The Order Of Things
by Fabella

Some things just happen in an order you can’t see at the time.

Blair gives up one dream, and is handed another. Jim gets shot, Blair helps him change the bandages daily. They carefully avoid talking about the future. Blair leaves one school to enroll in another, and does well despite the other cops-to-be hassling him. Jim loses a couple more hairs. He finds them on the floor of the shower, and picks them out of the drain so that the water can pass through. Blair loses a lot more than a couple, and shows up one day with his hair cut to his chin, saying something about sacrifices for the greater good. It’s bullshit, like always. Jim meets a woman with wildly curly hair, dates her once, then never sees her again.

You look in the mirror one day, and you have a few more gray hairs, and you kind of forget what it was like when they weren’t there. They kind of grow on you.

Blair becomes a rookie, and meets another rookie. He meets a lot of other rookies, actually, but there’s one in particular he likes, a woman. She’s real pretty, with long, yellow hair, but she’s got quite a mouth on her. Jim watches a lot of television, shows he watched as a kid, cuts his hair close to his head, and takes the clock down off the wall. Blair talks about love obsessively, then happens to fall head first into it, and one day, calls Jim, tells him he’s in Las Vegas, tells him to stay on the phone because he wants Jim there while he gets married. Her name is Edith, and Jim decides he doesn’t like All in the Family any longer. He stops watching so much television.

Time is one of those things that no one can stop, and it seems to have an agenda all its own.

Blair and Edith get a house. A very small house, that needs to be fixed up, that has a porch wrapped all the way around it and looks very close to falling off. Jim buys too much paint from the hardware shop, but only two paint brushes, and he and Blair spend two weekends in the sun, painting Blair’s house yellow. Edith really likes yellow, and Jim’s thumbs stay stained with it until they have to paint again. Inside, this time, a nursery. Blair falls in love again, this time with a baby girl named Lily, with big eyes just like her father. Jim thinks he might be in love as well, and buys her a huge stuffed dog that she won’t be able to play with for years. Edith falls in love too, but Jim never meets the guy she leaves Blair for.

It’s funny, you know, the way things always come back to the beginning.

Blair shows up at Jim’s door, kind of expected even though they hadn’t planned it. He asks Jim if he minds... Jim says no, and asks after Lily. Blair puts his bags in his old room, and stands in the doorway for a while, talking about money and visitation and how mad he is that he’s going to be a weekend daddy even though Edith was the one that messed up. Jim cooks dinner, and they talk about work, and their latest case, and then they’re quiet, and Jim turns on the television. He wonders what it would be like to be a weekend daddy. Blair falls asleep beside him, drooling a little. Jim is kind of guiltily okay with it when Blair’s head falls on his shoulder, and he sighs Jim’s name in his sleep.

Life just has a way of working out like it’s meant to.

Fin

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