Britannia, NY

Summer was ending.

It had been a long summer, but a quiet one. Jim had been a wonder, giving her space, but not too much space, and they'd settled into something like quiet normalcy. Or the Britannia equivalent anyway.

She would be lying if she didn't confess a small part of her was still waiting for Agravain to come and smash it all to bits. But she ignored that worry as best she could, as often as she could.

She'd even told her mother she was seeing someone, which she hadn't bothered to do in years, which she supposed meant she was somewhat serious about him.

The dreams, though, were still bad. A lot of the more mundane ones had faded, and the fleeting happy ones were all but gone. Now it was shouting and abuse and him a corpse in Camelot with it being the first time she'd seen him in more than a year.

If she could be rid of them, she would be. Instead, she worked. It had gotten to the point where she was working nearly every minute she wasn't with Jim. She said she was extending the store hours to get the tourist season, now that people were coming up for the leaves and the apples. But that wasn't all of it, and Jim, at least would be able to see. She and Ivy hadn't spoken in more than passing in weeks, and no one else probably knew her well enough to see, but she was beginning to fray, a little.

She made a small arrangement with some leftovers to take over to Jim's. It'd look nice in the window.

Clearly it has to be done at some point. For all their sakes, Mike waits until Gary has gone out to do the Saturday grocery shopping. Then he has a small drink to quiet his nerves, and dials Jim's number.

School is out for the summer, of course, but in a town as small as Britannia is hard not to know where everybody lives. Thus it provides no trouble at all for Jim to show up on Daniel's front porch with Sheila on her lead and a grocery bag in his free hand, and lean on the doorbell.

After ringing up Gary's purchase, Laurel closes the shop early. She's really not in any state to be running it, even if she's calmer now.

This is the second time talking to Gary has opened something in her mind, but this time, it won't shut. Things feel weirdly out of focus, and at first she suspects she just needs to lie down for a bit.

But it turns out she's too restless for that. And she really doesn't want to fall asleep, just at the moment.

So, an hour or so later, she turns up at Jim's, unannounced, which isn't like her at all. There's a bit of a sour taste in her mouth, but she tries to make herself calm as she knocks.

It's a really good day--he hasn't had nightmares in a week, he's managing to keep things cool with Mike (it involves effort, certainly, but he's making that effort, and he's been able to be friendly but not more than that for quite some time), and his intermittent dates with Laurel have been going really well.

So when school lets out for the afternoon he grabs his things, wraps Sheila's lead around his hand, and is out the door almost as quickly as the kids, heading back towards Laurel's shop.

For the past two days, the music students at Britannia High School have been left in the hands of a substitute-- much to their delight, Daniel is sure. He's not just playing truant, which he has admittedly been known to do. But in this case, avoiding sleep as much as possible for God knows how long does have a tendency to catch up with a person.

It's the dreams, of course. Since they've stopped being fun and a bit exciting, he's stopped mentioning them to anyone. He's reconsidering this strategy, now. Now, that is, that the first thing he does once he feels alive enough to venture outside is to immediately head to Habitat to begin caffeinating himself in preparation for mission: avoid sleep. Which is probably less than healthy, but there he is that afternoon, drinking one of those improbably large cups of coffee, a little paler than usual, the childhood Scots accent coming out stronger when he speaks because he's too tired to hide it.

Who does one go to, he wonders, if one wishes to complain about crazy dreams? He'd hardly know how to begin such a conversation, anyway; a lifetime's practice has made him perhaps too good at talking a great deal without saying anything at all.

Jim is trying to put things back together after these last few months, and while his relationship with Mike is crashing down, at least the one with Laurel hasn't completely fallen apart yet. And he's trying very hard to do things right.

Which is the short explanation for why he shows up at her shop at closing time, holding a small bouquet of flowers--which makes him feel like an idiot, honestly, but there you are--Sheila at home, because he feels steady enough to do this, and he wants to look normal, like any other worthy man. He feels guilty about leaving her, but this is important.

