Numb3rs fic: Symmetry

[owl]

Title: Symmetry
Pairing/Characters: Charlie, Don
Rating: U
Spoilers:Up to 5.03
Summary: Don and Charlie aren't as different as you might think, not when they're pushed. Takes place after Blowback.

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Symmetry

"I always end up with the dishes," Charlie protested.

"You do not," Don retorted. "That would be Dad. And, anyway, do I live here? No."

"You don't?" Charlie said. "Some day when I get around to it, I'm gonna start counting the number of meals you eat here."

They'd had this argument so many times before that they could bicker on autopilot, as if it were scripted. They were almost acting, Charlie thought, playing that everything was normal, agreeing without words to avoid the topic of Charlie's clearance. It reminded Charlie a little of when Mom had been ill, sticking to the islands of stability in a swamp as insecure as any college politics Charlie had ever played.

Amita knew the script too; she clicked her tongue and snatched Don's plate from under his nose, with a muttered, "Boys." And because it was Don's plate, he, as well as Charlie, got up to help her. The corner of her mouth on Charlie's side curled up neatly, so that he knew she'd done it on purpose. He loved it when she was smart like that. He'd have to ask her if she'd calculated it out the way he would have, or if she did it instinctively as the rest of the world seemed to.

Mission accomplished, Amita switched back to the conversation she'd been having with Charlie earlier, which had started out in information theory and then wandered slightly off-beam. "It's always the human element, anyway. Think of people Post-It-ing their passwords to their monitors."

"Or picking password1, password2, password3," Don put in.

Amita nodded. "Or Telephone. The enemy is dancing on wet planks."

Charlie snorted. "Yeah, like Colby telling me yesterday that—" he saw the oncoming disaster as the words left his mouth, unstoppable as colliding galaxies "—Don was wanting to leave the FBI...." Instead of possibly-probably getting kicked out, and it was all Charlie's fault—

Silverware clattered on the table as Don flung it down. "I dunno how we never realised Colby was a triple agent all that time when he can't keep his damn mouth shut!"

Charlie stared. "You mean it's true?"

Don didn't say anything to that, just swung around and pushed through the swing door into the kitchen. Charlie could hear Dad starting to say something before the door banged and cut it off. Charlie looked over at Amita, who was standing frozen with a glass in each hand.

"What just happened there?" he asked, small-voiced.

Amita set the glasses down on the table, one at a time and cautiously, as if they were fragile nanotechnology. "I think you need to talk to Don."

"Like that's gonna work, he just walked out—"

Amita came around the corner of the table to him, reaching up to kiss first his temple, and then his cheekbone and the corner of his mouth. "Even if you just go find him and sit with a beer each and don't say anything, it's gotta be better than nothing. Right?"

Charlie turned his head into the kiss, but Amita planted a small warm hand in the hollow of his back and shoved him towards the door. "Go on, get after him."

He stumbled into the kitchen, where Dad gave him a long look. "Your brother just blew through here," he said. "Am I to conclude that I should just fix dessert for me and Amita?"

"Whatever," Charlie said distractedly, rooting through the fridge for a couple of beers. "Colby told me that Don was threatening to leave the Bureau, and I—well, I—"

"Tried to talk to Don about it before he was ready?" Dad finished.

"I screwed up," Charlie said, taking the beer bottles in his left hand and shutting the refrigerator door with his right.

"Humph," was all Dad said to that. He was most likely hoping that Don would leave the FBI and get into some job where nobody tried to shoot him. He patted Charlie's shoulder as he went past him, but didn't say anything more.

Charlie went outside, blinking in the sunlight. A quick check showed that Don wasn't in the garage, but the door was left open like he'd just been there. Charlie went out again and round beyond the garage, and found Don kneeling in the dust, cutting dead flowers off a plant with rather blunt scissors. Charlie didn't know what it was called, since Dad did all the gardening, but Don's face looked more like Mom's than usual, concentrated and distant. He was wearing his ball cap—not an FBI cap, but a twenty-year-old college baseball cap—backwards, even though his hair had gotten long enough lately that he probably didn't need it to keep the sun off his neck.

Charlie sat down crossed-legged beside Don and silently held out one of the beers, and Don took it, just as silently. Charlie sat still for a minute or two, feeling the sun warm through the back of his shirt, hearing the noise of the freeway in the distance and Don's scissors cutting through the plant stems right beside him.

"Sorry," he said at last. He'd learned from Amita that it didn't hurt to start there.

"Sorry for what?" Don asked, setting down the scissors and taking a long swallow from his beer. Charlie looked down at the ground, Don's hand in the grass six inches from Charlie's, the one he was leaning on. Charlie's was a little smaller, the nails bitten back instead of neatly trimmed, but they were essentially built to the same pattern.

"Saying that back in there, for one thing."

