Category: drama/angst

Rating: PG

Summary: This one isn't just about Jim and Blair; Henri has a part, as does the ever-skillful paramedic, Emmett, from a previous story of mine.

What a difference a few minutes could make, Jim couldn't help thinking to himself later, once it was all over. Sandburg's flight home from an educational seminar had been delayed, meaning that Jim had left the loft later than he'd originally planned in order to get to the airport and meet Blair's flight; and because he'd taken that extra forty-five minutes to sit at home and watch the end of the game on ESPN, he hadn't been on the road-and on one road in particular--at the time he'd originally planned to be there. But someone else HAD been there at that specific instant--a very drunk, very dangerous-behind-the-wheel someone--and in a horrible quirk of fate, that inebriated s.o.b. had slammed his car at an extreme rate of speed into the car owned and driven by one Henri Brown, fellow MC cop and a damned good friend to both Jim and Blair.

Jim had come upon the terrible accident when he'd finally left home to go pick Blair up at the airport; when he'd slowed along the side of the road to fall in line with all the other cars being diverted by a patrol man into one narrow lane, Jim's initial grumbles of complaint had fallen into a sort of grim sympathy for the hapless victims of the totalled vehicles clogging half the roadway just ahead. And when he got close enough to realize that one of the fused, mangled hunks of metal that used to be a car belonged to H, the shock of it was almost enough to send him into a zone-out of stunned denial.

Senses feverishly scanning the confused jumble of wreckage, cops, and emergency vehicles just ahead of him, Jim had maneuvered his way around a shiny new SUV creeping along just in front of him and had bumped over several bright orange cones that had been set up in the next lane to discourage motorists from passing in that lane. Ignoring both the irate honking of the SUV whose back bumper he'd narrowly missed clipping and the angry gesturing of a policeman trying to cut him off and bring him to a stop, Jim grimly continued on his course and pulled up next to two squad cars sitting on the roadway with lights flashing. He had his badge out and was waving it in angry cops' faces the instant he was out of his truck; and as he'd bulldozed his way over to the ambulance where an achingly familiar figure was being loaded inside, Jim had focused all his attention on scanning Henri Brown's limp, bloody form with his enhanced senses, listening for the pattern and strength of H's heartbeat, checking the rhythm of his breathing, listening for the sound of blood gurgling in H's lungs or the grate of broken bone ends with each tiny movement of the stretcher on which his friend was being transported.

"How is he?" The words had left his mouth even before he'd made it to the back doors of the ambulance, and one of the two paramedics loading Henri into the vehicle looked up with a distracted frown that had softened into weary recognition at the sight of the large, intense man barreling down on the tense tableau.

"Hey, Jim; he's cut up some and it looks like he might have a concussion and a broken wrist; but considering how mangled his car was, your detective friend seems to have gotten off lightly." Emmett Reilly's tone was matter-of-fact and comforting in its certainty, and Jim had found his taut muscles relaxing slightly at the steady, quietly reassuring expression on Emmett's face. Both Jim and Blair had had past occasions of being involuntary passengers in Emmett's 'coach of torturous mercy,' as Sandburg had rather wryly christened the ambulance; and as Jim nodded once, brusquely, in reply to the paramedic's rundown of Henri's injuries, Emmett's stoic and equally competent partner Kinsey climbed up into the ambulance and pulled the head of the stretcher in with her while Emmett easily hoisted the foot of it and helped manuever the narrow, wheeled gurney securely into the vehicle.

Before the silent, battered figure of his friend and coworker had disappeared completely into the maw of the ambulance, Jim had reached out and placed one hand carefully on H's sheet-draped ankle, fingers pressing gently against the other man's flesh in a silent gesture of comfort and empathy. The contact lasted mere seconds, and Henri displayed no sign that he'd even been aware of Jim's presence or his touch. But Jim figured it certainly couldn't hurt to touch his friend and let him know he wasn't all alone in this; maybe, in some part of H's unconscious brain, he'd registered the brief connection between them and might find some level of comfort in that.

