Change.  An irrefutably inexorable process.  Everything changed, all the time.  Even inanimate objects weren't actually inanimate.  It was just a matter of scale, of perception applied to a particular dimension.

On the quantum level that was cool.  Quantumly, there was no such thing as an actual solid state; no such thing as stopping.  Everything was change – vibrating, moving energy.  Which was cool.  It was just that on the everyday, real-life level, the level perceptible by the average homo sapiens – including the average Sandburg – it wasn't as cool as it used to be.

Which had nothing to do with why he was doing this.  Or did it?  In some sneaky, subconscious way?  Blair looked at the carving in his hand doubtfully.  Well, yeah, maybe.  A little.  Not like bribing an inexorable process was apt to work, of course, but maybe it was worth trying.

Okay, that wasn't really why he was doing this.  But hey, bribery couldn't hurt, right?

Man, he really needed to stop thinking like this.  Change happened, just like shit happened, and what you needed to do was to seek it out first on your own terms before it came looking for you and knocked you flat on your butt.  Change, that was, not shit.  Shit you tried to avoid.  Proactive change and shit avoidance.  The Blair Sandburg philosophy of life.

Used to be, anyway.

Well, the shit avoidance principle was still completely intact, in theory; even if in practice it was getting pretty damn frayed around the edges.  But now he wanted to just stop the whole change thing and stay exactly where he was, in this freaky, absolutely un-Sandburg-like zone that had been his life for the past few months.

And that was goddamn scary – even if you didn't think about how scary it was to be willing to deal with a lifestyle which involved stuff like being shot at and held hostage and nearly exploded and just about…just about serial killed – serially killed? – god – it was goddamn scary, because you couldn't count on anything lasting.  Not that Blair wanted the "oh-man-I'm-going-to-die-now" stuff to last.  But the Sentinel stuff, the hanging out with Jim stuff, the staying at the loft stuff – it was scary how much he wanted all those things to last.  Things just didn't.

The little jaguar he was holding was nearly black, carved out of glossy madre de cacao, and Blair wondered – for the hundredth time – if the artist had chosen that wood for some special reason.  Melanistic jaguars did exist, so maybe the dark wood had been realism rather than some unknown symbolism?  Had the jaguar been carved as totem or purely as art?  Blair hadn't been able to find out anything at all about the history of the piece and that still made him edgy with thwarted curiosity.  But whatever the provenance, the woodcarver's soul had clearly been in his work; the two-inch cat was compellingly beautiful.  And irresistible.  Blair hadn't even bargained, he'd just paid the silent old man in the obscure Mexican village the first price mentioned, outrageous though it'd been.  It hadn't mattered that he'd needed that money for supplies.  He'd needed the carving more.

Something about the jaguar made Blair think of Jim, now that he knew Jim.  In a weird way it almost felt like the carving was making him think of Jim, literally; as if the pencil-eraser's worth of ligneous brain cells it didn't have in the first place were insistently broadcasting "Jim Jim Jim" into Blair's own mind.  As if the cat had deliberately hitched a ride from Mexico and hung around with Blair since the summer of '89 simply in order to be here now, becoming a Christmas present for a hard-ass Cascade cop.

Sentinel.  A hard-ass Sentinel.  God, it still made Blair shiver inwardly.  A Sentinel.  I found a Sentinel.

I found Jim.

Okay, that was getting a little too sappy.  Yeah, it was totally wild that he and Jim were friends now, but they were circumstantial friends.  And circumstances would change; they always did.  As long as Blair got enough data for his diss before they did, everything would be cool.  He just had to keep the right perspective, that was all.  SOP.

Giving up the jaguar was turning out to be unexpectedly difficult.  Blair let his fingers trace the sleek carved muscles one more time.  What if Jim doesn't want it?  What if he hates being reminded of the jungle?  Or what if this is just, like, clutter to him?  Jim isn't a clutter kind of guy.  Blair wrapped the carving reluctantly.  It was so small that Jim probably wouldn't even think of it as much of a present, even if he liked it – but that was part of the point, wasn't it?  For it to not be a big deal, for Jim not to feel like he owed anything in return?  He looked at the unprepossessing, lumpy bundle, not much bigger than a wadded-up Kleenex.  Geez, it almost looked like a wadded-up Kleenex.  Hey Jim, thought I'd give you a used Kleenex for Christmas.  That would really amp up Jim's holiday spirit.  Maybe he ought to look for a box.  On the other hand, just wrapped in tissue paper like this – okay, badly wrapped in tissue paper – it was definitely not a big deal.  Jim would be more open to it this way.

Maybe.

Well, this was stupid.  After all, you gave a gift, you hoped the gift-ee liked it, you turned the whole thing over to the universe.  Impatiently, Blair tried to smooth the crumpled paper.  No obsessing.  It's okay if he doesn't want it.  But he felt almost frightened at the thought, and that was just…it was just…it didn't make any sense.

"You're Jewish, Sandburg.  What do you care?"  Jim sounded mildly exasperated.  They were driving home through a suburb whose inhabitants obviously felt particularly celebratory – or competitive – this December, and Blair kept twisting in his seat to get better views of the passing extravaganzas.

"I'm not anything, exactly.  Not in the traditional sense.  Holidays are fascinating anthropological territory.  Besides, Christmas is Christmas, man.  And these lights…beautiful stuff.  Hey, look at this house!  Their power bill is going to be beyond unbelievable." 

"I'm trying not to, Chief."

Jim was wincing; Blair caught a glimpse of it as they drove beneath a streetlight and he felt like an idiot.  "Shit, Jim, I should have thought of that – why didn't you say something?  You need to tell me these things, okay?  Pull over for a minute and we'll work on it."

The truck sped up as Jim fed it a little more gas than was necessary or strictly legal.  "I'm not in the mood for your voodoo tonight, Sandburg.  Why don't I keep driving and get back home where there isn't any of this crap to look at, instead?  Problem solved."

Jim's voice wasn't as nearly as pissy as his words, but Blair figured Jim must be having a hell of a chronic headache if Christmas lights bothered him so much.  Cascade had been strobing in red and green and white and half a dozen other colors for weeks now.  "Man, you ought to let me try to help you.  And is this why you're so into the whole Grinch scene –"  Blair stopped himself with an effort.  Play nice.  Jim had a headache, after all.  "Hey, but if we're talking Dr. Seuss you're really more like Horton – you know, hearing the Who –"

"I don't think I'm flattered, here, Junior.  I never liked the Who.  Too weird.  'Tommy' – what the hell kind of music was that?"

"Not the Who, Jim.  The Who, like in Whoville.  Little bitty people with little bitty voices that only Horton could – okay, very funny.  Like I know if you know Seuss."  Blair glared amiably at Jim's self-satisfied gotcha expression.  "Hey, do you think we got enough spring rolls?"  Waiting until Jim turned his head away to check for traffic on a cross street, Blair eased his hand toward the takeout cartons from Saigon House.

"Touch the food and lose the hand," Jim said, without moving his head.  "You're not eating spring rolls in my truck."  He turned back toward Blair and looked pointedly at the hand hovering over Saigon House's offerings, ignoring Blair's best long-suffering sigh.

The corner of Jim's mouth was turned up, fractionally, so Blair sighed again theatrically and muttered, "Maybe I should rethink Horton.  You show definite signs of Sneetchiness."  The corner of Jim's mouth rose further.  Blair persevered.  "Hidebound and narrow-minded.  The whole world eats in the truck, man.  Hey, wait – I've seen you eat in the truck.  So it's just me who doesn't get to eat in your truck?  You are a Sneetch.  A snooty Sneetch.  A holier-than-thou morally indefensible Star-Belly Sneetch!"

It was openly a smile now.  Jim said, "Give it up, Sam-I-am.  You're not eating spring rolls in my truck."

"You know, that's an interesting idea, Jim."  Blair began to chant, sotto voce, " 'Would you like them in a house?  Would you like them with a mouse?' "

"Sandburg, you turn my scrambled eggs green tomorrow morning and I'll put bacon in your algae crap."

Satisfied, Blair settled back into the seat and watched the Christmas lights blur by.

The bullpen was boring.  Jim was off interviewing somebody and he'd been annoyingly insistent that he didn't need Blair along.  It was only in the – unvoiced – spirit of holiday harmony that Blair was still sitting here, passively, instead of tagging along anyway in stubborn curiosity, or gathering up his backpack and finding somewhere else to be this afternoon where he might actually be appreciated.  Or at least whining about being left behind more than was actually necessary to salve his basic self-respect.

