Between one heartbeat and the next, between one breath and the next, you can go from having a normal, never-think-about-it-twice kind of day to living a nightmare than you will spend the rest of your life wishing you could forget.  You can go from being on your way to work, to seeing your place of work being reduced to a pile of rubble with precious friends buried at the bottom of it.  You can go from standing there too shocked to even scream, to being hurled to the ground and covered by a living weight that took the brunt of a blast that would have killed you.

   Jim grabbed and whirled with me so fast that we were on the way down before the blast wave hit us.  I can remember thinking distantly, "Man, which sense told him there was an explosion cause like, *no way* are his reflexes that fast, Army Ranger or not."  Then he squashed the breath out of me, and it didn't help that all the air in the immediate vicinity was departing at warp speed for parts unknown.  I had a split second to wish I was doing likewise when a glimpse over Jim's shoulder told me that would have been suicidal, cause a great many sharp and deadly fragments of former building had the same idea.

  Heat was next, and later I had blisters on my knuckles from where my hands had instinctively gone up to clutch Jim's shoulders on our way down.  I'm still muddled as to whether or not sound arrived with it; believe it or not there had been this *silence* in the moments between seeing the PD begin to crumple and cold concrete impacting hard with my backside.  But the roar did arrive, doing more than hurting my ears, leaving them ringing off and on for days.  It finished the job of rendering me totally dazed, near unconscious, for which I am extremely thankful.

   Otherwise I would have killed my partner and roommate. And friend, though I had already begun to wonder if those words were really the ones that could be used to describe us.

   As it was, I tumbled back toward awareness unwillingly, and with more than a little difficulty, since I couldn't really *breathe*.  Jim is seriously heavy, and he had both arms wrapped around my head squashing me into his chest even as his forearms pillowed it.  My arms were caught between us, but we were lying half on and half off a culvert, so one of my elbows was jammed into the metal grate and the other was suspended in the air between the sidewalk curb and the drop to the sewer.  I had no leverage to push him off, though I tried for a second, wheezing his name as imperiously as a wheeze can get.

   Around me I could hear people screaming and crying, the wail of distant sirens, car horns and alarms, and a peculiar groaning metal sound that I later learned was the settling of the ruins of Cascade PD into its crater.  The stink of fire and burned clothes and people and hot asphalt and blood was choking what little oxygen I could get, and the last was so strong that I began to panic, thinking of all the people who could be dying while we laid there.

   Scrabbling around with my heels, I tried to get my knees up, thinking I could use the power of my legs to buck and get Jim's attention, but before I could a woman appeared in my limited view and put her hand on my forehead.

    She didn't say a word or smile or anything, and I have no clue why that simple touch made me lay still and wait.  Fingers brushing lightly over my face, she was obviously checking out my sentinel with her other hand, and it began to sink into my admittedly confused mind that something was *wrong* with Jim.  I couldn't turn my head enough to look at his face, which was buried in my neck anyway, nose pressing into my collarbone.  As much as I could, I explored with my fingers, and found his eyes were closed, mouth sagging open, wetness at a corner of it that I was afraid to see.

   Forgetting my own problems with breathing, I paid attention to his, actually holding my chest motionless to be able to monitor him.  I nearly panicked again when it finally, *finally* sunk into me that he wasn't, and I started to fight to get out from under him so I could help.

   "No."  One word, not even shouted, and it zapped straight into me, and I froze, eyes I didn't remember closing flying open to meet hers.

   Again, I had one of those weird thoughts that sort of spring up when you're stressed.  //They're the same shade as mine.//  But hers were set in a pale, wide face framed with long, straight, black hair that made them look three sized larger than mine.  The brows over them were barely more than a suggestion of a wing, darker than her hair.  Nose and mouth were unremarkable, except that they fit perfectly together, making her a pretty woman who was probably beautiful in the right circumstances.  Despite her skin color, there was something about the cast of her features that made me think 'Native American', especially when she turned sideways and called someone's name.

