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numb3rsflashficUnder the wire!
Title: Variations
Pairing/Characters: Don, Charlie (Billy, Kim)
Rating/Category: PG/Gen
Word Count: 1,863
Spoilers: Jumps around pre-series, so all the backstory stuff, but nothing else
Summary: You didn’t think Kim understood at all.
Notes/Warnings: Don perspective, healthy dose of angst. Somewhat triggered by Variations on the Word Love by Margaret Atwood, and, um, I think that's what it was supposed to be. Doesn't seem as close to the challenge as it was in my head, though. Hm.
variations
You could go for days without sleeping when you were out there with Billy – Coop was like some sort of battery charge you kept draining. You were wound tight the whole time and never tired, you were moving and moving and you never thought about your family. You never thought about much except where fugitives might spend their time, and you were pretty happy, all things considered.
‘Love this job, man,’ Billy used to say, grinning at you over the head of the guy he was cuffing, both of you panting and gleaming with sweat, you with your gun still levelled at the guy’s head, your hands twitching with adrenaline.
‘Yeah,’ you’d say, grinning back around your gum. Neither of you talked about your families, like you’d both just arrived on earth fully-formed, built out of all new material.
You used to build kites with Charlie and fly them on the school field on weekends when there was enough wind. He liked it because there was math involved in the perfect kite, a whole notebook of equations dedicated to it. You just liked it for the days it got windy enough that the kite strings burned through your fingers and you lost it, just got to watch it sail away. Kites without strings, that’s what it felt like with Billy.
You always thought Charlie would cry when you lost a kite, but he was usually pretty calm about it, watching it in the sky for as long as he could see it, trying to carve out the path it would take using numbers, variables, things you didn’t care about.
You never let him hold the string on his own. He looked like he would just get taken away, dragged up off the earth and into space because he wouldn’t let go.
*
The morning of the funeral you sat on the edge of Charlie’s bed, and tried everything you could think of, from guilt-tripping to anger to bribery. He didn’t move, didn’t even look at you, just curled himself up tighter under the covers and stared at nothing.
You got up and laid his suit out carefully on the back of his chair, and then you pulled all the covers off him and levered your arm under his shoulders, dragging him out of bed. He was silent and uncomplaining, his body almost a dead weight, and you decided right then that given a choice, you’d take unsolvable math problems over catatonia.
You hauled him into the bathroom and turned the shower on hot, and pushed him under the jet still in the boxers and t-shirt he’d slept in.
You left him there and shut the door, and went downstairs to check on your dad. He was in the kitchen, carefully wrapping cellophane over plates of sandwiches.
‘Is he coming?’ he said, without looking at you.
‘Yeah,’ you said. ‘He’s getting ready.’
Ten minutes later, you went back upstairs and found him still standing there, the bathroom steaming up and his skin bright red and raw from the hot water. He was shaking.
You shut the water off and pulled him out. He was starting to get you wet, the cuffs of your jacket soaked. You grabbed a towel and half-heartedly rubbed it over his head, but it was pointless trying to get him dry when he was standing in dripping wet clothes, and you certainly weren’t going to undress him, he wasn’t a goddamn child anymore.
You gave up and sank down with him onto the floor, leaning against the bath. You wrapped an arm awkwardly around his shoulders, not knowing what else to do. Tried to remember how it used to be easy to touch him. Water seeped through to your shirt and you were going to have to change, but fortunately you owned more than one suit suitable for funerals: a perk of your job. You could feel the tremors of muscles under his skin.
You decided then that you never wanted your own family, not if it was like this, this sick, awful love, getting eaten up by somebody else’s hurt and never getting to think about your own.
‘I’m sorry,’ you heard Charlie say then, very quietly. ‘I just can’t.’
Can’t what? You should have just told him that you didn’t care and he was being selfish, but part of you knew that if Charlie suddenly got it together, you would fall apart - so you tucked him under your arm instead and leaned your head on top of his wet curls, sitting in silence until you heard your father’s footsteps on the stairs.
*
The last summer you ever stayed at home, he was nineteen and sunburned and writing some thesis or other on the lawn, stretched out on his stomach with his t-shirt riding up, the small of his back exposed. The only words you ever spoke to each other turned into arguments, and you only got close to each other when you were fighting, hands curled into fists, shoving each other back and forth, daring to see how far you could push it.
You never really hit him hard, not as hard as you could have. If your dad tried to break it up, your mother would stop him, tell him to let you work it out on your own.
‘They’re brothers,’ you overheard her tell him. ‘They fight, but they’d never really hurt each other.’
Not true, you thought. You’d known each other forever and all it seemed to mean was that you both had stockpiles of weapons; you both knew where to strike.
You were both bruised and exhausted all summer, and your parents seemed to think you were really communicating. When you left, you swore you’d never come back.