Okay, he wasn't just sitting here.  He was marking papers, which he had to get finished anyway, and the more he got done here this afternoon the less he'd have to do tonight.  And if that was why Jim had pulled the Lone Ranger act, which it better not have been, because it was his job to juggle the U and working with Jim, not Jim's –

Nah.  It had just been Jim having a typical "I Don't Need Anybody, Especially Sandburg" moment.  Aggravated, no doubt, by the season.  Blair couldn't blame the guy.  If the Sentinels of Paraguay had had to cope with strong-wristed Salvation Army bell-ringers and endless repetitions of "The Little Drummer Boy" they probably would have been a little tetchy, too.  At least Jim was letting Blair try to help.  Some of the time.  When it didn't involve herbs, meditation, or anything even tenuously associable with Flower Power.

Blair grinned suddenly.  Jim should have been at the Solstice celebration Naomi had taken Blair to in Glastonbury one December.  No herbs had been involved, but everything else about that night would have pushed the detective's conformist buttons big-time.  Hey, even Blair had found that crowd weird, and he'd been only fifteen at the time and extremely open-minded.  Inserting this afternoon's grumpy Jim into that particular memory was pleasantly entertaining.  Simon's yelling-at-the-telephone voice intruded on the background and Blair pictured Simon there too, scowling, cigar clamped between his teeth in an attempt to remain civil to a bunch of raving New Age lunatics.  Perfect – Simon and Jim stomping around at Stonehenge under the stars, wearing those cheesy long white robes that had billowed out in the windy dark and made everybody look like Casper wannabes….

"What's so funny, Hairboy?"

"Um, nothing.  Just having a little mental walkabout."  Brown raised his eyebrows like he would appreciate some details.  "Want me to bring you some coffee, H.?"  Blair popped out of his chair and grabbed his five-cent yard sale mug from Jim's desk.  If Simon hadn't been in such a sour mood lately, Blair would have enjoyed sharing his imaginary home-movie with Henri.  But sharing anything with H meant sharing it with the whole bullpen, which meant Simon hearing about it.  And since Simon was probably already looking for an excuse to exorcise his rotten temper on a certain handily proximate anthropologist, Blair decided to pass.  This time.  He waggled his coffee cup in Henri's direction and peeled out for the break-room.

…That long-ago Solstice night had been beautiful, though, even if the ceremony had been pretty contrived.  And ironic, although he'd probably been the only one wallowing in the irony.  Celebrating the eternal verities?  Hah.  More like bowing to the impermanence of everything.  The beginning always implied the end.  Change was all there was, even for the standing stones and the burning stars.  Eternal didn't exist.  Everything just went.  Went away….

The fresh cup of coffee he had poured wasn't even hot anymore and Blair made a face as he took a sip.  Just how long had he been standing in the break-room, anyway?  It was a good thing Henri hadn't wanted any coffee, it would have been kind of embarrassing to explain why a 60-second errand had taken, well, obviously, a lot longer.

"Canyon de Chelly, Land of the Anasazi."  Blair fingered the design on his mug.  Way cool place.  He hoped whoever had bought the souvenir originally had been as blown away by the ruins as he had been that summer he'd spent hitching through the Southwest.  He also hoped the unknown souvenir-acquirer hadn't been anywhere near as shit scared, climbing up those unbelievable ladders to the cliff dwellings.

Man, what an amazing people. 

An amazing culture that no one would ever observe – or participate in – again.  Everything goes away.

Setting his mug down on the counter, Blair dug a hair tie out of his jeans pocket and pulled his hair back roughly in annoyance.  Sheesh.  How had he gone from amused to gloomy so quickly?  And for that matter, why?  Life was good, life was great; he'd found his Sentinel, for cripe's sake.  It was better than he'd ever dreamed it would be.  However long it lasted.

Blair made himself take his lukewarm coffee back to the bullpen instead of pouring it down the break-room sink and grabbing a fresh cup.  And that was pure, stupid masochism – it wasn't like he really needed a reminder of the fleeting nature of things.  He knew the drill.  Good stuff – hot coffee, reliable cars, relationships – didn't last, entropy and other cosmic forces saw to that.  You always had to stay packed up and ready to move on.

"Chill, man, I already told you I'm not going to be drinking."  Blair shrugged his coat on, shooting an exasperated look at his roommate sprawled on the couch.  He tapped his chest.  "Designated driver.  No booze."

Jim's eyebrows rose to an unflattering height.  "You're telling me people are actually depending on you to get them home in that junk-heap of yours?  I figured friends of yours would be a little smarter than that, Chief."  Blair's response was an exaggerated scowl and Jim chuckled.  "Just go, already.  And don't bring home anybody you meet under the mistletoe."

"Oh, I don't know, Jim.  I think you'd really like Melissa," Blair said, aiming for a sincere-but-slightly-evil expression.  "She's only coming to the party because her roommate wanted her to; she's, like, not into holiday cheer or parties or anything, and Jill says Melissa vacuums every day and does the toothbrush-grout-scrub thing twice a week voluntarily and stores her shoes on shoe trees – alphabetically, man, by the name of the shoe company – and labels everything in the fridge with 'use by' dates and complete nutritional profiles.  Except for the nutritional profiles part – which for you would be like profiling nutritional assassins – you two sound like a perfect match.  I'd be doing you a favor if I brought her home."

"Huh.  On second thought, you just go home with Jill and send Melissa here.  It'll be a refreshing change to have a civilized roommate."

Blair felt his heart squeeze bizarrely.  Irrationally.  He's just kidding, right?  Be kidding, Jim.  I mean, I know you're kidding, but be kidding, okay?  It's too soon, man.  Don't want me gone yet.  Jim shifted on the couch, reaching for the remote; and okay, yeah, there was that little quirk at the corner of Jim's mouth.  Blair took in a deep relieved breath and let it out, steadying his fingers as they fumbled with a button on his coat.  Whoa, where did that come from?  Paranoia – well, that was understandable.  Hey, it was often justified.  But that sudden stab of pain…man, that was a mistake.  Getting kicked out of this – by Jim, by life, by something – was inevitable.  He couldn't afford to let it hurt like that when it happened.

But at least it wasn't tonight.  Tonight it was okay.  It was good.  This was good.

Good.

Blair narrowed his eyes in pretended contemplation, spreading his now-steady hands to illustrate.  "I can see it now, man.  Your house rules meet up with her house rules and spawn an ever-increasing horde of sub-clauses, bylaws and conditional regulations.  Come to think of it, Jill mentioned that Melissa hates the smell of beer, so that'll probably be like Rule 452-b, No Beer in Loft."

"It'll be worth it, Sandburg.  Send me a postcard when you're settled in with Jill."

"Sure thing, buddy.  I'll even send you a case of Kool-Aid for Christmas."  Blair laughed and closed the door behind him as a pillow thumped into it.

"You know, Chief, I've been thinking.  If any of your friends want you to spend Christmas with them, I think you should do it.  If you want, that is.  Don't get all worried, I'm not trying to palm you off on anybody, but I know your mom's not going to be around, and I just don't – well, I just don't do anything for Christmas."

"Hey, man, that's cool –"

"I'm not done, here, Junior.  I kind of like peace and solitude, maybe it's my own way of celebrating, but I know it doesn't work too well for other people, and I'm just saying I want you to have a good holiday, be with some friends and enjoy yourself."

It was funny, Blair thought, how paranoid he'd been the other night, and how not paranoid he was today.  It was probably because they were eating Mr. Tube Steaks in the park and the nitrites were messing with his brain chemistry.  Or because he knew that Jim and Christmas were sort of like Felix and Oscar, and weird holiday stuff could be laid at the Odd Couple doors, he didn't have to take anything personally.  Or maybe it was because he could see Jim's eyes clearly this time in the clean winter sunlight.

Jim looked awkward, a little concerned.  Man, that couldn't have been easy to say, not for Jim, anyway.  Blair gave him a smile, a real smile, because Jim meant it – he wanted Blair to have a good holiday, even if he also wanted Blair not to be around too much for that holiday.  Hey, that was totally okay, Jim needed some space; and you couldn't ask more nicely than Jim had, Jim was almost being sensitive, and Blair felt his smile grow bigger.  After all, Jim hadn't said Get lost or Move out or Fuck off.

Well, okay, he'd wanted to spend Christmas with Jim, even if they didn't do anything except ignore the holiday entirely.  But Jim wanted solitude.  Blair could do that.  He could give the guy some peace and quiet for Christmas.  Total piece of cake.

"Hey, like I said, it's cool.  I do have an invite, actually, I just hadn't decided about it yet, but if you're sure you'd rather have me out of your hair, such as it is – okay already!"  Blair tried to fend off the hand reaching toward his head.  "Jealousy doesn't become you, Jim.  Hey, keep your hands out of my – do not tell me you got mustard in my hair, Ellison!"

