Ulysses Chapter 2: Who Are You? *Billy Cooper, mention of others; PG-13/K*
Title: Who Are You?
Series: Ulysses
Author: loozy
Characters: Billy Cooper, mention of others
Rating: PG- 13/ K
Summary: He does not know, and he does not care. He has his family, he knows he has his sisters’ support, and he knows that they know him. Know why he is doing this, why he cannot stop being in FR. It is in his blood, he needs to do this.
Word Count: 2441
Spoilers: after 5x23, Angels & Devils
Notes: valeriev84 is again the beta for this chapter...
Prompt: # 53 Support
Disclaimer: I do not own any of the characters mentioned in this fic. Numb3rs and everybody associated with it belong to Cheryl Heuton & Nick Fallucci and CBS.
Feedback: Yes, please. I love every kind of review, even the bad ones, as long as they are helpful and constructive.
William Donnelly Chaplan Cooper is not someone who shares.
His life story, at least.
He will share food, and space and ammo, but to get him to talk about his past is something that only a handful of people have managed.
His primary school teacher, when he did not yet know the power of secrets.
His first girlfriend, Karla, because he loved her like he had, and has, actually, never done before and since then.
The FBI- guy he interviewed with because he had to.
Don Eppes, because he was his partner, and his best friend.
To anyone else, he is an enigma. Well, so is Don, in a certain way, but they are made of different stuff.
Don’s status as an enigma comes from his hidden intelligence, the one he so rarely openly lets shine through, his intuition.
His status comes from simply not talking about himself. Sure, whoever wants to know about him might just as well, if they have the proper clearance, get his file, but he doubts that any will actually go to the trouble. Because if he finds out that they have been snooping around about him, he will want to know why, and he doubts that he will get the answers he wants, then.
Not a lot of people like him, which would explain the stream of partners he has had since Don transferred out of Fugitive Recovery and on to Quantico.
Granted, he knew from the start that Eppes might be excellent in FR, but he can do more. He is a born leader, whereas Cooper prefers to work alone, or with a partner. He does not have a lot of demands, but the one that has been true ever since he got promoted to team leader in FR, he has wanted someone who has as much guts as he has, and not everybody measures up.
In fact, before Don, there was only one agent, Special Agent Mariah Branovich, who he got along with. He would have stayed with her as a partner had she not gotten pregnant and taken a desk job.
Such a waste of resources.
He got lucky when the next partner he got assigned was Don Eppes, fresh from Detroit; the AD of his office told Cooper that Eppes had been stuck in Detroit for three months with a good- for- nothing partner who eventually requested the junior agent transferred because he could not get along with him. Eppes did not want to get coffee or answer telephones or do boring work. He was a field agent and had not been quiet about that, driving Special Agent Kevin Fetherson nearly insane with his constant badgering.
Fetherson had been the one who had suggested to stick Eppes with Fugitive Recovery because he was just tenacious enough. According to AD Conventelli, Fetherson had called Don a terrier, the same nickname that Conventelli had given Cooper.
Coincidence?
Conventelli did not think so and paired them up.
A match made in heaven.
Or hell.
Depends on who you ask.
They fit together like gloves, their personalities both strong, both dominant men who managed to gel perfectly by being stubborn, vocal and introverted; their combination bred the instinct of a bloodhound, as the Director had told them, which meant that they were probably the best pair of trackers who were not actually trained for the job.
They stuck together for two- and- a- half years, and Cooper knows that neither of them has shared so much stuff with anyone else, beside Robin Brooks in Don’s case, since then.
By the time they parted, they knew the other as well as they knew themselves.
Don knows that he likes his coffee cold in the morning, with a lot of milk. That his toothbrush has to be green and he does not use anything but Colgate. He has to sleep on the right side of the bed and can only fall asleep when lying on his left side. The scar on the back of his knee is from when he fell into a shard of glass when playing Hide & Seek with his cousins when he was four. The scar on his shoulder blade is from a rough tackle during an impromptu football match at the beginning of his sophomore year in high school. He likes to collect recipes even though he will probably never have the time to cook them all.
But he likes knowing that he has them.
He is an ambidextrous, and can write with his toes, kind of; that came handy when he broke both his arms after a cycling accident, when his older sister Catherine crashed into him, and he really wanted to write the school exams they had. Of course he could not write all exams, but at least he gave it a shot.
Speaking of, he never backs down from a challenge and is willing to try everything at least once as long as it is not insane. He has played football, soccer, tennis, basketball, baseball, was into athletics, triple- jump, hurdles and high- jump, learned how to do karate, volleyball, and paragliding.
