And in the Beginning...

by Brenda Bailey

Blair rolled over and squinted at the alarm clock that was determined to ruin his wonderful dream; he had found a Sentinel with all five enhanced senses and was delivering his doctoral thesis to the sound of thunderous applause. Wait a minute, I did find a Sentinel, and he’s supposed to be picking me up in fifteen minutes. Oh great, our first real testing session and I’m gonna be late. And knowing Ellison, if I’m not ready, he’ll use this as an excuse to just leave . The detective had agreed to the testing session as he drove Blair home after Veronica Saris had been taken into custody. He had then spent most of the night going back over Burton’s work and making notes for today’s session. He was not kidding himself that this was going to be easy. Handling Ellison was like working with a wounded animal. You had to convince him it would help before he would try it. But he thought back to yesterday when Jim had called him partner, and he smiled as he said the word aloud, “Partner, yeah.”

Hurriedly he gathered his notes into his backpack, Jim Ellison was due to pick him up in just two minutes now and Blair didn’t think he was the type to be even a few minutes late. He was determined to not give Ellison any reason to back out of the testing today. It had been hard enough to get him to agree to it in the first place. Ellison seemed to only want to know how to control his senses when he wanted to use them, but had little interest in knowing his own limits.

At exactly 8 o’clock, Blair heard Jim drive up outside the warehouse that was home. Looking around to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything, he dashed out the door and jumped into Jim’s truck.

“Hey, man, ready to get started?” Blair greeted the detective with a big smile and a cheerful attitude.

Jim barely glanced at Blair before shifting the Jeep into first and pulling away. “I agreed to it. I didn’t agree to be enthusiastic about it.”

“Riiiiight.” Blair still couldn’t keep the smile from coming back on his face. This was just too good to be true and no matter how unenthusiastic Jim wanted to be about it, he was bouncing in his excitement.

“I thought we would start out at the park, if that’s okay with you?” Blair had devoted a lot of time last night in thinking just how to get the maximum amount of cooperation from Jim, with the least amount of negative feedback. Jim had struck him as being an outdoor type person and would probably be more comfortable in a natural setting to begin.

Jim looked over at him and nodded. “The park? Yeah, that’s alright.”

Bingo, score one for the home team. Maybe this won’t be as hard as I thought . “Did you get finished with that Switchman case yesterday?”

“Yeah, the arrest was the easy part. It’s the paperwork that kills you.”

Blair had been waiting to ask how Jim had explained his senses in the report and the door had just been opened. “How did you handle how you found the bomb?”

“What do you mean?” Jim’s face was expressionless.

“Come on, did you tell them you heard a bomb ticking in a crowded bus filled with scared and nervous people? I mean, you went right to it man, how did you explain how you found it?”

“What difference does it make what I said? Why are you so anxious to know?” Jim was definitely on the defensive now.

“Jim, maybe you haven’t realized it yet, but people are going to wonder how you are able to see and hear things that no one else can. We have got to start coming up with reasonable explanations for what you do and it would be nice if they were consistent, don’t you think?” Blair tried to put every ounce of persuasiveness he possessed into his voice.

Jim looked over at Blair and shrugged. “I guess I hadn’t thought it through that far yet. I just said I saw the bomb as I was going down the aisle and let it go. I don’t think anyone cared *how* I found it, so long as I did find it.”

As Blair rolled his eyes up, Jim defended himself, “Well, it’s the truth. I‘m not going to lie.”

“Not lie, Jim, obfuscate. You come out and start telling people what you see and hear and they're not going to believe you." Blair's voice rose. They're going to think you're some kind of freak." Jim jerked almost imperceptiably. Whoa, that touched a nerve. Time to change the approach. Blair took a deep breath, calming himself before continuing in a quieter tone of voice. "Trust me on this. You’re something that hasn’t been seen in almost a hundred years. You need to practice what you can do without having an audience standing by watching to see if you can really do it.”

Blair needed Jim to trust him on this. He wasn’t sure how the real world would take having a living, breathing Sentinel in its midst. He did know the academic world had largely ignored Burton’s work and thought it fanciful at best. He wanted a chance to work with *his* Sentinel without the distraction of public attention. He looked directly at Jim as he spoke, willing him to go along with him on this.

Jim stared at him for a long moment. Blair returned the gaze, not saying anything else. Jim had come this far in his search to solve his problem, but he didn’t know if Jim would trust him on this or not.

Finally Jim nodded and said, “We’ll do it your way. I’m not anxious to be a lab rat for anybody.”

Blair responded with a smile and made a mental note to himself about the lab rat comment. Rat ? Definitely not, as Blair considered exactly what animal Jim Ellison did remind him of. He thought back over the history of one James Ellison he had pulled off the net in that Newsweek article. Lethal, without a doubt, the man had been an Army Ranger after all. Protective, how else would you describe someone who had continued with an assignment for eighteen months to prevent rebel attacks on a primitive people. Yet solitary, four days on that stakeout all alone...a big cat then, maybe a leopard or jaguar.

Never one to let a conversation lag, Blair began telling Jim about the Tonnuggo people and their worship of the rat. This continued until their arrival at the park.

As Blair led the way over to the far corner of the park, he began to explain to Jim exactly what he wanted to try to accomplish. “The first thing we want to establish is the range on your sight and hearing. I figure those are the two senses you use the most and will be the most familiar with. You probably already use them unconsciously every day. I want to set some kind of baseline to see if we can work on extending your range and capabilities.”

Jim walked over and sat at one of the picnic tables as Blair continued to talk. “I want you to begin by focusing on just your sense of hearing. The first thing I want you to do is shut your eyes and tell me when you can hear one of the joggers coming up the trail. Don’t listen for anything else, just concentrate on the sounds you associate with someone running.”