Sure, it was obfuscation.  The invitations Blair had were all for parties before Christmas; his friends were either heading out of town during break or they were going to be juggling incoming relatives and airport runs and already over-extended families.  Jim wanted Christmas Day to himself and he'd probably really appreciate a peaceful Christmas Eve, too.  So Jim didn't need to know what the invitations weren't for.

It wasn't a problem, even if it was an obfuscation.  He'd just let Jim think he was heading over to a friend's on Christmas Eve to be a fully entrenched party animal and houseguest until Monday morning; that would give Jim Saturday evening and all day Sunday for his personal, solitary peace and quiet.  Blair figured a couple of nights on the couch in his office certainly wasn't much to do to make Jim happy.  Actually, it was a damn cheap present. 

And it was fine.  Blair had been on his own more often than not, anyway, for any holiday you could name.  This was actually a very good thing, Jim preferring solitude.  This way, there wouldn't be any Christmas-with-Jim tradition to miss next year.

Crap.

Blair figured Jim ought to find the bullpen peacefully un-Christmassy enough, as least compared with most of the rest of Cascade.  Rhonda had a miniature ceramic tree on her desk and a bowl of little plastic-wrapped candy canes, and H. had a snow globe that was way cool, with an African-American Santa and a couple of clearly Polynesian reindeer teamed up with a possibly Latino Rudolph; but Henri and Rhonda were out there alone on the cutting edge of holiday décor.  Nobody else had either the time or the chutzpah, apparently, to pay homage to the season.

The inhabitants weren't much more festive than the environment.  Blair had noticed quite a few of the more kick-ass tough guys sucking incongruously on those miniature candy canes from the bowl on Rhonda's desk, and from time to time he'd spotted a seriously entertaining tie on a passing detective, but otherwise it was pretty much business as usual.  Boringly, Jim was off doing his own thing again somewhere.  Blair was thinking about heading over to the downtown public library for a while, where they'd decorated to honor every holiday in the winter calendar – taxpayer dollars at work, totally PC – and he could do something interesting.  Research the tendency toward holiday-based psychoses in pseudo-militaristic societies, maybe.

"What are you doing here, Sandburg?"  Well, that was Simon for you, cordial to a fault.

"Hey, Simon."  Simon hadn't paused on his way past Jim's desk toward his office, but Blair was struck with an idea and jumped up from his chair to hurry after the captain.  Maybe Simon didn't appear too pleased to find Blair on his heels – okay, there was no maybe about it – but he never did seem very pleased to find Blair in his office and if Blair was going to let a little thing like that stop him, well, he wouldn't even have stayed in the station long enough the first day to meet up with Vera.  Or Kincaid.

Or Daryl.

"Simon – hey, I was just wondering, is Daryl going to get to spend Christmas with you?"

For a moment Blair thought he had badly miscalculated.  Simon whipped around, all eight or nine muscular feet of him looming from about three inches away, his face livid; and Blair figured another wall was about to star in his immediate future.  Man, he'd have to start reinforcing the shoulders on his shirts, not to mention just reinforcing his shoulders, period.  The denizens of Holy Grail Land sucked at civil social intercourse.

But Simon stepped back, took a deep breath and went on to his desk, dropping forcefully into his chair.  The captain took another deep breath, this time letting it out in a sigh.  He rubbed the bridge of his nose underneath his glasses.  "Joan and her parents are taking him to Hawaii, so no, I won't being seeing him at all this Christmas."  Simon's voice was flat and Blair had to jam his hands into his pockets to keep from leaning over Simon's desk and patting his arm.  Simon hated it when Blair patted his arm.

"Man, that's tough.  And this is the first Christmas since you got divorced, right?  How could she do that to you?  And it's got to be hard on Daryl, too, you know.  I mean, not that Hawaii isn't wild, and he's probably excited about it and everything, but you know he's really gonna miss you, even if he doesn't know how to tell you that.  You two are having your own Christmas before he goes or after he gets back, right?  I know it won't be the same but you can still do something special and you'll be together even if it's not actually the actual day and that's what counts, right, being together, you've just got to not let the calendar have too much power here, man, but still this is really kind of – I mean, did Joan even ask you about this, is this some kind of once in a lifetime opportunity or is it just some kind of divorce power trip?  Have you talked with Daryl about how he feels about –"

"Sandburg!  Shut up."  But it was said with what might have been – almost – a smile.  "Go play with Brown's snow globe or something, I've got work to do."

"Jim!  I was just about to give up on you, man; go out and troll for beautiful unattached women in need of a helping hand with their packages – hey, I meant Christmas packages, shopping, you know, trying to carry too many parcels, and there I am, swooping gallantly to the rescue – you're really a prick sometimes, Jim, you know that?"

"Swooping.  Gallantly."  Jim was going for a pitying look, apparently, but the way his lips were twitching wasn't adding much verisimilitude.

Blair punched him in the arm.  "I can be gallant."

"Sure you can, Chief.  And God knows you'll stoop to anything to get a date."

"That's swoop, you prick."

"All right, Sandburg, say you swoop in gallantly.  A beautiful girl, lots of Christmas presents – the odds are she's got a boyfriend or a fiancé or a husband on tap for some of those packages.  Or more likely, she'll look at the holes in your jeans and figure you're a mugger, and you'll find yourself trying to swoop in a pair of handcuffs."

"Chicks dig this look, man.  You think I haven't done the market research?"

Jim snorted.  "Riiight, Nielsen.  Let's get out of here before Simon gets back from his meeting with the Commissioner.  He was grouchy enough before that, I don't want to hang around for the aftermath."  Jim handed Blair his coat, his hand lingering for a moment on the patch over the bullet hole.

"That's just it, Jim."  Jim's eyebrows lifted in puzzlement and Blair looked pointedly at the patch under the detective's fingers.  "Daryl.  Simon's being a bear because Joan's taking Daryl to Hawaii for Christmas, did he tell you?  I think it's more than the whole divorce thing though, you know – it's also just a couple months since Kincaid was…um, dangling Daryl out the window, and it'd be a lot to deal with even if Joan was being understanding about it and not taking Daryl off the continent, you know?  And obviously, she's not – not being understanding, I mean – and that's just gotta be hell for Simon, not being able to be with his own son on Christmas – yeah, I know, breathe, Sandburg, but it really sucks, man, Simon really loves his kid and wants to be with him, and you can't ever take that for granted, you know, you've got to –"

Blair's out-flung hand hit the coffee cup he'd forgotten on Jim's desk and it crashed to the floor, trailing a streamer of cold milky coffee.  "– oops.  Sorry, man."  He grabbed the nearest wastebasket and some Kleenex from Brown's desk and knelt down beside the remains.  At least Jim wasn't bitching about it, which was really surprising considering the soggy mess the tissues were making.  Okay, he probably should have opted for paper towels instead.  After living with Mr. Clean for a couple of months you'd think I'd know my mopping-up strategies better.

Well, maybe Jim wasn't bitching about it because Jim hadn't stuck around to bitch, he'd gone to the break room for those paper towels, and whoa, he was actually helping clean up Blair's mess, not bitching at all.  It must be Christmas or something.  Hey, this is probably my Christmas present.  Blair couldn't help grinning at himself.  Weird – Jim was grinning, too, even while he was shaking his head sadly, whether at the mess or at Blair's admittedly haphazard cleaning technique, Blair wasn't sure. 

"No, Chief, I didn't know."

Huh?  Blair dropped another dripping handful of shattered souvenir-mug exoskeleton into the wastebasket.  "Huh?"

"About Daryl.  I figured it might be tough on Simon this year, with Joan having custody, but I didn't know about Hawaii.  That's a lousy deal."

Damn, a thin tan trail of coffee disappeared under Henri's desk, and there wasn't any good way to reach it.  Blair flopped down on his stomach and snaked his arm as far as he could under the low drawer, making blind passes with his damp paper towel and snaring a few painful shards of ceramic against the side of his thumb.  He muttered a couple of choice Kombai epithets and tried to shove his shoulder further under the desk.

"Are you sure you've spent ten years at college, Einstein?"

Blair twisted his head to glare up at his grinning partner.  "You have a better idea?"

"Uh huh.  Several.  You could get a mop from the janitor's closet.  Or we could move the desk.  You know, pick it up, move it a few feet, clean up the mess nice and easy."

"You're a prick, Ellison.  Stop laughing and give me a hand, man, I think my shoulder's stuck."

