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Title: Waking
Revision: r7, 6/9/2001
Author: Megan
SA Dues: Yes
Archive: Sentinel Angst list; others welcome but please ask.
Disclaimer: Pet Fly owns “The Sentinel”, I’m just playing.
Warnings: Bad language.
Spoilers: None
Summary: A rather out-of-control Sentinel wakes up in the morning, a week or two after “The Switchman.”
Notes:This is my first TS fic, eek! I'm still not entirely happy with it, but I'm afraid I'll edit it to death, so, here goes.
Many thanks go to DawnC for her kind words and excellent suggestions! Any remaining errors are my own. Oh, and I’m assuming that the timeframe allows for Sandburg to be already at the loft, if only barely.
First posted to the Sentinel Angst list.
Feedback: Please!
Out of forgotten dreams, he roused blearily into semi-wakefulness. Once again, his alarm hadn't yet rung. What was there, he wondered, about this new habit that woke him well before the clock rang? Sure, on a mission it was an essential thing to wake up on time without an alarm. But this new and unwelcome habit of waking up just early enough to miss precious minutes of sleep, this sucked. On the flip side, he’d found that he needed this extra time just to drag his sorry butt out of bed...so maybe his unconscious was doing him a favor, after all. He rolled over and buried his face into the pillow, heaving a huge sigh and giving in to the inevitable slide back into the waking world.
It all started out with the pillow. Every *single day*. He'd tossed out the expensive goose-down pillows almost immediately. The artificial-fluff replacements were annoyingly lumpy in comparison, but he just couldn't bear to start out his day with an overwhelming whiff of...bird.
Though he now shared this space with Sandburg, he just couldn't bring himself to mention these little things that drove him nuts. If he did, he'd just start noticing more and more of them. He tried so hard to tune them out...and he just did *so* not want to go there.
*Hell*, he thought. I sound just like the kid. Now I know I really am losing it.
He'd had down pillows, once.
He didn't know how the birds had been slaughtered, but he knew they'd died in terror. Despite the supposed sterilization of the feathers, there was some faint, horrible hormonal trace floating about the down that was just NOT conducive to anything even remotely resembling peaceful sleep. Even if he was only just hallucinating it. Let’s not go there. The very thought, even hallucinated, was enough to make him violently ill. Let’s not go there. Or the recent murder scenes...let’s not go there, either...
He took a shuddering breath as a sudden cascade of scent-memories threatened to pound directly into the center of his skull and take up permanent residence. What was worse, images and sounds that he *thought* were only imagined wanted to--what the hell was the word?--piggyback over the scent and... NO, I am NOT going to start hallucinating again, here. Please, no. The stuff I know is real is bad enough as it is.
Enough, enough, enough. Aw, damn. It’s hippie bullshit, but... Okay, what’s that crap he’s always blabbering? Center. Don’t panic. You can control this; he told you so. Center. Breathe. Hippie bullshit, damn it, but...it helps. Breathe. Slower now. Pretend it's him telling you to breathe. Breathe. Let it out slowly.
A few long minutes later, he rolled over and came to himself enough to open narrowly slitted eyes to the golden sunlight spilling in through the skylight. The sunlight that had touched his skin, warmed him to waking, roused him to greet the day.
*Ahhh...* Nice.
It was too bright, really. Or would have been, if he had fully opened his eyes all at once. But he knew better already, and kept them nearly closed. Take your time. Adjust. The focus of heat and light through his eyelids was more than enough for him to localize the rising sun, even though it was still far too low on the horizon for its disc to bring its full brilliance to bear.
He sighed softly, slightly more awake now, and drifted through his morning routine of recognition.
Brief, rapid sensations, the kind he'd known before this whole damn frufru Sentinel thing started. The warm, comforting weight of his blankets wrapped smoothly over him, echoing the soothing warmth of his body... the warp and weft of the sheets against his skin...
