. Undercover, on assignment, can I fit you into my life some other time? And that didn't even begin to factor in the whole she-bang with Emily, his former partner's girlfriend. Like that was anything but doomed from the start. Blair snorted just as the kettle whistled, the two sounds mixing together.
Fear of intimacy. Carolyn, in the two interviews he'd had before she moved down to San Fran, had come right out and said it. Calmly, clinically, with just the faintest hint of regret. Jimmy didn't know how to get close. Hell, he saw it here, every day. Jim sidling up to him, making little overtures of friendship and kinship, then just sort of jumping back anytime Blair stepped over one of his, like, six gazillion borders. Blair narrowed his eyes against the steam of the water poured into the pot, narrowed them further in thought. He wondered, not for the first time, what sort of childhood bred a man so fucking terrified of letting himself love, be loved. Those little telltale touches, gestures, looks -- they told the story, gave Blair little ins to Jim's soul, and they damn near broke his heart.
Part of it might be the Sentinel thing; the senses, with a few rare exceptions, were bound to make the man want to hold people, and their noises and their messes and their, Jesus, smells at a distance, and that was certainly worth exploration in the diss. But it didn't explain the landmines Jim laid all around himself, the frequent bouts of self-sabotage. Didn't explain the tight-lipped silences, or the anger that to Blair seemed as much like loneliness, even despair, as anything else.
The first little while together, he'd spent some time wondering what it'd be like to get into Jim Ellison's pants. Nowadays, he spent more time wondering what it'd be like to get into his heart.
He heard the jingle of keys as he was pouring out the tea, and so he took down a second mug, fixed it sweet and milky, like Jim liked it, handed it to him after he'd hung up his coat.
Jim looked at him, a little puzzled, a little amused. "You become a psychic friend when I wasn't looking, Chief?" he asked, smiling even as he took a sip from the mug.
Blair shrugged. "It's Cascade. It's raining. Tea works." He headed over to the couch, Jim surprisingly following him rather than taking the mug up to his loft. They sat in silence, sipping their tea.
"Nice music," Jim said at last. Another lull stretched out between them. "Wendy had an early morning meeting, so I figured, you know, maybe I'd should just come home."
Jim had lipstick on his collar, Blair noticed. He smelled like sweat, and jasmine, and sex. And he was home by midnight, drinking tea with his roommate. It made him sad, but hell, what could he say? What was there to say? Only bone women who'll let you stay over, who'll twist you up in their beds and arms and lives, like you matter?
Yeah, right. He liked his balls right where they were, thanks.
"Can I borrow the CD?" Jim asked suddenly, and Blair blinked. "For the truck, it'd be nice in rush hour, you know? You always say traffic gets me too damned edgy." He drained his mug, waiting for a reply.
Blair nodded. "Sure, man, knock yourself out. Borrow whatever, whenever. It's cool." He collected their mugs. "So, you want me at the station tomorrow? My afternoon is clear."
Jim stood, tilted his head consideringly. "Yeah, that'd be good. Show up before 12:30, maybe, we can have lunch?"
"I could do lunch," Blair said, watching Jim stretch, watching him move up and away from him, into his bedroom. "But if it's Wonder Burger, you're paying," he called up after, and he heard Jim's soft, raspy laugh float down.
He stood in the kitchen for a long time, just thinking, about Sentinels and intimacy and grad students who needed to re-acquaint themselves with professional ethics (thou shalt not moon over thy thesis subject) until Jim called down, a little testily, "Go to bed, Sandburg!" He gave up thinking, realizing nothing would be solved right then and there. Instead he just shrugged, went to the john and peed out the tea, and then flushed for the sheer hell of it.
)0(
Kai knew, almost from the first morning, that he was going to be a bitter disappointment to his father. The man was all but a stranger to him, away for weeks at a time in the King's Court, or working with his bailiff to oversee his wide demesne. He did not know the ways of boys, or the ways of his son. He could not understand why Kai found no interest in the paintings and tapestries and gold-gilt furnishings. Only the Great Hall, with its standing armour, the magick ward stones laid in the floor and the Mirror held his attention long, for those were wonders like the stories Nana had read to them. He stood a long time peering in the Mirror, trying to see if it would reveal his true face, his true heart, like the family stories told. He glanced up, caught his father's reflected gaze: frowning, distracted, irritated. He wondered what his father saw in him that made the man look so darkly in the Mirror.
