Dropping In

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Blair slouched low in the chair, feet tucked under the desk in the study formerly known as his bedroom. His laptop hummed before him, idling away on the Cascade Police Department's Benefits@Your Fingertips 401K options webpage, while its user closed his eyes and focused on things he'd rather have at his fingertips.
Like a jar of butterscotch, hold the ice cream.
Or Jim's left nipple.
Or...both?
Oh, yeah. Smoothing his hands into comfortable spots on each denim-clad thigh, Blair visualized the slow removal of a plain white T-shirt to uncover the spectacular chest within. Dream-Blair opened the sticky jar with one hand and his teeth as here-and-now Blair's hand crept up his thigh to an up-and-coming erection. He breathed deep at the mental image of a fine drizzle of butterscotch from his thumb to one peerless pec, followed by...
POP! A bullet winging past his ear interrupted Blair's latest trip to Fantasy Central. With a startled yelp, he slithered off the chair and under the desk. He briefly reconsidered his position on riot gear as loungewear for the home, then turned to more practical matters, like how to see what was going on in the living room without sticking his head back into the line of fire.
"Chief?" Jim called from their loft bedroom, followed by the sound of two sentinel-sized feet hitting the floor. A second gunshot forestalled Blair's reply and elicited a curse from his partner.
"Jim! Are you OK?" Blair called back.
"Shut up! Both of you just stop talking!!" Blair couldn't tell where the third shot landed. Silence came from the upper level, but a fruit bowl smashing to the floor placed their attacker somewhere near the kitchen table. The soft thump and skittering of fruit across the floor echoed through the loft.
Wadded up underneath the desk, Blair had a tough time removing his shoes, but squirmed his way through the task. Still no noises, reassuring or otherwise, from upstairs. Blair was pretty sure Jim wouldn't have gone that quietly, so keeping the panic factor down didn't prove too great a problem. Blair hurled the left shoe at the floor space in front of the study door as hard as he could, the sound exploding like a gunshot.
The shooter responded with a wide miss that ricocheted against the far wall of the study.
"Blair!" Jim bellowed, vindicating his partner's hunch. His voice came from a spot in the loft much closer to the stairs.
"Shut up!" the shooter cried. "I got him, Ellison! You're next! Murderer!"
Blair could hear the man staggering toward the stairs.
"You can hear me breathing, Jim," Blair murmured. "I'm OK. Doesn't look like he can hit the broad side of a barn, man." Blair crawled out from under the desk. The chair scraped on the floor as he shoved it out of his way. "I'm just gonna create a little diversion here..."
"Sandburg, stay DOWN!" Jim shouted. Something fell in the living room, and Blair rounded the corner just in time to see a boxer-clad Jim Ellison vault over the loft railing and bring to the floor one truly enormous home invader.
Data ticked over in Blair's head: yesterday's bust gone awry, suspect in critical care, thatch-haired hulk of a cousin crashing around the waiting area until security arrived. Cousin, Blair thought. Cousin.... Harvey? The intruder was Harvey!
"Harvey!" he called out, hoping to distract the amazing bulk before Jim got the life pounded out of him. Harvey wasn't in the market for distraction, and twisted away from Jim until the cop hit the floor sideways and heavily, and Harvey's gun hand came up.
The other shoe flew out of Blair's hand, Blair having forgotten it was there. His subconscious had great aim, as the Nike landed hard on Harvey's elbow and the gun skidded beneath the couch.
With a catlike twist of his own, Jim came off the floor and rolled his attacker the other way, gathering arms as he went. They ended with Jim sitting astride a heaving side of beef, holding both of Harvey's wrists in position for cuffs. Blair sprinted for Jim's jacket, retrieved a pair and brought them over, then headed for the phone to call for backup.
"Harvey Warburton, you are under arrest," Jim recited, having recognized Cousin Harvey as well. Sirens sounded in the distance before he finished the Miranda warning.
Blair padded back into the study and returned with a T-shirt and sweatpants from the spare closet. Jim eased stiffly off the prisoner and snatched the clothing with a glare.
"Was it the 'stay' or the 'down' you had trouble with, Sandburg?" he barked, yanking on the sweatpants. Harvey twitched, and Jim planted a bare but sturdy foot into the not-so-small of his back and applied pressure.
Blair met Jim's glare with a steady gaze of his own. "You're welcome," he replied. "And don't even start. I told you he couldn't hit the broad side..."
"Of a barn, yes. Is that supposed to make a difference?"
There will be no eye-rolling, Blair told himself sternly. Trouble come. Sentinel worried. Crisis averted. Different trouble stay. Diversionary tactics in order until reason restored.
"'Stay down' isn't for my health, Sandburg," Jim said, moving closer. "If you would just..."
Blair watched for the sniff, and moved deftly away from the reaching hand. He knew what lay down that road, and they still had an audience twitching on the floor, with more arriving shortly. He cast about for a distraction.
"Jim, check out the door," Blair said, keeping the relief out of his voice. The best diversions were always rooted in reality. Clear signs of forced entry scarred the wood around the deadbolt.
Moving so that he could keep an eye on Harvey Warburton, Jim surveyed the damage, then faced his partner with a fresh glare.
"How could you not hear that?" Jim exclaimed.