*
After the service, you called Kim from your childhood bedroom while relatives you’d never met murmured quietly downstairs over their sandwiches, and Charlie self-destructed in the garage. You hadn’t spoken to her in weeks, but she had sent a condolences card. It was nice.
You could tell when she answered that she didn’t want to talk to you, but she didn’t hang up, and you were painfully grateful. You talked about nothing for a while, and then you told her about Charlie, and she started sounding tired.
‘For God’s sake,’ she said. ‘Maybe you should give him a break, Don, his mother’s just died.’
You stared at the chipped paint on the walls where you used to tape up your baseball posters. You’d noticed distantly that you talked about Charlie all the time, it was almost all you talked to Kim about anymore - at least since the conversation about whether or not she should keep the ring. (You’d wanted her to, but it had arrived in the mail a few days later. Charlie had signed for it. You hadn’t told him what it was.) Charlie was the easiest thing to talk about; anything else and you felt your throat start closing up. Complaining about your little brother was tracing a familiar pattern, a worn-down groove. It was comforting.
Kim had never met Charlie. The way you talked about him, you wondered if she thought he was fourteen.
‘He’s twenty-seven years old,’ you said. ‘He needs to --’
‘I’ve got to go, Don,’ Kim said, and hung up. You listened to the dead line for a while, and then went back downstairs. You had the card she sent in your back pocket; it was addressed to your father and Charlie as well, but they hadn’t seen it. You’d read it maybe twenty times, searching for the hidden significance of every letter. The words belonged to you and you didn’t want to share them.
*
The kites Charlie designed – haphazardly coloured with bright crayons at the end, an afterthought to the calculations of dimension and weight – were probably startling feats of design, but you’d stopped being startled by anything Charlie did by the time he was seven. You just had to concentrate on how they could be made, and where you could get the materials.
He went through dozens of shape experiments – squares and arrows, and once, because you thought it would be cool and he wanted to impress you, a whole dragon – but he always went back to the regular kite shape. No parallel sides, but two pairs of equal sides – he told you so often you could never forget.
‘It’s boring,’ you told him, but you had to admit those kites always seemed to fly best. They were easier to make, too, and that’s what it came down to: the perfect combination of design and manufacture, the perfect combination of Charlie and you, making something beautiful and useless and watching it fly.
*
You had packed your bags in Albuquerque and thought a year, maybe less.
There were about a million reasons not to think in timelines, but you couldn’t help it. You’d written the word ‘temporary’ all over your transfer request forms, in about as many places as it would fit, finishing with it scrawled in red marker on the front of the envelope.
‘You spelled it wrong,’ Kim had said, when you dropped the envelope down on the coffee table, ready to hand in the next day. You blinked down at the red letters. Temparary. You thought of Charlie.
‘He’s not doing great,’ your father had said on the phone, sounding annoyed. ‘When are you getting here?’
You drove to L.A., although everyone told you not to. You took a wrong turn and it took you fifteen hours. You had a lot of miles of long hot road to think about stuff, but you mostly just thought about where you could stop to eat, and Kim’s wet eyes as she made her voice sincere and said goodbye. ‘It’s family, Don. I understand.’
Kim had a sister and they talked on the phone every night, got together every weekend, giggled and whispered and told each other about their boyfriends. Kim told her sister she loved her at the end of every call. You didn’t think Kim understood at all.
The way you loved Charlie was like a stone or something, a rock. This hard, unbreakable thing that half the time you didn’t even want. In high school, you once knocked out two of your best friend’s teeth because he laughed at Charlie in all the hallway.
The memory made your knuckles hurt, your skin. You didn’t know what you were going to find in L.A., and it scared you.
You drank a can of warm flat Coke as you drove and then crushed it in your palm, tossing it out of the open window to fly backward into the empty road behind you. You’d lost track of how far you’d driven and how far you had left to go, but you were less than half way, and the light was going. It would be late before you got there.
You stopped more times than you needed to for gas and bad coffee in styrofoam cups, but when you started seeing California plates you didn’t stop any more, just kept on driving until you got home.
Title: Variations
Pairing/Characters: Don, Charlie (Billy, Kim)
Rating/Category: PG/Gen
Word Count: 1,863
Spoilers: Jumps around pre-series, so all the backstory stuff, but nothing else
Summary: You didn’t think Kim understood at all.
Notes/Warnings: Don perspective, healthy dose of angst. Somewhat triggered by Variations on the Word Love by Margaret Atwood, and, um, I think that's what it was supposed to be. Doesn't seem as close to the challenge as it was in my head, though. Hm.
variations
You could go for days without sleeping when you were out there with Billy – Coop was like some sort of battery charge you kept draining. You were wound tight the whole time and never tired, you were moving and moving and you never thought about your family. You never thought about much except where fugitives might spend their time, and you were pretty happy, all things considered.