Yet despite his father's reserve, his air of disappointment, Kai still tried. He grew proficient with the horses, the lessons his father's bailiff taught, the household and manor accounts he would someday be required to run. He learned swordsmanship and court manners. He learned wines and crops and political intrigue. He tried very hard to be his father's son.
But at his heart, he was his mother's son. He was different, in a way his father couldn't understand, couldn't abide. He called Kai's farseeing faery tales. He accused Kai of lying when he told of the cutting things Sir Marrot had said of their family when driving away from the estate. When Kai smelled the blight on the fields, tried to warn his father of the coming rot, he'd been shaken, hard, sent to his room for telling lies. When the fields turned to sludge two weeks later, his father would not speak to him, would not even meet his eyes.
As the years passed, and his body grew and his heart waned, he found himself further and further estranged from his father. He still tried, as best he could, but he also snuck back to the nursery, to the safe warmth of Nana, the serious, thoughtful boy his brother was becoming, and to Bowen, who would launch himself at Kai's legs, climb the older boy like a tree, ask him a thousand questions he had no answers for. When he saw across the fields, they asked what. When he heard distant music, they listened with him, straining to hear. His happiest days were when his father was at court, for days on end, and he could live in the nursery again, and be himself, be believed.
Then came the day when Corbin was called out of the nursery, and Nana pensioned off to some small estate in the Northlands. For the third time in Kai's life, it seemed as though the world were ending. He withdrew, watched in hurt silence as his father openly came to favour Corbin, finding in the younger boy a son he could understand, take pride in. His blatant partiality drove a thin wedge between them, one neither boy could understand or overcome. Sometimes, Kai felt his brother's gaze on him, heavy with longing; sometimes, he heard Corbin calling for him at night. For the first time in his life, he looked away. He did not answer. Years continued to pass, and a silence grew between them.
In his nineteenth summer, he overheard his father talking to a cousin, visiting from the Southlands. He was half a house away, should never have been able to hear it, should have known enough not to listen to his father.
"Why would God give me such a one for a first son?" and there was regret in the words, and despair, and if he'd been older, wiser, he might have heard the self-recrimination, but the words, the words were what echoed. More words followed, words that meant the same thing: he was different, and different was wrong, a wrongness that nothing could undo, no matter how hard he studied, how hard he tried.
Anger and grief grew in his belly, pushed him to pace his room, pushed him to leave it, pushed him to run the corridors, to find his father and demand of him what he'd done that was so very wrong, what was so terrible about ears and eyes and hands like his?
Kai almost tumbled down the great staircase and right through the Great Hall, but stopped short at the blur and shimmer of his own reflection in the Mirror that hung there. He had not looked into it in years, averting his gaze for fear of seeing what his father had seemed to see so long ago. This time, however, he stopped, transfixed, caught unawares by his own reflection.
His found himself moving close, leaning in. His fingers touched the cool, silvery surface of the mirror, his sweated skin slipping, leaving greasy smears. His father's voice was harsh in his ears, still, and it brought a taste to his mouth like bile. His reflection flickered suddenly, twisted and turned until he was a grotesque, a sick parody of himself, and he thought that was what his father must have seen, what all the world must see.
With a howl of grief he drew back his fist, smashed it hard against the mirror, pounded it repeatedly, but the surface was hard and unyielding. His reflection bobbled, mocked him. Another cry tore itself loose, and he grabbed a candle stand, slammed it into the mirror, using the full force of his body. It shattered at last, spraying glass in all directions, an explosion of small, fractured brilliants. Fragments tore at his face and hands and throat, even as one long, skewering shard found its way into his heart, and settled there like ice.
His father found Kai where he fell, the servants gathered around him, trying to staunch the thirty pulsing wounds on his body, all save the one at his heart, which had already, miraculously, closed over. Kai, had he been aware of anything but his own, bleak misery, might have rallied at the obvious fear and care in his father's voice as he called for the surgeons and magicians and priests. As it was, he simply lay on the cold marble floor, and hoped that he might bleed to death.