He likes to be active, and when he finally signed up for the FBI and heard of FR he knew that was what he wanted to do.
His instructor wanted him to consider SWAT but Billy wanted FR, and it turned out to be the better option. He was in SWAT at first, after completing training and then pushed for FR relentlessly.
This was what he was born to do, and nobody was going to keep him away from it.
He got paired up with Michael Vollangey, a Chicago Bulls- fan who thought Michael Jordan was God, and loved to listen to recorded games when they were on the road. He reminds Cooper, now, a bit of David Sinclair, Don’s second- in- command. Cool, calm, collected. A consummate professional, with a wicked sense of humour that he only rarely let shine through the exterior of the cool African-American man that he had cultivated. He was a good trainer, someone from whom Billy learned a lot, but he knew that he could do better.
Now, more than fifteen years later, he is solo once again, and he loves it.
His current partner, Dellen DelVecio, stupid name, seriously, is on vacation and has left Cooper hanging high and dry, but honestly, he is not missing the company. DelVecio is a boring loser, someone who should be sitting behind a desk somewhere in a quiet region, the desert, where no- one is going to bother him.
According to his resume and from what his superiors told Cooper, the guy rocked the training, but now he is just lacking any instinct, any drive. He just sits and moans about being away from his parents, his granny, his fiancée.
Well, now he is gone to see them and hopefully, when he’s back, he won’t moan and whinge so much. If he continues on that track, Cooper might just kick him out the door and leave him stranded.
Preferably in the middle of nowhere.
DelVecio is not someone that Cooper would want to talk to about his life. The guy is over- sharing at every junction, whenever he opens his mouth, Cooper would love to scream ‘TMI!’ He just knows that he will get a rundown of every second of DelVecio’s time off. Probably even a description of the sex with his woman.
Blech.
Cooper could use a vacation himself, but his twin sister Theresa, who he usually goes to visit, is in Europe where her husband is on a lecture series around German universities. He could go and visit his parents but they barely recognize Catherine, and she
comes to visit them every day. The last time they talked, she told him she had shown them a photo of him and Theresa, and they had asked who those two were. If that was them when they were younger, seeing as both him and Theresa are the splitting images of their parents.
An actual visit of him or Theresa would upset them very much, so the doctors have actually told them to stay away.
Usually he would say ‘Screw that’ and go and visit them anyways, but they are his parents, and he does not want to hurt them. He does not want to hurt his sisters, either, and he knows what it would do to them.
Catherine is stuck at the convent at the moment, doing another series of fasting and not receiving visitors. She is only allowed to go out to visit the parents because otherwise the old ones’ health would deteriorate even more than it is already doing.
So he cannot visit her either.
He would love to go and drop by LA but knows that if he showed up at the Craftsman, he would be less than welcome.
Gas is nearly empty, and he stops by the next station to fill up the tank. His introspective mood is broken by the overly cheery Barbra, the owner’s daughter, who helps out during her summer vacation, chattering his ear off, asking about his travels once he
has revealed that he is an FBI- agent.
That is one thing that he is not reluctant to talk to people about, because it usually keeps them from diving too much into his personality, to try to get to know him too much. They are distracted by all that the Feds represent, and a mention of his occupation either starts a tantrum or rant about the inefficiency of government agencies, or the direct opposite.
The girl in front of him loves the Feds, she gushes. She watches every telly show about Feds, and wants to become one of them, as soon as she is old enough to join up. She wants to know if he can give her a reference.
Or if she can do him another favour and turns around to display an enticing backside barely hidden by a skirt so short Theresa would not even dress her three- year- old daughter in.
This reminds him, from every petrol station he takes a photograph of the metre- stand for his nephew, seven- year- old Daniel, who loves to see how much his uncle has driven and then tries to calculate the average speed that he was going at. Sometimes,
Daniel reminds him of Charlie Eppes, whom Cooper met once, when he was in LA a couple of years back, man hunting with Don once again.
Boy, it had felt so good, to be with Don again, to tease him, to call him Donnie, to know that the guy he was working with had his back a hundred per cent and was not going screw up by running away like a sissy.
But he got the impression that Charlie did not like him. For whatever reason.
He understands why Alan Eppes might not be his biggest fan.
But what did he ever do to the genius? Aside from helping his brother work through some of the rage that his younger partner felt towards his little brother. So what if he could not imagine that the Don Eppes that he had worked with so intimately would rely on maths to solve their cases? To use them as a crutch to catch the perp and not his own superbly honed skills?
He was witness to more than one fit that Don threw in the car when years of pent- up emotion unloaded.
