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October Snippets - Older (Numb3rs 1/1)
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julad and I raced to see who could finish a Numb3rs flashfic on the same prompt first. Here's hers: Julad's Numb3rs fic. I won by wordcount but lost because I was lame and failed to edit and post my thing. However, since this month I am purging my writings without bothering to edit or anything, here's what I did.
Since I lost I owe her 500 words, which I have also written but not edited of course. Maybe I will post that tomorrow.
Don had always known that the pipes in his father's house—well, Charlie's house—banged randomly, but somehow it had never seemed so loud when he was younger. He never remembered having trouble sleeping as a kid—he read comic books under the covers with a flashlight past lights out sometimes, but for the most part he worked hard, played hard, and hit the sack at the end of the day worn out. Charlie had always been the one whose mind couldn't turn off, who wandered around the house in the late in the evenings to ask their parents random questions about penguin migration or the growth patterns of strawberries.
It made Don feel old, even back in his childhood home again, it made him feel old to be staring up at the ceiling at three in the morning, taking pills off the bedside table and swallowing them dry, staring at the red numbers of the clock and wondering how long it would take for the pain to fade enough for him to finally drift asleep. He was old, he thought, and he made himself face the thought head on—he was forty, and he felt old.
The advantage of restricted duty was that Don could sleep in a little bit after a bad night, and when he finally got up at nine Charlie was already gone at school—or still gone, possibly, Charlie slept over at Larry's Victorian mansion periodically when they were working on something, and he'd been known to conk out on his desk in his office at the university.
Charlie had pretty much insisted that Don move in with him after he finally finished enough rehab to leave the assisted living center, and since that point he'd done a pretty good job of avoiding Don entirely. Dad was around, and Dad was great—sympathetic when Don needed that and encouraging when Don needed that—but Dad's consulting partnership had picked up a few more contracts then they could really even handle, and he'd been gone most of the summer, getting paid to sit back in executive leather chairs and share his opinion. Alan claimed that this was the job he'd been waiting for his entire life.
Don was happy for him—he only hoped that maybe he could find the job he'd been waiting for his entire life, except that he had the sneaking suspicion he'd already had it, hadn't appreciated it, and had now really lost it for good. They'd offered him a teaching position—not even at Quantico—he could stay in LA and do continuing education seminars, they'd said. Don had told Charlie he was excited about it, “You and me, we'll both be teachers, it'll be good,” but Don wasn't really excited about it. It was too far removed from the real meaning of what he wanted to do, and he knew it shouldn't be, he respected teachers—he respected Charlie—but when he did it himself it felt unimportant, felt like a time filler, and he felt a little guilty for feeling that way but he did.
After Don had been shot in the leg he'd been in the hospital for 19 days and Charlie hadn't once come to see him. “He's pretty shaken,” Alan had told Don sympathetically, “You know how he is,” and yeah, Don knew, Don knew maybe better than anybody, but it still seemed vaguely insulting to have even Larry and Amita bring him flowers with embarrassed smiles and half-excuses for his brother. All the anger that Don had felt when Charlie had done this during their mother's cancer treatment came back and doubled; he justified what he was feeling to himself by telling himself he was mad at Charlie for how he'd acted toward Mom, since that felt better than admitting he just wanted Charlie to visit. Why was Charlie so damn selfish, Don asked himself angrily, and yeah, Charlie had issues, okay, fine, but still, did he think no one else in the world had issues? Were Charlie's issues somehow more important than everyone else's because he had three times as much brain power to blow them twelve times out of proportion? Couldn't Charlie suck it up like everyone else in the world and do something for someone besides himself?
Couldn't Charlie pretend for five freaking minutes that everything was okay so that Don didn't always have to pretend it for both of them? Don was the one with the fucking bullet in his leg!
Colby and David came by once a week or so, but they'd missed the last week because of a big case, and Don knew that it was only a matter of time before once a week became once a motnh, and once a month became once a year at a Labor Day picnic. Alternately, Don was more attractive to women, now, somehow. He wasn't quite sure how that worked, or maybe it was just that now he'd been forcibly slowed down and had time to appreciate the women in return. Alan held out hopes of finally getting grandchildren, but Don didn't feel close to that. He was having a midlife crisis, maybe, feeling old and enjoying the attentions of beautiful women but not wanting the baggage of someone else around all the time, someone trying to talk about how he felt, how hard it must be with his injury, and admirable it was to be wounded in the line of duty.