He drew another deep breath and then let it out very slowly. Bull, Ellison. He didn't remember what it was like before, anymore, not really. Even if it had only been...how long?? God, had it only been, what, a couple weeks ago? It seemed like months, decades even. A lifetime. Does a person really measure time by how many things they sense? *Hell*, he growled to himself irritably. *Look out, gray hair: Here I come...with bells on.*
First awake, senses raw, everything was wild and chaotic. He latched on to the first thing he noticed, trying to slow the whirl. *Don’t latch too hard; this is where you zoned that time. Damn wires!* There was one spot in the weave of the top sheet, just above his left hip, where the weft was distorted into a ripple. He was probably going to have a rash there. *Great, just great*. Right under his belt, right where he’d be feeling it all day long. The sheet probably had gotten wound up along the upper rotor blade in the washing machine; there was a trace of metal residue on the...*stoppit*. Stop it. STOP IT. No zoning allowed, Ellison, you have to go to work.
Okay, fine. It's comfortable, anyway. It’s not that bad. You believe that. Really. Right? OK, fine, if you don't believe that, check in with something else instead. Don’t panic. You can control this.
There was mold somewhere within the vent system of the air return, far above his head. And for that matter, one of the screws in the vent plate was ever so slightly loose. It shivered slightly now and then against the plate, in time with the thrum of the fan, with a very faint, ticking, irregular rattle.
He threw a forearm across his forehead and groaned faintly. *Oh, God, Sandburg, please start wrecking a pot of coffee already, so I can have something *normal* to bitch about, for God's sake. Something normal to think about. Please. PLEASE.*
Almost on cue, he heard Sandburg pop awake in his room below. He sighed with vast relief...then, a minute later, abruptly refocused his attention to the ductwork's vagaries while his observer/hippie punk partner made his morning ablutions. *Sorry, kid, there are some things I would just as soon *not* share, thank you. No offense, really. Not that I can avoid it, damn it all...but I can pretend. Gee, Ellison learns manners. Now who’d believe *that*, huh? News at eleven.*
The whole effort was futile, but at least there was humor value in the Tea Tree toothpaste and the mind-staggeringly intense scent of Dr. Bonner's Peppermint Oil soap. (Had anyone else really READ that label?!? Geeze!) But then the worst was over and he got the bonus: listening to the vibrantly shimmering Sandburg fluttering about the loft. Wafts of curly hair tossed with a rustle--over a shoulder?--as a cupboard creaked open. Totally incomprehensible whacked-out anthropological mutterings as he packed a tea ball--some weird herb--and immersed it. Tiny bubbles fizzled out through the holes in the teaball and popped in a frenzy of sound and odor. Faint dragging noises on the wooden floor of the half-untied laces of his left, yes, it was the left shoe as he traipsed about. The sudden shredding roar of the coffee mill and the accompanying thunderclap of scent. Water running, then after a while the hiss of steam in the coffeemaker.
Jim groaned, rolled over directly onto his face, and tried very, very hard to go back to sleep. Or to even pretend he was going back to sleep.
No such luck.
Still, though, he counted himself lucky that he was able to awaken with his senses narrowed down so relatively tightly. He sighed, remembering last Saturday when he'd lain stunned for over an hour. He’d woken from a nap and found himself listening to the melodic thrum of the wind through some powerlines over half a mile away. The pitch and volume varied with the speed and direction of the wind, sometimes singing, sometimes moaning, and the changing tautness of the lines had a minute but intricate effect on the sounds from a nearby transformer, and...
Blinking, he jerked himself violently away from the memory in fright. Damn it all, it's not FAIR that I can zone on the memory of a zone. Is it? Or... is it?
In some subtle, frightening way, he wished he had the guts to zone more often. Sure, at the worst, in the wrong place or time, it was hellishly dangerous. He knew that. Even knew it in his gut. At worst, it could get either or both of them killed.
But at best...