)0(
Blair paced the length of Simon's office. Fuck. He could not fucking believe this. "Did you hear me, Simon? He made the beast with two backs with her. They did the nasty. He schtupped his assignment." He leaned down, pressed his hands flat onto Simon's desktop. "He fucked Michelle Lazar."
Simon glanced coolly up at him, over his glasses. He did not appear impressed. "You kiss your mama with that mouth, Sandburg?" He waved at Blair, shooing him off. "I know all about it, thank-you very much. Not the brightest move he's ever made, and hell, had she complained, he might have gotten into some trouble, but the thing is, he's a big boy. You aren't his chaperone or his conscience, Jiminy Cricket, and I sure as hell didn't sign on for that duty."
Blair dragged his fingers through his hair, making the curls stand on end like he'd been electrified. Hell, he felt like his nerve-endings were jangling with electricity. Why was he the only one to see it? Here he was, the one with the horn dog, love 'em and leave 'em rep, and he was the only one noticing how goddamned scarily self-destructive this was. Hello, wake up and smell the foolish risk-taking.
"Simon." He tried, he really tried to sound calm and reasonable. "Simon, listen to me. He had sex in an undercover operation in the middle of a mob family. With the daughter-in-law of the mobster. His relationship spurred him to take risks he might not otherwise have taken. His cover got blown to shit because he tried to get her out. He almost got his ass killed."
Simon didn't seem to be buying his calm and reasonable act. "Sounds like vintage Jim to me. He does that sort of thing on a regular basis -- sometimes to get your ass out safely," he added pointedly. He got up, poured himself a cup of coffee, did not offer Blair one. "So unless you have something else to add to this little rant of yours, other pertinent details in Jim's life that you see as unnecessary risk-taking, I'm going to have to simply take this under advisement and ask you to move on."
The look Simon gave him was not without sympathy, and he knew the other man was offering him an out, but some things... some things he just couldn't bring up. The nights Jim went out, looking for company, coming back smelling not of jasmine or vanilla, but other men's aftershave. He found himself hoping that Jim, who had once threatened to wrap the furniture in plastic, applied the same fastidiousness to his dick. The number of one night stands was not staggeringly high, but more than anything Blair had seen in the previous two years, and it troubled him; pieced together with the whole Lazar thing, it made all his "Danger, Will Robinson" signs flash on and off inside his head. But he couldn't say that to Simon, not without outing his best friend, and somehow, he didn't think that was an option.
Besides, if Simon kept saying "I don't wanna know!" when he talked about Jim's earwax or piggybacking, he thought the big man might just stroke out if he had to deal with the mental image of Jim doing dick.
"Nothing that I can share right now," Blair said at last, reluctantly. Simon looked at him a moment longer, through lowered lids.
"How the hell did you manage this without him knowing?" Simon asked suddenly. "I'm assuming he can't hear us?"
Blair let out an explosive breath, flopped down into a nearby chair. "God, no. I may be crazy, man, but I'm not suicidal. He's out, chasing down some lunch for us. He should be back soon."
Simon returned to his seat, nodding. "Good to know he won't be biting my ass anytime soon, and that I won't have to be dragging down under the docks for your body," he said drily. "Listen, I appreciate your concern, Sandburg. It's good to know you're trying to look out for him, but sometimes... hell, adrenaline, proximity... people do dumb things. It's not the end of the world."
"Yet," Blair said darkly, rising. Simon rolled his eyes, stuck a cigar in his mouth.
"Get out, get out. Let me get some real work done here. But," he said, and Blair paused in the doorway. "I'll keep my eyes open, just in case."
Blair sighed, rubbed the back of his neck. "Thanks, Simon." He shut the door behind him, and went over to Jim's desk, and waited for him to return. His whole 'intimacy and the Sentinel' chapter was playing out in his head, but the scientist just wasn't going to win this round. He was scared. The deeper he got into Jim's life, the deeper he wanted to be, the more these damned liaisons and exploits messed his head around. They were like those scars he'd see on some kid's arm, now and again, a perfectly sane-seeming kid whose sleeve just happened to hitch up too far when handing in a paper. Little, ugly marks that told him more than he knew what to do with, pissing him off and scaring him and ultimately, frustrating him with the knowledge there was nothing he fucking could do.