He'd tried pretending everything was fine for three months, had tried reassuring Charlie that he was okay, he wasn't in a lot of pain, he was excited about teaching, he didn't regret what he'd done, and Charlie was still hiding out staring at the koi pond. Dad had strong-armed Charlie into a game of chess one evening and Don and Dad had won after only seven distracted turns, and then Charlie mumbled something about a math problem—as though it was ever anything else—and scurried out the back door.
Later, Don was ashamed that it had taken him three months to clue in to a case sitting right under his nose, but he'd admittedly been distracted at the time. Larry and Amita visited again and laughed at all of Alan's jokes over dinner, and Amita made some teasing comment--”So you're working Charlie pretty hard, huh? He take over your old job, Don?” that suddenly made Don sit up.
“Me?” he joked back, helping himself to more salad, “You guys are the ones keeping him busy—he's always running off to school stuff, or calling that he's staying out late helping Larry with some last minute calculations.”
“That's a falsehood,” Larry said in that peculiar way of his, “Charles hasn't assisted me with calculations in over three months.”
And it suddenly became clear, placing all of the alibis together in the same room, that Charlie had been lying to all of them, claiming he was helping Alan while telling Alan he was with Don, telling Larry and Amita he was doing a lot of extra FBI work to explain why he wasn't around the university and telling Don that schoolwork kept him away from home.
None of this explained what Charlie was doing. Alan tried to bring it up with him in a subtle chat, but Charlie avoided saying much as usual, and Don decided to go for a less subtle route and hit Colby up for a favor and bugged Charlie's backpack.
He needed Amita and Larry's help to decode the evidence. There was a weird laboratory set up in the garage, with at least four new computers that Don could count and some equipment that he had no idea how to identify. He hit Colby up for a favor and bugged Charlie's backpack and got a bunch of students asking for extensions on their exams. Larry looked over Charlie's notes and said it was very advanced work and somehow centered around biology, so Amita pulled a neurobiologist from the university to come look at it, and the woman was impressed. Charlie had identified protein markers and genetic modifications that made it possible to halt a certain variation of abnormal cell growth by adapting the use of anti-viral therapy and using it on cancer patients. He'd developed a cure for a certain type of cancer, and that resonated in Don's head. Charlie cured cancer, Charlie cured cancer—he heard it over and over again while the neurobiologist went on explaining how amazing this really was to Amita and Larry—as if Don couldn't understand the significance himself. “This is the kind of work people win Nobel Prizes for,” she finished, finally.
Charlie didn't take well to being investigated. When Don confronted him with what he'd found out, Charlie shouted at him, accused Don of using “his FBI stuff” on Charlie and how that wasn't fair—which was a totally unfair accusation in and of itself, Charlie had been using math stuff on Don their whole lives.
Don had thought that Charlie's withdrawal and reticence was about his injury, but now he had to rethink his assumption. He asked Charlie if anyone was bothering him, if he was being harassed, pressured by the government, blackmailed by a criminal mastermind, and Charlie just shot him an irritated look and complained that Don had eaten all the Cheerios.
“Dad finished them this morning,” Don said. “Is this about my leg?” Don asked.
Charlie froze in place mid-pouring milk on to raisin bran and his tone verged on the edge of hysterical. “You said the leg was fine! That you're happier teaching than you were in the field,” and Don agreed to the placating lie again for the sake of keeping some of the milk inside the carton and not spilt all over the counter.
Don worried. Charlie was acting like a desperate man and Don knew that desperate men do stupid things. “Tell me this isn't like that Finn guy, okay? That you're not going to go off yourself about something?” Charlie didn't answer quickly enough, and Don made Charlie swear to tell him before he even thought about committing suicide, and Charlie agreed, but Don wasn't sure he believed him.
He worried more when he came back to the house one evening after physical therapy and found Charlie throwing all of his notebooks into the fireplace. Don was appalled—he shouted for Charlie to stop and Charlie barely even looked up at him, and Don tackled Charlie to the floor and landed hard on his bad leg but ignored the pain to see if he could save any of the research from the flames. Charlie refused to be subdued and tried to toss the last of the notebooks in as well. Don pinned Charlie in the middle of the living room rug and grabbed handcuffs from his teaching bag and put them on his brother.
