Num3rs : Holding the Shadow
Title: Holding the Shadow
Author: Avari (sunlesslands)
Pairing: Colby Granger/OMC for a minute
Rating/Category: PG13 Slash
Summary: There’s always something left behind; Colby packs up his life and leaves more than he takes.
Disclaimer: I don’t own Numb3rs or lay any claim to the characters or situations in the show.
Author's Notes: Chopin's Prelude #15, for anyone who would like to listen while reading the story. Absolutely giant thank you's to my beta Shelly and my lobster Ariel who kept me from having a break down while writing this. I don't know what I would have done without the two of you. I hope everyone enjoys!
"You're a shadow. You slip out of your own skin, like molting, shedding your own history and your own future, leaving behind everything you ever were or wanted or believed in."
- The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien
I. Capriccioso : Winchester, Idaho 1987
Outside the sky was glowing dark, a black fire of seething clouds that rolled and billowed in time to the thwarted roars of thunder. Inside, there was Jeremy, with his features a little too fine, a little too sharp for small town Idaho. Colby sat next to him at the music room’s piano and watched his hands {intensely). They were perfect, so unlike Colby’s. Jeremy’s hands were fined boned and delicate and out of place in Middle America while Colby’s hands were like him; they belonged too well.
Spring had been the season for storms in Winchester. The high school athletic calendar had been all but destroyed without practices or outdoor events turning the energy in the halls restless and tense. Every distant groan of thunder and moan of wind and caress of rain left the town in renewed panic. While Colby begged for the encroaching storms like a sunflower begged for light.
It was only during the storms that he could stop pretending and play.
“Colby? Hey, wake up over there.” Jeremy’s shoulder bumped against Colby’s, triggering a flow of blush to his face.
“Huh? Oh, yeah, sorry.”
Jeremy turned on the bench, his chest against Colby’s shoulder now. “Something going on? You -”
“No. Nothing, I’m here, really. Just - what comes next?” It was hard not to flinch under the direct stare that Jeremy was so good at. Colby wasn’t sure how the music prodigy of Winchester High (delicate limbs, dark hair, so much slighter and thinner and frailer than him) managed to be intimidating. But damn if he didn’t manage it anyway.
Jeremy sighed and closed his copy of Chopin’s Prelude #15 (‘Raindrop’). “Hey, did I ever tell you the one about Sir Beecham and the cellist?”
“Huh? Uh, no, I don’t think so.”
“Okay, well, there’s this conductor, English guy, Sir Thomas Beecham. Really famous, anyway,” Colby grinned as Jeremy launched into one his stories, hands (exotic, out of place, flowers in a breeze) fluttering, “he’s in the middle of rehearsing the cello concerto when he stops and snaps at the soloist, ‘Madam, you have between your legs something that could give pleasure to thousands - and all you do is sit and scratch it!’”
Colby’s bark of laughter was half surprised as much as anything. Jeremy’s stories went over his head half the time, lost in musical jargon and intricacies. Sitting next to him, Jeremy soaked up the laughter the same way Colby soaked up the storms. And when he leaned up (leaned in) to press clumsy lips to Colby’s still laughing mouth, it wasn’t much of a surprise.
II. Affrettando : Winchester, Idaho 2005
Ghosts of the past lived here, in the sealed cardboard boxes and the ones still open. Others still sit, collapsed, alongside markers and packing tape next to the door waiting to be filled. White walls, never painted, are still damp from the brisk wash, the photographs that hung there had long since been pulled down. Collected together on the last remaining table (dining room table, a house warming gift never used), Colby hasn’t glanced at the framed memories. All of them will end up in one of the boxes not yet set up, labeled and tossed on the back of a moving truck. Then the box, like all the others with brick a brack (and sentiment) will be neatly tucked away in a Los Angeles closet, a million miles from home.
Whatever that meant.
Colby had never been strong on sentiment or memory. He had too many of one and tasted too much of the other for any romantic notions to survive. A quick look around, the boxes that were his life, said everything by saying very little; thirty years of life, packed away in two days.