This is how close they were. How close they are again.
They shared everything, every emotion, every thought. They did not hold back. Screaming matches and massive fights were not unknown to them. They relied on the other to catch them when they were overwhelmed, when they had to just let their guard down.
Only someone who has been in FR knows how it feels like. Can relate to the torrent of emotion going through you when you are closing in on who you have been chasing. When the elusive comes so close that you can nearly feel their breath.
And then the tension unloads, and with the tension memories often come to the surface that otherwise would never see the light of day.
Don knows about his father, a colonel in the Navy, who was deployed a lot, who taught his children a sense of justice that Cooper wants to pass on. He took them out hunting with their grandfather, he showed Cooper how to track, how to hunt. He was the one to discover that Billy had a knack for finding tracks, for discovering clues.
Don knows about his mother, a teacher, who loved to read to their children, who was the consummate housewife after school.
People sometimes think that Cooper grew up in a rough household because of his demeanour, when in actuality it was the direct opposite.
So what does it say about him that he, the notorious loner, grew up in a loving family?
He does not know, and he does not care. He has his family, he knows he has his sisters’ support, and he knows that they know him. Know why he is doing this, why he cannot stop being in FR. It is in his blood, he needs to do this.
He comes back down to Earth when Barbra asks him for the money. He pays her absentmindedly, still, and then drives off. He is between cases right now, and has half a mind to call his superior and ask him for a vacation.
He really needs one.
Even if it is just to lie in his apartment and do nothing.
And then the phone rings. It is a cell phone that he does not recognize.
“Special Agent Cooper.”
“Cooper? This is Robin. Robin Brooks. Remember me?”
“How could I forget? I thought Don was gonna come down and kick my ass.”
“Don’t sweat it.”
Soft laughter.
“So, what is it that you want, Robin Brooks, AUSA? And I’m not even going to ask how you got my number.”
“Oh, that was easy. He’s sleeping, but his phone is not.”
Now he is the one laughing.
“Listen, there is something I’ve been wondering...”
---
Three hours later he has called in his vacation with his superior, promising to fill out the proper form as soon as he gets to Chicago, where he will drop off the car at his apartment and take the next outgoing flight to Los Angeles tomorrow.
And then the phone rings again.
An LA number.
“Special Agent Cooper.”
“Hello, this is Alan Eppes. Agent Cooper, can I have a moment of your time?”
Series: Ulysses
Author: loozy
Characters: Billy Cooper, mention of others
Rating: PG- 13/ K
Summary: He does not know, and he does not care. He has his family, he knows he has his sisters’ support, and he knows that they know him. Know why he is doing this, why he cannot stop being in FR. It is in his blood, he needs to do this.
Word Count: 2441
Spoilers: after 5x23, Angels & Devils
Notes: valeriev84 is again the beta for this chapter...
Prompt: # 53 Support
Disclaimer: I do not own any of the characters mentioned in this fic. Numb3rs and everybody associated with it belong to Cheryl Heuton & Nick Fallucci and CBS.
Feedback: Yes, please. I love every kind of review, even the bad ones, as long as they are helpful and constructive.
William Donnelly Chaplan Cooper is not someone who shares.
His life story, at least.
He will share food, and space and ammo, but to get him to talk about his past is something that only a handful of people have managed.
His primary school teacher, when he did not yet know the power of secrets.
His first girlfriend, Karla, because he loved her like he had, and has, actually, never done before and since then.
The FBI- guy he interviewed with because he had to.
Don Eppes, because he was his partner, and his best friend.
To anyone else, he is an enigma. Well, so is Don, in a certain way, but they are made of different stuff.
Don’s status as an enigma comes from his hidden intelligence, the one he so rarely openly lets shine through, his intuition.
His status comes from simply not talking about himself. Sure, whoever wants to know about him might just as well, if they have the proper clearance, get his file, but he doubts that any will actually go to the trouble. Because if he finds out that they have been snooping around about him, he will want to know why, and he doubts that he will get the answers he wants, then.
Not a lot of people like him, which would explain the stream of partners he has had since Don transferred out of Fugitive Recovery and on to Quantico.
Granted, he knew from the start that Eppes might be excellent in FR, but he can do more. He is a born leader, whereas Cooper prefers to work alone, or with a partner. He does not have a lot of demands, but the one that has been true ever since he got promoted to team leader in FR, he has wanted someone who has as much guts as he has, and not everybody measures up.
In fact, before Don, there was only one agent, Special Agent Mariah Branovich, who he got along with. He would have stayed with her as a partner had she not gotten pregnant and taken a desk job.