He asked Charlie why he was tossing a Nobel Prize and a cure for cancer in the fireplace.
“I'm too late!” Charlie said, but that didn't make any sense.
Finally it did—somehow when Don was shot, Charlie started investigating the exact form of cancer their mother had died of. He had an inspiration, was able to look at the situation in a new way, solved the problem, but it was all three years too late. If he'd looked at the problem three years earlier, he could have saved her, but he'd stuck his head in the sand and now it's too late.
Don didn't really understand how all of that led to burning the research now, but Charlie was losing it. Their argument dragged on and they both brought out all the really harsh questions they generally didn't ask each other: How can you ever know what you're doing is right? What if the government feeds the FBI information to make them arrest government dissidents? What if man never actually landed on the moon? What if Charlie's research can be turned to bad ends? What if some problem he solves helps to create a super-weapon that destroys the earth? How can he balance the guilt for all the things he may have done with the guilt for all the things he might have done? How can he possibly know what problem to work on next, what sort of thing might affect their father, or Don—how can he not make the same mistake with them again?
Don un-handcuffed his brother after Charlie finished his breakdown and they were done screaming at each other. They sat on opposite ends of the couch and stared at their hands. Don felt old.
“Bro,” Don said finally, “I think next time you should work on coming to the hospital for a visit.” He dared a look over at Charlie, and Charlie was looking back at him, long unruly curls falling in his face.
“Yeah?” Charlie said. “Maybe I could work on that.”
“And another thing,” Don continued. “My leg isn't fine, it hurts all the time, and I hate teaching, I don't know how you stand having all those people stare at you all the time.”
“I don't usually notice them,” Charlie said absently, and Don snorted, because it figured.
“I was thinking, though,” Charlie said, staring at Don's leg, “that with the right kind of brace to keep your leg at the correct angle, you should be able to decrease pressure on the injured tissue while still being able to retain maximum mobility.”
Don smiled at Charlie, and Charlie smiled back, tentatively. “Yeah?”
Charlie nodded, and launched into a further explanation of the details, including an analogy to flower stems that Don intentionally tuned out.
“But will this improve my batting average?” Don wanted to know, and as he put Charlie in a headlock and messed up his hair he began to feel slightly younger once again.
julad and I raced to see who could finish a Numb3rs flashfic on the same prompt first. Here's hers: Julad's Numb3rs fic. I won by wordcount but lost because I was lame and failed to edit and post my thing. However, since this month I am purging my writings without bothering to edit or anything, here's what I did.Since I lost I owe her 500 words, which I have also written but not edited of course. Maybe I will post that tomorrow.
Don had always known that the pipes in his father's house—well, Charlie's house—banged randomly, but somehow it had never seemed so loud when he was younger. He never remembered having trouble sleeping as a kid—he read comic books under the covers with a flashlight past lights out sometimes, but for the most part he worked hard, played hard, and hit the sack at the end of the day worn out. Charlie had always been the one whose mind couldn't turn off, who wandered around the house in the late in the evenings to ask their parents random questions about penguin migration or the growth patterns of strawberries.
It made Don feel old, even back in his childhood home again, it made him feel old to be staring up at the ceiling at three in the morning, taking pills off the bedside table and swallowing them dry, staring at the red numbers of the clock and wondering how long it would take for the pain to fade enough for him to finally drift asleep. He was old, he thought, and he made himself face the thought head on—he was forty, and he felt old.
The advantage of restricted duty was that Don could sleep in a little bit after a bad night, and when he finally got up at nine Charlie was already gone at school—or still gone, possibly, Charlie slept over at Larry's Victorian mansion periodically when they were working on something, and he'd been known to conk out on his desk in his office at the university.
Charlie had pretty much insisted that Don move in with him after he finally finished enough rehab to leave the assisted living center, and since that point he'd done a pretty good job of avoiding Don entirely. Dad was around, and Dad was great—sympathetic when Don needed that and encouraging when Don needed that—but Dad's consulting partnership had picked up a few more contracts then they could really even handle, and he'd been gone most of the summer, getting paid to sit back in executive leather chairs and share his opinion. Alan claimed that this was the job he'd been waiting for his entire life.