He felt Jim in the room, even before he saw him, and he forced himself to smile, forced himself to choke down the turkey on deli-thick rye, and to pretend that everything was all right, that he didn't see the scar tissue. And Jim smiled back at him, his eyes easy and open, making Blair feel like a total shit for going behind his back, but somehow,
"Stop the indiscriminate fucking, Jim!" just didn't seem like a plan he could go with. He didn't have any plan at all. So he just chewed and swallowed and prayed for some sort of blinding insight.
Nothing came but indigestion. Fortunately, Jim had Rolaids.
)0(
Kai survived his cuts, had very few scars by the time the surgeons and magicians and priests were through with him. But the sliver in his heart, that was another matter, something no one knew how to touch. For weeks and months his father sent runners out, tried to find some cure to the slow chilling of his eldest son, the winter that had settled in his heart. It was the darkest of all ironies that this care, this concern came when Kai could no longer appreciate it.
No answers came from afar, and Kai wasted away, inside. He spoke to no one, simply sat at his window and watched the world with a blank, unwavering gaze. When his brother came to him, held his hand, he just stared at him, unmoving, until the fourteen-year old withdrew in tears. He ate mechanically, sparingly, and only if someone shoved the food in his mouth. His skin was always like ice, and his lips grew thin, and tinged with blue. The maids whispered that his breath frosted the windowpanes.
At last, in despair, Kai's father wrote to his Northland estate and arranged to send Kai there, to Nana and Bowen, in hopes that their heat and vigour might thaw him out, might cure him of his frozen blight.
He arrived a fortnight later, the carriage door ripped open by a small, tousle-headed boy with dark blue eyes. "Kai!" the boy crowed, and something in him shifted, like glaciers moving, told him that he remembered that smile, those eyes, told him that they were once almost everything to him. He closed his eyes slowly against the memory.
He heard the soft hitch of the boy's breathing, an almost sob, but two hands still reached for him, drew him out into the harsh light. His feet crunched in dry snow, but he felt no chill at all, for he was already as cold as cold could be.
Nana was waiting for them; she led him into the house that had held her and Bowen for the last few years. She walked him through to the back garden, where flowers grew against all reason, the soil warmed by a hot spring that bubbled up in the centre courtyard. She sat him in a chair, covered him with blankets, with kisses. He remembered the taste of thick, heavy milk, the fizz of ginger beer, but they were buried too deep, too deep. A moment later, Bowen was with him again, heaping flowers in his lap, naming them, letting him touch them and smell them and see them and even, once or twice, taste them.
"My poor, poor boy," Nana said, her voice snapping and crackling like twigs in a bonfire. "Oh, my dearest boy. We'll warm you up again, just see if we don't," but underneath her words, there was doubt, the thin, chill thread of fear. Bowen kept bringing him flowers.
Years passed slowly, glacially. Kai eventually ate on his own, walked on his own, but he never spoke, never acknowledged their presence. Sometimes, he heard Nana weeping, but it mattered not at all. All that was real to him was the surety of ice, the hard knot of it within his breast. Sometimes, at night, a cool voice whispered to him in his dreams, phantom hands touched his body. They became more real than food or drink or breath, the hands and the voice. A part of him wanted nothing more than to fall asleep and surrender to the whisperings.
Bowen, though, was relentless, always dragging him places, bringing him things, from sun-up to sun-down. Even when Bowen outgrew his child's body, should have outgrown childish ways, he continued to bring Kai strange things, to place them in his hands, to his ears, against his tongue. He read him stories, sang him songs. He would tell Kai that he remembered him, that all his first memories were full of Kai, of how Kai had helped him walk and run and talk and read. Sometimes, something in his voice, in his eyes made those glaciers shift and stir, but they were never quite enough. Sometimes, he heard Bowen weeping, and it almost, almost mattered, but never quite enough.
