Disclaimers: They aren't mine, I make no claim to them beyond that of a fellow participant in popular culture, and I make no money from this endeavor.

Notes: This came to me one night, and patiently waited the three days until I could clear my schedule and give it life. <hugs> to fuzzicat for convincing me to post.

Summary: Jim makes a long-avoided visit.

Warnings: No one dies. Jim/Blair more implied than explicit.
 
 

Those Left Alone by Owlet
 
 

The room was dark. Jim flinched as they entered, and the nurse flipped on the light abruptly. "Thank you," he managed carefully. "Would it be okay...if we were alone?"

"Of course, Detective," the nurse said calmly. "Just let the nurse's station know on your way out." She slipped back outside, eased the door shut with barely a whisper. Jim shivered at the tiny 'snick' it made as it latched, like the sound of a trigger being pulled, the sound always lost in the roar of the explosion.

A little like now. Jim stared, caught, at the form on the bed. Pale, unmoving, looking like a dreamer caught in a nightmare that they had given up trying to leave. The arrow-straight body covered in an unwrinkled white sheet and a blanket that still had the creases in it. Like it wasn't a person at all. And yet, he had once touched that body, had once held it, felt it warm and vibrant against his own--real. Alive.

It was easier to think of it as it.

He turned the lights off, blinking hard as the lights winked out, and slowly moved to the side of the bed. There was an armchair there, creaky and stiff with age and disuse. It had been so long since the last time he had been here.

After a long hesitation, he reached out and touched the cool hand. It lay limp, clammy, but he could still feel that familiar heatbeat underneath it, feel the elastic skin of youth flex and give under the gentle surge of blood. The scent he'd never forget rose up, choking him for a long minute. He choked for a long minute, and when he came back to he was clinging to those long fingers. A lifeline.

He didn't know what to say, and so he said nothing, rubbing the fingers under his hand gently, soothing, petting, the touch bringing back a faint, wistful tingle of the charge that this person had always been able to make him feel. Always, he thought, and suddenly he could speak.

"It's been two years," he said finally, softly.  He stared off into the shadows, as moonlight and streetlights striped the walls. "And I still can't believe that you're here. That I'm here."

Silence from the bed, and somehow it encouraged Jim to keep going. "Did you know, I think I loved you? I didn't know how to say it--I didn't know how I could feel it. We were so different. And what happened, at the end--I don't know how to explain it. I can't explain it. But...I'm sorry. Even after all you did, I'm sorry.

"I'm happy now. Loved--in love. Not like when you found me, so twisted and torn and...god, I felt like I was going insane. Like I was just going to spin away into nothing, and what would be left? And when you discovered me...

"I wanted to kill you. But it wasn't all you, you know? It wasn't even what you did, anything you'd done. Althought that was bad enough, god, more than bad enough--but it was me. I couldn't...I couldn't go past it. Couldn't accept you. Even when you were hurt, hurting." He shivered again, feeling the cool chill of sickness in the room pressing hard against his skin. Long hair drifted in the breeze from the ventilation system, and fluttered against his hand; he shuddered hard and pulled away.

"I still don't think I can." He drew a deep breath. "Sometimes I think I wanted to kill you, for what you said, what you did." Something in that glorious, terrible, achingly familiar face had changed, looked tense and unhappy. Looked almost alive. And he closed his eyes and again took the slack hand in his own.

"But I want to try. To accept you. To take you back. Because you...you're like me. And I won't leave you alone."

The moon shone round and full on the floor beside him, and outside he heard an owl, crickets, the occasional sound of a car *shushing* past on wet pavement. It had rained earlier today, the filmy, misty rain and velvet-gray sky reminding him of what he'd found and lost.

Reminding of what lay here, waiting for him to come. Reminding him of what almost was, what could have been.

For a long time, he simply stayed there, feeling the cold fingers in his warm slightly, watching the chest rise and fall with steady, slumberous breath.

Finally he stood, and loomed over the bed. After a long hesitation, he leaned down and kissed the waxy cheek. "'Bye," he gruffly said, and turned abruptly, striding to the door. He flung open the door, again wincing at the sudden light, and this time when the door shut, it did so with a resounding *bang.*

Behind him, pale blond hair trembled in the faint breeze, and at last, with a faint sigh lost in the peaceful sound of crickets, the troubled face calmed.

The End