Don sighed. "I was going to tell you. I tried to tell you, and then I thought, it'll just make you feel bad, and maybe you'll never need to know, after all."

Charlie's fingers closed tight on the beer bottle. He kept looking straight ahead, not looking at Don, because Don still—still, after all this—didn't trust him with something this big, still was treating him as a kid brother instead of an adult. He swallowed, trying to ignore the bruised-inside feeling.

"Didn't you—I mean, it's my fault." If Don had done something that made Charlie resign from CalSci, Don would certainly have known about it, probably in exhaustive and furious detail.

"Charlie, no, no it's not. Your thing's just the—I don't mean trigger, what's the chemistry word?"

"Catalyst," Charlie said, which didn't make him feel any better. Until he'd tried to get his clearance back, they'd been in the same situation they'd been in before Charlie started consulting for Don; now they were in unfamiliar, unbounded territory. He didn't like things changing. "So, um, the reactants?"

"Huh?"

Charlie opened his mouth to explain, and then decided that the half-assed throwaway metaphor wasn't worth the effort. With Amita or Larry, they'd be three sentences on by now. He glanced up, and forgot all about feeling hurt, because Don looked so sad. "I thought you loved the FBI," he said, and then thought that loved was the wrong word, but he couldn't think of anything better. He'd never been all that good with words.

Don snorted softly, without looking any less sad. "Man, Charlie...you know you said practically the same thing when you were nineteen and I told you I was quitting baseball. You don't ever change."

At least then Don had been going to do something he wanted to do more than what he was leaving. Charlie nearly said that too, but even he could tell that it wasn't likely to be helpful. He couldn't think of anything else to say, though. He didn't even know what was going on with Don, not really. So often he couldn't work out why people did things, even why Don did things, what mixture of causes you could deduce by working backwards from actions. The inside of other people's heads were like chaotic systems.

Don swirled the beer bottle. "It's just, I kinda feel, the person my bosses want me to be, it's not who I even am, and it's definitely not who I want to be. Oh, I don't know."

Charlie disentangled this. He thought he knew this one; plenty of people over the years had wanted a percentage in Charles Eppes. "So, don't be," he said, which was about as clear as what Don had said, but probably Don could handle it. "They can't make you."

"You're always so certain of yourself," Don said. "I wish I—well."

"Mom said that," Charlie said, and felt himself blush as he remembered when.

"What is it?" Don said. It was so unfair the way he always seemed to read Charlie's face at the most inconvenient moments, without returning the favour.

"Uh, actually I dreamed Mom said it," Charlie mumbled. "That time you had the case with the creep who stuck you with half a syringe of morphine."

He really didn't want to have to explain how much he wanted it to not have been a dream, or to acknowledge the irrational small voice that insisted that it hadn't been, it hadn't, and luckily Don didn't press it. He looked away and said, "Do you ever dream of her and realise that you'd forgotten what she really looked like, that you'd been just seeing the photographs for so long?"

"Yeah," Charlie said. "Or all I remembered was when, you know, she was in the hospital."

Don looked as if he felt sorry for Charlie at that. "Charlie, listen, it's all right. Really, it's all right. And if the Bureau's willing to throw you under the bus on purpose to hurt me—if they're that stupid—" He broke off, scowling fiercely. "And I figured they might as well shoot for the right target."

"We're the same target," Charlie said in all a rush. "It was never me, not now, not ever, because you never let it be. You always covered for me."

"Yeah, you got that right, about us being one target." Don grabbed Charlie's arm. "You were the one who told McGowan he was backing a loser with the divide-and-conquer thing, first, not that either of us knew at the time. Buddy, don't you see?"

Charlie thought that normally it was the other way around, Don staring in bewilderment as Charlie tried to explain something that to him was diamond-clear, a mirror-symmetry—and with that image the pieces all dropped neatly into place, like a proof, self-enclosed and perfect with quod erat demonstrandum written beneath it. Symmetry, as fundamental and satisfying as anything in quantum physics. And probably as difficult to explain to the uninitiated, besides. But he didn't need to explain it to Don, and Don didn't need to explain it to him, because they'd both been in it from the beginning, they'd written the book, Schroedinger and Heisenberg. Charlie thought of the Copenhagen interpretation, and the History of Physics class he'd had at Princeton, and Don saying Me and Heisenberg, we're all over this, that time, which probably meant Don was Schroedinger. He was grinning like an idiot at Don, and Don shook his head, laughing a little.

"Ah, screw 'em all," he said, and grinned back at Charlie, sliding his hand up above Charlie's elbow and half-hauling him to his feet—what was it with his nearest and dearest and all the manhandling today? "Didn't I hear Dad say something about baked alaska?"

"If he and Amita haven't finished it off by now."

"It's always the girlfriends you wanna watch, with the desserts," Don said, and looped his arm warmly around Charlie's neck as they headed back into the house together.