One day, when Nana was at market, and Bowen off on one of his long walks in the woods, Kai heard a sleigh pull up to the house. Something in the bells called to him, as nothing else had in the last seven years. He found himself drawn out, found himself standing on the front step with bare feet, a bare chest. The sleigh was long and sleek and whiter than the snow, drawn by six white bears. A small coachman sat at the front, while a tall woman, wrapped in white bear furs, sat regally behind. She held out her hand to Kai, smiled at him, and he found himself running down the path, clamouring up beside her, crawling inside her furs to lay against her cool, pale flesh.
"I have been looking for you," she said, her voice like bells, like sleet hitting the window, like winter lakes cracking. It was the voice of his dreams. "I felt you when the ice went in, and I have been looking for you ever since."
The sleigh moved forward, and Kai did not once look back.
)0(
Jim had come home, eventually, which was more than Blair had actually expected. He'd half-figured he was going to get a call from the Canadian border. Jim had a tendency to drive first and ask questions later at times like this.
"How you doing?" he asked carefully, adding a shot of whiskey to the coffee he'd poured when he'd heard Jim at the door.
"Like shit," Jim replied bluntly. He winced a little as the coffee and whiskey burned its way down, but he drank it all in one long gulp, standing there in the doorway, still in his rain-soaked coat. "Thanks for asking." He stood there, wavering a little on his feet as the night and rain and the whiskey all colluded to kick his ass at three in the a.m. "You waited up for me?"
"No, I was making coffee for the block meeting. Yes, I waited up for you. Get out of your damned jacket," he said brusquely, trying to cover up the yawning ache of sympathy with a wash of justified annoyance. "Tomorrow, you'll see spots on the hardwood and start bitching at me." He helped the older man get the coat off, hang it up. Emotional shock made Jim oddly biddable. It'd been a rough year, all around, and tonight... tonight just couldn't have helped.
"Go have a shower," he ordered, feeling both tender and profoundly pissed off. Kiss him or kill him, really...
Jim glanced down at Blair bemusedly. "Last I checked, my mother was dead," he said drily.
"I talked to her on the other side, she told me to go ahead and boss your ass around," Blair replied firmly, pushing the older man towards the bathroom. "She insisted, in fact. Go have a fucking shower, get to bed."
"You gonna pull the sheets down for me? Tuck me in?" Jim grumbled, heading for the bathroom all the same.
"Hold the pillow over your face," Blair muttered.
"I heard that," Jim called back.
"You were supposed to," Blair answered, softly, even as he headed up the stairs, turned down the plaid flannels, shoved a hot pack between the sheets. "Goddamned thick-headed bastard." He heard the shower start, allowed himself to sit down on the edge of the bed.
He remembered wanting to gag when Jim had spouted off that whole "the one" shit to him over Lila. The man was almost forty, and he was getting seriously moony over some chick he'd had a one-week fling with, back in the day. Hello, Ellison, meet Windmill. Tilt away. Still, when Lila had died, he'd been hurting. Another batch of scar tissue, fresh after the whole Lazar thing. He'd gone out, a few weeks later, only to come home late, smelling of beer and sweat and sex. Blair had shaken his head at the coping mechanism, wanting to shake Jim instead.
Wanting to take Jim to bed, teach him what "the one" might actually mean; to stop him, finally, from hooking up with lost causes and lost women.
Then had come the whole Alex Barnes fiasco, his little side-trip through the afterlife (sometimes, he still had the urge to turn around three times before going to sleep) and the weird sort of fuck or die scenario he'd witnessed on the beach. When he'd gotten to the grotto, found the reflecting pools, he'd had to suppress a pretty strong urge to take Jim back and hold him under just so the idiot had a real good of idea of how much drowning sucked, and maybe give him a good reminder that he shouldn't go off alone to play with freaking psycho killers. He'd also been tempted to kick Alex once, hard on the shins, as she was being hauled out, but Jim had been wearing his Don Quixote hat again, so he'd resisted. At least he hadn't heard any "true love" shit.
And now this. Veronica had been tall, slim, redheaded and lethal. Pretty much Jim's bad habit of choice, all things considered. And she'd fucked him over but good. Played his heartstrings, called on his loyalty, understanding, as so few did, Jim's need to be needed. She'd murdered her husband, set Jim up to take the fall, and maybe, at the end, had even been willing to kill him. It was like every time Jim reached out, God or somebody just slapped him down.
