Choice Danae Disclaimer: Not mine but if they were... well, let's not take that trip, okay? No harm of infringement intended. Just had to fix it and nobody is paying me for this. Author's notes: I was really worried that I would be able to do this anymore. I have spent the last days in a deep blue funk, completely unable to even look at the projects that I have had in the works much less anything new. But my best friend, who isn't even a TS fan (I was in the process of conversion), knows me better than I know myself. She said that at some point I would stop being blue and start getting really pissed off. Well, last night, it happened. I can't pinpoint exactly when but I crossed over that line and here we are on the other side...So here's my humble offering to the list of fixes. D'ree, this is for you. Thanks for the cheers and the faith. Thanks to my beta reader, Laura, as always. Michelle for being such an inspiration and everyone who writes to me, thanks. Choice ______________ Blair squinted at the rising sun before him. A hint of confusion touched his mind and he stopped walking. He looked about himself and found his surroundings completely unfamiliar. He should have been distressed but he felt only peace. Even the confusion disappeared like a wispy ghost of the night at morning's first light. He smiled and started his journey again. He had not walked very much farther when a shadow appeared in the blinding sunlight ahead of him. It drew closer to him, coming out of the light itself. The shadow became more defined the closer it came until Blair could identify it as the form of a man. The man came closer still and Blair found himself looking into a familiar solemn face. "Incacha?" "Shaman, what are you doing here?" the Chopec asked in only slightly accented English. "Where is here?" "You're on the Eastern Road." "Eastern Road?" "To the place where the sun rises and those who have gone before wait." Blair searched his vast store of knowledge for the meaning of the man's words. "You mean, I'm dead?" "Not dead. Not alive. Between. You should not be here." "Why?" "Because, Blair, you have work yet to do." The confusion came back with a vengence and Blair closed his eyes against the uneasiness that came with it. He frowned. "I don't understand." "Look behind you, Sentinel's Guide, and you will understand." Blair hesitated. He did not want to see what he had left behind. Shadows of pain and sorrow lay there. He knew it to be so but could not say why or where the knowledge came from. "I can't." "You must." "I'm afraid." "Look." Blair swallowed the lump in his throat and turned slowly. _______________________________________________________ "No! It's not over! I won't let him go, dammit! Don't you touch him. He's alive, you hear me?! H, let me go. Simon, please! Blair!" Brown struggled to hold onto Jim as the man went mad with grief and denial. "Jim, oh God, Jim, I'm sorry. He's gone. You have to stop this now." Simon urged even as the first tear slid down his own face. He was not sure who he was crying for as a second tear followed quickly in the wake of the first. Blair Sandburg was gone but Jim Ellison was the one left to go on alone. He watched as the man came apart at the seams. "Blair! Please, Chief, don't go!" _________________________________________________________ "No!" Blair turned from the pain, his own and his best friend's. "I can't go back there. I want to go on." Forward was peace, no pain, no reminders of all the things that he had done wrong, all the trust he had destroyed. It was so easy to forget it all in the light of the rising sun before him. So hard to look back and remember. "Why?" "Because it hurts too much back there." Blair told the Shaman. "Inquiri needs you. He is a Sentinel, he needs a guide." "He can find somebody else. Somebody better than me. Look at me, Incacha. Look how badly I screwed everything up! He was barely speaking to me. I betrayed him. I don't deserve to be his guide." "You made mistakes because you are human. There is no one else. One sentinel, one guide." "You're wrong. That's not right. You guided him." "I taught him once what he was but I was never his guide." "He doesn't want me. He threw me out. I can't go back there and face that he doesn't want me as his guide." Incacha shook his head and frowned. "Look and listen." When Blair did not turn, the Shaman grabbed his shoulders and turned him. "Look and listen. What do you see? What do you hear?" Blair tried to pull away but he found himself held tight in Incacha's arms. "Pain." "There is more." ___________________________________________________ "Jim, they're going to sedate you if you don't calm down. Let him go, Jim. They need to take care of him." "They aren't taking care of him! They gave up! But I won't give up!" Simon stood over the man he had described on many occasions as his best detective. More than that, however, he was Simon's friend. Jim had finally gotten away from Henri and had scooped up Sandburg's body from the cold ground and was rocking him like a child. "Jim," Simon fought against choking sobs that threatened to steal his voice away, "Jim, please, listen to me. If they sedate you, I don't know if I can help you." Simon touched his arm. "Blair!" ______________________________________________________ Blair felt the pain all the way to his soul and he fought to catch his breath under the weight of the waves of grief he knew to be Jim's. "Jim." "You made mistakes, but he made mistakes too. You are both human. You are also two halves of one whole. It is