*Oh, Sandburg. If only I had your gift of gab. All the things I can sense now. They’re all so beautiful. And all so lost, the second they pass me by. Yeah, I might try to recapture them for you, but it'd be like trying to paint the Sistine ceiling with a bunch of mud. Futile.*
*How I wish I could show you. If I had the nerve. Heh. You'd just laugh your ass off...*
He sighed inwardly, suddenly feeling more tired than before. He chopped off short a unvoiced moan of complaint, struggling to reach for that iron self-control that kept him going. But still, despite all that...
*If only you knew, Sandburg. Not like it's any of your damn business, of course, but... Damn. It's...I won't quite call it an issue of artistic integrity, but maybe it comes close. There's simply no way to do it justice. Language just can't deal with describing this stuff.*
*And I'm not*, he thought to himself with a silent shiver, *ready to cope with the idea of you laughing at me, or treating me like your damn ape....*
His head fell back against the pillow with a soft thud that was surprisingly painful, a rasp against his skin, as he wavered between fear and fierce resentment and hope and more fear.
Blair suddenly bounded halfway up the stairs and tapped the banister, "Look alive, Jim, c'mon man, the coffee's almost ready! Yo!" His breaths came deeply, evenly, catching only where he chuffed breezily in amusement. His heart thundered steadily, stolidly in his breast. A smooth rhythm, speeding slightly with humor, stilling a bit as he paused on the stair, head cocked to one side, a bright, eager smile plastered on his face.
Jim could hear the faint squelch of saliva as Sandburg swallowed, the elastic recoil of the muscles in his jaws, the grumble of his gut as it assimilated its first mug of tea. With careless ease, Jim picked up new smells: A sick odor of filth from where his flannel shirt had brushed against an outdoor wall the day before. The crisp, chemical scent of a new $20 bill crumpled into the shirt pocket; the previous owner of the twenty had one heck of a nasty cologne, *ugh*. And, God help us, was that *stale jelly beans* the kid had in his jeans pocket? The synthetic overtones of the flavorings were nearly enough to make him hurl. (Hah! So much for the kid’s vaunted alfalfa diet. Blackmail material, there.) His scent... skin and hair and musk and clean socks, warm and present and vibrant. His voice, his motions, his heartbeat, rattled around the large, relatively empty loft, cascading down onto Ellison's painfully aware skin and ears in echoing, pulsing thuds of air vibrations that made him think wistfully of taking up a quieter lifestyle as a bat.
"Sand-burrrrrrrg!!!" he groaned directly into his pillow, in a loud, plaintive protest. He was sure it sounded muffled to the hippie, but it rang in his own ears. A complaint. Do I *really* have to face this? Do I???
"What?" Blair bounced on the stair step. The vibrations rattled his bed. Christ, did Sandburg ever NOT bounce? The building itself seemed to know him...the rafters and struts knew his rhythm, echoed to him sometimes.
"C'mon, man...up and at 'em. Time to get up. Focus! It's a beautiful day out there, whoa, wouldja look at that sunrise! Just gorgeous, man, gorgeous, I’m never gonna get tired of the view from here. Hey, coffee’s all ready and waiting for ya; d’y’want eggs or bagels? C’mon!"
A beautiful day. Right. Jim dragged his eyes open again just a crack, then wiped bleary sleep out of them with the edge of his hand. He muttered softly, looking for courage. He narrowed his senses down tightly on Blair, blocking out all the rest, until, in his half-awake state, it ceased to be chaos and started to maybe just resemble his partner coaxing him into a bright, shiny new day. Well, new anyway. Maybe it would be bright and shiny after that second mug of coffee in the bullpen. The wrenching assault on his body and mind resolved, after a few minutes of harsh struggle, into the soft, calm thudding of a known heartbeat, and the hyperactive banter of someone doing his best to help him, to treat him like he wasn't a total freak of nature, to...be a friend.
He sighed. The start of a new day with his senses.
With Sandburg.
Thank God.
He rolled over with a grunt and sat up, slamming his unsounded alarm off, bone-weary but grateful. "I’m *coming* already, Chief," he grumbled crossly, in a tone to blister paint.
Sandburg just grinned, bounded down off the stair, and made a beeline for the bagels.
--- Fin. ---