"I need to call Simon," Jim had murmured distractedly to himself as he'd watched Emmett slam the ambulance doors shut. "And Blair's flight is probably already here, dammit; he's going to wonder what's happened to me. I have to go get him, then we can head to the hospital..." Muttering under his breath, Jim started back for his truck and came up short at the sight of the coroner's wagon parked near the wreckage of the two vehicles. So...the other guy hadn't made it, Jim thought grimly to himself, and at that moment his cell phone had vibrated at his hip, sending him fumbling to open it as he'd continued his trek back to his truck.

It was Blair on the phone, his cheerfully exasperated teasing at Jim's tardiness instantly switching over into fullblown concern when Jim tersely explained the situation with Henri. "God, Jim, is he going to be okay?" Blair had asked as Jim negotiated a tedious route behind the cordoned-off wreckage onto an access road not open to the long line of motorists who'd been restricted to the one narrow lane on the opposite side of the roadway. Reduced to rubbernecking or futile complaints about the traffic backed up for a good distance ahead, the trapped drivers could only watch in grudging envy as Ellison whipped along the near-deserted access road on his way to the airport, his cell phone cradled loosely against his shoulder for the purpose of replying to Blair's anxious queries. With his sentinel hearing, he certainly didn't need the phone pressed to his ear in order to hear what the other man was saying; but had he tossed the phone onto the seat beside him in order to fully free his attention for driving, he would have been forced to bellow his replies to Blair in order for his normal-hearing partner to even catch what he was saying.

So Jim had juggled the phone, the road, his truck, and Blair's demands for details as he'd sped toward the airport, uttering intermittent, monosyllabic replies over the phone as he'd wrestled with a strange sense of guilt for not having left home earlier. He knew it was crazy thinking, but he couldn't help feeling HE was the one who should have been there on that stretch of road at that particular moment, not Henri. Maybe, if he had been driving there instead, he would have been able to use his enhanced senses to detect the approach of the drunk driver's out-of-control vehicle; maybe he could have avoided the terrible crash that had sent his friend to the ER's trauma unit in serious condition. If nothing else, maybe he could somehow have stopped the stupid, now-dead idiot before he'd turned his car into a lethal weapon.

"Jim...Jim, are you listening to me? You'd damned well better NOT be zoning behind the wheel, for crap's sake!" Blair's tense, nominally frantic voice had suddenly cut into Jim's dark broodings, and Jim had forced his attention back onto the road in front of him and onto Blair's anxious diatribe spilling into his ear.

"I'm here; I was just...thinking," Jim had grumbled into the phone, and a suspicious note entered Sandburg's voice as he'd murmured in reply: "Uh oh, that can't be good. C'mon, Jim; I've heard that tone in your voice before, and I'm tellling you right now--there's nothing you could have done to prevent what happened to Henri. So if you're tooling along in your truck, recreating the accident in your mind and thinking maybe you could have saved H if you'd only left the loft a few minutes earlier, then STOP it. That's magical thinking, and you know it--that's trying, in hindsight, to go back and change an event that can't be changed. And if you HAD been on that road then, how do you think that you--even with your senses on full alert--could possibly have reacted in time to prevent the accident? You're good, Jim, but even you aren't possessed of superhuman reflexes. And so help me, if you're nursing some bullshit guilt theory that it should have been YOUR truck on that road at that instant instead of Henri's, I swear I will knock the crap out of you the second you get here! You get that?"

"Yeah, Chief, I get it," Jim had replied, the slightest hint of a fond smile creeping into his voice at the mix of love and acute exasperation he could feel and hear coming in waves through Blair's taut rant. Geez, how does the kid do it; what gives him that uncanny ability to read me like he does? Jim had thought ruefully to himself. But aloud he'd merely quipped: " And I guess you're right...probably." At Blair's inarticulate splutter, Ellison had relented and had reassured his best friend that he was okay, that Blair had nothing to fret about as far as Jim's senses OR his emotional state were concerned.

