Bought

William Ellison closed the last folder quietly. He sat in the lowered light that suffused his home office, his hands lingering on the cheap, pressed paper cover of the last report. It was all a lot to take in. Most of it in direct contradiction to what he'd been taught all of his life. He hated the implications. Sentinels, the self-appointed protectors of Guides around the world, were responsible for the most dire offenses against them. Sentinels were going to drive Guides to extinction. It was almost too horrific to believe.



He reached over and flicked his lamp off, plunging the room into greater darkness. Fitting. The leather of his chair creaked under him as he shifted his weight. He was close to wishing he had never heard of Dr. Blair Sandburg. And yet...he was also caught in the Guide's web. He could not go for an hour without thinking of the smaller male. The Guide. The man. The scientist he had been. Still was.



William's head dropped back to rest against the elevated back of his desk chair. This whole thing...all of it...it was a nightmare. He was standing on the brink of annihilation, had been for years, decades, only now he could see it, courtesy of Dr. Miller.



Dr. Miller who had been fighting her own silent, desperate battle to stop the fall of Sentinel, Guide and Mundane. With only the few tools available to her. One Sentinel/Guide bond at a time. There was no way she could win; it wasn't enough, too little too late. But she was trying. He would see she was not stopped. But...it wasn't sufficient. He had to do more, a lot more. He had to come up with a plan of how to proceed. His headache grew.



He'd read for hours every day for more than a week, ignoring or delegating out his other duties. His staff had tiptoed around him, terrified of disturbing him, most never recalling a time he'd dedicated this much energy to one thing alone. But he had to, if he was going to bring himself up to speed on this subject. If he was going to know whether it was something he should believe.



He had to read all the reports he could lay his hands on. An appalling number of reports and secret research. Most disturbingly, he'd read the work of Dr. Blair Jacob Sandburg. Raised by a single counter-culture mother. Sent to university at fifteen years. A boy of jaw dropping intellect. His son's Guide. His son's brilliant Guide. Brilliant not only from the standpoint of what most Guides were capable of, but brilliant on any stage. William Ellison had needed the help of several PhD consultants to understand the impact of many of Blair's conclusions.



None of the specialists had disputed, or voiced the slightest doubt in the truth of the Guide's carefully thought out and occasionally revolutionary positions. Those who were not familiar with his work already, demanded more of his writings. They had been spellbound. William sent them what he had. Putting off telling the voracious, atypically excited scientists why there wasn't more of it. Why there might never be.



He now had to find a way to deal with the realization that his conception of Guides as a whole was not the only one that made sense. In fact his vision of what Guides were, why they existed, was fatally flawed. As was the position of nearly every Sentinel in his immediate sphere of contact. Steven, his younger son, came closest to living the life that supported Blair's depiction of what was holistically healthy for a Sentinel's senses. And he, William Ellison, had always decried his son's ridiculous choices.



Blair wrote very little about Guides. Which considering the quality of work he put out on Sentinels was a shame. William had always been more interested in Guides. But for whatever reason, Blair had put all his efforts into Sentinel Studies.



There were others who were authorities on Sentinel Studies also not spouting mainstream ideas and theories. Even as the leader of Cascade's Sentinels, William had not had an easy time getting access to the tightly controlled and suppressed works. Research that was not for public consumption, going against current popular thought. Research that showed Guides were not always intellectually inferior, not only partially human, an interim species. Research that proved conclusively that training and breeding were at least partly to blame for the decreased mental acuity that did exist. Guides were being bred into stupidity.



William could hardly stand to look over the volumes of material on Guide breeding and the prevalence of hormonal treatments for the ever-decreasing segment of fertile Guides who ended up in breeding farms. His hands shook when he turned the pages, feeling soiled by the bald descriptions of what happened to Guides during breeding. This, he had always thought wrong. There were far better ways to breed Guides. Far more humane ways.



It was bad enough to understand that they were being altered by a campaign that preferentially took female dominated Guides and gave them priority in every way, including breeding, research, and medical treatments. All seeming to have the goal of changing the natural state of Guides from a wide swathe of female-male dominated varieties, to the strongly preferred female ones, who were incapable of functioning in male's roles at all.



And thus, being mostly female, appearing all female except to the closest examination, they would not offend the male Sentinels with an unexpected and unwelcome desire to penetrate, or an erection to spoil the mood. William felt his stomach twitch, again, less violently, but it was still there to overcome. He on one hand could not remember ever being as attracted to a Guide as he was to Blair. On the other hand...he knew that Blair was not a female-dominant Guide. Under his robes he was closer to being visually male than any Guide William had seen. And William could not stop thinking about that.



He couldn't stop wondering, doubting...himself. Maybe that was why he had such an easy time resisting the urge to couple with his own Guide. Maybe he wasn't attracted to her, because she was on the extreme end of female-dominant Guides. Perhaps...he was attracted to males and to male dominant Guides in particular. Perhaps it wasn't a question of Spirituality at all. He pushed that very painful train of possibilities away. He couldn't think of that, not while there were more important things to confront. Time was short. He had to do something. But what?



Sentinels were making Guides over into versions they'd been trained to prefer. And the methods were sometimes brutal. Castration and other surgical alterations were widely in use. Medications without regard to the side effects. Battling against nature.



