Blue

by Ceares

A/N: This was beta’d by the terrific Cinel many moons ago. Changes have been made since then, and I’ve ignored a few of her original suggestions, so I take complete blame for any errors.

Meets the challenges: A/U. Everyone is aware of Sentinels, and Blair is a virgin.

Blue

by Ceares

No words were spoken, as gentle hands stripped him of his clothing. His eyes roamed eagerly over the magnificent body of the silent man before him.

Blue eyes met blue with matching passion. Strong hands slid over his body, blazing a path that was followed by a wet, open mouth. He writhed under the nibbling lips and searching tongue, moaning in helpless pleasure and clutching broad shoulders as that ravenous mouth latched onto a raised nub and began to suckle.

His hands slid up, fingers grasping for purchase in short, coarse strands as he pulled the sucking mouth up to meet his own. Tongues battled in a sweet duel as the hard body settled onto his, their cocks seeking alignment automatically. He moaned again at the slide of flesh against flesh, arching into the touch, the kiss.

Blair sighed as he sat up and rubbed his eyes. He slid a hand over the palm panel and eased the light level from low to moderate. He'd had the same damn dream again, and again woke up as hard as a rock. You'd think if he was going to have an erotic dream, he could at least reach completion. Instead he always woke up just before he could cum, leaving him wallowing in frustration.

Horny he could handle, hell; he’d handled it since puberty. Shorter than average, and a geek to boot, he wasn’t exactly a sex magnet. By the time he caught up with everyone else, and started to draw attention, he was too wrapped up in his studies to be interested. Blair had never had a girlfriend, or boyfriend for that matter – one friend had told him he was asexual, and he’d agreed, at least until all of this started. No, it wasn’t the lack of orgasm that bothered him; it was this sense of emptiness, of loss when he woke up that ate away at him.

He shoved the memory of blue eyes out of his head, and picked up his laptop. Since he was up, he might as well go over the notes for the lecture he was giving later that week. Even as he listened to the computer recite the notes back to him, adding pithy comments, as was its wont, he knew that he couldn’t ignore the dream for long. His subconscious was telling him it was time for another visit.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Blair winced slightly at the hearty blow the security guard delivered to his shoulder in the guise of a friendly pat.

"Congratulations, Doc. I hear you’ll be springing him from here soon."

Blair nodded. "Yeah. Thanks, Pete."

"Hey, we actually like to lose one from time to time." He pushed the clipboard in Blair’s direction and turned his attention back to the newspaper he was scanning. "You know the routine, Doc. I’ll see you on the way out."

Blair signed in, then went through the metal detector by rote, having done it a hundred times in the last four years.

He entered the inner chamber, ignoring the first cubicles with their temporarily preserved figures. He found them slightly eerie. Frozen wax dolls waiting. Always waiting.

The wait was over for him. For them. He eased into the last cubicle on the left, resisting the urge to dance and sing. Wishing the still, frozen figure in front of him could join in his celebration.

He pulled up his chair to its usual spot and sat down. He leaned against the cool glass and closed his eyes, trying to absorb the essence of the man locked away from him. Drawing comfort from even this artificial closeness. "It won’t be long now, Jim, I promise."

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

"Dr. Sandburg, it’s time."

Brown curls bounced in an absent nod, but Jerry knew that the bespectacled young man, head bent, furiously typing on his computer, hadn't actually heard him. At least not consciously. After three years with the very brilliant doctor, Jerry had learned that there was a delay switch between Dr. Sandburg and the rest of the world. It could be anywhere from a minute to an hour before the doctor acknowledged what was said to him, but he always did.

It had amazed Jerry when he had first signed on as Sandburg's assistant. He'd heard so much about the man, and frankly he was slightly in awe of working with a man ten years younger than him, who was already the head of a research laboratory. At first sight he hadn't been impressed with the short, curly haired, and frankly, beautiful young man who had welcomed him with a boyish smile. After a few conversations in which it was clear that the kid wasn't paying attention to anything he said, he was convinced that the boy genius had been far overrated, and had obviously gotten his position through his connections.

It was only after he'd seen the doctor the next day, and the man not only brought up the conversations they'd had, but pulled out a sheaf of papers with detailed, handwritten notes on the solutions that he realized everything he'd heard was true.

He hated to interrupt the doctor now, but he knew how important this was to the younger man, so he took the extreme measure of leaning forward and gently closing the cover of the computer. Wide blue eyes blinked at him owlishly for a moment before the movement was processed, and then those same eyes were suddenly glowing.

Sandburg stood up, knocking several of his files to the floor. "Time! It's finally time."

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Blair watched as the temperature in the cryochamber was slowly eased down to match that in the room. He was peripherally aware of the observers in the antechamber, but they were only a small blip on radar that was concentrated solely on the still figure carefully being thawed.

James Ellison. Quite possibly the living embodiment of his major field of study. Sentinels. Rare individuals with heightened senses that, in primitive times, were tribal protectors. He'd become fascinated with the subject as a child, after scanning the text of an ancient monograph written by an English explorer almost two hundred years ago.

Over the years, he'd found people with a few heightened senses. Enough to support his theories of genetic advantage, and to obtain his doctorate. Well, actually his third, but really the one that meant the most. But over the years, to his disappointment, he'd never found an actual Sentinel, one with all five senses, until one day, in some military archives donated to the university, he'd stumbled across the records of one James J. Ellison. The papers detailed the story of his rescue from a botched mission in Peru. The Captain had spent over eighteen months living with an indigenous tribe in the Peruvian jungle, and when he returned, he was suffering from some sort of hyper awareness.

