Blair stood by the front door, so shocked that he couldn't get his legs to move well enough to carry him to the couch. He was aware of time only as a distant concept, at least until the lock rattled as Jim worked his key from the outside. The door swung open, and Blair continued to stand staring at the phone and the wall and the electric bill propped up behind the phone. They were shapes, squares and rectangles, but Blair somehow couldn't make sense out of them.

"Chief?" Jim's voice sounded worried, and Blair wondered how Jim could know within one second of getting home that Blair's life had managed to somehow turn itself upside down once again. Blair didn't answer.

"Chief, you okay?" Jim's voice was louder now, and Blair turned to face him. Blair opened his mouth to explain the impossible thing that had just suddenly become possible, but the words refused to form in his mouth.

"Blair, you're really worrying me now." Jim's hands closed over Blair's shoulders, and Blair began to slowly smile.

"Oh, man," Blair managed after a second.

"Come on now, Chief. I need a little more to work with than that. Is that an 'oh man, someone is out to kill me' or an 'oh man, I just won the lottery'?"

"Man," Blair whispered.

"I'm looking for more words here, Chief, not fewer." Blair felt strong hands guide him toward the couch, and he followed along without protest.

"You're not going to believe it. Oh man, no fucking *way* are you going to believe it."

"Chief, if you don't tell me what's going on, I can't believe it. What's more, you're frustrating me enough to consider beating a few facts out of you." Blair just smiled wider at Jim's threat.

"They want to hire me," Blair said in a shocked voice. If he hadn't been looking at Jim, and he never would have seen the moment of pure pain that crossed Jim's face, but the moment he saw that expression, Blair could have kicked himself. "Whoa there, no jumping to conclusions!" Blair blurted, but Jim held up a hand to keep Blair from saying any more.

"If someone's offering you some big chance, you need to take it. You turned down your own department once, and if you do it again you can't expect fate to keep giving you new chances."

"Man, you are the world's biggest goober. No one's offering a different job. That was the University of Phoenix on the phone. They want me to teach at their new online program. Me. Teaching again." Blair stopped as his brain once again stuttered to a halt—shock making him temporarily incapable of forming complete thoughts or sentences.

"Teaching?" Jim seemed just as shocked as Blair had been when he picked up the phone. In fact, Blair had thought it was a practical joke at first. However both the program and the offer had been legit.

"Yeah, isn't that cool? They want me to teach Criminal Culture and Working with Marginalized Populations. The whole program is online, so I could do all of my grading and paperwork right on my laptop."

"They don't," Jim stopped in the middle of the sentence, but Blair could hear the rest just as clearly as if Jim had said the words.

"Man, that's the perfect part. I talked to the chancellor for over an hour about the diss and the press conference and my lack of academic credentials. The man told me it was a good thing that I was a cop because I didn't understand how criminals worked. He said if I was actually a fraud, I would've taken the $3 million. Said that the very fact that I gave it back proved that I was just somebody who got caught in the middle of other people's ambitions. He wants to hire me, Jim." Blair realized that he was sitting on the couch only when he turned to face his partner. "They really want to hire me."

"Don't sound so surprised, Junior. You have some pretty unique credentials. How many trained anthropologists ever get a chance to see inside police culture and criminal culture as much as you have?" Something in Jim's words set off alarm bells in Blair's head.

"That's true," he said slowly. "A trained anthropologist inside police culture, huh?" Blair watched as just the edges of Jim's ears turned pink. "Oh man, if you want to avoid torture, start talking."

"What?" Jim demanded as he scooted a couple of inches farther away on the couch and crossed his arms over his chest. Blair didn't answer but simply glared.

"Okay, Simon might have mentioned to me that he and Roth had recommended you for the position," Jim admitted. "They wanted to know whether this would be something you wanted or whether this would be rubbing salt into an open wound. For some reason they seem to think that I understand you.

I told them that I had no fucking clue what made you tick, but that I was fairly sure that the idea of holding down two jobs and trying to live on caffeine and two hours' sleep a night would make you happy." Jim shrugged dismissively and then stood up as he headed to the small table next to the door. He dropped the keys from his hand into the basket.

"Jim, have I mentioned lately that I love you?"

"Not lately, no." The answer took Blair aback for a minute, but then he realized that even if they didn't say the words, it was still there.

"I do, you know."

"Yeah, yeah. Don't go mushy on me, Chief." And with those words Jim retreated to the bathroom.

"No problem, Chief. New case?" Jim came over and looked over Blair's shoulder.

"I wish. These psych papers are driving me nuts. The students don't know the difference between Jung and Adler, and you don't even want to know some of their theories on crime and poverty. If these guys don't get over their chauvinistic attitudes, they're going to do more harm than good no matter what part of law enforcement they go into."

"Well, I know you'll whip them into shape." Jim's strong fingers started rubbing along his neck, and Blair could feel the tension draining from his body.

"But it was my turn to cook," Blair said guiltily.

"It's worth it to see you back to the same bouncing, hyper, overcommitted goof I fell for," Jim assured him.

"Hey, I resemble that remark," Blair swatted at Jim's thigh.

"Yeah, well, I'll call for Chinese."

"Oh, hey, order me some sweet and sour chicken," Blair called as he went back to a paper on the psychology of gangs.

"No problem. After all, it's your night, so you're paying."

"Whatever," Blair said absent-mindedly as typed his response to the paper in a second e-mail window. He was so tired of his students using post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacies. Next semester he was definitely going to send out an e-mail on logical argumentation.