fate, destiny. So tell me, Blair Sandburg, will you follow your destiny or run from it in fear?" "If I go back..." "Then you will feel pain and fear. You will watch others that you love die. But you will also feel love and joy. You will watch new life begin." "And if I stay on the Eastern Road?" "Some measure of peace." "Some?" "You will not be complete. You will have left something behind, someone. You will have left work undone. But it is your choice." "It's my choice." Blair stated. He looked to the rising sun. Its rays warmed his face and painful memories faded. He took a deep breath and turned to the west. His breath caught as Jim's voice reached his ears once again. Jim called to him, asking him not to go, begging him to come back. "He really wants me to come back?" "You know the answer to your own question, Guide." Blair blinked at the realization that he did, indeed, know the answer. He smiled shyly at Incacha. "You know I have no idea half the time what I'm doing, right?" "Your heart knows. Follow it." Incacha smiled back at him. "Well, I guess now would be a good time to start, huh?" "Better late than never." the Shaman grinned. "Great, a sarcastic Shaman spirit. Thanks a lot, man." The Chopec was already fading away down the Eastern Road. "Take care of Inquiri. He needs you and you need him." "I will." Blair watched the man disappear into the sun and then began his journey west. ______________________________________________ "Sir, let me get to him. I'm going to sedate him and we'll take him in with us." The EMT gently pulled Simon away from Jim. "Wait, you don't understand. He has a lot of strange drug reactions, allergies and things. I don't know all about it. Only..." Simon tried to fight back the wave of emotion that hit him as his words reinforced the feelings of loss and dread building in his chest. Blair Sandburg was dead and Jim was left alone. Blair understood this Sentinel stuff, Blair was Jim's safety net when things went wrong with the senses. Jim had not just lost his best friend. No, as if to add insult to injury, Jim had just lost his control as well. "Only Blair knew all of his allergies and..." he pointed at the two shapes on the ground, one, a shell which no longer held a soul and the other, a shell of a man whose soul was dying as Simon looked on. "Ah God." "We'll take care of him, sir. We'll be very careful and watch him closely. We have to do something." "Okay, go ahead." _______________________________________________________ Jim focused only on the body he held in his arms. His world grew smaller around him until it only encompassed the two of them, he and his guide. He used the very senses that Blair had taught him to use to memorize every detail of his best friend. Everything was catalogued meticulously. Touch, smell, sight, even taste from the mouth-to-mouth he had administered. He wondered absently how Blair would feel about that and was amazed that he almost smiled. Everything was taken in and stored, everything but hearing. He thought at one point that he had heard a single beat of Blair's heart, just before the paramedics gave up but then there was nothing. Everything and everyone faded until they seemed to be talking to him from a great distance with a very bad connection. They were static, annoying but not really intrusive. He dismissed sound anyway. What good was it now? If they were right, then there was nothing worth hearing. He rocked the precious form and softly apologized. At least, he thought he was apologizing. One thing about his hearing deserting him was that he could not hear his own voice. So when the thumping sound reached his ears, he was angry. He did not want to hear anything if he could not hear Blair's heart. The sound was interloping into his tiny world. He raised his eyes to the crowd around him to tell them to go away. An EMT knelt beside him and touched his arm, he was saying something that Jim, of course, could not hear and Jim was just about to tell him so when suddenly sounds from the world outside came tumbling back in on him. Not overwhelmingly, but normally and under it all was a soft question bringing with it recognition of a familar and precious rythym. "Jim?" Bright blue eyes fluttered open and met ice blue ones. "Holy Mary Mother of God." he heard off to one side in Megan Connor's Australian accent. "Sandburg?" Simon was there beside them in an instant. "Damn!" A flurry of activity ensued. The EMTs nearly snatched Blair from Jim's arms as Simon and Henri once again moved swiftly to keep Jim from interferring and quite possibly killing one or both of them, while Rafe helped the paramedics load Blair unto the stretcher. When he was safely strapped on, Simon and Henri let Jim go and he grabbed his partner's hand. Blair smiled at him and Jim's heart jumped in his chest. "Welcome back, Chief." "Thanks, Jim." A weak whisper and a beating heart were the sounds that reached Jim's ears and with them Jim Ellison's soul, so abruptly dropped and shattered, mended and melded with its other half. ____________________________________________________ And somewhere, far down the Eastern Road, a shaman smiled and waited. ______________________________________________________ Voila'! At least for the time being. IF UPN comes to its senses and brings TS back, then this shall stand alone. IF TS goes into syndication, same applies. If they finish this right somehow, so be it. If not, I'll return to this and deal with Ms. Thang, 38 of D as Tracy called her. Believe me, I shall devise thee, the most horrid of fates for her.