   Jim chose that second to draw in a shaky, wet-sounding suck of air, and I forgot all about her.  "Yeah!  Do that again, Jim.  You need to keep those lungs moving, man.  Come on, Jim. Again."  He did what I asked, moaning softly, and I kept encouraging him, worried that he wasn't coming around.

   "His name is Jim?"  She was back again, bending over us, close enough to me now that I could have kissed her.

  "Jim Ellison, Detective Ellison.  I'm his partner, Blair Sandburg." I gasped out, trying to time my breath in with his so that I had some space to work my lungs.

   "Hi Blair.  I'm Dr. Rebecca Avery, and yes, I'm a real doctor, and yes, I'm trying to help you and your partner."  She smiled, and I congratulated myself on guessing correctly that she would be beautiful in the right situation.  "Have I answered all your questions?"

   "Wrong?" I got out, hoping she'd understand that I meant how badly Jim was hurt.

   Going very serious, she laid her hand over one of mine where it rested on the back of Jim's head.  "He has a steel support rod imbedded in his back, piercing his lung and far too close to his heart for my peace of mind.  You *have* to lay as still as you can, Blair.  Believe it or not, as long as the bar doesn't move, we've got a good chance of saving his life before he can bleed out or his lungs collapse.  So until we get the right kind of help, the best thing you can do is exactly what you've been doing.  Talk to him, keep him calm if he starts to regain consciousness, and stay put.  Okay?"

   I gave a tiny nod, terrified that dragging in enough air to talk would kill Jim.

   "Can you tell me if you're hurt at all?  Or if you can feel the other end of the rod poking at you?"

  "Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit...." I mouthed/thought.   Not exactly an original mantra, but, hey, *very* satisfying under the circumstances.  Her grip on me tightened, and her eyes were trying their best to reassure me while I did a lighting fast inventory.  Okay, my ass was going to hurt for a week from meeting terra firma so hard and fast, and I was pretty sure some skin was missing from my shoulder blades, despite the shirts.  My chest was wet with something warm, and I had to swallow *hard* at the thought of what that had to be.  Then Jim took an extra deep breath, looking for more 02, I knew, and I felt the blunt, hard end of the rod impaling him nudge me right over my breast bone.

   Panic went away.  Just like that.  Panic, fear, worry, pain.  It all went away, and I stared up at the buildings and sky nearly completely blocked by the man who was dying in my place.  In the few unbroken panes of glass I could see the reflections of the fires from various buildings and cars in the area, could dimly make out the ghosts of people scurrying through the streets, some heading away, some heading toward.  I heard someone using a voice very like mine tell Dr. Avery about the metal poking at me and the blood pooling on me, under me, but I concentrated on the bit of clouds I could see, giving names to the shapes they made.

   She patted my face, once, making me turn away from the compelling motion overhead, and pricked my calm the tiniest bit.  "I have to see to other people, Blair.  I'm sorry.  As a cop you know about triage; there are people who can live if I get to them fast enough, and there's not much I can do here until I get the right kind of help.  Will you be okay?"

   "Sure."  And the hell of it was, I would be.  The look she shot me was compassionate and something else that I couldn't put a finger on at the time, gave me a last squeeze on the hand, and was gone.

   Nearby I heard the ambulances and rescue squads begin to squeal to a stop, doors opening and authortative voices start doing their thing.  Help was arriving in force, and a part of me wondered how long the response time had been.

   Most of me was watching the clouds, though, and petting what tiny bits of Jim that I could reach.  I could feel him fighting to live, feel the wet, gurgling heaves of his chest in futile attempts to feed his starving lungs, but it was all so far away from where I was.

   I'd always known on some level that he would die like this: quietly, ignored by almost everybody as they focused on the more important aspects of what killed him.  And it didn't bother me that it had been me he was protecting.  It could have easily been Simon, or Rafe, or a total stranger that had been standing close by when the bomb or whatever went off.  Jim probably had known, too, though he'd never said anything.