‘Love this job, man,’ Billy used to say, grinning at you over the head of the guy he was cuffing, both of you panting and gleaming with sweat, you with your gun still levelled at the guy’s head, your hands twitching with adrenaline.
‘Yeah,’ you’d say, grinning back around your gum. Neither of you talked about your families, like you’d both just arrived on earth fully-formed, built out of all new material.
You used to build kites with Charlie and fly them on the school field on weekends when there was enough wind. He liked it because there was math involved in the perfect kite, a whole notebook of equations dedicated to it. You just liked it for the days it got windy enough that the kite strings burned through your fingers and you lost it, just got to watch it sail away. Kites without strings, that’s what it felt like with Billy.
You always thought Charlie would cry when you lost a kite, but he was usually pretty calm about it, watching it in the sky for as long as he could see it, trying to carve out the path it would take using numbers, variables, things you didn’t care about.
You never let him hold the string on his own. He looked like he would just get taken away, dragged up off the earth and into space because he wouldn’t let go.
*
The morning of the funeral you sat on the edge of Charlie’s bed, and tried everything you could think of, from guilt-tripping to anger to bribery. He didn’t move, didn’t even look at you, just curled himself up tighter under the covers and stared at nothing.
You got up and laid his suit out carefully on the back of his chair, and then you pulled all the covers off him and levered your arm under his shoulders, dragging him out of bed. He was silent and uncomplaining, his body almost a dead weight, and you decided right then that given a choice, you’d take unsolvable math problems over catatonia.
You hauled him into the bathroom and turned the shower on hot, and pushed him under the jet still in the boxers and t-shirt he’d slept in.
You left him there and shut the door, and went downstairs to check on your dad. He was in the kitchen, carefully wrapping cellophane over plates of sandwiches.
‘Is he coming?’ he said, without looking at you.
‘Yeah,’ you said. ‘He’s getting ready.’
Ten minutes later, you went back upstairs and found him still standing there, the bathroom steaming up and his skin bright red and raw from the hot water. He was shaking.
You shut the water off and pulled him out. He was starting to get you wet, the cuffs of your jacket soaked. You grabbed a towel and half-heartedly rubbed it over his head, but it was pointless trying to get him dry when he was standing in dripping wet clothes, and you certainly weren’t going to undress him, he wasn’t a goddamn child anymore.
You gave up and sank down with him onto the floor, leaning against the bath. You wrapped an arm awkwardly around his shoulders, not knowing what else to do. Tried to remember how it used to be easy to touch him. Water seeped through to your shirt and you were going to have to change, but fortunately you owned more than one suit suitable for funerals: a perk of your job. You could feel the tremors of muscles under his skin.
You decided then that you never wanted your own family, not if it was like this, this sick, awful love, getting eaten up by somebody else’s hurt and never getting to think about your own.
‘I’m sorry,’ you heard Charlie say then, very quietly. ‘I just can’t.’
Can’t what? You should have just told him that you didn’t care and he was being selfish, but part of you knew that if Charlie suddenly got it together, you would fall apart - so you tucked him under your arm instead and leaned your head on top of his wet curls, sitting in silence until you heard your father’s footsteps on the stairs.
*
The last summer you ever stayed at home, he was nineteen and sunburned and writing some thesis or other on the lawn, stretched out on his stomach with his t-shirt riding up, the small of his back exposed. The only words you ever spoke to each other turned into arguments, and you only got close to each other when you were fighting, hands curled into fists, shoving each other back and forth, daring to see how far you could push it.
You never really hit him hard, not as hard as you could have. If your dad tried to break it up, your mother would stop him, tell him to let you work it out on your own.
‘They’re brothers,’ you overheard her tell him. ‘They fight, but they’d never really hurt each other.’
Not true, you thought. You’d known each other forever and all it seemed to mean was that you both had stockpiles of weapons; you both knew where to strike.
You were both bruised and exhausted all summer, and your parents seemed to think you were really communicating. When you left, you swore you’d never come back.
*
After the service, you called Kim from your childhood bedroom while relatives you’d never met murmured quietly downstairs over their sandwiches, and Charlie self-destructed in the garage. You hadn’t spoken to her in weeks, but she had sent a condolences card. It was nice.
You could tell when she answered that she didn’t want to talk to you, but she didn’t hang up, and you were painfully grateful. You talked about nothing for a while, and then you told her about Charlie, and she started sounding tired.
‘For God’s sake,’ she said. ‘Maybe you should give him a break, Don, his mother’s just died.’
