Part One: Four Months in a Uniform

Author: E. Batagur

Pairing: J/B

Rating: PG

Pre-slash

Disclaimer: Paramount and PetFly own the Sentinel and all its characters. I own nothing and make no profit.

My thanks go out to Thalia and the Sentinel_Betas for the beta on this story. Also, a great big thanks go out to all of you who supported me through the Mojo crisis, especially my Master Sage!

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**The blues**

The only way that you can get out of going to the academy altogether is by having prior law enforcement experience or corrections officer training. It's normal for a cadet to spend one year in the academy if they are just fresh out of high school. However, six months is the normal stay for a cadet who has a college degree in criminology, sociology or a related field of study. It also helps to have a letter of recommendation from an official from an accredited law enforcement agency. Sandburg fell into the second category of cadets. Simon signed the letter, and anthropology counted as a 'related field'.

The first thing we talked about was his reluctance to carry and fire a gun. I thought it would be like breaking horses… No, literally, I thought it would be like breaking horses. First you have to get a wild horse use to the saddle by bringing one into the pen with you but not putting it on him, just hold it near him and get him use to its presence. I pretty much got that first part taken care of. Sandburg's been around my piece before. He's even held it.

It was time for phase two of the process. I dragged him down to the firing range with me a week before his first classes in the academy. It's not like he's never fired a gun before. I just don't think a lot of thought went behind the pulling of the trigger. It was time for me to teach him to think. Hey, everyone's got to have a hobby.

I thought I was going to have to negotiate around words like 'pacifist' and 'moral barometer' and 'conscientious objector'. I got lucky. He clammed up around the flower child, gun-control stuff. He knew the score. In for a penny, in for a pound.

So I got him down to the range. I put my gun in his hands. He held it for a moment. Looked it over with big eyes and swallowed a few times, looking nervous.

"God, Sandburg, don't flake out on me now!"

He looked up at me and gave me that half-flustered, nervous voice he uses when his mind is moving at warp nine and he starts sweating bullets. "I'm not flaking out, man. I… I'm just realizing the implications here. This is big, Jim. I mean once I start to learn how to shoot a gun with the intent to kill, it's all over, man. End of the innocence…"

I shook my head at him. Why does everything have to be such high drama with him? "Don't think of it that way, Sandburg. Think of it like you're honing your skills at a sport."

He snorted a laugh. "Sport!" he said ruefully. "This is freakin' life and death here. This isn't a game!" He hefted the gun at me in his open palm.

"Look, Chief, lots of people shoot for fun. It's a sport. Most people never intend to hit anything more in their lives than a paper target. They do it because they like it…Just like playing darts…with a faster, smaller projectile…slightly more lethal too."

Blair blinked at me once but didn't say a word. Expecting the big hairy philosophical argument, I was a little taken aback by that. He set the gun down and got this determined look on his face. He heaved this tremendous sigh and then picked up and put on the protective ear gear. Next he put on his safety glasses. He picked up the gun, disengaged the safety, and turned to the target. I've seen him hold a gun before. He has a good natural grip. I just wanted to see what the kick back did to his wrist and how he would compensate.

"Just fire a few, Chief."

He put the gun up and aimed with both eyes. Good boy! Lots of first-timers think they have to shut an eye to aim. That's a big mistake. I'm glad he didn't make it. The first shot went high and outside heading off to the right and over the shoulder of the paper silhouette. He aimed again and I noticed he was trying to compensate by lowering his grip. Not the right answer. Out in the field, you don't have time to change your grip position after you miss once. The key is adjusting the tension in your wrist for better control. Second shot was still high and outside but closer, but I had to stop him before he tried to adjust again.

"Control your wrist movement." I came up from behind him and carefully took his left arm. I could feel him trembling slightly, tense as a bowstring. My hand cupped his left hand, and I adjusted its position at the bottom of his right wrist and hand to help hold his grip steady. I wrapped my fingers firmly about his left hand, which steadied his other hand that gripped the gun.

"Try it now." I said as I released him from my grip. "Hold your hand steady. Fire where you aim."

He squeezed off two more shots. This time they were high but not outside. He was now perforating the shoulder of the silhouette. Better. He went through a total of four more rounds. Each shot showed a little more control. Now that he knew that his weakness to the kick would move his hand up and to the right, he'd know just how to clamp down on his wrist for control.

"It's too bad they don't make wrist braces for cops…you know, like they make for the longbow for wrist control," he said with a quick smile.

I rolled my eyes at him. "Come on, Chief." With a push on his shoulder I moved us out of the firing range.

That was actually the easy part. Two days before the first day of classes, he went to a barber. Need I say more?

It was bad. He spooked and shied for nearly a solid week about it. You'd think he'd never got his hair cut in his life. I knew that wasn't true. He got that mop trimmed at least every couple of months…to remove the split ends, he said. He can be so vain. But Saturday morning he left the loft practically hyperventilating. The man who returned looked like a total stranger to me. If it had not been for his smell and heart beat, I would have questioned his identity.

I never knew his face was so square. I never noticed how his forehead was so high. His eyes are really blue. I never really noticed. It was like losing all that hair changed the whole dynamics of his face. And it was funny about all those things that I was only just then seeing. He's worn his hair tied back many times. I should have noticed all of that before, shouldn't I have? I am a police detective after all.

He was morose, completely bummed out. So I took him to Fat Johnny's, the new Cajun place in town, to cheer him up. Gumbo was good for what ailed him.

Then the following Monday he started on his new career.