At least, now, he had a better understanding of where all this came from. Time and love had given him insights into Jim, an understanding of what motivated this insane Knight Errantry of his, this constant quest for unattainable women. At least, now, he knew with a bone deep certainty he'd be around to pick up the pieces, for as long as Jim'd let him. He was just worried that someday, he wasn't going to be able to put Humpty back together again. He covered his eyes, sighed.
"I was kidding about turning down the sheets." Blair started, realizing he'd drifted off while sitting on Jim's bed.
"Don't get too excited, I ate the complimentary mints," he yawned. "You gonna be okay, Jim?" He stayed sitting, looking up at his friend, holding his gaze, willing him to answer.
Jim shrugged. "I don't know," he said at last. "But I'll keep you posted."
Blair snorted, standing. "Yeah, I'll believe that when I see it. I'll also probably be ice-skating in Hell."
"I hear they miss you down there," Jim replied, but he reached out, kept Blair from moving past him. "Thanks, Sandburg. Blair." He pulled the younger man to him in a quick, tight hug, and then moved back, almost guiltily. "For everything."
Blair wanted to keep moving, but something, some crazy-assed part of him made him stop, turn around. "You're welcome," he said softly. "To anything." and he let three years of obfuscation and willful blindness just fall away. Jim's eyes held his, for a while, and then he nodded, dropping his gaze.
"Good night, Sandburg," and his voice was soft and rough but he didn't get angry, and he didn't shut Blair out, and it was, oh, hell, a beginning.
Maybe.
)0(
Her castle was ice, her crown was ice, and she drank chilled wine and ate frozen grapes, slicing through the pale green fruit with strong white teeth. She touched him everywhere and she touched him nowhere. He was... a plaything, a poppet. Her nipples tasted like snow. She slept in bearskins, and he slept beside her, and she was perfect, flawless, and her mouth burned like frost when she swallowed him down. Each time she touched him, his pulse slowed, his breath slowed, the last of his heat bled away until the ice in his heart spread throughout his veins, until he was frozen completely, until he was nothing but ice.
Days might have passed, or weeks, when Kai heard the stuttering heartbeat, the faltering, chilled breath of Bowen. He thought, perhaps, that he should tell the Snow Queen, but that would require effort, heat. It mattered not. He watched, quietly, as she rose from her bearskins, slipped into snowflake lace, went to play with her bears and her seals and her sled dogs, leaving him behind, a discarded toy. He heard Bowen's stumbling progress through the ice-caves, down into the bower. He closed his eyes and waited with glacial patience.
He opened his eyes at the first drop of saltwater, bitter and scalding, sliding over his face, into his mouth. He watched as Bowen, frostbitten and exhausted, wept openly over him, leaned deeply into him. He felt the younger man's mouth close over his, warm and alive and real. He felt the younger man's pulse, so much faster than his winter heart, and he realized that it beat for him, that it had, perhaps, always beaten for him.
"Oh, Kai," Bowen cried, touching Kai's body, feeling the chill weight of his limbs, searching vainly for pulse and breath and heat. "What have you become, what has she done to you?" and he bent his head, laid it on Kai's chest, and wept over his heart.
At first, there was no change; gradually, though, Bowen's grief pierced the frozen shell of Kai's body. There came a noise like the lakes in spring thaw, the crack and groan of melting ice, as Bowen's tears reached in, melted the sliver that had frozen in Kai's breast. First the pale scar turned rosy pink, and then the skin around it. Bowen pulled back in amazement, tears turned half-way to laughter, as Kai felt a slow, sweet heat infuse him, turning him to flesh and blood again. He wrapped the bearskins around his shivering shoulders, pulled Bowen into the soft nest, kissed him as though he could crawl inside him, find true warmth in there. Something rich and dark exploded across his tongue, and some part of him recognized it, even at twenty-seven, as a sort of magick, a sort of binding, but it was a kindly one, a loving one.
"We have to leave this place," Bowen said at last, pulling back reluctantly. Kai followed him up blindly, wanting to taste him again, feel him everywhere, but Bowen was insistent. Between them they managed to hook up a single bear to an ice-sled. They were many miles away when Kai heard the Snow Queen's cry of rage, felt the tendrils of her winter storms seeking them out, trying to take back that which she had irretrievably lost. He simply burrowed closer to Bowen in the furs, and listened to him name the trees they passed, and the stars that moved overhead.
