Dreamtime - Anniversary

Anniversary

by Sheffield

There was an elephant in the living room.  Jim stayed cool, making like he was ignoring it, while inside his combat brain worked overtime.  He tossed his keys in the basket, his jacket on the hook.  Because what are you going to do, really, in the end?  It's an elephant.

Although… using his detective skills… it was actually kind of a blue elephant.  Wearing a pink striped party hat.

Clearly it was all Sandburg's fault.

"Sandburg!"

Sandburg came out of the bathroom and went into his room, waving a casual hand at Jim and walking through – no, that was "through", really – the elephant's front right leg.  The elephant regarded the anthropologist fondly, cocked its party hat towards him and looked meaningfully at Jim.

"What?"

And, now he came to notice it, there were vines and assorted greenery twining around the kitchen island and the staircase, so he was probably just having a "blue jungle" moment.  Which made it doubly Sandburg's fault, somehow.

The elephant harrumphed in a vaguely irritated tone, used its trunk to point meaningfully towards Sandburg's door, and then morphed into the usual black jaguar, hanging on to the cone-shaped party hat which, Jim had to admit, on the jaguar looked really quite, well, jaunty.

The jag raised an eyebrow at him.  Oh.  Right.  Clearly it was trying to tell him something –

"Sandburg!" he yelled again.

"How the hell did I ever live in your closet, man?" Sandburg complained as he emerged from under the stairs.

He was wearing his good suit, the grey Armani knock-off he'd had made in Singapore last year, plus the silver-grey silk tie Daryl had bought him as a graduation thank you present, and he had his hair tied back.   Meeting with the Commissioner, Jim deduced.

"For six years, on me, as I remember," he teased affectionately.  An Ellison may be stupid, but it doesn't take an elephant in a party hat to remind him of some good times.  Sandburg had finally moved out of the loft in 2001, to celebrate the "real" millennium, as he'd kept calling it, and had bought himself an apartment over a Chinese herbalist in the Ave. near Rainier.  He now presided over poker nights when it was his turn in the rotation, ran a study group for his Anthro 501 students and another for those unfortunates studying for the Cascade PD sergeant's exam, and occasionally cooked bizarre but usually edible meals for Jim, Joel, Simon and any of the guys who happened to be off rotation when the mood took him.

He also ran Sentinel classes three times a week, but those were just for his Sentinel and he seemed to imagine his Sentinel hadn't worked out yet just why he always was the one who had to go buy the particularly recherché herb or colour match the swatches he was considering for the never ending job of repainting his efforts at dry-wall patching.  Even a simple invitation to watch a Jags game came with requests to pass on what the coach was telling the water-boy and how many pixels did it take to indicate the number on a player's shirt.  But they played "I'm sneaking this under your radar" and "I don't notice you're doing this" so nicely now that Jim had almost forgotten how he used to bitch about tests when they lived together.

Sandburg's central heating system was being remodelled this week so, with much laughter and quoting of "just a week, man", he had returned temporarily to living under Jim's stairs.

"Just like old times, eh?" Sandburg said.

Not really. For one thing, Jim had got used to having an office and to being able to check his email when he came in from work, before dinner.  And, for another, he would never get used to the Serious Sandburg vibe that Sandburg used for meetings with the brass.  Six years ago, in all that Diss disaster, Jim had been astonished how Sandburg seemed to blossom in all those meetings with the lawyers and the ACLU and the student activist groups who wanted to support him.  The "it was all a plot to lure Zeller out" story had stuck, mostly, and the financial settlement with Sid and the University had satisfied some deep sentinel need to see his Guide taken care of, which apparently translated into smugness when his Guide banked a seven figure cheque.  But it had been the change in Sandburg's … what?  His appearance? Sure the tide of  flannel had turned in favour of organic cotton and a serious cashmere fetish.  His manner?  Sandburg still spoke like an ageing hippy but somehow it now sounded like Wall Street, too.  His "vibe"?

Jim stood back, mentally, for a moment and thought seriously about that one. The Sandburg vibe?  Aw hell, yes, after ten years of it, it was too late now to start bitching about the language.  The Sandburg Vibe was in his blood now, was the music of the spheres that his whole life chimed to, was in the food that he ate and the air that he breathed.

Wait a minute…

He had just thought something important…

"Earth to Jim?  Hello?  Oh come on, man – you haven't zoned for like a decade, and I refuse to believe that having me back here has set you back…"

"I'm not zoning, Sandburg.  Sheesh!  Stop to think for a second and suddenly you're catatonic."

Sandburg gave him That Look and quirked an eyebrow at him.  The same look, incidentally, that the jaguar had given him.  And the elephant.

OK OK, I get it, he thought.

Ten years.

Ten freaking years!  Sandburg had hung up his jacket and turned on the tv and looked like he was settling down for an evening in front of the tv with a frozen pizza.

"Put your jacket back on, Chief," Jim said mock-sternly.

Sandburg stood back up.  "What's up?"

"We're going out."

"Oh man, another case?  I thought we were done for the weekend."

"Not a case, Sandburg."

Not that Sandburg worked cases with him any more, much.  Too often out meeting with the Victim Support Group he'd set up, or the endless funding meetings for the officer stress support network or the women's shelter or the homelessness project.  Or with the trustees of his own charitable trust, where the bulk of the settlement money had wound up in the end and then doubled and trebled under the peculiar Sandburg idea of Active Management.

"Not a case?"

"No."

The jag had pinched Sandburg's place on the sofa and was looking sarcastically towards Jim over Sandburg's shoulder.  Which was kind of off-putting, now you come to mention it.

"Look at your watch, Sandburg."

"Half eight.  So?"

"Not the time.  The date."

Ten years ago, to the day, he'd thrown a hippy witchdoctor punk up against the wall.

"Well you old softie!  I never thought you'd remember."

Jim's brain skittered around the better restaurants in Cascade, panicking briefly over which one he might be able to get them in without revealing he hadn't remembered early enough to book or anything…

"So where are we going?  I know – let's do the thing where I drive and you scent the restaurant and find us somewhere we've never been before where the food's good…"

"You know, Sandburg, I know it's a test…"

"I know you know."

"You know?  You know that I know?  I knew that…"

"Happy anniversary, Jim."

"Happy anniversary, Chief."