Now I thought that there were parts of Sandburg that would mix like oil and water at the academy. But apparently Sandburg was as every bit as adaptable as he ever claimed he was. After the initial week's culture shock wore down, he settled in and treated it like any new learning experience in his life. He gave it his best attention. I have come to learn that when Sandburg gives something his best attention, he remains focused. I often forget when I look at him and listen to him talk, blathering on in that strange neo-hippy, semi seventies slang, that he is more disciplined than he looks.

He started making friends right away. That made me feel a little more at ease…not that I thought that Sandburg wouldn't make friends. Sandburg is very personable. You could sit him in the middle of a grumpy, retired-postal-worker-with-prostate-cancer convention and within four hours he'd have them forming conga lines. But in this case, Sandburg making friends signified to me that he was adjusting enough to let his guard down to the others. He was invited to study groups and the names he rattled off of the other cadets tended to lean heavily on the female side. Nothing new there.

Sandburg cracks me up with that over active libido thing. In my opinion, that is a sign of a man who started late in life to get nookie. If I pressed him I'd bet I'd find out that he didn't lose his virginity until after age twenty. Wouldn't surprise me. He once told me that he had been a 'book nerd'. That still shows a bit in him. I've never told him but despite his great pitching arm, he runs like a girl…especially when bad guys are chasing him. He has also a very short repertoire of less than masculine gestures and movements. He was a young nerd all right.

I knew his type when I was in high school. Small, bookish, non-confrontational and the target of every muscular but brainless bully in the school (unfortunately I was in the ranks of the brainless), these 'book nerd' guys were all brains and practically no testosterone, or at least they were afraid to show it. Beta males, Sandburg would call them, and he knows he's one. Add on to the pile for poor Sandburg the fact that he had jumped grades and was exceptionally smaller and younger than all of his classmates. Then add on the fact that he had more school district moves under his belt than an army brat. Most of these beta male poor slobs grow up and, if they are lucky, finally get laid when they reach college. Once they get laid they over-compensate for the late start by going sex crazy. Table legs beware!

Sandburg pours on the charm now, and sometimes it's very effective. He's figured out a formula for women: dazzle them with intellect. It works a lot of the time. He knows what he's doing. I sometimes wonder if he took anthro with a minor in psych to figure out how a beta male can still get a date. He says that most human cultures value intelligence. Having smarts pays off good. Then he would continue by stating that psychologically speaking, a good number of women are drawn to successful men. Intelligence can equal success, or at least future success. Blair + Big Intellect = Blair Gets Laid. Good formula, buddy. As I said before, it works a lot of the time.

So now he had this string of female study-buddies. But this was the first time school didn't come all that easy. Oh, the actual academics he slicked through great. The few criminology courses they made him take he passed like sleeping would have been harder. However, the civil service part is not as easy as it looks. It is deceptively hard. The whole thing is not just looking at your intellect but your character and how good a judge of character you are. I know a lot of fine people who are incredibly intelligent and very nice law abiding citizens that I know for a fact couldn't pass the civil service exam if they tried. It took Blair a bit of time to completely wrap his 'big intellect' about the civil service component of the academy.

The physical training wasn't too bad on him. He's a healthy boy. He survived. Self-defense bruised not only his tailbone but also his ego to the point that he begged me to help him with it. Apparently some of the girls were outstripping him in this course work. I did remind him that a woman's center of gravity works to her advantage in self-defense and, psychologically, the women feel that they have to excel in this particular area to feel equal to their male counterparts. But he reminded me that no guy likes to get his ass kicked by a girl, regardless of how chauvinistic the attitude sounded. So I helped him.

We thought there would have been more trouble over the dissertation shit, but we followed Simon's advice and waited six months before Blair enrolled in the academy. Simon was right, and Blair wasn't surprised. I sure as hell was. In six months' time, our little newsworthy drama was not even the tiniest blip on the public radar screen anymore. People forget. They push crap that doesn't directly affect them right out with the speed of rising and falling gas prices. When Blair Sandburg walked onto the academy grounds all anyone saw was another recruit. It might have been different if the press had gotten wind of his fast tracking into Cascade PD, but, fortunately for us, there were just too many other, better, stories out there to keep them preoccupied. We slipped past without even causing a ripple in the flow of useless information and human-interest stories.

I got used to him coming home in that blue cadet uniform every day. But that was only for six months. Those six months flew. Next thing I knew I was throwing him a graduation party that was attended by H and Rafe and Joel and Megan and Simon and about a dozen young, pretty and personable new rookie cops, Blair's study buddies. More like his harem. But it was great fun, and I started talking with one of the girls. Her name is Mary Beth. She's this tall brunette with a brilliant smile, and if I didn't know any better I'd think she'd singled me out of the pack and was moving in for the kill.

Naturally the subject turned to Blair. After all, he's my best friend and my roommate. If I was going to let this beautiful young huntress corner me into a dinner date, I wanted to know how important he was to her.

"Blair's sweet," she said. "Really smart too…and fun. He actually made studying fun. Never had that happen before in twelve years of public school and five years of college." She nodded her head and looked fondly over at Blair, who was laughing, surrounded by a bevy of women…and Rafe and Brown. "He's a great guy. A girl feels safe around him."

*A girl feels safe around him. * Words reserved for dithering old men, computer nerds, and homosexuals. Well, this girl was up for grabs then. I let her talk me into dinner. It went okay. I'll be seeing her again two weeks from now.

Now here we are. Blair took the news well that he would have to work a required four months as a patrol officer before he could take the detectives' exam. He collected his new uniform and later made a determined noise in the back of his throat at Simon, who reassured him that this would be relatively easy compared to the shit he had already been through as my ride-along.

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Next section: Day one: Polyester, a Ford Crown Victoria, and Good-n-Plenties