"Ellison and Sandburg residence, Blair Sand–"

// "Quit answering the phone that way, for Pete's sake.  You sound like a damn butler." //

"Hey, Jim.  Did I ever tell you I worked as a butler once –"

// "Sandburg, you have not worked as a butler.  No one in their right mind would ever hire you as a butler." //

"Well, not exactly as a butler, and it was only for a couple of weeks, but – hey, don't growl at me, man.  It's not my fault I've led an interesting life."  Blair grinned at the snort coming out of the receiver.

// "Interesting isn't the word I would have chosen.  Chief, didn't you say you were making an extra sweet potato casserole for me to heat up for tonight and tomorrow?" //

"Yep.  And I kind of got carried away and made some more stuff to take along, and I'm leaving you some of that, too.  Cranberry bread and celery logs with cream cheese.  It's like a disease, man, I start and I can't stop.  If I don't get out of here soon you'll find a seven-course meal in the refrigerator when you get home."

// "You'd get no arguments from me, pal.  Look, I just invited Simon over for tomorrow, he's missing Daryl and looking pretty pathetic.  I wanted to know how much food you were leaving so I could figure out what I need to pick up to feed him a decent dinner." //

Blair swallowed inaudibly.  Okay, not inaudibly to Jim; but Blair fervently hoped it was inconspicuously.  "Um, everything I made should be more than enough for two.  You could have ham, there's plenty left over from yesterday, and there's a green bean casserole in the freezer – wait, let me check, I think I put that yellow-squash parmesan thing in the freezer, too, that we never got a chance to eat….  Yeah, here it is.  You might want to pick up some rolls; we've still got half a loaf of nine-grain from Hansen's, but I'm thinking Simon's probably more a Parker House kind of guy.  Oh – uh, there's a pie, too, the farmer's market had these cool-sounding heritage apples that are supposed to be amazing for baking, so dessert's covered – though if you ask me, the sweet potato casserole is more dessert than vegetable, you and Simon are gonna love it, it's like ninety percent brown sugar and butter, man."

// "Sounds great.  Look, I know you're getting ready to go, and I've got a witness I need to talk to before I can get out of here.  Have a good time, Chief.  See you Monday." //

"Yeah, sure, Jim, you too.  I mean, have a good time, and Merry Christmas – and hey, tell Simon Merry Christmas, too, okay? and that I'm really sorry about Daryl being out of town."

Blair hung up the phone carefully, resisting an urge to slam it down into the cradle.  Great.  Just great.  Christmas comes to the loft and I'll be stuck at my pathetic one-person office party.

Okay.  There wasn't any point in playing the "if-only" game.  He was stuck with his faux holiday plans unless he wanted Jim to find out how faux they were, and that would just piss Jim off or make him feel guilty, or both, and it was just a couple of days, and you couldn't let the calendar have too much power anyway, right?

Great.  Just fucking great.  The Corvair paid no more attention to Blair's muttered curses than she had to his earlier pleading encouragements.  He'd rotated through half a dozen languages but he wasn't getting the first whisper of hope from her temperamental engine.  At least she hadn't died in a tow zone and it was an okay neighborhood, so there was a decent chance she'd still be there after the holidays.

Hey, Jim?  My junk-heap died, come and give me a ride, okay?  Oh, actually not to anybody's house, just to my office, 'cause that's where the party is, man.

That was so not a phone call Blair was going to make.

It would take him at least twenty minutes to walk to Hargrove from here, lugging his backpack, and that was just, just…great.  And cabs weren't in his budget, and he wasn't all that near a bus stop.  Even if he had been, the city was running drastically reduced bus schedules for the next couple of days; if he waited for a bus he'd be lucky to get to the U by midnight.

Great.  Just…great.

Blair slung the backpack over his shoulder and slammed the car door with unnecessary vigor.  Of course the Corvair had died straddling a puddle that was more like a small pond, so now he'd have wet, muddy denim slapping around his wet, muddy ankles, just to make the walk more appealing.  If that was, like, actually possible.  He resolutely ignored the temptation to express any sarcastically grateful thoughts on the fact that it wasn't raining at the moment – no point in tempting fate any further, after all – and stamped off toward Rainier, sneakers squelching.

The thing was, he hadn't done it.  He hadn't tempted fate.  So where did the universe get off dumping a monsoon on him halfway to his destination?  Ten more minutes, that's all he'd needed.  If it could have waited just ten more minutes –

The soaked strap on his backpack slipped and Blair twisted to grab it before it could fall, just as his left foot caught on a broken piece of the sidewalk and he pitched forward awkwardly onto his hands and knees.  The backpack jerked off his shoulder and hit the ground hard beside him, and there was a moment, a suspended, perfect, awful moment when he knew exactly what was going to happen.  The top of the pack wasn't fastened securely – no, because after Jim's call he'd been a little ticked off at somebody out there's sense of humor, and he hadn't really been paying attention – and all of his Christmas food was going to spill out of the pack and roll into that enormous muddy puddle in the street and, yes, there it was, there was a car approaching like it was running in the Indy 500 and it was going to mangle the Tupperware beyond redemption, and naturally his face was exactly on a level with the ton of water the evil car was going to fling up when it plowed through that puddle to kill his sweet potato casserole in the square container and his celery logs and sliced ham in the oblong container deader than any Christmas dinner had probably ever been killed before –

And then it was all over except for wiping the muddy water out of his eyes and trying to wring it out of his hair, which was pretty useless, really.  The streetlight illuminated the carnage unfortunately well despite the drizzle still coming down, and Blair could easily see the twisted corpses of the Tupperware cartons, with a single celery log capsized forlornly nearby.  A foil-covered hump in the gutter, half submerged in brown water, told of the cranberry bread's demise; and damn, was that – yeah, that had been the bag with the pears and the dried figs and the gingerbread men Rhonda had given him yesterday.

Dead, drowned, smashed gingerbread men.

Just great.

Could there be any place on earth quieter than Hargrove Hall at 10 o'clock on Christmas Eve?  Of course, that particular square inch of icing on the cake of his Christmas was his own stupid fault.  If he'd remembered that Jeremy had borrowed the boom box from his office he'd have brought the Walkman along, but of course he hadn't remembered.  So, no Christmas carols for Blair Sandburg.  No chants, no tribal music, no drums, no rock, no radio, no anything.  Just peace and quiet.  Crap.

This was Not. Going. Well.

The memo taped on the outside of his office door had been a help.  Really.  Really, it had been so helpful to know that the reason it was so sadistically cold in the building was a last-minute administrative decision to cut heating costs by turning the thermostat down to cryonic levels in selected office – and artifact storage – areas.

So much help to the wet and muddy.  His hair was wet and muddy – trying to dry it with the paper towels in the men's room had been a waste of time and trees; why did Rainer buy water-repellent paper towels, anyway?  His coat was wet and muddy.  His clothes were wet and muddy. 

All his clothes.  It would have been nice if the top flap of his backpack had fallen closed after disgorging his dinner onto the street, or if half of the wall of brown water the food-murdering car had flung up in its homicidal passage hadn't poured unerringly into the open backpack.  Onto his spare clothes.  It would have been nice.

Blair was intimately familiar with the conditions necessary to move from cold and wet to warm and dry.  In this virtually unheated office? – yep, his clothes should be dry in a week or two.  His coat – maybe by late March?  It was going to be a long silent night because there was no way he was going to be able to sleep when he was this wet and cold.

Okay, he was being pretty immature about this.  So his office was Hypothermia City – it wasn't like he had to be out on the streets in the cold, which would really be Hypothermia City.  Lots of people liked cold, anyway; thought it was actually exhilarating.  There were even people who vacationed at ice hotels in Sweden and paid disturbing amounts of money to sleep on solid blocks of ice.

Really weird people.

And if he couldn't sleep, so what?  It was just a couple of nights.  He could study or meditate or organize his filing cabinets or something.  Maybe he could try to teleport the laptop here from the coffee table at the loft.  Teleporting a laptop couldn't be that tough, right?  Okay, it wasn't the end of the world or anything, not being able to work on the diss for a few days.  But man, the next time Blair prepped for a holiday in exile he'd pack everything important like his laptop first, then fasten the damn flap on his backpack before Jim called him at the last minute with a casual one-eighty and blew his concentration all to hell.

Sure, Sandburg.  Blame it on Jim.  Like you don't know better than to not watch out for the spin.

Why had he worried about sleeping?  He was never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever going to be able to sleep again.

This is what you get for having three pounds of un-decaffeinated coffee beans in your office and not a single, sorry tea bag of any kind whatsoever.  Blair shivered in his soggy, chilly coat as he paced – okay, limped – the crowded confines of his office.  And yeah, it was stupid to be pacing – limping – with his knee like this, but the caffeine was in control and he couldn't stand to sit for more than a couple of minutes at a time. 