   Hey, no surprise there, right?  But if he didn't talk much, he acted often.  Too often I'd seen him recklessly endanger himself to save others, then shrug it off afterwards, not to have been able to translate his behavior into Jimspeak.  "It's what a cop does.  It's what *I* do; being a sentinel has nothing to do with it."

   I could argue that, of course, but that could be a major waste of time with Ellison if he wasn't in a mood to listen.  So he expected to die in the line of duty and I expected him to, and hell, most of Major Crimes expected it, and it looked like I was going to be the one soaking up his blood while he did it, thinking, well, it finally happened.  And I didn't have a clue what I was going to do, despite all that.

   It seemed that I was just going to let him go.  Not like when our positions had been reversed.  I'd heard about that day from every person there, in tones ranging from near awe to 'well, fuck, that's Sandburg and Ellison for you'.  Jim had denied, fought, shouted, and, ultimately, dragged me back to life, literally giving me a piece of his own to do it.  Maybe that was why I was, well, content to let him go quietly, me a step behind, watching his back like always.  The time I'd had since had been borrowed from him to start with.

   Yeah, I was dying too.  The great heart in the chest pressed so close to mine was faltering, and everytime it struggled to keep up its beat, mine echoed it, and my body felt as starved of air as it had that day at the fountain.  There were sparkles in the clouds by then, and it was getting dark around the edges, as if the day's usual rain was moving in as a heavy t'storm.  I brushed a kiss over the ear closest to my mouth, murmured Jim's name sentinel quiet, telling him I was there, I wasn't going anywhere and neither was he without me.

   I swear I felt the hand curled nearest my head trace out the rim of my ear.  Limned as softly as only Jim could.

   A new head appeared in my bit of sky, and I blinked, readying myself to warn this stranger off if I needed to.  But he smiled, and I recognized it instantly, smiling back.  "I'm Dr. Sam Avery," he said softy.  "My twin sent me over to work on Jim."

   A second later the female Dr. Avery was beside her brother, and they two of them were doing doctorish things out of my line of sight, which was good.  I didn't want to watch anyway.  I must have started to drift off, because a cold palm cupped my cheek, yanking me back to Dr. Sam's eyes.  His were as green as his twin's were blue, and his skin had the burnished bronze of a Native American.

  Another hand  touched me on the other side, Dr. Rebecca's and I heard her murmur, "I told you."

   "Mike, I didn't say I..."

   She grinned broadly at him, tilting her head, and their gazes met, mixed, discussed.  A chill chased over my skin, one that had nothing to do with the explosion or injuries and had everything to do with the fact they had entire conversation in that one look.  For the first time I had an inking of what other people saw when Jim and I did that, and it *spooked* me.

   My reaction must have been as loud as a shout.  Dr. Sam bent down to my level and began carefully probing at me, looking to find his way to Jim's chest wound, I think.  Dr. Rebecca vanished and I heard boxes being opened, plastic wrapping ripped.

   "Mike thinks that there's something special between you and your partner, Blair." Sam said conversationally, expression intent on what his hand was telling him.

   "Mike?" I asked stupidly, changing the subject as best I could, not willing to expose Jim even in that circumstance.  Or maybe despite it.  Hell, I don't know.  By that time what few brain cells I had that weren't going down for the third count were too busy trying to figure out if what I'd just seen was an example of the kind of 'twin's bond' I'd heard so much about.

   "Her legal name is Rebecca," Sam laughed, his fingers moving surely over my ribs.  "But she's been Mike to everybody since she was ten.  Long story behind it, of course."

   "Not... going 'nwhere," I huffed out carefully.

   There was motion going on around me; people in uniforms beginning to cluster with Jim and myself as the center of their activity.  It bothered me, bothered the peace I'd claimed for myself, so I made fists in Jim's shirt to hold him to me and focused on Dr. Sam's face, distractedly thinking he was as beautiful as his sister.

