House Rules, how they help and hinder positive social behaviours.
The Sentinel belongs to Pet Fly and UPN as far as I believe. Blair and Jim belong to each other, but don't know it yet. Cascade has the highest rate of explosive arson in America. All is well.
Blair wiggled awkwardly in the tuxedo. It was a little too small in places, suggesting that merely replacing his breakfast with a blender chock full of nourishing algae wasn't having the effect on his figure he really wanted. But the algae was nourishing. That was the idea. His hair seemed to thank him for it, anyway. And that was his other issue with the case; his hair. The guy had wanted it off, chopped, deprived of its rightful place. Blair had had none of it. So the compromise was that he had the thing back in an almost painfully tight ponytail and he didn't even want to think about the amount of gel in his hair, or the potentially nasty chemicals the gloop probably contained.
The fact he'd never Sentinel-tested hair gels and sprays wasn't as big an issue as it probably would have been if Jim wasn't on the other side of the casino, standing at a door and looking dangerous. It wasn't as if he used them, well, he used some stuff Naomi had bought him, but it was all organic and had recognisable ingredients. The company had some policy on the lines of don't put anything on your body that you wouldn't put in it.
And his suit would get tighter if he didn't stop thinking those kind of thoughts, the ones he wasn't meant to be having. More to the point not about his best friend and cop partner. More to the point not about his best friend and cop partner in public. In his room, back at the loft would be dangerous only for one not versed in the ways of the Sentinel. He'd accidentally washed the futon. The sort of accidentally you do on purpose. The sort of accidentally you do on purpose with some very strong floral scented detergent, which despite its gut churning horribleness has been established as unlikely to do any actual damage to Sentinel senses.
Blair Sandburg knew all about scent marking. He was an anthropologist. It wasn't as if he was Jim's spare extra brain all the time, so he'd study while the futon got a little top-up in the washer. And then he'd wash everything else he could find in the regular all-natural detergent, partly because trained observers tend to pick up on washer use and partly to make sure it didn't smell too bad should Jim get suspicious.
More pressing than his futon, however, was his suit. Not that he had any intention of pressing any kind of suit with Jim. It would be horrible, disastrous and would end horribly. What Blair didn't expect was for Jim to be the answer to his woes. What you eat… loathe as Blair was to admit it, there were many ways in which Jim was simply unattractive and smeared with lard and Wonderburgers was one of them.
Now he just had to pay attention to the head croupier as he briefed him on his temporary new job. He hoped Jim would find the jewel-thief soon, the costume was killing him.
And that was saying nothing for the house conduct rules. They were, in Blair's opinion a recreation of forms of outmoded servile behaviour intended to flatter the customer's personal vanity into spending more money. Something about it seemed strangely perverse to the level of a Wonderburger fetish, which thankfully, Jim didn't seem to have.
It would have been too much to come into the Loft after TA-ing his ass off to find Jim lounging with all his joints un-Jim-like and loose and reading a copy of Wonderburgerboy. Looking, not reading. Jim would be looking at the centrefold, holding the baps to her breasts as the oil trickled down the space between them.
And that wasn't sick enough without him realising that something was hot about it. It's just Blair couldn't tell what. Was it that at least it would prove that Jim had some human needs, and that Blair's suspicions about Caroline and separate beds were a desperate attempt to queer Jim and make what he felt less perverse? Blair didn't know. He was pretty sure that it wasn't the centrefold, even if he liked breasts more than a little, and without the burger connotations, as a centrefold, it would be vaguely hot. In a two dimensional kind of way.
That was the problem, two dimensional. It's not as if he didn't try. Suddenly the pretty pictures did nothing for Blair, who'd learnt from close observation of the Sentinel that the best way to hide things (such as a dog-eared copy of Babes Busting Out) from the Sentinel was to put it away tidily. In a box. Under more tidy and heavy things.
And he was so trying to keep those thoughts in that box too. He hadn't opened it for weeks. None of it was doing it for him, even the one with buff looking guys in uniforms that weren't quite right and sure as hell weren't worn in the regulation manner. He'd rather hoped that one would. Do it, he means. Tell him he's just developed a thing for crypto-military tough guys, who could bend his neo-hippie ass over anything they liked and…
…okay, that was too much detail right now. Back to Jim and lard, before the head croupier, whom Blair already hates more than the guy who did the tutoring in the commune in Idaho (don't ask), notices the new tight spots and that he hasn't been listening.
And then he sees it, the flash; and he knows Jim saw it too. As an another detective in another time with another chronicler would say "the game is afoot" and so are they, chasing through the crowd, with Blair slightly behind already and hoping that Jim doesn't look too closely at the diamonds.