Blair had time for one mute look of utter disbelief before backup arrived in the form of Rafe, Henri, and what appeared to be about half a dozen EMTs, though it was really only two busy ones. Then it was all chaos and statement taking and poking and prodding and transfer of custody. Blair noticed the distance between him and his lover rarely exceeded a few feet even at the height of the hubub.
Harvey ranted at some length about murdering cops until Rafe made it clear that reports of his cousin's demise had been greatly exaggerated; the suspect had been removed from CCU not to the morgue, but to a ward. Harvey then launched into a creative description of police brutality until Jim recovered the firearm from under the sofa and Blair pointed out the bullet holes it had produced in the study, the kitchen wall and the loft ceiling. Once the EMT's determined that the prisoner was in pretty good shape for an alleged brutality victim, Harvey didn't have much more to say.
Jim busied himself with placing each piece of furniture Harvey had knocked over back into its appointed spot while Blair finished giving Henri a statement. Blair half-expected to see his meticulous partner re-arrange the damned fruit the way it had been before, but Jim limited himself to sorting it by damage and throwing out about half of it.
The EMTs finished up with Harvey, Henri finished up with Blair, who eventually closed the door on the whole raft of home invaders. He stalked toward Jim and initiated his pre-emptive strike.
"How could I not hear that?" Blair asked, pointing to the scarred door.
"I was asleep," Jim muttered, focusing intently on the pears at the kitchen table. "What's your excuse?"
"I was --" Blair paused, a vibrant image of butterscotch nipples derailing his train of thought. "Finishing up that benefits crap you left me saddled with before you went to get your beauty sleep."
Jim paused in his busy-work and looked at Blair for the first time since the door closed behind their "rescuers."
"You were not," he said.
"I was, so! The website's up right now, if it hasn't timed me out."
"Of course it is, Houdini. You said you'd get it done before dinner. But that's not what you were doing when Harvey broke the door down."
Blair paused and stared. "I don't know what you're talking about, man. And neither do you! You were sound asleep, remember?"
"I know your heart rate spiked like a pro volley ball player when you said you were working on it, so what were you really getting up to down here?"
With his grip on spin control as loose as it could be, Blair resorted to the truth.
"Butterscotch."
"The mind boggles, Chief," Jim said impatiently. "How do you 'get up' to butterscotch?"
Blair leered. "The same way you 'got up' to my hair gel last night ."
Jim's glance dropped involuntarily to Blair's chest as a brick-red flush climbed the sentinel's neck.
Situation stabilized, Blair mused.
"You have got to be shitting me, Sandburg!" Jim bellowed.
OK, time to regroup.
"Jim, where are you..."
"You're down there jerking off to asset allocation and butterscotch, of all things."
"...getting the idea."
" ... and some nutball just waltzes in here."
"AND WHERE WAS THE SENTINEL OF THE GREAT CITY DURING THAT WALTZ?"
Jim flinched. Blair suspected there was some hasty dialing down of senses to which the Sentinel of the Great City had not been attending in his eagerness to corral the Guide. What Blair didn't expect was the quick, furtive shift of ice blue eyes to the right and a renewed flush along Jim's neck. The penny dropped.
"You SHITHEEL!" Blair shrieked, torn between outrage at nearly being out-diverted and triumph at an all too rare Jim-bust. "Nap, my ass. You'd rise out of a coma if a gnat farted in 107! What were YOU getting up to, huh?"
"That is not the point."
"It's exactly the point! Don't even go there with trying to put this on me. I wasn't the one leaping rails in a single bound out of some misplaced guilt over having a fantasy life."
"Jamoca almond fudge," Jim blurted, raising one hand in surrender.
Blair stared.
"You know," Jim said, waving at the freezer.
"The ice cream? Nuts and fudge ripple?"
"Coffee flavored," Jim supplied helpfully.
"And I'll bet you even think your lousy coffee nutfudge ice cream kicks butterscotch ass as a sexual aid," Blair said, crossing his arms over his chest.
Jim shrugged. "Ice cream. Nipple ring. Need I say more?"
"Yeah, but how did it get there?" Blair nearly crowed.
"The nipple ring? You were too drunk to remember, I devoutly hope."
"The ice cream, dickwad."
Jim brushed past Blair and retrieved a spoon from the drawer. "How do you think?"
Blair wiggled his fingers under Jim's bottom lip, then sucked one slowly into his mouth.
"Chief, that's disgusting. We'd have jamoca almond fudge everywhere."
"Ta DA! He CAN be taught. Ice cream melts and runs. Butterscotch stays where you put it long enough to..." Blair finished his thought with a slow lick up the side of his index finger. Jim shifted slightly, then regrouped.
"You've said it yourself, Sandburg," he replied, setting the spoon against his chin teasingly. "Man is a tool-using animal." Jim drew the spoon down his throat to the center of his broad chest.
Blair's eyes narrowed as he made his way to the cupboard near Jim, and seized the jar of butterscotch sauce.
"You," he said. "Are going to BEG."
Jim turned to the refrigerator and fetched out the ice cream, then snapped the door closed. Behind him, Jim heard the slow scrape of metal on glass as Blair opened the jar. Tapping the spoon on the carton lid with a challenging glance at his lover, Jim headed for the stairs.
"First drip on the sheet has to top," he called over his shoulder.
"You are so on."