Blair figured this was a sound that Jim would naturally listen for in his work and should be relatively easy for him to focus on. With the early hour, the only other people present in the park were the early morning joggers, running on the trail that circled around below them. With the clear weather and his handy dandy pair of binoculars, he could see the beginning of the trail, about a mile away, before it disappeared into the trees.

Jim sighed, but he had agreed to this. “Shut my eyes and listen for joggers. Riiiiight.” Reluctantly, he shut his eyes.

Blair noted the tense expression on Jim’s face and knew this was getting off to a bad start. Jim was going to have to relax, no one ever *made* something happen by forcing it like he was trying to. Speaking quietly, he tried to defuse the situation before the testing ended in frustration with the detective walking away. “Hey man, just relax. Don’t think about it so hard. Just let it happen naturally. Breathe.” He demonstrated by taking a deep breath and then letting it out slowly.

“Sandburg, I know to breathe. I’ve been doing it on my own for a long time.” Annoyed, Jim opened his eyes to glare at Blair.

Blair put his hands up defensively. “Chill, man. I’m just trying to get you to relax. You know you can do this. You’ve already done it on the bus.”

Reluctantly, Jim once again shut his eyes to focus on his hearing. The tense expression he had been wearing faded and his head tilted slightly to one side.

Nodding to himself, Blair tried a little positive reinforcement. Speaking softly, he lightly touched Jim's arm as it rested on the table. “That’s right, relax, breathe. Listen for the sounds. Put everything else out of your mind except the sounds you want to hear.”

“I hear someone coming. A lighter stride, probably a female.” Jim spoke softly. The same hint of amazement present in his voice as when he could smell the roses.

Blair immediately scanned the trail to try to pick out the jogger, but couldn’t see anyone. He scanned backwards on the trail into the trees. After a few seconds he spotted the female jogger and used the distance plotter he had borrowed from the Anthropology Lab to verify the distance. “Seven hundred and ten yards. This is great! And this is just your first try.” He glanced over to see a slight smile grow on Jim’s face at the successful first test.

Blair wrote down the information in his notebook, while Jim had gone back to listening for the next jogger. He pushed his hearing farther to detect the next runner. Blair looked up to see Jim seemingly frozen in place. His head was still tilted to the side, his eyes closed, but he didn’t appear to be breathing. “Jim? Hey, man, are you okay? Jim? JIM?" The lack of response he was getting was not helping the situation. "Come on, you’re beginning to scare me here. This would be like a really good time to talk to me and let me know what’s going on with you. Jim?” He looked closely and saw that Jim was indeed breathing, but slowly and very shallow. Throwing his pen down, he jumped up abruptly and began pacing next to the picnic table. “GREAT. Just GREAT. This is not what I need. A zone out on the first thing I try to get him to do. Now what do I do?” He thought furiously, nervously running his hands through his hair. Burton’s research had barely mentioned the total concentration problem, or zone out factor as he liked to call it. It had not even offered a clue as to how to correct it.

Pausing in his diatribe, he took a deep breath. “Well there’s always the tried and true method of knocking you flat on the ground. That seemed to work all right the last time, but I’ve got to tell you, tackling you is going to get old like really fast. Besides the fact it tends to be painful, it’s obvious as all get out. Okay, THINK. He wasn’t zoning when he started listening, what was different then?” Blair frantically reviewed the beginning of the test. He had been trying to get Jim to relax and concentrate. He had been talking to him, but he had already tried talking to him and it hadn’t helped at all. Jim was still zoned. What else? He had been touching Jim’s arm as he talked to him. Couldn’t hurt. Blair laid his hand again on Jim’s arm again and started talking to him. “Jim, listen to me, its time to wakey, wakey. Come on, come on back. Listen to my voice, let’s get with the program here.”

Jim shook his head and opened his eyes, momentarily disorientated. “It happened again, didn’t it?” His voice was flat and emotionless and he wouldn't make eye contact.

“Yeah, it did, but I think I know how to solve the problem now.” Blair was talking fast now. He had to convince this man that he could solve the zone out problem, or Ellison might back out of everything, the tests, the research, the whole Sentinel thing. “You need to be like, grounded, when you’re focusing. If you’re grounded, then you don’t get lost in just one sense. Think of it like ...flying a kite, so long as the string doesn’t break the kite can fly as high as you want. Of course, knocking you on the ground is another way of grounding you, I guess, but I really don’t think we have to be that literal here. And it may just be a temporary thing anyway, once you get better control of your senses it may not even be much of an issue, that is, unless, you’re trying to do a really deep focus, or something, but we can look at that when the time comes. Of course...”

“Sandburg? “ Jim interrupted the seemingly endless flow of words.

“Yeah, Jim?”

“How did you stop this zoning thing this time?”

“I made contact with you and just talked to you.” Blair tried his best to make it sound simple and easy. Never mind the fright and helplessness he felt that he might not be able to get the detective to come back.

“And I came out of it?” Jim was single mindedly sticking to the subject.

“Like a champ.”

Blue eyes met blue eyes as Blair desperately tried to convince this man to trust him. He watched Jim’s face as he processed this information. He knew that the prospect of having to rely on someone else was not going to be appreciated one bit by the detective. Words came and went in Blair’s mind, but it all came back to trust. Either Jim was going to trust him or not. Finally Jim spoke.

“Okay.”

Blair waited for more, but that seemed to be the only comment Jim had at the moment. “Okay what, Jim? Okay to continue. Okay this can work. You want to elaborate on that, man?”

“Okay to both. Now do you want to test something else or not?” Jim met his eyes directly.

Definitely a man of few words, this was really going to be fun. Blair couldn’t stop the smile that lit up his face. “Right. Fine. Now let’s test your sight.”

Finis for now