Work Text:
Pesach
by Brighid
Author's disclaimer: All things Sentinel belong to Petfly, UPN, Paramount and probably many others. This is not for profit, but for love.
started out to be a lovely family piece and turned in to this very much against my will.
Pesach
by Brighid
"Why is this night different from any other?"
For some strange reason, the words from the Haggadah echoed in Blair Sandburg's ears, in the slow, warm cadences of his grandfather, his dead grandfather, and that alone was enough to push him over the edge into weeping. It was silent, little more than a steady track of wetness down his cheeks, but Simon Banks noticed, and crossed the small waiting room to sit beside the younger man.
"Look here, Sandburg, I know it doesn't look good, but Jim's a tough son of a bitch. He's too damned stubborn to die," the big man offered, trying to console, but his words were faint, uncertain. He had been in to see Jim at the last ICU visitation, having finally convinced Blair to go home to eat and shower; he had broken down and cried himself at the sight. He had not been able to recognize the horribly battered detective, had not been able to find Jim Ellison under the swelling and the bruises and the tangle of machinery that kept the badly damaged body running.
Blair turned bleary eyes on the Major Crimes captain, and shook his head. "Man, that is such a fucking lie, so let's not even go there, okay? They've already talked to me about his living will, and suggested I contact his father and brother. They're not just hedging their bets this time, Simon. They honestly don't expect him to make it through this." He scrubbed angrily at his face, but the tears continued and he gave up in disgust. "I can't track Stephen down, and his dad's out of town, but is catching the first flight back. He should be here by morning."
Simon Banks slid low into the chair that barely managed to hold his long body, and butted the back of his head against the wall in weary frustration. "Aw, hell, Sandburg," he said faintly, his big voice small and lost in the middle of midnight in the drab sitting room. "I am so sorry, Blair," he added after a little while, laying his big hand along the smaller man's back, as though somehow he could just send strength into the bowed shoulders, the hanging head.
Blair twisted his head to the side, and his mouth twitched in parody of a smile. "I know, Simon. I know. This is just not how this weekend was supposed to happen, y'know?" His voice caught, splintered on the last words; he let his head drop back down and waited for the time when the nurse would let him visit Jim again. Try as he might, he couldn't make sense of it, couldn't put it together, couldn't understand how everything had gone so very, very wrong.
"Why is this night different from any other?" The words twisted through him, still in the voice of his grandfather, and he shut his eyes tight against the scalding rush of fresh tears, gritted his teeth against the low cry that snaked up from his belly. He knew the answer, he did.
It was different because it would be the night Jim Ellison died.
It was against every policy the hospital had, but at two a.m. Blair Sandburg took up residence beside Jim's bed and very quietly refused to leave when his time was up. The nurse didn't try very hard; rules were rules, but she knew a deathwatch when she saw one, and there was room for leniency, for mercy even. She didn't even protest when he took Jim's good hand, the one they'd stuck the I.V. port in, and cradled it between his own two hands.
"Shit, Jim," he whispered at last, not the words he'd intended, but the only words he had. "Leave it to you to pull over four guys with a load of designer drugs because they were speeding in a school zone. Jesus, man, you're Major Crimes, not highway patrol!" He rubbed his hands over the motionless hand, tried to ignore the chill of it. Tried, instead, to remember it warm and moving against him, carding his hair, stroking his face, touching his body, opening him up with infinite slowness. He bit back a strangled noise at the memory, and somehow turned it into a short, humourless laugh. "They caught the bastards, Jim. They hadn't even had time to wash off your blood. Henri and Rafe are questioning them now, still. We're all of us keeping watch, in our own ways."
He leaned down, kissed the still fingers. "I just wanted to tell you, Jim, that it's been a wild four years, and an even better six weeks. Right about now I'm pretty pissed that we've only had six weeks, y'know, but I'm also grateful that we had them, that we had that much. I never would've expected it, never would've pegged you for the romantic type. But there you were, loft lit up and bath all ready, and only one pussy joke the whole night long...." Blair trailed off. "I owe you, you know. To date, I've gotten 2 beanie babies, a Gund and three of the ugliest ceramic cats I've ever seen. Not to mention a fire extinguisher and a set of those beeswax firelighters. Who the hell didn't you tell, man? The girls in records still meow at me when I go in to pick stuff up for you." He sighed, leaned his body forward and laid his head down on the square inch of bed free nearest his Sentinel's shoulder. "Shit, Jim," he repeated softly, huskily, his voice dropping Sentinel soft and then to nothing at all.