Blair was one of a soon to be eliminated group. The male-dominant Guide. Only undetected Guides running free had kept that subset of Guides from being eradicated before now. William also wasn't ignorant enough to miss the precipitous drop off in Guide fertility that accompanied increasingly harsh measures directed at eliminating the male Guides. More and more, breeding farms turned to Mundane males to impregnate their Guides. And the number of attempts to impregnate Guides had gone from 3-4 matings in the 19th century records, to ten to fifteen cycles now. Soon Guides wouldn't be capable of carrying...except by sheer, dumb luck, and rarely at that.



Dr. Miller was right. William scrubbed his forehead. The problem was how to disseminate the information. Where to start? How to start? How not to lose his power to the fundamentalists of whom he'd been an enthusiastic member just one week past? They would not stay silent if he voiced his radical new position. He shook his head. It would have to be both forceful and yet gently done. With all the finesse and power he possessed. And he hadn't any idea how to get it started. He had never been called a rebel, not in his entire sixty some years. Now he was going to rebel. And it wasn't going to be easy, nor pretty.



Fiddling with the foot high stack of files. More than half were Blair's work on Sentinels. He drew in a deep breath. Then he stood. It was time to go and see his inspiration. The man who had made his change in thought and position possible. He wanted, needed to see Blair and the sweet smelling, sense focusing infants. The purity of the infants...the way they focused him...William needed it if he was to prepare himself for the upcoming battle..



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Blair spent the day as he had every day for a week, tending to his babies. He held them all; his Sentinels had surrendered the couch to him during most of the day, cuddling the three tiny infants to his body. He nursed them, blissfully reveling in the sensation of feeding them, of having them close to his body. He became less circumspect with his veil and robes. It was just not important to him now. The Sentinels, Jim and Brian became secondary. His babies primary.



Rafe and Ellison wisely made no mention of Blair's new habits. Never insisting he veil himself or replace the second or third layers of his robes that he'd abandoned. The layers made it too difficult to nurse. So, they hung in the downstairs room, unused. Even the new, beautifully embroidered robes that William had offered as gifts celebrating the infants' birth.



Jim and Brian were gradually permitted to handle the babies more often, always under their Guide's watchful eye. They took advantage of the leave granted to Sentinels over Guide related matters and remained home much of the time, only working half time on alternating days. Blair was never left completely alone. He accepted the vigil as his due, as his Sentinels protecting him and his newly born offspring. He was able to concentrate all of his vast attention on them without concern for his, or their security.



He was often petted and stroked affectionately himself, his Sentinels hovering as he nursed. Jim had gone so far as to wet one finger in Blair's generous amount of milk, and taste it, his brow wrinkling in concentration as he experienced all the flavors spreading across his sensitive tongue. Rafe had not dared. Blair didn't care one way or another. Apparently Ellison did. This morning he had touched Blair's milk again, and offered it to his Companion. Rafe had tasted the blue-white offering, his eyes closing, his face intent. The look on his face....he and Ellison disappeared up the stairs in short order. Blair listened with half an ear, then lost interest. They returned rather quickly, tugging at zippers, straightening clothes.



Blair turned back to his restless infants, gathering them around his body, curling around them like a mother cat. He preferred to sleep like this, his babies next to him. But it was one concession Ellison refused to grant him. The Sentinel would allow Blair to fall asleep with the babies, but once he was asleep, he and Rafe moved them to the safety of the large cradle they shared. The fear of his rolling over on them, or the tiny bodies falling off the low mattress was too much for the Sentinels to tolerate. Picking up on the level of their anxiety, Blair made no objections.



Today was no exception to the rule. He washed them, Rafe standing by with the new, softer towels that were reserved for the babies use. He watched as Blair bathed each in warm water, both Sentinels and Guide marveling over the miniature perfection of each one. Blair washed, Rafe patted and snuggled them dry. Jim wrapped them in soft robes, covering head and body but not faces, having learned the first day, that despite convention, Blair would not tolerate their faces draped, not even with the lightest of cloths.



Then it was time to sleep. Blair slept on the same schedule as his babies. Which meant much of the day. Nursing took great energy out of him. He rested when they rested and woke with them. He was surprisingly content with that. His mind no longer clamored for stimulus, for academic pursuits. He was perfectly happy looking after his children. He didn't question that his Sentinels were happy, too. As if the children were their own, and not children fathered by a nameless Mundane.



Peaceful, Blair checked on the three bundles tucked up next to his stomach and chest, seeing each was comfortable and safe. Reassured his eyes grew heavy, and he drifted off to sleep.



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Blair woke, his heart pounding, thudding, knowing there was something bad, something dangerous nearby. His head whipped around towards the cradle holding his babies. And saw the man bending over them.



It didn't matter that Rafe and Jim were in the room. It didn't matter that the man was just looking and not touching. Blair was not about to trust him. His skin crawled in memory.



He launched himself up off of the bed and into the man, aggressively knocking him back away from the cradle and onto his ass. The man's eyes stared at him in utter shock from where he was sprawled on the floor. Blair bared his teeth, growled, placing himself between the Vet and his babies.



Three stunned Sentinels stared back at him.