New
Arrivals
Author-Allmoran
Titles
An Acre of Optimism
by Allmoran
Summary: Jim and Blair as private detectives. Hardboiled Jim speculates about the lighter and darker sides of their inevitable partnership.
Warnings: A couple of mildly bad words, and some hardboiled cliches and James Ellroy ripoffs too.
Author's Note: I decided to issue a self-challenge: Write a short scene from Jim's POV with the first and last lines being from noirish detective films. So the first line is from the 1975 version of Farewell, My Lovely, and the last line is from Out of the Past (1947). (Robert Ludlum speaks them both in voiceover.) I wanted to imagine what it might be like for Jim to contemplate the way he and Blair are beholden to each other, that in a way their pairing has a fatalistic quality. (and that though he is deeply grateful for it, the darker side of this scenario is that they cannot really escape.) But... mostly this is just for fun. I sort of wrote Jim stylized and against character (too many words; too reflective; too bitter!) because I’m much more comfortable writing slangy, wordy, intellectual Blair and am not quite ready to take on the canon Jim…
Disclaimer: Pet Fly and Paramount own them. This is not-for-profit borrowing. Please don't shoot! (or sue.)
I was eating some Chinese downtown when a shadow fell over my chow mein. Great, I thought, a hulking client about to shake me down for the week's take in information-which was zilch, zip, zero, the proverbial goose egg. Or worse, a man with a gun bent on giving me terminal indigestion. I gripped the underbelly of the red Formica tensely and glanced up, ready to spring into action.
It *was* a man bent on giving me terminal indigestion, but not by means of a handgun. It was my perpetually hopped-up partner, Sandburg.
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"Hey Jim," he crowed, shaking the rain out of his ringlets and sitting down uninvited. "That stuff'll kill you. Why don't you try one of the authentic places? I can take you to one tomorrow. Besides I think I got us a lead in the Elton case. It's a real bitch!"
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He was grinning, ignoring my hacked-off glare, enjoying himself. I eyed him warily. Sandburg didn't seem to grasp that some scenarios weren't theoretical, that he very well might have been a lowlife with a gun, determined to leave me with a hole I wasn't born with and go away laughing. That was the kind of world I lived in. But Sandburg, despite his turn with me in the Cascade PD and our recent foray into private, was still an academic at heart.
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I'd rescued him from academia against my better judgement, because he had rescued me from myself in a way that no-one else could. He understood me. And he had certainly waded through his share of trouble since the impish Fates had thrown us together. He just couldn't wholly accept that the world, left to its own devices, would always bite you on the ass, and sooner rather than later.
Sandburg still managed to live something of a charmed existence. He still spent a lot of time studying. He still saw shades of gray. He still drank herbal teas, meditated, and ate whole grains. He still thought people were basically good. And he actually dated. I was what a private dick ought to be, for chrissake, a broad-shouldered, steely-eyed ex-cop, a closemouthed tough guy of mysterious means and with a past to boot. But Sandburg was the one the women went for. Beautiful women got one hit of his elfin features-the fathomless blue gaze, all that hair-and they wanted to mother him, the cute, crimecracking, wisecracking waif... and then they wanted to take him home and make love to him. It was all a bit hinky if you asked me, but it made Sandburg a happy man.
And it wasn't like I could catch a break from Sandburg's glittery little acre of optimism, speculation, communion and sexual contentment. I couldn't crouch anymore in the stark, morally definite lone-wolfness that was such an essential part of who I was. For more years than I cared to count , Sandburg and I had lived together in what had once been my minimalist bachelor's railroad on Prospect. Sandburg had dressed it up over the years with his tribal doodads and odd art, his stacks of jungle music CD's and weighty texts , all of his academic (and personal) detritus. In a way it was really more his space now than mine, though if you stood absorbing it for longer than a few minutes you'd grasp that on some deeper level it was truly a product of our personalities tightly intertwined. This caused a lot of people to make fine, glad-handing assumptions about our relationship, most either tinged with happy (or at least PC) acceptance or carefully restrained distaste. Only a select few knew the truth:
The thing was, I was more grateful for Sandburg's oft-maddening presence in my life than I had ever been for the presence of any other. And I needed Sandburg far more than any member of his harem ever could-far more than anyone else on the planet could, probably-but not at all for the same reasons.
I looked at him across the Formica from me, steepling his fingers eagerly, panting like a puppy, pushing his elbows out so as to practically knock over my pot of Ceylon black. I gave him the eye again.
"What is it, Sandburg?" I said. I could hear his heart thudding softly under his wet overcoat, the little hitches in his breathing. He had picked up the scent. I knew I'd be getting up in a matter of minutes, abandoning my half-eaten noodles and following him out into the early, rainy, Cascade dark. All these years beholden willingly. All these years living an existence, a kind of ideal, really, which most human beings could never know. But I had my pride.
How big a chump can you get to be? I was finding out.
The End