Dumb pun.

It served him right, he should have remembered he was out of tea, or he should be Spartan enough to handle the cold by mainlining plain hot water instead of constant cups of coffee, but man, it was better to be too wired to sleep – or maybe even sit – anytime within the next two decades than to have to drink plain hot chlorinated tap water.

Blair looked at the remnants of his lavish Christmas Eve feast.  He couldn't quite believe he'd let his snack stash get down this low, but there was the proof sitting on his desk, a half-empty miniature box of raisins and absolutely, positively, nothing else at all.

And he'd been so busy cooking all day he hadn't even eaten lunch.

And he really needed to stop feeling so pissy about this.  Sure, he'd been making Christmas food for himself – and hadn't that worked out well – but he'd also been making it for Jim, a little something else he could do that Jim wouldn't think of as a present, that he wouldn't feel pressured by or anything, and Jim was still going to get to enjoy the fruits of Blair's labors – and Simon, too – so he really needed to stop feeling so pissy.

Gimpy knee or not, in the morning he would walk over to the convenience store on Paulson.  The Qwick-Pick's slogan was "24 / 7, 365" and that was a motto Blair could get behind.  Hell, he'd limp over there right now except that it was raining again.  Okay, and it was late.  He so needed to get mugged, or trip in the dark and twist his other knee.  And he'd already used up all his Band-Aids, anyway.

So, tomorrow morning.  Potato chips and Slim-Jims.  A Christmas feast.  Man, be still my heart.  Well, considering all the caffeine in his bloodstream, maybe not.  Be jumpy, my heart.  Blair gestured disgustedly with the hand that wasn't holding a mug of hot coffee – ow, dammit!  He should have just punched the stupid bookshelf deliberately instead of slapping it accidentally, it probably would have hurt less.  Great, a little fresh blood was seeping out around the Band-Aids.  Of course, it wasn't like Band-Aids were really designed for scraped palms, at least not the quarter-inch Band-Aid strips he'd had in his office.  Maybe he should be more prepared, like Jim; keep a Red Cross first aid kit or something here. 

And MRE's.  Definitely some MRE's.  No matter what they were made of.

He'd been trying to do a good thing here, but being the butt of this cosmic joke was making Blair wonder if he shouldn't just have embraced selfishness instead.  No, Jim.  I don't have anywhere to go for Christmas, I think I'll just stay here, in your home, in your face, even though you don't want my company for a couple of days.  Tough cookies, man.

Yeah,  insensitive and selfish would have been the way to go.

What time was it now, 4 o'clock?  And so quiet he could nearly hear the caffeine-enhanced thudding of his pulse.  Jim would hear it, hear it racing along, and it was a good thing Blair wasn't at the loft because Jim probably wouldn't be able to sleep through it, and Jim wouldn't much appreciate that.

4 a.m.  Jim would have found the jaguar hours ago.

Blair wondered if he'd been irretrievably stupid.  He'd been damn careful not to violate Jim's space ever since Larry's little loft-trashing escapades, even though Jim hadn't exactly said that any anthropologists invading his personal upstairs bedroom would be subject to immediate dismemberment and retroactive eviction.  Some things you just knew.

So why had he lost his mind and left the stupid present on Jim's bed?

Maybe all this bad Christmas karma was because he'd broken the tacit "Let Jim Have at Least an Illusion of Privacy" rule?

Or maybe it was because Somebody Up There figured Blair would be out in the cold on his own again pretty soon and he needed the practice?

Okay, there was a thought he could do without right now.

But it hadn't been like he'd had a choice – it was like the supposedly inanimate little carving practiced mind control or something, like it had willed Blair's body up the loft stairs and over to Jim's bed, like it had insisted that it belonged in Jim's very personal space.

Yeah, right.

Right. That was likely where everything went wrong yesterday.  You let two inches of dead tree take over your sense of self-preservation and you probably deserved to be screwed, anyway.

Maybe Jim wouldn't even have unwrapped it.  Blair had done an undeniably lousy job with the tissue paper, and the small lumpy result really didn't look much like a present.  Why the hell would Jim bother to open something that looked a discarded Kleenex or some kind of unwelcome after-manifestation from the long-departed Larry, especially when it appeared unexplained in the middle of his bed?

Okay, so he should have left a note with it, it wasn't like Jim broke out in hives or anything when somebody said "Merry Christmas" to him.  Blair could have just left a note that said, "Hey, don't freak out or anything, this is just something I found in Mexico a while back that made me think of you, but it's cool if you don't like it, no pressure, man, and I'm not expecting to, like, exchange presents, or anything; even though it's Christmas and this is a present it's not a Christmas present, not exactly, well sort of, maybe, but not in any big way; so okay, whatever."  That would have summed it up.

Right.

This officially sucked.  The sun was barely up – like anyone could really tell through all the clouds – and this Christmas was already one of the bottom-feeders. 

Blair wondered if Naomi was having a good Christmas.  Which was a stupid thing to wonder – she was unquestionably perfectly happy, she always was; but she wasn't having Christmas, not in an ashram.  Still, maybe she'd had the right idea.  Maybe he should have gone on a pilgrimage himself, somewhere warm.  With food.  Maybe Rio.  Yeah, Rio.  He should have just robbed a bank and gone on a pilgrimage to the beaches of Brazil.  Bikinis and samba and beer – or maybe caipirinha, more bang for the buck – and black beans and rice.  Ipanema.  Oh, yeah.  It wasn't like he was spending Christmas with Jim, anyway.

And hadn't he been a total idiot, freaking out about not wanting things to change?  Because if you looked at it straight on, this was where Change fell out of its chair and rolled around on the floor, laughing hysterically.  After all, Blair was getting what he wanted.  Being on the outside looking in was no goddamn change at all.

Man, he was being an idiot.

It was just the stupid coffee, and thinking too much, and feeling sorry for himself.

But Jim would be eating the Christmas dinner Blair had made for him. 

With Simon.  After telling Blair he wanted to spend Christmas alone.

Okay, and exactly how mature was it to blame Jim's generous impulse for giving the finger to his own generous impulse?

Blair sneezed.  Shit.  It would probably be easier not to be such a self-pitying jerk if Qwick-Pick delivered.  And if he hadn't  run out of Kleenex, or if Admin supplied the men's room with a non-abrasive brand of toilet paper.  His nose hurt.

Damn, but his knee was pissed off.  Apparently spending the night inside a glacier – well, it had felt cold enough for that, anyway – was an insufficient substitute for an actual ice-pack.  Okay, he shouldn't have paced so much last night, but caffeine was an unforgiving god.  Blair's knee should have the common decency to accept that, right?

Of course, Hargrove's stupidly icy front steps hadn't improved his knee's mood much.  Hadn't done much for his palms, either, since he hadn't been able to figure out how to latch onto the handrail with his armpit instead of his hands.  Well, at least his sideways, two-handed, hop-and-wince step-descending technique had worked and he hadn't landed on his tailbone.  There was enough ridicule in his life already with having to spend the next couple of weeks sitting on a plastic donut.

Man, if he didn't really need those Slim-Jims and Band-Aids and Kleenex and aspirin and maybe something for his sore throat – like he wanted over-the-counter garbage, but it wasn't as if the Qwick-Pick carried herbs, he'd be lucky if they even carried cocoa mix or Lipton's tea so he could give the coffee a rest – he wouldn't be limping along with his pissed off knee and his bleeding-again hands in the intermittent sleet along this depressingly deserted sidewalk.

But hey, it was probably a good thing the sidewalk and streets were deserted.  Between the rising bruise on his cheekbone and last night's mud on his jeans and his coat and in his hair – it wasn't like he'd succeeded in washing his hair in the tiny sink in the men's room with its stubby little faucet that had left a tender spot on the top of his head and only managed to distribute the muck more thoroughly instead of washing it out – Blair figured he looked like an electrocuted muskrat with ablutophobia.

Yeah, the empty sidewalks were a good thing.  No point in scaring the natives, or giving them a horselaugh, after all.

Blair fingered his aching cheekbone as he hobbled cautiously toward his mini-mart Shangri-La.  If he looked at it objectively he ought to feel lucky that when he'd slipped on that patch of ice his face had caught the edge of the stone bench.  After all, it could have been his skull instead.  And while he was lying unconscious on the sidewalk a dog could have come along and peed on him.

Probably would have been a Great Dane.  Something with a big bladder, anyway.

Geez, shit, fuck, damn, crap, this is not happening.  Not. Happening.

