Title: Perspectives

Author: alee

Rating: G

Category: Gen

Summary: Two perspectives on the same thing can be quite different.

Notes: This is actually two vignettes dealing with the changes that have occurred since Blair was given "The Way of the Shaman". "Skewed" is from Blair's POV, and "Twisted" offers Jim's take on the situation

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Perspectives
by alee

SKEWED

People think I've changed. They think I'm not the same person I was before. They watch me with less speculation, they listen with more attentiveness. They assume the changes are "growing up", or "settling down", or any of a thousand other phrases we use to describe the process by which other people mold themselves to fit our notion of what they *should* be. They see the change in me, and they think it's a good thing.

They're wrong.

It scares me, sometimes, the ease with which I've accepted my role. The "Way of the Shaman" should be harder to tread, shouldn't it? It should be more than just another layer of power, a means to hone Jim's senses. When it hits me -- really *hits* me-- how easily I guide Jim, influence his choices, manipulate all the variables...

It's all too easy to look at this gift, this *sacred duty*, as nothing more than another research tool.

Search the literature.

Formulate a theory.

Find a subject.

Test the theory.

Terminate the experiment.

What am I, then? Nothing more than a scientist, carrying out empirical research with my subject pool of one? I observe, I control, I record, I analyze; I have become nothing more than the sum total of my parts, a conduit for concepts best left un-conceived. Corrupted by the very focus that draws admiration, and undeserved praise.

People think I've changed. I haven't. I've been this way all along.

I've just stopped trying to be anything better.

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TWISTED

Blair's worried again. He thinks I can't tell, that I don't notice when his brow furrows, or when that cold, frightened blankness veils his eyes. He doesn't know that his heartbeat quickens, his breath speeds up when he's alone in the dark. I bet he'd never believe me if I told him. If I confronted him he'd deny it, rationalize it away with a pithy smokescreen, with words like "transference" and "projection".

But he'd be wrong.

The anxiety, the near *panic* that rolls off of him in waves, sometimes so thick I can almost taste it, has nothing to do with me. With *my* fears.

It's ironic, really. For all his prattle about "fear-based responses", all his didactic lectures on the ways in which my instinctive responses seem to lead me astray more than aid me, he's swimming in the same waters right along side me. And the sharks are circling closer.

He's terrified, and he thinks I don't notice. More importantly, he thinks I don't know *why*. But I do, I know it all too well, and I wonder if I didn't plant the seeds of that fear.

He's horrified by the same spectre that has always haunted him: failure.

He worries that he's not the investigator that he could be. He stresses over the fact that he's not the shaman that he believes he should be. He knows he's not the scholar that he once was. He's trying to deny he'll never be the son Naomi wants him to be. It's a million little things, and a few big things, but they add up to the white elephant in the spaces between us, the nameless *dread* that he never acknowledges, at least not to me: he thinks he's failed me.

I wish he knew that's the one thing he could *never* do.

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