Time passed, and he tried hard to separate out Jim's breath and pulse from the hiss and pump and beep of the machines he was hooked into, but he wasn't the Sentinel, just the Guide, and he couldn't find Jim there at all. "You know," he continued at last, "I love you more than anyone else, man, You know that, right?" He kept his voice low, pitched to Jim's ears alone. "When I came out, and the whole loft was just glowing with candles, there was this part of me that hoped, hey, finally and another part that was terrified. Then you said it, said you loved me, and all the terror just went ppffft and the hope became happy and I thought ... I thought ... and then I couldn't think, y'know?" He let out a soft huff of laughter. "Christ, for pushing forty and a small bathtub, you were pretty fucking agile, man. I think I damn near ruptured something internally, never mind pulling that damn handle off the hot water tap. And dinner in bed ... man, I kept waiting for the vein to throb in your temple or your jaw to lock or something, but there you were, buck-naked in the middle of your bed, feeding me shrimp off your chopsticks, and then...!" He laughed again. "Gotta tell you, I 'm like, soooooo glad we own wooden chopsticks. You can boil those suckers. It's kinda embarrassing, though, 'cause I still get a hard-on every time I walk by Fortune Wok in the Student Union food court. I don't think my T.A. buys that it's a sudden allergy to MSG, either."
Blair sat up again and scooted his chair closer to Jim's bed, then forced himself to look at the battered, hideously swollen face. "You're so fucking beautiful, you know that, babe? I mean inside, although the outside is pretty damn hot, too. It's just ... you do all this stuff, and it's quiet-like, no show or fuss. When I first moved in, I got pissed that you never seemed to notice all the stuff I did, just pitched a fit if I left a towel on the floor or ate your leftover stew. Until I, you know, grabbed a clue, and realized you were just fitting me into the nest. And that you didn't do talking very well, but you did doing just fine, and yeah, maybe you never said shit about the white-noise generators, but the new futon that I know never saw a garage sale appeared pretty damn soon afterwards. And yeah, sure, your friend just happened to give you his old bookcases when his wife re-did the family room. And hell, Jim, Mr. Mechanic, let's tinker with Blair's clunker for the weekend. Sure that was an old hobby. That's why you went out and got all those books out of the library and none of your tools were dirty."
He reached out, let his hand ghost over the length of his lover's body, unable to touch Jim for fear of hurting him further, and aching himself at the enforced separation. "I love you so goddamned much, you know?" he said after a few, helpless passes. "Right now, I'm pretty damned pissed at you, too, if I'm honest. Man, why couldn't you let the thing go? You know I was waiting at home for you. Why'd you have to play great Sentinel of city that one last time?" He let himself take Jim's hand again. "I know, I know, genetic imperative, who are you to argue, right? I just've missed you so much, what with getting my classes ready for finals and you breaking the Michael's case, and I had this whole twisted Easter egg hunt planned. Didja know there are, like, a gazillion flavours of lube out there, man?" Blair laughed. "I even bought bunny ears and a pair of briefs with the little pompom tail. I figured you'd look good in them." He laughed again, briefly, before it became something more like a sob. "God fucking damn you, Ellison. How dare you do this?"
This time he did reach out, did touch the corner of his Sentinel's mouth. "I know I'm supposed to be gracious here, pal, and tell you to go if you need to, but I'll be damned if I will. You don't have my permission to die, y'hear me? You check out, and I'm gonna leave wet towels on the hardwood and paint your fucking truck purple and give the tupperware away to Goodwill. I'll have parties in the loft and let co-eds serve nachos on your Santana vinyl collection, got that man? I'll ... I'll...." he trailed off helplessly. "I'll curl up and follow you out is what I'll do," he confessed softly, settling his head beside Jim's shoulder and letting the tears come until he gave into the incredible weariness the plagued him, and drifted off into a troubled sleep.
"Why is this night different from any other?"
Blair watched his grandfather sitting at the head of the table and didn't understand much of anything, really. He instead focused on the little trays of funny foods, and the silver goblet that his cousin Rachel said was for Elijah. He was especially entranced by the fact that instead of eating at the dining room table they were lounging around the edge of the several card tables, laid flat on the living room floor and dressed with linens and plates he'd never seen before, not even when he and Naomi had visited last Chanukah. He rather liked this whole leaning on pillows thing. It reminded him of a special he'd seen on Romans on PBS a few months ago. He looked furtively along the table, but saw no grapes.
Next thing he knew Rachel was tugging him off to the bathroom, making his rinse off his hands under the hot tap. He looked up to protest, and was stunned into silence by the image in the mirror -- a tall man in jungle fatigues, with sharp blue eyes and a gentle smile that suddenly twisted into the snarl of a black jaguar. Blair blinked once, twice, to find the image gone and Rachel tugging him back to the table, back to his first Seder.
Grandfather let him come and peer over his shoulder for part of it, let him see the pictures in the ornately wrought Haggadah that he read from. Blair reached over the old man's shoulder, and traced the gilded pictures with still-chubby fingers even as his Grandfather told the story of the Exodus. His grandfather smiled at him, and handed him the book as he pulled out a snowy white napkin, and began the story of the plagues.
Blair watched in rapt fascination at the older man dipped his finger in his wineglass, and dotted the napkin for each plague visited upon the Egyptians.
"Blood." A crimson stain, too rich and red for wine marred the gleaming linen, and Blair flinched at it before raising his eyes to look at his grandfather, who was no longer his grandfather at all, but a strange man with long, dark hair and a painted face.