Don was happy for him—he only hoped that maybe he could find the job he'd been waiting for his entire life, except that he had the sneaking suspicion he'd already had it, hadn't appreciated it, and had now really lost it for good. They'd offered him a teaching position—not even at Quantico—he could stay in LA and do continuing education seminars, they'd said. Don had told Charlie he was excited about it, “You and me, we'll both be teachers, it'll be good,” but Don wasn't really excited about it. It was too far removed from the real meaning of what he wanted to do, and he knew it shouldn't be, he respected teachers—he respected Charlie—but when he did it himself it felt unimportant, felt like a time filler, and he felt a little guilty for feeling that way but he did.
After Don had been shot in the leg he'd been in the hospital for 19 days and Charlie hadn't once come to see him. “He's pretty shaken,” Alan had told Don sympathetically, “You know how he is,” and yeah, Don knew, Don knew maybe better than anybody, but it still seemed vaguely insulting to have even Larry and Amita bring him flowers with embarrassed smiles and half-excuses for his brother. All the anger that Don had felt when Charlie had done this during their mother's cancer treatment came back and doubled; he justified what he was feeling to himself by telling himself he was mad at Charlie for how he'd acted toward Mom, since that felt better than admitting he just wanted Charlie to visit. Why was Charlie so damn selfish, Don asked himself angrily, and yeah, Charlie had issues, okay, fine, but still, did he think no one else in the world had issues? Were Charlie's issues somehow more important than everyone else's because he had three times as much brain power to blow them twelve times out of proportion? Couldn't Charlie suck it up like everyone else in the world and do something for someone besides himself?
Couldn't Charlie pretend for five freaking minutes that everything was okay so that Don didn't always have to pretend it for both of them? Don was the one with the fucking bullet in his leg!
Colby and David came by once a week or so, but they'd missed the last week because of a big case, and Don knew that it was only a matter of time before once a week became once a motnh, and once a month became once a year at a Labor Day picnic. Alternately, Don was more attractive to women, now, somehow. He wasn't quite sure how that worked, or maybe it was just that now he'd been forcibly slowed down and had time to appreciate the women in return. Alan held out hopes of finally getting grandchildren, but Don didn't feel close to that. He was having a midlife crisis, maybe, feeling old and enjoying the attentions of beautiful women but not wanting the baggage of someone else around all the time, someone trying to talk about how he felt, how hard it must be with his injury, and admirable it was to be wounded in the line of duty.
He'd tried pretending everything was fine for three months, had tried reassuring Charlie that he was okay, he wasn't in a lot of pain, he was excited about teaching, he didn't regret what he'd done, and Charlie was still hiding out staring at the koi pond. Dad had strong-armed Charlie into a game of chess one evening and Don and Dad had won after only seven distracted turns, and then Charlie mumbled something about a math problem—as though it was ever anything else—and scurried out the back door.
Later, Don was ashamed that it had taken him three months to clue in to a case sitting right under his nose, but he'd admittedly been distracted at the time. Larry and Amita visited again and laughed at all of Alan's jokes over dinner, and Amita made some teasing comment--”So you're working Charlie pretty hard, huh? He take over your old job, Don?” that suddenly made Don sit up.
“Me?” he joked back, helping himself to more salad, “You guys are the ones keeping him busy—he's always running off to school stuff, or calling that he's staying out late helping Larry with some last minute calculations.”
“That's a falsehood,” Larry said in that peculiar way of his, “Charles hasn't assisted me with calculations in over three months.”
And it suddenly became clear, placing all of the alibis together in the same room, that Charlie had been lying to all of them, claiming he was helping Alan while telling Alan he was with Don, telling Larry and Amita he was doing a lot of extra FBI work to explain why he wasn't around the university and telling Don that schoolwork kept him away from home.
None of this explained what Charlie was doing. Alan tried to bring it up with him in a subtle chat, but Charlie avoided saying much as usual, and Don decided to go for a less subtle route and hit Colby up for a favor and bugged Charlie's backpack.
He needed Amita and Larry's help to decode the evidence. There was a weird laboratory set up in the garage, with at least four new computers that Don could count and some equipment that he had no idea how to identify. He hit Colby up for a favor and bugged Charlie's backpack and got a bunch of students asking for extensions on their exams. Larry looked over Charlie's notes and said it was very advanced work and somehow centered around biology, so Amita pulled a neurobiologist from the university to come look at it, and the woman was impressed. Charlie had identified protein markers and genetic modifications that made it possible to halt a certain variation of abnormal cell growth by adapting the use of anti-viral therapy and using it on cancer patients. He'd developed a cure for a certain type of cancer, and that resonated in Don's head. Charlie cured cancer, Charlie cured cancer—he heard it over and over again while the neurobiologist went on explaining how amazing this really was to Amita and Larry—as if Don couldn't understand the significance himself. “This is the kind of work people win Nobel Prizes for,” she finished, finally.