He's also wearing his nicest suit jacket and the blue silk tie that he got at Nathan's urging. He wishes he didn't feel so nervous about this; it would be nice to be suave.

It's been a while since anything interesting happened to Jim. He's been living solitary, and very quiet, doing his teaching as usual (few As, as always, are ever awarded in his class). Sheila is comfortable with the town, and he's getting more comfortable with her, hardly noticing now that she comes with him, hovering under his hand.

That changes when he starts to dream again. He's thrown off-balance by it, by the feeling that he's hovering between two worlds and the battle in the heat of summer, his body fallen among a hundred other fallen bodies, his blood leaking out under the burnished sun.

Suddenly he's taking more aspirin than he should, and skipping his meds without noticing it. The real evidence of a problem comes Friday afternoon, when his head is splitting and the smell of blood is dizzying, and he lets the class out twenty minutes early, sitting in the classroom with his face in his hands until he can regain his composure.

His walk is almost staggering as he goes to his office to put his things away and start the trip home. Sheila whines unhappily at his side.

The weekend away in the city did him good; he took the train down on Friday afternoon and spent Saturday and Sunday with friends and their daughter, who loved Sheila and fussed over her enough to last a few weeks at least (she smells a little bit like teenager-perfume). The next week was uneventful, and he followed his usual routine of home to school to home again, working studiously and not doing much in the way of getting out.

But now it's Friday again and there's still some unfinished business to take care of, so once school lets out around three he and Sheila make the easy, if cold, walk down to the bakery. His hand is clasped tight on her lead, and his quiet blue eyes are determined.

For the last two weeks Jim has been on leave from his job, leaving the students newly returned to school with a substitute teacher. Canine Companions has a fourteen-day training period where prospective dog owners take an obedience course with their service dogs and get to know them. It's over now, but the upshot is he's home with a black lab that has to wear one of those half-jackets with SERVICE ANIMAL printed on it in big black letters, and she knows when he's feeling sick or strained, can sense even the small changes in his gait when there's pain in his legs.

And Nathan's managed to coax him out on a walk (Sheila does need to be walked) to the bakery. He grips the leash fiercely, still unused to it, but he's getting the idea.

In general he's content these days. He gave up cigarettes for a pipe, he doesn't expect Amanda to call, he pushes away all thoughts of Mike as anything more than a friend. It's just that somehow he still feels unfulfilled; his body still feels emptied out and he's always hungry but never for food. In this regard Sheila is more helpful than for his CP. She's undemanding and solid under his hands, and when she's out of her harness she likes to be scratched and petted. (He wishes this had come to him when he was still a boy, uncertain of himself and shaking, aware of the disappointed eyes of his parents.)

But the walk, at least, is pleasant. He draws his coat a little tighter against the wind, and she looks back over her shoulder at him for a moment.

Jim has definitely started smoking again, the upshot being that he hasn't touched his whiskey, or any kind of alcohol, as per the doctor's orders.

Christmas passed uneventfully, as did New Year's Eve--he got a call from Amanda wishing him a happy new year, and just as he was about to hang up Laurie Jean came on the line and said she was grateful to him for staying out of their lives, and not trying to turn Amanda against her or her new husband; and Jim said it was nothing he'd ever consider, and then the conversation was over.

New Year's day finds him up early in the morning, reading on his couch with another cigarette. He has a quilt over his legs and he's on the verge of dozing off again; luckily Nathan still has his own set of keys.

( I want something/That's purer than the water/Like we were/It's not there now/In eloquence and anger/Are all we have/Like Saturn's rings/An icy loop around me/Too hard to hold/Lash out first/At all the things we don't like/Or understand/And it's beginning to get to me/That I know more of the stars and sea/Than I do of what's in your head/Barely touching in our cold bed/Are you beginning to get get my point/That all this fighting with aching joints/It's doing nothing but tire us out/No one knows what this fight's about )

Sagramore doesn't get out much, mostly because Jim does a good job of squashing him down and keeping him out of his life. But the recent events with Nathan and the fact that Jim's been exhausted lately have his guard down, and Sagramore is the one who woke up this morning and spent half an hour working out modern plumbing, got his body dressed and headed out into town.