"Frogs." Red ran into red, puddling like blood on the napkin.
"Lice." The native man shifted, became the soldier from the earlier vision.
"Wild Beasts." The panther was back.
"Blight." A wolf sat there, tongue lolling and knowing eyes watching carefully.
"Boils." A man with a dark wig and mad, mad eyes smiled at him.
"Hail." A big man, bigger than any he'd seen, and dark as night, scowled at him.
"Locusts." The soldier again, but older, wearing jeans and a T-shirt and smiling sweetly at him.
"Darkness." The man shifted again, his face twisting and bloating and bruising under Blair's horrified gaze.
"Death of the First Born." Now it was another man, short and blue-eyed with long curly hair and a sad, sad face. He lifted the napkin up for Blair to see. It was all red, all blood and wine; it stained the young man's hands. "And the blood shall be to you for a token upon the houses where ye are: and when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and the plague shall not be upon you to destroy you."
Blair shook his head in denial, stepping away from the words, falling back from the incredible sadness and strange urgency of the other man's gaze. His foot caught on one of the pillows, and he stumbled backwards, tumbling into blackness.
Blair awoke to a silence marred only by the whir of hospital machinery. The dream clung to him, like a film over his skin, and it made the hairs prickle along his arms. He realized that he was cold, marrow-cold, and he glanced at his watch, wondering how long he'd slumbered. The faintly glowing dial told him it was almost four in the morning.
A slow shiver whispered down his spine, and he remembered a snatch of conversation with his old girlfriend, the one who worked in this hospital. "You know, if someone's going to go in the night, it's almost always around four in the morning. Funny, huh?" Stranded in the middle of night, Blair found nothing funny about it at all. All at once, the silence of the place became oppressive, and the temperature seemed to drop even further, rippling his skin with gooseflesh.
Something inside him snapped, and he knew that something must be done now, or the doctors would be right, that this was how it would all end: a senseless death, without even a chance to say goodbye. "Damnit, no!" he rasped, standing suddenly, defying wobbly legs and low blood sugar. "No way, not a fucking chance, man!"
"Why is this night different from any other?" Blair whirled, but it wasn't his grandfather, it was Incacha, staring at him from the shadowed corners of the room.
"You tell me," Blair said bitterly. "You make me Shaman of the Great City and then check out. I can't even begin to stop this, you bastard. I'm just watching. It's all a fucking joke. I don't have any magic, y'know? I don't have a spirit walk or magic herb for this. He's fucking dying here, and I haven't the words or the way to bring him back!"
Incacha's eyes gleamed from the shadows, flared gold like the jaguar's. "You have magic, young shaman. Look to where you come from. Look to the miracles of your mothers, the rites of your fathers, find the magic there." The Chopec shaman melted into the tall, lean form of his grandfather, who held out a cup in one hand, a stained napkin in the other. "And when He seeth the blood upon the lintel, and on the two sides of the posts, He will pass over the door, and will not suffer the destroyer to come in unto your houses to smite you," he said softly, lovingly. Blair watched long, precious seconds as his grandfather twisted down into the form of a wolf, and loped off into the night.
Pass over. Passover. Pesach. The miracle of the Jew's salvation. With a ragged cry he turned back to the bed, to the shadow that hovered over his lover's broken body, and he began to pray, perhaps for the first time in his life. His hands clenched convulsively as he shouldered through the wave of cold, and he felt his nails bite into his palms; he pressed down harder, letting the cold numb the pain, and only eased off when his hands were slippery with blood.
Still praying, he leaned over Jim to smear a bloody palm mark across the wall over the head of the bed. Two more swipes and a rough, red doorway marred the institutional green of the ICU wall. Then he sank to his knees, and let the words come, a torrent of half-forgotten Hebrew and ancient Greek and Latin. Perhaps it was blasphemy, perhaps the God of the Jews had no mercy to spare for apostate sons, but it was all that he had, all he could offer to hold back the darkness. The cold was overwhelming; it numbed him, leached the words from his mind, until all that was left was a litany of "Please, oh please, no!"
A small noise pulled him from his mantra, shattering the pall of silence. Blair looked up to find Jim looking back at him, good eye groggy and a bit vague, but growing sharper by the second. As the confusion cleared, Blair saw recognition and relief as the Sentinel registered the presence of his Guide. "You in there, big guy?" Blair asked, voice hushed by the threat of tears, as he made his way unsteadily to his feet.
The big man winked once, clearly, in answer, and Blair's knees gave out as sheer relief flooded him. He managed to get into the chair, and thumbed the call button for the nurse. "Good, good. Shit man, you scared the hell out of me. You better hurry up and get out of this bed, because I'm going to kick your ass from here to Sunday. What did you think you were doing, man?" The tirade was ruined by the tears coursing down the younger man's face. "Just get well, okay?" he said softly as the nurses rushed over and shooed him away. He moved back out of the way, never once breaking eye contact with his Sentinel.
Though there were no windows in the ICU, Blair Sandburg could feel the sunrise in his very bones.
A New Beginning
End Pesach.