There were the big fluorescent orange letters on the plate glass – "24 / 7, 365" – and there was the unbelievable card taped on the door, "Closed Due to Emergency."  Blair pounded a fist against the door and yelled.

Great, now his hand hurt again.  Okay, that was temporary, his hand would be numb from the cold again in a few minutes, it wasn't like his threadbare gloves with the now-ripped palms were doing a bang-up job of keeping his hands warm.  Blair rested his forehead against the door.  Move away from the building, Sandburg, or a patrol car will happen by and decide you're a homeless person resorting to a little B & E… Hey Jim, guess where I am, you and Simon want to come down to the precinct and spring me?

Blair gave the door a final disgusted thump before trudging back across the parking lot toward the sidewalk.  Nothing else around here had a hope of being open today, and there wasn't any point in trying to get a bus anywhere, even if the nearest bus stop hadn't been further than the return trek to Hargrove.  Well, at least he wasn't going to be blowing his budget on over-priced convenience store crap.

Okay, by the time he made it back to his arctic office, even if he didn't get arrested – or peed on, by anything or anyone – this would officially be the worst Christmas of his life.

When he was seven…no – eight? – yeah, when he was eight, Blair had stayed with some friends of some of Naomi's friends for Christmas.  That was one of the years she hadn't been around for the holidays, but she'd been happy leaving him with those people for a couple of weeks, pleased that there were twin boys only a little older than Blair, and a puppy, and one of those living Christmas trees that could be planted outside after it was done wearing tinsel or whatever.

Blair blew his sore nose into a wad of  toilet paper and coughed, his bruised cheek throbbing fiercely in sympathy.  He'd had a black eye that Christmas, too.  Andy – or was it Randy, he'd quickly lost interest in trying to tell them apart – had decked him, Blair didn't remember why, just that it had been something stupid, an excuse.  Even at eight, Blair had been an old hand at conciliation, and he'd done his best to get along; but there wasn't any pleasing those people or their puppy from hell.  The tree had turned out to be the nicest member of the family.

By the time Naomi came back to pick up Blair the skin around his eye was a totally gross greenish-yellow and the puppy had chewed up both of his personal books and peed on his sneakers, egged on by Randy and Andy.  Maybe the parents had egged the puppy on, too.  Blair hadn't ever caught them at it, but they surely had been snide about Naomi.  They'd been snide about a lot of things, like didn't Blair know who his father was, and why didn't Blair actually have a home, and what was the matter with him that he couldn't sit still while they were all watching some gosh-awfully stupid boring sitcom on TV, and wasn't Blair embarrassed when Naomi dumped him on people this way.

Well, maybe that Christmas had been worse than this one.

He remembered how he'd really, really, really wanted to knock the smug expressions off the twins' faces and tell Mr. and Mrs. Snide exactly what to do with their asshole opinions and kidnap the demon puppy and drop him off at the nearest obedience school.  He hadn't done any of it, of course.  He was stuck with them till Naomi came back, and they were armed with dog urine.  And spite.  Besides, they controlled the food; if Blair had ticked them off they would have made him subsist on Spam and frosted Pop-Tarts.  Revenge wasn't worth that.  So what if it was an un-fun scene – it wasn't going to last that long.  He knew how it worked.  The next place would probably be better, but it didn't matter if it wasn't, it wouldn't last long either.  He and Naomi were like rolling stones, which was so cool, because then you didn't gather any crappy moss that just weighed you down, anyway.

Blair coughed again.  This cold is getting a little old… Hey Jim, I hope you and Simon are having a fine old time, with your bowl games and central heating and dry socks and perfect health and all. 

Jim.  It was only since he'd met Jim that Blair had begun to think that gathering a little moss wasn't such a bad thing, even if that was unrealistic, even if life – his life, anyway – just didn't work that way, even if the moss came packaged with honest-to-god criminals who shot guns and exploded things and…tried to be you.

Shit.  Think of something else.

Okay – but what if this was his only Christmas with Jim?  Only he wasn't with Jim.  That would make this the worst Christmas ever – not all the piddly crap that had gone wrong, but the not-Jim part of it.  Which was just weird, wasn't it?  Because he'd only known Jim a few months.  And anyway, Blair hadn't spent two Christmases ever with anybody except Naomi, he shouldn't even be thinking like there ought to be a next Christmas with Jim.  That kind of thing just didn't happen.  Not to Sandburgs.

God, why couldn't he just think about something more cheerful, like nuclear proliferation, or like how being honest with Christine had turned out to be so not a good idea.

Blair figured he could save a lot of time and money if he kept this up.  The whole not-sleeping thing – how many cups of coffee was it now? – would give him more time to work on his diss, learn a couple more tribal dialects for future expeditions, maybe write a novel or two.  After he got over this cold, anyway, when he could actually think.  Well, okay, it wasn't like he actually ever sawed logs eight hours straight more than one or two nights a term as it was, but he usually managed a couple of hours most nights, except when things were really crazy.  But the not-eating thing – that would definitely save money.

Of course, coffee wasn't free, either, except for the pedestrian stuff he got from the break-room at the PD.  Blair looked at his seventy-fifth cup of espresso-roast coffee with distaste.  Maybe not seventy-fifth yet, but he was beginning to seriously long for a roll of Tums.  And a big bottle of Pepto-Bismol.  Ginger or slippery elm bark or peppermint tea would be better, but hey, any port in a storm.

Maybe it was his cold instead of the coffee.  Blair wasn't sure.  He just knew that if Santa walked in with a bag of pears and un-smashed gingerbread men or a turkey or anything, he'd better be prepared to duck.  Providing, of course, that Blair's banged-up hands weren't too stiff to lob something at him.

Thinking about food – so not a good idea.  Blair hobbled toward his office door as quickly as he could, hoping he still had a hair tie in his pocket.  There were times long hair was a disadvantage.

Well, Jim, considering the weekend I'm having, you can bet I'm never gonna accept an invitation from these people again.  Blair gathered up the paper towels he'd used to clean the hall floor and headed back toward the restroom.  At least all he'd had in his stomach was coffee.

Jim was going to work tomorrow, wasn't he?  It wasn't like Blair couldn't explain the shiner and the swollen knee and the oozing palms.  He didn't need to say which sidewalk – okay, sidewalks – he had tripped on, and anybody could catch a cold anywhere.  It just wouldn't be so easy to explain the continual caffeine jitters or his spectacularly muddy – and still damp – clothes.  Or his hair.

Oh, man, the Tupperware.

This Christmas was totally fucked.

Jim would notice the missing cartons; he always knew where every stupid Tupperware container was at any given moment, and what was more, he cared.  The man didn't keep pets, he kept Tupperware; and it was like he had tracking devices embedded in their little petrochemical bodies, like the time he'd stalked over to Blair's backpack and pulled out the container Blair had surreptitiously borrowed that morning to carry some pottery shards he was working with, and he'd actually glared at Blair, pointing out a couple of scuffs on the plastic – visible only to Sentinels – and blaming the rough edges of the clay – well, blaming Blair – like the scuffs couldn't have been there before.

The little black jaguar – if Jim had even opened the present, and wasn't pissed at Blair for leaving it on his bed – was hardly going to make up for Jim's Tupperware cartons becoming hit and run victims.  Jim was practical.  Tupperware was practical.  A two-inch carved jungle cat was not practical.

Why did he ever think he knew what he was doing?  And now he owed Jim some new Tupperware and it was probably expensive Tupperware and god, what if he had to go to a Tupperware party?

Maybe change was good, if it meant he didn't have to go through another Christmas like this one.

Well, it wasn't Christmas anymore.  That was the good news.  And the sun was shining.  It wasn't raining, or sleeting, or snowing.  And he probably had only four miles or so left to go.

God, if he only had his sunglasses.  And a cane – okay, a new knee, this one hurt like a mother – and a warm dry coat, and his Fargo hat.  Or completely dry hair, at any rate.  Blair squinted past his headache at the painfully bright city around him.  At least the streets and sidewalks were amazingly free of puddles, despite the weekend's crappy weather, and the sun was helping to offset the chilly wind.  Sort of.  Psychologically.  Maybe.

Maybe it hadn't been such a bright idea to try to hike from the U back to the loft.

Of course, if the City Transit Authority had adhered to the constitutional separation of church and state, or at least hadn't decided that Monday was also an official holiday, the buses would have been running normal routes and schedules and Blair could have taken a bus and gotten back to the loft in a reasonable amount of time.  He wouldn't have had to walk.