)0(
Blair looked up from his desk and the files he was currently reviewing before someone from Records started hunting him down. He noticed Jim checking his watch. "What's up? Hot date?" he asked, teasing.
Jim fidgeted slightly, looked away. "Uh, yeah, actually. I'm taking Amelia Soong to the new tapas bar in the U-district." He looked at his watch again. "We're meeting in the lobby, and I don't want to be late."
Blair set down the files, rampaging Records clerks forgotten. Amelia Soong? "Amelia Soong? The new wonder kid in the D.A.'s office? That Amelia Soong?"
Jim glowered at him. "Not such a "kid", Sandburg. She's of age."
"Barely," Blair snorted.
"She's your age," Jim pointed out.
"And aren't you always calling me Junior?" he felt compelled to point out, even as his gut roiled. It was like seeing the same fucking train wreck, again and again, in slow motion.
"When not calling you smartass, yeah," Jim said, standing up, reaching for his coat. "But if things go well tonight, I won't be calling you anything at all until tomorrow."
Blair shook his head. He'd thought... hell, he didn't know what he'd thought. Neither of them had been out with in anyone in almost a year, not since d-day. He'd gotten through his academy courses, his firearms certification, his detective test, gotten on the street with Jim. They'd been living pretty much in each other's hip pockets the whole time, and those looks, the little things from the earliest days, those were back again. Jim was always touching him. Apparently, though, that meant for shit, whatever he might have thought. "I think Rafe asked her out, a few weeks ago. I seem to recall the words "snow queen" the next day," he said, obliquely warning, trying to set up flags for Jim to slow down, catch the freaking clue bus.
"I'm not Rafe," Jim replied, locking down his desk, "in case you didn't notice."
"I noticed," said Blair. "I notice everything, Jim," he said as his partner went out the doors, throwing a determinedly casual wave back at him. He watched Jim's stride falter, but he recovered, kept on going. Fuck. "Fuck. Cut and Run Ellison: Emotional Evader, strikes again." He didn't know whether to laugh or cry.
For a time, he actually tried to get work done, but nothing was happening. He locked the files in his desk, checked the clock, saw that it was well past six and thought, to hell with it. Get my ass home. Rent a video. Play music, loud. Flush after ten. Whack-off in Jim's bed.
But then he got home, and he looked at it, walked around, had a couple of beers. He looked at the shelves he and Jim had installed on the one wall, the new rug they'd bought after a particularly bad red wine spill. He looked at the new showerhead they'd put in last week. He got mad. He'd been here over four years. He'd loved Jim stupid for most of that time. He'd repeatedly let Jim go off and bash up his head and heart over women who did not love him, stupid or otherwise.
He was, he realized, a schmuck. An idiot.
He went for the phone, dialed Jim's cell. Two rings, then "Ellison," terse but not, thank-you God, breathless.
"You're a fucking moron, you know," he said, conversationally. "I mean, you're out there, laying out money for some woman you barely know, hoping you might get her to like you enough to get into her pants for awhile, until she eventually discards you or breaks your heart or tries to, you know, murder one of us." He'd sort of expected an expletive and a click before this, but he could still hear Jim breathing, so he plunged on, recklessly. "And all the while, you've got a sure thing here at home. No dinner, no wining or dining required. And I'll think tickets to the Jags are a fucking turn-on, and I already know how to wash your shorts and how you like your coffee in the morning and I think you actually look cute with bed head, which I assure you, my man, is a quality you should appreciate, as you have pretty fucking awful bed head. And, as often as I might be tempted, I won't kill you." He took a deep, deep breath against the unnerving silence at the other end. "And then there's the fact that I fucking love you so much it makes my stomach hurt. So, what's it gonna be?" He hung up, quickly, hands shaking. He turned on the CD player, something soft and Celtic, something the neighbours could easily hear gunshots over, should the situation arise.
