Peace on earth, good will towards men
The first of the fics, with more to come:
Charlie’s got this thing.
To be accurate, Larry would say that Charlie has a googolplex of things. Like his thing with glasses, or how he manages to wear his shirt inside out, or how he never remembers his keys and spins pencils between his fingers, or how he once brought in a stray cat from a humane shelter to demonstrate Schrödinger’s equation and then gave it to a student after the class ended.
But Charlie has this one thing where he gets his numbers, he gets his equations, and he steps outside the door, shuts it carefully behind him, and exits reality.
He lives inside this world of pure reason so often, pure theory and logic and abstract thought, where nothing really exists but numbers, and he’s always searching, always yearning and longing looking for something more-hunting for the treasure, seeking the truth. He needs to know, needs to find out, and it consumes him, it’s taken his entire life, in obsession.
And when he lifts his head out of its daze-after scritching at the chalkboard for too long, holed up in his office or cramped in the garage, or bent double over a desk scratching with a pencil-he gets dizzy-drunk on his own senses, reeling from sudden awareness. Everything is sharp and acute in its clarity, focused, and it overwhelms him.
The moments of lucidity come at the oddest times, when he’s in the middle of a lecture or on the phone or walking down the street, and the world unfolds and opens up like an origami flower coming apart. And he takes in everything, every single detail, and it’s new as the first time.
It used to disorient him, terrify him when he was a little kid-he’d been more withdrawn then, hiding behind his numbers in awkward, tearful shyness-and he still can’t get used to it. Even when he thinks he’s got a handle on it, when he thinks he can be normal and relate to the world like other people (without this disconnect, this unreality, this freakishness), Don comes and turns him head over heels again.
Charlie is addicted to Don with all of his senses.
Most of the year Don’s skin tastes clean like soap and shampoo and the musky cologne he wears, rich and smooth and lingering, when Charlie inhales and nuzzles along the lines of his palm and crook of his fingers-buries his nose in the crook of Don’s neck; kisses open-mouthed along the ridges in his chest and biceps and stomach, stroking and tracing muscles; licks up a long, slow line along the inside of his thigh, the underside of his cock, the edge of his earlobe and rests his lips against the fine soft hairs at the back of his neck-breathes him in.
Gets high and delirious on his scent and his skin and his warmth, dizzy like helium, drunk with pleasure.
And his kiss tastes of toothpaste and gum, and the bitter husky darkness of coffee and the golden amber buttery-malt honey of beer, and Charlie will slip his tongue inside and bite his lower lip and kiss him over and over again until he can’t breathe, just to taste all his flavours.
Sometimes Don tastes of gun oil and cordite, acid and metallic, and those days Charlie’s hands are all tremors and his kisses are frantically erratic, quick and shaky. And sometimes Don tastes of blood-split mouth, raw feverish swollen skin, nails digging crescents and dragging scratches down his back-and Charlie’s pulse pounds hard. Sometimes Don tastes of sweat and heat and his breath gasps in Charlie’s face, his groans muffled in Charlie’s mouth, his slick-wet skin slipping beneath Charlie’s fingers and strong, taut muscles tensing around him, and he comes and Charlie can’t remember anything, can’t think of anything but Don.
Sometimes, when it’s a very bad day, Don is hollow-eyed and gray-faced and smells like vomit as he huddles over the toilet. Sometimes it’s even worse and Charlie threads his fingers through Don’s hair and holds him fiercely close, and presses his lips to Don’s eyelids and cheeks, gently, insistently, and tastes warm salt as his brother breaks down and cries.
But these days, the holidays, Charlie luxuriates in Don. There are new smells in the air-cinnamon spice and apples, pine needles, gingerbread and turkey-and he’ll kiss Don and taste eggnog, the peppermint of candy canes, hot chocolate. When Dad visits to light the candles and Charlie sneaks into the kitchen where Don’s getting the plates, Don kisses him and cups his hand around Charlie’s curls amid the smell of fresh baked challah from the oven and latkes browning on the stove.
He’ll be greedy and steal extra hidden kisses just to taste more, stretch out in bed and explore Don’s skin lazily as they sleep sprawled out, close his eyes and breathe in and indulge in the heady sensation.
It distracts him, when he’s hunkered down at his desk and he’s got his pencil in his hand and he realizes he’s been doodling the same equation around the page for ten minutes. He tosses the pencil at the drawer and gets his coat and rouses Don from the sofa. It’s bitter cold outside as the wind blows rippling drifts of snow across the road, and Don slips his arm around Charlie’s shoulders and hugs close, and the rows of golden-white Christmas lights all blur together.