The CTA could even have had its regrettable Monday holiday if it would just have coordinated things a little better.  In what hellish alternate universe was it a cceptable to leave the campus area at 9 a.m. and be forced to transfer five times in order to arrive relatively near Prospect a mere seven and a half hours later?  Getting back to the loft at 4:30 was cutting it way too close to possible Jim-coming-home time.

Okay, hoofing it was dumb.  But not getting home before Jim – a couple of hours before Jim, preferably – was really dumb.  Yeah, Jim, I had a blast.  Can't you tell just by looking at me?  Blair needed a shower, clean hair, clean clothes, two bottles of aspirin, arthroscopic knee surgery, new Tupperware – man, the list of what he needed before Jim came home and he had to start obfuscating was way too long.  Freezer burn, Torquemada knee, and Elmer's Glue fatigue were a small price to pay to keep Jim from getting suspicious.

I can do this.  Just a couple more miles.  Blair watched the sidewalk beneath his feet morosely as he hobbled toward Prospect.  God, he was cold.  And tired.  Tired and wired.  And mondo uninspired.  The oxygen in his blood had apparently been replaced by caffeine – not that his brain cells could tell the difference, they were too stoned on sleep deprivation.  He was totally not in good shape, mental or otherwise, for composing a Jim-proof obfuscation.  Even the basic low-level obfuscation, the only one he should need, the one that didn't have to explain the clothes and the hair, even that one wasn't coming along very well.  The cold wasn't helping, of course, or his cold, or his killer knee.  But just a couple more miles – surely he could do a couple more miles?  He'd figure out what to tell Jim after he had a shower.

Two showers.

Two showers and a long hot bath.

"Sandburg – what the fuck – ?"

Blair started violently, yelping as his knee twisted beneath him and he fell backwards and landed on his butt on the sidewalk, whacking his forearm against a fire hydrant in the process.

"Shit shit shit shit…"  Blair grabbed his arm and seriously considered feigning unconsciousness.  Not that he would get away with it.  Not happening.  Can't be.  Not.  Not happening.  But that was the F-150 pulled up to the curb and that was Jim getting out of the cab in a hurry and crouching down in front of him and that was Jim's alarmed voice saying, "Sandburg!" again.  Loudly.  Shit.  At least the fire hydrant hadn't been recently anointed by any passing dogs.

"What the hell happened to you?  You all right?"

Blair attempted to not cringe from the eyes raking him from head to toe.  "Don't startle me like that, man."  Oh yeah, whine defensively.  Great idea.

"I didn't startle you into the state you're in, Junior.  Don't tell me, you played Pigpen in A Charlie Brown Christmas over the weekend."  Jim pushed back a handful of snarled damp hair from Blair's face to check out the gaudy bruise on his cheek.

"You've watched A Charlie Brown Christmas?  You've been holding out on me, Jim."  Inane is good.  I can do inane conversation in my sleep.  Blair flinched and tried not to yelp again as Jim's hands slid gently across his swollen knee.  "Um, I fell.  Tripped on the sidewalk.  Hit a puddle."  There had to still be puddles around somewhere, right?  "You know, basic klutz stuff."

"Uh huh.  Come on, Chief, into the truck."  Instead of holding out a hand to help Blair up, Jim grabbed Blair's biceps and hoisted him to his feet.

"Hey –" Oh.  He noticed my hands.  Blair cut off his surprised protest, even as he found himself bundled into the truck cab and buckled into his seatbelt in a highly undignified fashion.

"I'm waiting,"  Jim said, although he wasn't actually waiting, he was pulling into traffic.  There hadn't been much credulity in Jim's voice and Blair wilted back into the seat.  There were times Blair sincerely wished Jim weren't both a Sentinel and a detective.

"Waiting for what, man?"

The glare Blair fielded from his friend was definitely low on credulity, not to mention patience.  "To hear what the hell you think you were doing limping around with that knee, looking like a half-dead mudskipper and courting hypothermia when you have a bad chest cold and it's forty damn degrees outside.  Not to mention waiting to hear how the hell you got this way in the first place.  You were supposed to be spending Christmas with some friends, not reenacting World War One trench warfare."

"I fell in a puddle, Jim.  I told you that.  The Corvair broke down and catching a bus wasn't an option with the schedules all screwed up for the holidays.  So I walked, except I tripped.  No big deal."  True enough.

"Uh huh."  Jim still sounded totally skeptical and Blair decided to go with innocent wide-eyed silence.  Not that it helped any; after another uncomfortably piercing look at Blair, Jim continued, "Why didn't you call your friends for a ride?"

Crap.  "They were going out of town, they left right after I did."  During his twenty-six years of life surely some of his friends must have gone out of town shortly after Blair had left their presence.  Hey, it had probably happened lots of times.  So, technically, that was still obfuscation.

"You have other friends, Chief.  Including me."  Good, Jim wasn't pursuing the Decamping Hosts angle.  If he could just keep Jim from requiring details about any of this, Blair might be able to stick with obfuscation.  He didn't really want to out-and-out lie to Jim.

Oops, bad place for a long pause.  Jim is not looking happy here.  "Hey, I didn't want to bother you; I thought you were supposed to be at work.  Aren't you supposed to be at work?"  Why the heck aren't you at work?

"I was, but the schedule got changed.  Doesn't matter, Junior; you should have called me anyway."  Jim tightened his grip on the steering wheel and Blair felt a pang of sympathy for his friend's hands.  That tight a grip had to hurt.  Jim went on, sounding as tense as his knuckles appeared, "Look, you can screw up an injured knee by walking around too much before you get it checked out.  Did you really think I wouldn't want to help you out here?"  There was concern and censure and…disappointment?…in Jim's voice.

Shit.  Now Jim felt like Blair hadn't trusted him to want to help?  This just got worse and worse.

And worse.  Blair suddenly realized that Jim wasn't driving toward the loft, after all; he'd turned onto Millhouse, which meant he was – "Jim, no, you are not taking me to the ER.  No way, man."

"Way, kid.  That knee needs to be looked at.  They can check the rest of you out, too, make sure you haven't given yourself pneumonia.  And I'd kind of like to know why your heart is racing like you spent the weekend popping amphetamines.  Beyond the speed-up from you lying to me, that is."

Well, that didn't take long.  From "you should have let me help" to "prepare to spill your obfuscating guts, buster" in sixty seconds or less.

"Coffee.  I drank too much coffee.  That's all."  Blair wanted to rest his face – okay, hide his face – against the window, but he didn't think his bruised cheek would appreciate it.  "And the weekend just didn't go the way I expected.  No lie, man.  It's just nothing I want to talk about, okay?"

The truck turned off Millhouse into the ER driveway.  Unless Blair wasn't seeing straight – which was not as possible as he would like it to be at this moment – his plea hadn't worked and Jim had The Look on his face.  The You've Been Digging Yourself a Big Hole, Sandburg, and I'm Gonna Make Sure You Fall Into It Look.  "We'll discuss it later, Chief."  And Jim's voice had That Tone, too.  Oh yeah, Blair had caught The Look correctly.  God, why did The Christmas That Wasn't have to have an epilogue?  Especially an epilogue featuring Jim in "Grill Sandburg" mode.  Blair rested his face against the truck window; to hell with his bruise.  He should probably re-christen this weekend to something like The Christmas That Was Preferable to Experiencing Bubonic Plague…Just Barely.

Blair bumped his forehead once, gently, against the cold glass.  Man, he wasn't ever going to try to do something nice again, at least not for a detective-slash-Sentinel with an occasional older brother complex and delusions of authority.  Right, Jim.  Sure.  We'll discuss this later.  Can't wait.

Clean.  Warm.  Drinking chamomile tea.  Pretending to ignore Jim.

Blair let the heat of the mug rest against his neatly re-bandaged palms and inhaled the grassy warm fragrance of the tea.  Oh, crap.  A Kleenex box landed on the couch next to him and Blair snatched hurriedly at a tissue with a mumbled thanks.

"So, Chief, these friends of yours don't have a shower, huh?" Jim asked, as he walked around from the back of the couch to stand in front of Blair.  "It's pretty obvious they don't have a washer and dryer, either.  Or a well-stocked medicine cabinet, but I guess I shouldn't find that surprising, since the only thing they apparently keep in their pantry is coffee.  Which kind of leaves me wondering what happened to all that food you cooked to take along to your generous hosts.  Maybe their pet raccoons got into the food – was that it?  And I should be glad you didn't come back with rabies?"

