The Journey

The sentinel thought him dead.

He knew this because he saw the pictures, the newspaper articles, the inarticulate floundering at the remembrance service, the tears of Naomi and the dry eyes of the Cascade PD, looming large and grim in their dress blues, marking his grave with all there was left to give. He even got his degree. An 'aegretat' award, although apparently he was worse than 'aegretat', he wasn't just sick, but dead, dead, dead, more dead than he wanted to be.

Blair lived. He was tired, and afraid, and alive. They had taken him from his hospital bed in the dark of night, the hurried silence and the abrupt pain of unexpected movement on a body not ready for it marking his nightmares. He had struggled with them desperately, not wanting to go, but they drugged him into acquiescence, and beyond. He had no awareness of time.

Eventually, the grey sameness drifted away from him, and he found he was almost well, the battering he had suffered in the car wreck only a matter of aches and scars, already healing up. They let him have a little news, gave him the pictures and the news clippings, but no one spoke to him for days. He was restrained and unable to move from the bed, until the day when two large orderlies unstrapped him, and stuffed him, protesting wildly, his legs folding under him from inactivity, into a large packing crate.

Hours later his eyes ached from straining to see without his glasses, his back from squatting on the ground in a space too small to stand or sit, tightly packed in a box.

//A crate full of Guide,// he observed dryly to himself, and stretched his shoulders out as best he could. The truck stopped, finally, and the silence of his captors went on as his cage was lifted out and carried into a low, grey building. He watched from between rough wooden slats, fenced in and trapped, jostled and jerked about until the box was dropped carelessly on the floor. Curt words brought a wrenching tearing of plywood, and light poured in. Impersonal hands reached under his armpits, and lifted him out, cramped and aching legs refusing to move.

He sat, cautiously, in the hard chair, in the grey room. A parody of his nightmares come true.

"Mr Sandburg." The man might as well have been invisible. Ordinary features, grey hair clipped short, back straight, eyes hooded. Nothing to distinguish him from any other anonymous passer-by. Except for the power of fear he wielded, weighted by the green uniform and all it threatened. He breathed in, slowly carefully. This was his testing then. He let the air out again softly, eyes lifting to the man across the room, resolution leaving his face blank, his hackles up.

"Welcome to our facility."

The guide was silent. He could wait if he had to, for forever. He might have to.

"Tell me of Sentinels, Mr Sandburg. And of one James Joseph Ellison, whom you were so careless as to expose."

"What am I doing here? I want a lawyer? Am I under arrest? What the hell's going on here?" he exploded furiously.

The man's thin lips twitched in a small chuckle. "This is not a game. Or an episode of the X-files. You are an intelligent man, perhaps you can see that simply discussing your dissertation calmly and sanely with me would be better than betraying your country."

"My dissertation is on closed societies. What the hell that's got to do with national security beats me. what, you want me to study the military closed society?" he mocked. "Except I might sell secrets about tribal structures in the Pentagon, and betray us all." He shook his head angrily. "I don't get it. What's going on?"

The other tapped idly on a printout, and Blair read the title page - his dissertation, the one that had been denied and destroyed, resting beneath the neatly kept hands. "Captain Ellison is needed to serve his country to the best of his ability. If you fail to help us, then you have hindered." His face held no expression, "This fine country of ours needs protection from her enemies at all times. Ellison is a better soldier for your -- training. Our appreciation for your assistance in making more like him would be appreciated."

Sandburg held his eyes, letting the pretence go. "Perhaps I would have helped if I had been asked."

"No." he shook his head, almost sadly. "No, we do not believe that you would. Don't lie to me. I am merely offering you the chance to have this be less, rather than more, awkward. I am trying to help you. There are others who will just take whatever they can, how ever they can." He leaned forward. "Make it easy on yourself."

"I have nothing to say."

"Nothing."

Blair nodded gently. "Nothing."

The other nodded in response. "You were offered the chance. Goodbye, Mr Sandburg."

The man left, and Blair squared his shoulders.

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His cell was swapped for a suite of rooms, pleasant and south west facing. Locked electronically from the outside, opened by a keypad that he only ever heard from a drug hazed distance. Left alone in the day, drugged by night... A computer and books were his on request. And the pictures of Jim, offered unasked for. He almost wept then, letting them see how very much he cared for the broken-eyed man in full military uniform, his life there reactivated, leaving Cascade, leaving everything that could let him remember his lost guide.

The books in the room weighed on him, staring at him from their neat rows as he worked on castles in the air, studying, learning, taking the time that he had never had in Cascade, when his days and nights were so full it was all he could do to find time to sleep. Some of them sat up there on the long shelves were even his own. The tiny erased marks from the Goodwill store Jim had given them all away to made him smile, and let him ignore the wince of stomach deep pain. He could see him, and his hand paused over the keyboard for a long moment, seeing him walking through the loft, touching Blair's things, choosing which to keep, which to store, which to give away. The clothes , videos, cds, books- they'd appeared in dribs and drabs in the silent nights.

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