Charlie didn't take well to being investigated. When Don confronted him with what he'd found out, Charlie shouted at him, accused Don of using “his FBI stuff” on Charlie and how that wasn't fair—which was a totally unfair accusation in and of itself, Charlie had been using math stuff on Don their whole lives.
Don had thought that Charlie's withdrawal and reticence was about his injury, but now he had to rethink his assumption. He asked Charlie if anyone was bothering him, if he was being harassed, pressured by the government, blackmailed by a criminal mastermind, and Charlie just shot him an irritated look and complained that Don had eaten all the Cheerios.
“Dad finished them this morning,” Don said. “Is this about my leg?” Don asked.
Charlie froze in place mid-pouring milk on to raisin bran and his tone verged on the edge of hysterical. “You said the leg was fine! That you're happier teaching than you were in the field,” and Don agreed to the placating lie again for the sake of keeping some of the milk inside the carton and not spilt all over the counter.
Don worried. Charlie was acting like a desperate man and Don knew that desperate men do stupid things. “Tell me this isn't like that Finn guy, okay? That you're not going to go off yourself about something?” Charlie didn't answer quickly enough, and Don made Charlie swear to tell him before he even thought about committing suicide, and Charlie agreed, but Don wasn't sure he believed him.
He worried more when he came back to the house one evening after physical therapy and found Charlie throwing all of his notebooks into the fireplace. Don was appalled—he shouted for Charlie to stop and Charlie barely even looked up at him, and Don tackled Charlie to the floor and landed hard on his bad leg but ignored the pain to see if he could save any of the research from the flames. Charlie refused to be subdued and tried to toss the last of the notebooks in as well. Don pinned Charlie in the middle of the living room rug and grabbed handcuffs from his teaching bag and put them on his brother.
He asked Charlie why he was tossing a Nobel Prize and a cure for cancer in the fireplace.
“I'm too late!” Charlie said, but that didn't make any sense.
Finally it did—somehow when Don was shot, Charlie started investigating the exact form of cancer their mother had died of. He had an inspiration, was able to look at the situation in a new way, solved the problem, but it was all three years too late. If he'd looked at the problem three years earlier, he could have saved her, but he'd stuck his head in the sand and now it's too late.
Don didn't really understand how all of that led to burning the research now, but Charlie was losing it. Their argument dragged on and they both brought out all the really harsh questions they generally didn't ask each other: How can you ever know what you're doing is right? What if the government feeds the FBI information to make them arrest government dissidents? What if man never actually landed on the moon? What if Charlie's research can be turned to bad ends? What if some problem he solves helps to create a super-weapon that destroys the earth? How can he balance the guilt for all the things he may have done with the guilt for all the things he might have done? How can he possibly know what problem to work on next, what sort of thing might affect their father, or Don—how can he not make the same mistake with them again?
Don un-handcuffed his brother after Charlie finished his breakdown and they were done screaming at each other. They sat on opposite ends of the couch and stared at their hands. Don felt old.
“Bro,” Don said finally, “I think next time you should work on coming to the hospital for a visit.” He dared a look over at Charlie, and Charlie was looking back at him, long unruly curls falling in his face.
“Yeah?” Charlie said. “Maybe I could work on that.”
“And another thing,” Don continued. “My leg isn't fine, it hurts all the time, and I hate teaching, I don't know how you stand having all those people stare at you all the time.”
“I don't usually notice them,” Charlie said absently, and Don snorted, because it figured.
“I was thinking, though,” Charlie said, staring at Don's leg, “that with the right kind of brace to keep your leg at the correct angle, you should be able to decrease pressure on the injured tissue while still being able to retain maximum mobility.”
Don smiled at Charlie, and Charlie smiled back, tentatively. “Yeah?”
Charlie nodded, and launched into a further explanation of the details, including an analogy to flower stems that Don intentionally tuned out.
“But will this improve my batting average?” Don wanted to know, and as he put Charlie in a headlock and messed up his hair he began to feel slightly younger once again.