He smiled ruefully at another box, unlabeled; from his mother’s place. She didn’t want his old things cluttered in the attic, and he didn’t blame her. Colby wasn’t exactly fond of them either. The box cutter felt different in his hand, he knew the weight was wrong but could be compensated for on a downswing.
The twenty year old tape ripped open with one slice (efficiency is important, always make sure it’s neat). Colby tossed the box to the floor and rifled through its innards with practiced ease. A few notebooks he barely remembered from high school, the first page filled with notations he remembered too well.
Twenty years of too many memories; notes on Chopin’s prelude.
III. Agiato : Winchester, Idaho 1987
“Damn!” Nerves, it was just nerves. Colby had lost his fifth lure of the trip, he hadn’t even known it was possible to lose five lures in less than a day.
“Hey, language, Colb!”
“Shit. Sorry, Dad.”
“Here,” Colby’s father was laughing as he set down the tackle and rod. It didn’t take long in his hands (big and calloused, used to guns and lures and wrestling throws) and a new lure took shape. “Wooly bugger, best damn lure you can have in your kit. Try not to lose this one.”
“Thanks, Dad, I appreciate that.” Colby rolled his eyes as he took the lure, running his thumb over the furry body (back and forth and forth and back and over again).
“Well, maybe if you talk about it, you won’t keep losing lures.” The fans around his dad’s eyes were a pale white when he smiled, shining against a weathered face.
“I’ve just - I’ve been thinking.” Colby traced the feathered tail (swish, swish, swish).
“Yeah, that’s always a bad idea.”
“Um, well, it’s just - I was thinking of not going out for the wrestling team next year.”
“What? Why? Did something happen? Is it your brothers, Colby you know -”
“Nah, it’s got nothing to do with them. It’s just -”
“Just? C’mon, would you spit it out?”
“I’ve been, um, I’ve been talking to the music director at the school and he -”
“Whoa, whoa, hang on a sec, the music director?” Colby knew. The second he heard the tone (incredulous; ‘my son is talking to a music director? When the fuck did the high school get one of those).
“Yeah, the music director. I’ve been thinking more and more and music, maybe a conservatory or -”
“The hell? Colb, what’s gotten into you? We had this figured out, remember? The Grangers have been in the military for -”
“For four generations, yeah, I know, but Dad -”
“No. I don’t know where the hell you came up with this, but we’re not discussing it. You need to get your head screwed back on straight.”
V. Estinto : Winchester, Idaho 2005
Colby doesn’t have to look for a box. The letter and the clipping are tossed at the bottom of his duffle bag.
Jeremy, with his features too fine, never fitting in had killed himself the day before a concert. An overdose of something because being told (always, always told) that you were this or you were that and god damnit people had expectations; especially for geniuses, had finally broken the weird kid from high school.
Colby had been Kabul when he got the news, two hours away from an IED attack on his Hum-Vee and a lifetime of owing Dwayne Carter. The letter came from a high school sweetheart who always wrote when she was having fights with her husband.
Jeremy’s suicide had been sandwiched between a thinly veiled offer for when he got home and a second child learning how to walk (‘Oh, before I forget, remember that musical kid? Jason - Jacob - Jeremy, something like that, anyway, turns out he offed himself a few weeks ago. The local paper just got the story, what a weirdo. So, about Maggie-”).
Two hours after the attack, Colby had been in the hospital bed sick with the knowledge that Carter owned him; like a father. Another roar of thunder and his life derailed, again. Alone, (recuperating), Colby had read the letter driven half-frantic from desperation to have something from his old life to shine. All there’d been was more death.
Paper crumbled in his hand, teeth sunk into his wrist to stop from screaming or crying because Grangers did neither.
He had two seconds to let it matter. Two seconds to grieve when the best and the brightest he knew was dead and Colby would have done anything, killed anyone else (especially himself) to change the ending.
Then he pretended not to care, again. He was good at pretending, it was the only talent he had.
“Fuck!”