  "We're not really twins, you know," he said quietly, his head so close to ours that I could feel strands of his short blond hair catch in my beard stubble as he looked down where his hand was worming between me and Jim.  "We were both foundlings, and spent most of our lives in foster homes.  We met at one and it was instant bonding.  I'm not joking; she walked up to me, took my hand in hers, and pretty much refused to let go, not that I would have let her.  Then we got transferred to another fosterage and we were so afraid of being separated, that we pretended she was a boy so they would let us stay together.  Stupid, but we were only 9 or so.

   "And at that, we got away with it for nearly a year.  Mike was the name she used because that was the name of the autistic boy that was transferred at the same time.  Took his things and left him hers.  By the time we were found out, the name had stuck like super glue and she's been Mike to me and everybody who loves her since."

   "Cool," I whisperered, sincerely impressed that he was sharing so much simply to reassure me.  Then it occurred to me that he was doing more than probing for Jim's wound.  With his ear so close to my chest, he could hear my stuttering heartbeat. I could see the piece from his stethoscope in his other and could easily guess where the bell was. It had to be obvious to him that what was happening to my sentinel was happening to me.

   I expected questions, curosity, anything but the calm acceptance clearly written on his face when he looked up.  "Blair, I need you to listen to me really, really carefully."

   "You've got a captive audience here, Doc," I quipped, but it fell flat thanks to the nearly airless way I spoke.

   Smiling anyway, he put his hand back on my face.  "If it were any other person other than your partner, I'd not give him much of a chance.  As strong and healthy as he is, the moment we take that steel out of his body his lungs are going to fill with blood and his heart will likely go into arrest from the strain.

   "But he's *your* partner, and there's nothing physically wrong with you.  If you fight for his life, if you refuse to die, he'll stay with you."

   "You can't know that," I argued hoarsely.

   "I *can* know that.   He's already fought for yours and won, hasn't he?"

   He knew my answer to that; he knew!

   "I..." I stuttered.  "I can't..."

   "If you can't, who can?" Sam asked calmly.

   And the truth of it was, there was no one Jim would trust to make a life and death for him except me, because he knew I would chose life.  Always.  I nodded my decision, and tender fingertips brushed my eyes closed, sending me effortlessly into sleep.

   Two days later I woke from unremembered dreams in a hospital bed pushed close enough to Jim's that I could - and did - hold his hand.  Our wrists were bound together with a slender braid of dark hair, twined with gold, the ends held together with a thin metal disk with what looked like druidic runes on either side.

   According to Simon, the paramedics working with two unknown doctors had lifted Jim off me and onto a gurney, dragging me with him because I had my hands knotted in his clothes.  Rather than pull me away, the doctors had bundled me into the ambulance with my partner, one of them staying with each of us during the ride, the emergency surgery, the move to ICU.  It had been them who pushed our beds together just before they left, telling the nurses it would save them a world of grief to leave the beds that way.

   The nurses listened, mostly because the explosion only took 5 lives, about half as many as there would have been if Drs. Rebecca and Samuel Avery hadn't been on the scene.  The revenge the splinter group from Kincaid's people had must have been poor to them.  They'd timed their bomb to take out the Department during shift change, not knowing that a bad strain of flu had reduced the staff so badly, that 12 hour shifts had been instituted only days earlier.  So instead of 2/3 of Cascade's finest, they got a few hands full of clerks and uniforms in the process of stopping by for what ever reason.

   Wanting to thank Sam and Mike, Major Crimes tracked them down.  Or rather tried to.  Despite *good* witnesses and descriptions that sketch artists could use to draw with their eyes closed, no one could agree on what they looked like.  And there are *no* Dr. Avery's fitting the general descriptions listed with the AMA or any medical school we could query.

   In the long run, the only proof we had they existed was the braid, and the metal disk with the 'S' on one side, and the 'M' on the other, both written to look like runes.  That and my sentinel, standing tall and healthy behind me, with hardly a scar to mark that you can go, from one heart beat to the next, from roommate, friend, and partner - to lover.

finis