It's Sagramore, and for some people it might be obvious in the way he carries himself, the way his smile is relaxed and easy and his movement has a grace about it that Jim never has, a beautiful deer-like grace. He's exploring the shops that he hasn't ever been in, grinning freely at the lovely and unlovely alike, using the full extent of his charm to make everyone feel like the most special person in the world.

( never seems to die / the trail's spent with fear / not enough living on the outside )

A few hours after the disastrous conversation with Nathan, Jim manages to rouse himself enough to get out of his chair and dial Mike's number, his hands shaking considerably. He's already going into a slight withdrawal from his medication, and mixing it with alcohol wasn't the best idea anyway.

He waits and listens to the rings, sinking back into the chair because his knees don't seem to want to work.

( Oh my God how you make it hard/Not to pick the apple/Pick the apple/And Lord I long to give it back./And I was on shaky land/Lost and unsure I opened my hand/And she held it like sinking sand/But all, all, all of my light is for you/And home, home's anywhere you are too/So take this one fallen man on his knees/Saying please/Forgive me )

Jim is in full-blown bad-decision-making mode right now, and, as such, he's hanging out at the local bar. He's not drinking, true, he's just fiddling with a glass of some kind of cola (possibly Coke; he doesn't like plain tonic), but that doesn't mean he isn't kind of hoping to get picked up, or at least come on to, and the fact that his shaking is all but disappeared is, in his opinion, going to help with that particular cause.

He's even left his cane at the house. Right now he just wants to escape from all the people he knows, all these damned conflicts he can't work out, and take refuge in someone else's warmth, safety in anonymity.

( Near to you, I am healing/But it's taking so long/'Cause though he's gone/And you are wonderful/It's hard to move on/Yet, I'm better near to you./You and I have something different/And I'm enjoying it cautiously/I'm battle scarred, I am working oh so hard/To get back to who I used to be/He's disappearing/Fading subtly/I'm so close to being yours/Won't you stay with me/Please )

Life has not been spectacular for Jim lately, and he is feeling it noticeably. Although the new medicine is working wonders for his spasticity, it makes him feel tired and light-headed, and his heart races faster than usual. But his cane is really only for the good feeling it makes in his hand, a kind of magic feather that he prefers over suspicious little capsules.

Also, the last argument with Nathan has unsettled him more than he thought it would. Part of him wants to argue that it doesn't mean anything, but Nathan's insistence that he doesn't know him, and his own lingering doubts and insecurities, aren't helping him put it aside.

He hangs in Mike's door in anticipation of their Friday-afternoon coffee outing looking rather inconsolable, although he doesn't realise it.

The novel isn't going well. A week or two ago, sure, his agent had been ecstatic and he'd been all set to redefine the genre and make his millions and build a goddamned castle right here with the money...

… and then a week or two had gone, and he'd not sat down and put pen to paper or finger to keyboard. Probably because he'd been too busy stalking Lexi...

… and then it's today and said agent is hounding him for the first chapter and all he's got thus far is a sonnet about some guy in red armour and it doesn't even rhyme properly.

Shit.

Normally the best way to break writer's block is to get drunk and end up tangled up in the nearest amenable warm body, but knowing his luck they'd turn out to be Malehaut or Guinevere or something and he'd be even more screwed than he is now, and he doesn't need a new obsession (not, he thinks, that anything would measure up to Lexi-Lance-whoever, but he's not quite naïve enough to believe that finding her's undone the habits of this lifetime in one magic moment). Instead he's trying this 'going for a walk and clearing your head' thing, kicking his way through the first casualties of autumn – no, wait, they call it Fall here, right? Crazy damn yanks – like a little kid in wellies and a souwester except that he's a grown man in faded red knock-off Converse and a Prose before Hos t-shirt. The words probably aren't hiding under the fallen leaves, but they look pretty as they tumble around.