An hour later, Jim walked in the door, stone-faced, body coiled tight. "Hey, Jim, good to see you." He held out a mug of lukewarm tea. Jim just looked at him, his jaw twitching, the vein in his temple throbbing. "So, what's it gonna be?" he repeated.
Jim just sort of shivered, and suddenly, he was laughing, but it wasn't a particularly happy sound. "You are such a fucking asshole, Sandburg," he managed at last.
Blair forced the mug into Jim's trembling hand. "Ah, yes, but I could be your fucking asshole," he said, and he waggled his eyebrows, and Jim laughed again, a gentler sound.
"What am I going to do with you?" Jim said at last, sipping the tea.
Blair leaned back against the kitchen island. "Take me to bed. Fuck me, repeatedly, over many years. Go camping with me. Catch bad guys. Repaint the railings, 'cause the colour sucks."
Jim scratched his head, looking around. "You want to repaint the railings? You don't like the colour?"
Blair moved in closer to Jim, taking this as a good sign of sorts. "I've always hated the colour, since the day I moved in. We're getting sidetracked, here, Jim. Rail painting was way low on my list."
"I don't know what's wrong with the colour," Jim protested, but Blair moved in closer, pressing his advantage, pressing into his body heat. He smelled like aftershave, a bit, but not, thank God, perfume. "It's a perfectly good colour."
"Shut up about the goddamned railings and kiss me, Ellison," Blair demanded. So Jim kissed him, hard and angry and frightened, and with such a yawning chasm of want underlying it that it almost unmade Blair.
At long last, panting and sweating and trembling, Jim rested his forehead against Blair's. "This scares the shit out of me, you know," Jim whispered, his voice ragged. "This is where I always fuck up."
"No shit," Blair snorted. "I have long been witness to the train wreck that is your love life, and yet, here I am," he said, and he smiled, trying to coax a smile out of Jim. "Man, you've got nothing in there to surprise me with, scare me with. I know you, Jim, and here I am." He leaned up, bit Jim's chin lightly. "I know you, I love you, and I don't want to be anywhere else. I don't want you going anywhere else, either. We've got everything else, man, why not this?"
"It's not that easy," Jim whispered, nuzzling against his neck, tasting the hollows of his throat. "It's never that easy."
"We wouldn't know easy if it bit us on the ass," Blair said drily. "But we know we can handle hard," and his hand moved, caressed Jim until he shuddered, making a play on the word, on the man. "And I love you."
"I love you, too," Jim said, and suddenly his mouth was wide and wanting and everywhere at once. Suddenly, everything was heat and motion and Blair was lost in a maelstrom of sensation, of yearning so powerful that he felt, near the end, as though he'd been turned inside out.
Later, drowsy, lying on his belly with Jim lying half on top of him and gnawing gently on his shoulder, he yawned, cracked open an eye to look around. "I think a really deep, copper finish, metal copper, not verdigris, would look good on the railings. What do you think?"
Jim sighed, burrowed his face in Blair's neck. "I think it's already a perfectly good colour, Sandburg." He felt Jim blow soft, wet raspberries against him, tickling him. He used everything he'd ever learned in locker room fights and academy training to flip them over, straddle Jim's body.
"Why are you so attached to the railings?" Blair demanded, laughing.
Jim reached up, stroked his belly until it quivered. "As it is, they don't show too much wear and tear. Shiny new paint job, every scuff, scrape, and chain mark's going to show up."
"Chain mark?" Blair asked, feeling a familiar heat suffuse his body. "Why, Officer Friendly, what a big nightstick you have! Can you show me your restraints?" He leaned down, kissed Jim until they were both breathless, gasping. Okay, so maybe no paint job. He could live with that.
)0(
Kai stood at the window, watching as Nana threw fish to the bear that sat, ponderous and confused, in the middle of their garden. Bowen came up to him, wrapped strong, slim arms about his waist, pressing his mouth against the scar on his chest. He bowed his head down, burying himself in the fragrant, dark curls, laughing. "We stink."
"Three days in bed will do that," said Bowen, mildly. "Race you out back. We can roll in the snow, then soak in the pool from the hot spring."
Kai just shook his head. "No, thank-you. I'd rather just stay here, where it's warm." Bowen smiled up at him, and it was summer in Kai's heart.
An End.