The symptoms recorded showed spikes on all five sensory levels. With a tingle of excitement in the pit of his stomach, Blair had begun to investigate further. What he found was amazing.

"We should be reaching stable temperature in less than a minute, Dr. Sandburg."

He nodded at Jerry, feeling his stomach flutter again with the same sense of hope and fear that he’d felt the first time he'd opened that file.

As far as the military was concerned, Captain Ellison had seemingly been cured of whatever ailed him by the time his two-week debriefing was over and he had taken an early retirement from the Army. He joined the Cascade police department soon after he returned home.

To Blair, he’d been instinctively protecting the tribe, even without knowing what he was.

He'd had a good career with the PD, though he'd developed a reputation as somewhat of a loner, despite a brief marriage to a fellow officer. This was yet another Sentinel trait Ellison exhibited. They were usually apart from the tribe they protected, fairly isolated except for their Guides, companions who watched out for them while they employed their heightened senses. These helpers usually served as their link to the world. Burton hadn’t mentioned the importance of a Guide but Blair had found through further research that it was nearly impossible for a Sentinel to function well without one. That’s why he wasn’t surprised at what happed to Jim.

One day, in pursuit of a serial bomber, his ‘illness’ had returned, escalating uncontrollably, despite the efforts of the best specialist in Cascade. When he lapsed into a catatonic like state, his father had stepped in, choosing a rather radical solution. Cryogenics. The process had been around for decades, on the fringes of ‘respectable’ science. It had only recently been perfected, and still wasn’t accepted as a valid option to medical treatment by the majority of the scientific community, but William Ellison was willing to take a risk to give his son a chance at some point in the future.

Blair was sure Jim’s father never imagined that future would be nearly thirty years later.

William Ellison was killed in a car accident the next year. He’d never gotten around to changing his will, so his company and sizable estate were left to both sons, Jim and his brother Stephen. At that point, it became a legal nightmare. Stephen Ellison was forced to deal with the ramifications of his brother's condition. Not quite dead, not quite alive. Stephen was finally appointed trustee of his brother’s share of the inheritance as well as his brother himself.

When Blair had approached Stephen with his theories, the man had been reluctant at first to chance it. Only after Blair had introduced him to other subjects that had gone through similar, though less intense experiences, was Stephen finally persuaded to take a chance.

Once Stephen had agreed, the board of directors and those with various interests in the Ellison fortune had stepped in with protests, complaints, and even threatened lawsuits. After twenty-five years, they were happy with the status quo. It had taken nearly a year to get everything settled. A year in which Blair thought he would lose his mind. He became plagued with dreams of Jim Ellison. The man alternately made love to him and asked him for help. Blair became convinced he was meant to be Jim’s Guide. That idea made the whole process that much harder for him. The only thing that saved his sanity was being allowed access to Jim at the cryo-center.

After that, Blair had to find someone to fund the project. Someone willing to put up the money to provide the necessary facilities to not only unfreeze Ellison, but to acclimate him, and begin the Sentinel studies. Over the years the concept of a Sentinel had become accepted by modern society, as anthropologists discovered more and more ‘pre-tech’ societies that had tribal members that acted in this capacity. The work Blair published aided in this, but he’d still had a hard time finding someone other than Stephen Ellison willing to invest money in the project. He’d almost exhausted both his own funds, and his salesmanship, when from out of the blue, help arrived.

The money had come from an unexpected source. Daryl Banks. He was the son of Jim's former Captain, and had fond memories of the man, since Jim had saved both he and his father's life on a vacation to Peru that had gone badly. Or at least so he explained to Blair.

Daryl’s mother had made some wise investments, leaving him an extremely rich man, one of the wealthiest in the country, and hence, the Banks Center for Sentinel Studies was born.

All that had taken time, and one day Blair had looked up and five years had passed. Five years from the first time he'd opened that file. From the day he'd taken one look at a photograph older than he was, saw solemn blue eyes in and fell in love.

He knew people thought his regular visits to the cryo-center were the act of an obsessed scientist, or hell, maybe they just thought he was crazy. He didn't know, or care. What he did know was that from the beginning, he'd felt a connection with this first for this man stretched out on the table in front of him, and it had only grown stronger over the past five years.

He found it nearly impossible to go too long without being in the same place as Ellison. Physically impossible. He'd tried a few times to resist the pull, and his punishment had been blinding migraines that vanished the minute he was near Ellison. It always started the same way, first with the dreams, and then the nagging ache would begin.

He'd given up trying to fight it, or trying to find some scientific explanation for it years ago. Now he only knew he had to rescue James Ellison. That somehow, this man had been waiting for him to come along.

"We're not getting any vitals!" There was a slight panic in Jerry's voice, and Blair could see the worried glances being exchanged by Stephen Ellison and Daryl Banks, but he was infused with utter calm as he leaned over the still body.

One hand rested on the bare, muscular chest, the other running gently over the short hair. He could feel the current run through him as he touched, for the first time, what he'd caressed so often in his dreams. His voice was a breath of a whisper. "Jim, it's okay. You don't have to wait any longer. I'm here now. Come back. Come back to us. To me."

He kept up his litany until he could feel a gentle thump under his hand, and the slow rise and fall of the now warm chest. He ignored Jerry's triumphant yell, and the murmurs of relief coming from the other room.

His entire being was focused on what he felt he'd waited his entire life for. The gentle flutter of dark lashes and blue eyes opening to meet his.

END