"What are you yelling about?" Blair asked as he ran his fingers through his curls and headed for the coffeepot.

"Just once, would it kill you to pick up your own damn stuff?" Jim snarled, and Blair stopped by the kitchen table. Jim was busily mopping up coffee with paper towels, at least he was mopping up the coffee that hadn't soaked into the papers and files stacked on the table.

"Oh man," Blair breathed softly as he looked at the mess.

"If you'd pick up after yourself, this wouldn't happen," Jim said as he threw the coffee soaked paper towel down on top of what used to be Blair's case file for the Sisson rape. Blair thanked god that he followed policy obsessively, meaning that all his personal files were photocopies with the originals safely stored at the station. Of course, that meant that he would have to photocopy and highlight and annotate another set of files. Blair winced.

"Oh boy," Blair said both at the sight in front of him and the idea of spending hours redoing all his lost work.

"Well, if you wouldn't leave your crap sitting around on every available surface, maybe this wouldn't happen." Jim stormed back into the kitchen and slammed the mug down on the counter hard enough that Blair flinched and half-expected the thing to shatter.

"It's not as if—"

"It shouldn't have happened at all," Jim said in a low, deep voice that practically trembled with frustration and anger. Blair also suspected Jim had a bit of guilt in there since that was the one emotion guaranteed to send Jim off into a tight-lipped rage. Blair bit his lip in indecision. Usually his relationships fell apart before they got into the daily aggravations stage, so he wasn't entirely sure about how to handle this.

"I'll get this cleaned up," Blair offered as he headed for the cupboard with the trash bags. He would have to take the files to work until they dried out and he could shred them, but he didn't think Jim would want to have the smell of drying coffee and wet ink in the loft.

"Leave it. I'll get it after my shower," Jim snarled.

"It's okay I'll just—"

"Leave it, Sandburg. You didn't get in 'til after three, and you're not the one who spilled the damn coffee." Jim hurried out of the kitchen, detouring around the far side of the table to avoid Blair.

Blair watched Jim disappear into the bathroom and slam the door. Nice. Well, Blair supposed they had to have fights over something. Blair decided that the best way to keep the peace was to take Jim at his word and go back to bed. Blair suspected he wasn't going to get much sleep.

Blair cursed out the walnut-colored laminate board as he turned it one way and then the other trying to figure out how to make the object in his hand look like the object in the drawing. Deciding it was futile, Blair put that board down and picked up a slightly longer plank and repeated the process. He was so engrossed that he didn't notice Jim until the man stood over him, blocking the light from the living room windows.

"Sandburg?" Jim asked in a wary tone of voice. Blair just wasn't sure whether the man was wary because of their morning fight or because of the disaster in his living room.

"Oh, hey. I can explain," Blair said quickly as he looked up into Jim's patented frustrated expression.

"This should be good."

"It's from Ikea," Blair explained with a wave toward the various boxes and faux wood planks and pieces of hardware strewn about the room like shrapnel from some home decorating war. "I thought it would be a little easier to put together than this," he admitted.

"Is this why you borrowed the truck at lunch?" Jim asked as he started stepping over pieces to look at the pictures on the fronts of the boxes.

"Um, yeah. It's called the home office organizer. It comes with file cabinets, work space, a mail organizer, vertical filing slots, the whole works," Blair said enthusiastically. He could just see the spare room with the small desk moved out and this whole unit in its place. Or at least he would be able to see it if he could get it put together.

"So is this because of this morning?" Jim asked as he moved a particularly long board in order to sit on the couch.

"Oh man, I totally didn't realize how I let my stuff collect all over the house," Blair said. When he'd gotten up the second time, he had looked around the loft and realized that Jim had been right about one thing: he had started leaving his stuff absolutely everywhere. In the past, Jim had started yelling when the clutter reached a certain point, and Blair had cleaned it. This time, Jim hadn't yelled and Blair hadn't cleaned.

"This is your home, you shouldn't have to listen to me yell about how you live in your own home," Jim sighed.

"This is your home too, and you shouldn't have to put up with my shit if it frustrates you," Blair quickly pointed out. "I'm just not good at noticing that I'm spreading, so here's the deal. When I leave my shit all over, you yell and I'll put it way in my brand new home office organizer."

"Just like old times?" Jim asked.

"Oh hell yeah. Your yelling is not exactly new."

"I—" Jim stopped after the one word, obviously trying to come to some decision. Blair waited as Jim struggled with some internal demon that Blair didn't even understand. "What piece are you looking for?" Jim finally asked.

"C-13."

Jim looked around the room, getting up so he could circle a bit before picking up a long skinny board from near the front door and handing it over.

"Finally!" Blair exclaimed as he compared the piece in his hand to the picture in the directions. "Now we need to attach this to B-1." Blair started looking at the pieces near the couch while Jim hung up his jacket before looking at the pieces laid out near the kitchen table.

Jim quickly spotted the missing piece, and handed it over.

"Thanks man." Blair smiled as he took the piece.

"What's the next piece on the list? I want the living room turned back into a living room before we go to bed."

"B-3."

"You start putting it together and I'll get these pieces in some sort of order. We'll get this up in no time," Jim promised.

"Good to have you home," Blair said, and Jim stopped for a moment, his hand reaching for a thin strip of laminate. Then Jim picked up the wood and Blair started using bolt T8 to attach C-13 to B-1.