"I'll be at the airport in ten more minutes, so don't keep me waiting out front." Jim had ended the call rather brusquely as he'd driven past the familiar 'Airport Ahead' signs, but Blair's equally clipped assent before both ended the connection let him know that the other man wasn't perturbed by Jim's abruptness. Sandburg was used to it by now and would understand that Jim, despite his protestations to the contrary, still had Henri's accident weighing heavy on his mind and needed the small bit of time still left of his journey to process all he'd seen and felt.

Not for the first time, Jim had experienced a sudden, warm rush of gratitude and affection for his partner, realizing just how much the other man's friendship and daily presence in his life meant to him. He knew the horrible emotional toll it would have taken on Blair had Jim himself been the one involved in the accident, and he allowed himself the briefest surge of relief that he had indeed been delayed long enough to avoid becoming the victim of that drunk driver. Yes, he hated that Henri had been injured and would have to live through the trauma not only of his accident and recovery but of the death of the driver who had hit him; but Jim had to logically agree with Blair that his delay in leaving for the airport had had nothing to do with who would or would not become the drunk driver's hapless victim.

Even if Jim HAD been driving down that road at that moment, there was no way of knowing if he would have been the one trapped inside the wreckage of his truck instead of poor H trapped unconscious and bleeding in his car. His analytical mind knew this, Jim had reflected morosely as he'd neared the airport and his partner's all-too-discerning perusal; now he just had to convince his guilt-gnawed gut of that fact before Blair saw that he wasn't as composed and 'okay' with the whole ordeal as he'd evinced over the phone.

************

What a difference a few minutes could make, Jim's mind reiterated some four hours later as he and Blair stood beside Henri's hospital bed, both men gazing down at their now-conscious friend who lay swathed in bandages like some mutant demi-mummy. In a slow, aggrieved voice slurred with drugs and pain, Henri had just informed them both that had he only WAITED another five minutes instead of actually leaving for work EARLY for once, he would have avoided the accident that had almost cost him his life.

"My timing today SUCKED ASS, man," Henri muttered mournfully as he gazed down at his tightly wrapped right wrist and the plethora of cuts and scratches decorating both his arms. "Next time Simon bitches at me for being a bit...delayed...in making it in to work, I'm going to remind him that five minutes late here or there could actually save my LIFE, you know?"

"Sorry to tell you, Henri, but I'm not so sure Simon will accept that reasoning," Blair responded with a small chuff of laughter even as he and Jim exchanged glances heavy with shared meaning. "He'll just tell you that maybe you should leave REALLY early next time and beat ALL the traffic completely; that way you'd make it to work safe and sound AND be there in plenty of time to catch up on all that backlogged paperwork you keep trying to dump on Rafe."

"Ooh, that's cold, babe...but it sounds JUST like something Simon would say," Henri sighed mournfully as Jim shot him a half-amused, half-sympathetic smile. "Maybe you guys could stir up a little sympathy for me in the big guy, make him see I'm SUFFERING here and in need of mucho time off to recuperate...maybe even a trip to Mexico, or the Bahamas..."

And as the exhausted and thankfully only moderately injured detective drifted back into drugged slumber, Jim and Blair slid quietly from the room, the silence between them laden both with relief for Henri and with the deep sense of unspoken communion that they always seemed to share during times of crisis. Fate was a fickle thing, with the ticking of the clock simultaneously signifying nothing and everything, depending on one's perspective; and even though he wasn't a fan of 'emotional scenes,' from Jim's perspective right now he knew that he didn't want to put off for one minute more expressing to Sandburg just how glad he was to have the younger man as his friend, partner, and roommate. After all, one never knew when the opportunity to say something this important might be lost forever.

"Chief--" he began, there in the hushed corridors of the hospital; but one look from Sandburg's earnest blue eyes, one knowing touch of the other man's hand on his arm, let Jim know that everything essential had already been communicted between them, instantaneously and without delay. And the quiet, almost shy smile he sent Blair in reply sealed the deal and left both men absurdly grateful for every second of precious time allotted to them.

~The End~