Such a waste of resources.
He got lucky when the next partner he got assigned was Don Eppes, fresh from Detroit; the AD of his office told Cooper that Eppes had been stuck in Detroit for three months with a good- for- nothing partner who eventually requested the junior agent transferred because he could not get along with him. Eppes did not want to get coffee or answer telephones or do boring work. He was a field agent and had not been quiet about that, driving Special Agent Kevin Fetherson nearly insane with his constant badgering.
Fetherson had been the one who had suggested to stick Eppes with Fugitive Recovery because he was just tenacious enough. According to AD Conventelli, Fetherson had called Don a terrier, the same nickname that Conventelli had given Cooper.
Coincidence?
Conventelli did not think so and paired them up.
A match made in heaven.
Or hell.
Depends on who you ask.
They fit together like gloves, their personalities both strong, both dominant men who managed to gel perfectly by being stubborn, vocal and introverted; their combination bred the instinct of a bloodhound, as the Director had told them, which meant that they were probably the best pair of trackers who were not actually trained for the job.
They stuck together for two- and- a- half years, and Cooper knows that neither of them has shared so much stuff with anyone else, beside Robin Brooks in Don’s case, since then.
By the time they parted, they knew the other as well as they knew themselves.
Don knows that he likes his coffee cold in the morning, with a lot of milk. That his toothbrush has to be green and he does not use anything but Colgate. He has to sleep on the right side of the bed and can only fall asleep when lying on his left side. The scar on the back of his knee is from when he fell into a shard of glass when playing Hide & Seek with his cousins when he was four. The scar on his shoulder blade is from a rough tackle during an impromptu football match at the beginning of his sophomore year in high school. He likes to collect recipes even though he will probably never have the time to cook them all.
But he likes knowing that he has them.
He is an ambidextrous, and can write with his toes, kind of; that came handy when he broke both his arms after a cycling accident, when his older sister Catherine crashed into him, and he really wanted to write the school exams they had. Of course he could not write all exams, but at least he gave it a shot.
Speaking of, he never backs down from a challenge and is willing to try everything at least once as long as it is not insane. He has played football, soccer, tennis, basketball, baseball, was into athletics, triple- jump, hurdles and high- jump, learned how to do karate, volleyball, and paragliding.
He likes to be active, and when he finally signed up for the FBI and heard of FR he knew that was what he wanted to do.
His instructor wanted him to consider SWAT but Billy wanted FR, and it turned out to be the better option. He was in SWAT at first, after completing training and then pushed for FR relentlessly.
This was what he was born to do, and nobody was going to keep him away from it.
He got paired up with Michael Vollangey, a Chicago Bulls- fan who thought Michael Jordan was God, and loved to listen to recorded games when they were on the road. He reminds Cooper, now, a bit of David Sinclair, Don’s second- in- command. Cool, calm, collected. A consummate professional, with a wicked sense of humour that he only rarely let shine through the exterior of the cool African-American man that he had cultivated. He was a good trainer, someone from whom Billy learned a lot, but he knew that he could do better.
Now, more than fifteen years later, he is solo once again, and he loves it.
His current partner, Dellen DelVecio, stupid name, seriously, is on vacation and has left Cooper hanging high and dry, but honestly, he is not missing the company. DelVecio is a boring loser, someone who should be sitting behind a desk somewhere in a quiet region, the desert, where no- one is going to bother him.
According to his resume and from what his superiors told Cooper, the guy rocked the training, but now he is just lacking any instinct, any drive. He just sits and moans about being away from his parents, his granny, his fiancée.
Well, now he is gone to see them and hopefully, when he’s back, he won’t moan and whinge so much. If he continues on that track, Cooper might just kick him out the door and leave him stranded.
Preferably in the middle of nowhere.
DelVecio is not someone that Cooper would want to talk to about his life. The guy is over- sharing at every junction, whenever he opens his mouth, Cooper would love to scream ‘TMI!’ He just knows that he will get a rundown of every second of DelVecio’s time off. Probably even a description of the sex with his woman.
Blech.
Cooper could use a vacation himself, but his twin sister Theresa, who he usually goes to visit, is in Europe where her husband is on a lecture series around German universities. He could go and visit his parents but they barely recognize Catherine, and she
comes to visit them every day. The last time they talked, she told him she had shown them a photo of him and Theresa, and they had asked who those two were. If that was them when they were younger, seeing as both him and Theresa are the splitting images of their parents.
An actual visit of him or Theresa would upset them very much, so the doctors have actually told them to stay away.