Why do I always have to be right about the things I want to be wrong about?  It really sucks… Great, I said that out loud.  Typical.  It did suck, though.  A good thing happening – clean and warm; full of chicken soup; as comfortable as it was possible to be with a wrenched knee and sore hands and a collection of old and new bruises and the aftereffects of caffeine intoxication, and a solid cold, and being drugged on antibiotics because of scaremongers bitching about bronchitis – and zap, the good thing's gone.  Well, the pretence of peace was gone, anyway.  Presto chango.  "Nothing gold can stay."  Sure, Robert Frost had been referring to something a little more profound, but the guy knew the score.  Poets did tend to know the score.  In their poems, at any rate.  Not so much in their own lives, from what he remembered from his various Lit courses.

"Yeah, Darwin, something about this really sucks."  Jim had moved to sit on the coffee table by the couch and Blair had absolutely no trouble reading his body language.  "Aside from the fact that your friends don't appear to pay their utility bills, I mean."

"Jim – "

"Don't even try it, Sandburg.  I know you spent the weekend somewhere stupid.  And since it was without food or heat, or anybody around with a lick of common sense, and your clothes smelled like that god-awful incense you used to burn in your office, I'm figuring you spent it at Hargrove with the thermostat locked down over the break.  What I don't know, the thing that's really pissing me off here, is why."

Andy and Randy had been a lot easier to deal with.  They might have been ten-year-old bullies with an incontinent schnauzer and maliciously small-minded parents, but they hadn't mattered.  Jim, sitting there, pissed off and suspicious, mattered.

Shit.  This was not a time for his invention to fail him, but Blair couldn't think of a single saving thing to say.  Anything he said, Jim was going to figure out why Blair had lied – obfuscated – about his weekend as a houseguest, and that was so not cool.  Okay, maybe he just needed to think bigger, something so wildly implausible that –

"Stop right there, kid.  As entertaining as the line of bull you're thinking about feeding me might be, I don't want to hear it.  Just tell me the truth."

Fuck.  Why did I ever teach him how to be a lie detector?  Whoa, wait a minute –  "Jim, you could smell that incense?  That's amazing!  I haven't burned any for months, man, I only keep a couple of sticks there anymore, and they're in Ziploc, I didn't want them to bother you when you stop by, but I didn't want to throw them out, I'm holding on to them because they were expensive and Anika really likes them but she's in Bolivia and I can't give them to her until she gets back in February, but you could really smell that on my clothes? – maybe I don't have the Ziploc locked tight, man, I'd better check it out, but we should test that, you know, how well you can sense smells through sealed plastic, and –"

"Hold it!  Nice end run, but we're not talking about tests. Tell me why."

"All right, all right, just chill, okay?  It's not a big deal, man.  I just decided to spend Christmas at my office, you know, catch up on some stuff.  The Corvair broke down, and when I tripped on the sidewalk and got drenched the food I packed got run over by a car and my spare clothes got wet, and Admin had turned the heat back to practically nothing in my office, doing this totally unexpected Scrooge thing although I should have expected it considering the U's usual generosity toward those of us at the bottom of the pecking order, and I didn't have any tea left so it was just coffee to stay warm because the Qwick-Pick on Paulson failed to live up to its always-open motto, and on the stupid pointless trip to find that out I slipped on some ice, and there weren't any buses.  Oh, and Rainier buys shitty paper towels.  At least no dog peed on me."  Blair looked straight at Jim.  Get lost in it, man.  Misdirection.  It could work.

Or not.  "As many interesting points as that recital raises, I'm still not hearing why you lied to me."

"I didn't lie, Jim.  Not exactly."

"You led me to believe you were spending the weekend as a houseguest with some of your friends, when you weren't.  You went to a lot of trouble to put up a damn good front.  Why the hell…"  Blair winced as Jim's eyes narrowed.  "Ah.  It was because of what I said, wasn't it?  When I said I was used to peace and quiet for Christmas?  Goddammit, Sandburg, what kind of a lunatic idea was that, to go off and turn yourself into a banged-up, starving popsicle just because I mentioned I like my holidays to be quiet?"

Okay, universe, I tried.  I really tried to do something nice here.  I give up.  Blair took in a slow deep breath and let it out in a series of coughs rather than the centering peaceful exhalation he'd intended.  A bottle of cough syrup materialized in front of his nose, apparently out of thin air, and Blair shook his head adamantly, punctuating the motion with several sneezes.  "No way, I'm not taking any of that. You know how I feel about that crap, man.  You've already forced those morally corrupt antibiotics on me and that's bad enough; I am not taking this glop, too.  I've probably got some herbs that would help better, anyway."

The bottle was not withdrawn.  "Chief, I take your crap all the time.  You're not waltzing around the kitchen with that knee, so just take this crap and forget about brewing your witch-doctor potions for a little while."

Well, yeah, his knee did hurt.  Blair gave in, without grace.  Give in, give up, whatever.  Jim took the bottle back and sat down again on the coffee table.  "Cough it up, Darwin – the explanation."

So much for the sympathy reprieve.  Blair sighed.  "Okay, okay.  Maybe I can't defend against "lunatic" considering how it turned out, but my intentions were honorable.  It was a gift, man.  I was trying to give you a gift, okay?  I know I'm a very, um, present person, kind of hard to ignore, and I figured you would really enjoy having your own space back for a day or two.  It's your home, and I've kind of invaded it, taken away your options for solitude, so I was just trying to give a little of that back, okay?  Anyway, I'm totally used to being on my own, holidays or not, so don't make it into a big deal.  I wasn't being a martyr or anything."

Apparently it was Jim's turn to sigh.  "Chief, you wear me out.  Listen up: this is my home, but you live here, too.  You don't go holing up on the couch in your office just because you think maybe I'd like some time alone.  If I need time alone, I'll tell you flat out, I won't beat around the bush.  And I won't expect you to make do somewhere else if that ever happens; I'll front you a motel room."

Blair tensed.  "Weaseling my way into your spare room is one thing, Jim, but I don't need you shelling out cash for me –"  Blair subsided unwillingly as Jim gave him a quelling look.

Jim pointed an emphatic finger at Blair.  "My idea, I foot the bill, if and when.  No argument."  Shaking his head, Jim added, "You were off base here, Darwin.  I told you I wasn't trying to blow you off.  I just figured you would have more fun with some of your friends who like to party.  That's all it was."

Jim rubbed the back of his head and gave another sigh.  "I guess you were trying to do a nice thing, so I'm trying to appreciate that.  But this is important, here – as far as I'm concerned it stopped being a nice, if wrong-headed and stupid, thing when your car broke down and you didn't call me.  It turned into a really lousy wrong-headed and stupid thing when you got wet and hurt and lost your food and found out the heat was out in your office and didn't call me.  Christ, Chief, you think I feel good knowing you had such a miserable Christmas while Simon and I were lounging around here watching football and eating all the food you left for us?"

"You weren't supposed to know, Jim.  That was the point, okay?  You're not a schmaltzy Christmas kind of guy, so I thought this was, like, a perfect present, something I could do for you.  I wasn't about to back out in the middle of it, man."

Blair watched Jim's jaw work for a moment.  Then Jim was standing, looking down with those intent ice-blue eyes.  "Just don't be such an idiot again, Sandburg."

"Hey, you found it."  Blair paused on his hobbling journey from the couch to his bedroom, staring over at the shelves by the stereo.

Jim took three long strides across to the shelves and returned to Blair with the carved jaguar cupped in his hand.  "Yeah, Chief, I found it.  I take it department store gift-wrapping isn't one of the many jobs you've worked at over the years."

"Hah."  Blair waved that away impatiently.  "Do you like it, man?  I found it in Mexico. I've had it for years, but it just…"  He trailed off, watching Jim with the carving.

Blair didn't realize he was holding his breath until Jim looked up from the jaguar and he could see the warmth of Jim's smile.  "Yeah, I like it.  It feels…right, somehow.  Thank you."

The held breath came out in a whoosh and Blair felt unaccountably relieved.  "You're welcome.  It kind of felt like it belonged with you, like it was supposed to be yours, I guess.  It's cool you feel that way too."

Blair watched as Jim gently ran his fingers over the dark wood.  "Blair… Next Christmas.  Spend it with me.  I missed having you here."  Jim had been staring down at the jaguar, but as he finished speaking he looked up.  Not many of the detective's acquaintances would have recognized his expression.

Oh, man.  Blair swallowed.  There had to be something he could do to propitiate change – polish its shoes, set it up on a date, sacrifice a goat.  Whatever it took.  "Yeah, I'm down with that, man.  Next Christmas with you."

The smile suddenly dropped from Jim's face.  His eyes narrowed disbelievingly and Blair gave an involuntary lurch backwards as Jim growled,  "Wait a minute – your food got run over by a car?  Sandburg – my Tupperware?"