You stared at the chipped paint on the walls where you used to tape up your baseball posters. You’d noticed distantly that you talked about Charlie all the time, it was almost all you talked to Kim about anymore - at least since the conversation about whether or not she should keep the ring. (You’d wanted her to, but it had arrived in the mail a few days later. Charlie had signed for it. You hadn’t told him what it was.) Charlie was the easiest thing to talk about; anything else and you felt your throat start closing up. Complaining about your little brother was tracing a familiar pattern, a worn-down groove. It was comforting.
Kim had never met Charlie. The way you talked about him, you wondered if she thought he was fourteen.
‘He’s twenty-seven years old,’ you said. ‘He needs to --’
‘I’ve got to go, Don,’ Kim said, and hung up. You listened to the dead line for a while, and then went back downstairs. You had the card she sent in your back pocket; it was addressed to your father and Charlie as well, but they hadn’t seen it. You’d read it maybe twenty times, searching for the hidden significance of every letter. The words belonged to you and you didn’t want to share them.
*
The kites Charlie designed – haphazardly coloured with bright crayons at the end, an afterthought to the calculations of dimension and weight – were probably startling feats of design, but you’d stopped being startled by anything Charlie did by the time he was seven. You just had to concentrate on how they could be made, and where you could get the materials.
He went through dozens of shape experiments – squares and arrows, and once, because you thought it would be cool and he wanted to impress you, a whole dragon – but he always went back to the regular kite shape. No parallel sides, but two pairs of equal sides – he told you so often you could never forget.
‘It’s boring,’ you told him, but you had to admit those kites always seemed to fly best. They were easier to make, too, and that’s what it came down to: the perfect combination of design and manufacture, the perfect combination of Charlie and you, making something beautiful and useless and watching it fly.
*
You had packed your bags in Albuquerque and thought a year, maybe less.
There were about a million reasons not to think in timelines, but you couldn’t help it. You’d written the word ‘temporary’ all over your transfer request forms, in about as many places as it would fit, finishing with it scrawled in red marker on the front of the envelope.
‘You spelled it wrong,’ Kim had said, when you dropped the envelope down on the coffee table, ready to hand in the next day. You blinked down at the red letters. Temparary. You thought of Charlie.
‘He’s not doing great,’ your father had said on the phone, sounding annoyed. ‘When are you getting here?’
You drove to L.A., although everyone told you not to. You took a wrong turn and it took you fifteen hours. You had a lot of miles of long hot road to think about stuff, but you mostly just thought about where you could stop to eat, and Kim’s wet eyes as she made her voice sincere and said goodbye. ‘It’s family, Don. I understand.’
Kim had a sister and they talked on the phone every night, got together every weekend, giggled and whispered and told each other about their boyfriends. Kim told her sister she loved her at the end of every call. You didn’t think Kim understood at all.
The way you loved Charlie was like a stone or something, a rock. This hard, unbreakable thing that half the time you didn’t even want. In high school, you once knocked out two of your best friend’s teeth because he laughed at Charlie in all the hallway.
The memory made your knuckles hurt, your skin. You didn’t know what you were going to find in L.A., and it scared you.
You drank a can of warm flat Coke as you drove and then crushed it in your palm, tossing it out of the open window to fly backward into the empty road behind you. You’d lost track of how far you’d driven and how far you had left to go, but you were less than half way, and the light was going. It would be late before you got there.
You stopped more times than you needed to for gas and bad coffee in styrofoam cups, but when you started seeing California plates you didn’t stop any more, just kept on driving until you got home.
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no subject
Date: 2006-02-18 07:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-22 07:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-18 10:44 pm (UTC)Poor Donny. He seems so undecided, unfocused. C'mon Don, admit it!! Being away from your bro left a big black hooole!!!
no subject
Date: 2006-02-22 07:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-19 01:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-22 07:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-19 05:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-22 07:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-19 11:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-22 07:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-19 04:28 pm (UTC)Wow, intense. I like the idea of Don not wanting to go back just as much as he needs to.
no subject
Date: 2006-02-22 07:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-20 01:36 am (UTC)That was one big owie to read, but it's beautiful. Perfectly in character, for both of them. The kite metaphor is stunning.
no subject
Date: 2006-02-22 07:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-21 02:00 am (UTC)but part of you knew that if Charlie suddenly got it together, you would fall apart
Oh, I love that line. So achingly true.
no subject
Date: 2006-05-21 01:54 pm (UTC)Great Story!
Date: 2007-04-26 05:12 pm (UTC)You never let him hold the string on his own. He looked like he would just get taken away, dragged up off the earth and into space because he wouldn’t let go.
I like the implication of Don's concern about Charlie. It is touching.
You should have just told him that you didn’t care and he was being selfish, but part of you knew that if Charlie suddenly got it together, you would fall apart
Oh, it hurts. Poor Don. His conflict for loving his sensitive brother or angry with his evasion was well-written. Great work.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-14 12:28 pm (UTC)