Usually he would say ‘Screw that’ and go and visit them anyways, but they are his parents, and he does not want to hurt them. He does not want to hurt his sisters, either, and he knows what it would do to them.
Catherine is stuck at the convent at the moment, doing another series of fasting and not receiving visitors. She is only allowed to go out to visit the parents because otherwise the old ones’ health would deteriorate even more than it is already doing.
So he cannot visit her either.
He would love to go and drop by LA but knows that if he showed up at the Craftsman, he would be less than welcome.
Gas is nearly empty, and he stops by the next station to fill up the tank. His introspective mood is broken by the overly cheery Barbra, the owner’s daughter, who helps out during her summer vacation, chattering his ear off, asking about his travels once he
has revealed that he is an FBI- agent.
That is one thing that he is not reluctant to talk to people about, because it usually keeps them from diving too much into his personality, to try to get to know him too much. They are distracted by all that the Feds represent, and a mention of his occupation either starts a tantrum or rant about the inefficiency of government agencies, or the direct opposite.
The girl in front of him loves the Feds, she gushes. She watches every telly show about Feds, and wants to become one of them, as soon as she is old enough to join up. She wants to know if he can give her a reference.
Or if she can do him another favour and turns around to display an enticing backside barely hidden by a skirt so short Theresa would not even dress her three- year- old daughter in.
This reminds him, from every petrol station he takes a photograph of the metre- stand for his nephew, seven- year- old Daniel, who loves to see how much his uncle has driven and then tries to calculate the average speed that he was going at. Sometimes,
Daniel reminds him of Charlie Eppes, whom Cooper met once, when he was in LA a couple of years back, man hunting with Don once again.
Boy, it had felt so good, to be with Don again, to tease him, to call him Donnie, to know that the guy he was working with had his back a hundred per cent and was not going screw up by running away like a sissy.
But he got the impression that Charlie did not like him. For whatever reason.
He understands why Alan Eppes might not be his biggest fan.
But what did he ever do to the genius? Aside from helping his brother work through some of the rage that his younger partner felt towards his little brother. So what if he could not imagine that the Don Eppes that he had worked with so intimately would rely on maths to solve their cases? To use them as a crutch to catch the perp and not his own superbly honed skills?
He was witness to more than one fit that Don threw in the car when years of pent- up emotion unloaded.
This is how close they were. How close they are again.
They shared everything, every emotion, every thought. They did not hold back. Screaming matches and massive fights were not unknown to them. They relied on the other to catch them when they were overwhelmed, when they had to just let their guard down.
Only someone who has been in FR knows how it feels like. Can relate to the torrent of emotion going through you when you are closing in on who you have been chasing. When the elusive comes so close that you can nearly feel their breath.
And then the tension unloads, and with the tension memories often come to the surface that otherwise would never see the light of day.
Don knows about his father, a colonel in the Navy, who was deployed a lot, who taught his children a sense of justice that Cooper wants to pass on. He took them out hunting with their grandfather, he showed Cooper how to track, how to hunt. He was the one to discover that Billy had a knack for finding tracks, for discovering clues.
Don knows about his mother, a teacher, who loved to read to their children, who was the consummate housewife after school.
People sometimes think that Cooper grew up in a rough household because of his demeanour, when in actuality it was the direct opposite.
So what does it say about him that he, the notorious loner, grew up in a loving family?
He does not know, and he does not care. He has his family, he knows he has his sisters’ support, and he knows that they know him. Know why he is doing this, why he cannot stop being in FR. It is in his blood, he needs to do this.
He comes back down to Earth when Barbra asks him for the money. He pays her absentmindedly, still, and then drives off. He is between cases right now, and has half a mind to call his superior and ask him for a vacation.
He really needs one.
Even if it is just to lie in his apartment and do nothing.
And then the phone rings. It is a cell phone that he does not recognize.
“Special Agent Cooper.”
“Cooper? This is Robin. Robin Brooks. Remember me?”
“How could I forget? I thought Don was gonna come down and kick my ass.”
“Don’t sweat it.”
Soft laughter.
“So, what is it that you want, Robin Brooks, AUSA? And I’m not even going to ask how you got my number.”
“Oh, that was easy. He’s sleeping, but his phone is not.”
Now he is the one laughing.
“Listen, there is something I’ve been wondering...”
---
Three hours later he has called in his vacation with his superior, promising to fill out the proper form as soon as he gets to Chicago, where he will drop off the car at his apartment and take the next outgoing flight to Los Angeles tomorrow.
And then the phone rings again.
An LA number.
“Special Agent Cooper.”
“Hello, this is Alan Eppes. Agent Cooper, can I have a moment of your time?”