VI. Espirando : Winchester, Idaho 1987
The car came up from nowhere. No one says the word drunk driver (no one says anything at all). There’s tears from the girls and tight jaws, tight fists, taut tempers from the boys (Granger men don’t cry, never, never ever. Sometimes they explode.).
Colby can’t hold his father’s hand. It’s all he can do to stay in the room (clean and beeping, faint and high when it should be rumbling crashes, dissonance and strength).
“I’m sorry,” he can’t recognize his own voice. It’s a voice that belongs to this room, just a rasp of breath (stirs only dead leaves). “I’m so fucking sorry. You were right. You were right. Five generations, Dad, I don’t want you to worry.”
Granger men don’t cry, never. Never, ever, but sometimes they run, sometimes running is all they can do. Colby didn’t look back (didn’t see the flinch, didn’t see the second thoughts).
His father is buried on a perfect day, clear and cloudless and soundless.
Codetta : Winchester, Idaho 2005
The last box doesn’t fill up the moving truck (thirty years of life contained in less than eight feet of space). As Colby pulls the door down it rattles, rumbles like distant thunder.
A box in the apartment is open (notebooks and song books and the ghosts of the past); the label (‘Junk’) in Colby’s neat handwriting fills one side.
This fic was written for the Angst vs Schmoop Challenge at numb3rswriteoff. After you’ve read the fic, please rate it by voting in the poll. (Your vote will be anonymous.) Rate the fic on a scale of 1 - 10 (10 being the best) using the following criteria: how well the fic fit the prompt, how angst-y [or schmoop-y] the fic was, and how well you enjoyed the fic. When you’re done, please check out the other challenge fic at numb3rswriteoff. Thank you!
Author: Avari (sunlesslands)
Pairing: Colby Granger/OMC for a minute
Rating/Category: PG13 Slash
Summary: There’s always something left behind; Colby packs up his life and leaves more than he takes.
Disclaimer: I don’t own Numb3rs or lay any claim to the characters or situations in the show.
Author's Notes: Chopin's Prelude #15, for anyone who would like to listen while reading the story. Absolutely giant thank you's to my beta Shelly and my lobster Ariel who kept me from having a break down while writing this. I don't know what I would have done without the two of you. I hope everyone enjoys!
"You're a shadow. You slip out of your own skin, like molting, shedding your own history and your own future, leaving behind everything you ever were or wanted or believed in."
- The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien
I. Capriccioso : Winchester, Idaho 1987
Outside the sky was glowing dark, a black fire of seething clouds that rolled and billowed in time to the thwarted roars of thunder. Inside, there was Jeremy, with his features a little too fine, a little too sharp for small town Idaho. Colby sat next to him at the music room’s piano and watched his hands {intensely). They were perfect, so unlike Colby’s. Jeremy’s hands were fined boned and delicate and out of place in Middle America while Colby’s hands were like him; they belonged too well.
Spring had been the season for storms in Winchester. The high school athletic calendar had been all but destroyed without practices or outdoor events turning the energy in the halls restless and tense. Every distant groan of thunder and moan of wind and caress of rain left the town in renewed panic. While Colby begged for the encroaching storms like a sunflower begged for light.
It was only during the storms that he could stop pretending and play.
“Colby? Hey, wake up over there.” Jeremy’s shoulder bumped against Colby’s, triggering a flow of blush to his face.
“Huh? Oh, yeah, sorry.”
Jeremy turned on the bench, his chest against Colby’s shoulder now. “Something going on? You -”
“No. Nothing, I’m here, really. Just - what comes next?” It was hard not to flinch under the direct stare that Jeremy was so good at. Colby wasn’t sure how the music prodigy of Winchester High (delicate limbs, dark hair, so much slighter and thinner and frailer than him) managed to be intimidating. But damn if he didn’t manage it anyway.
Jeremy sighed and closed his copy of Chopin’s Prelude #15 (‘Raindrop’). “Hey, did I ever tell you the one about Sir Beecham and the cellist?”
“Huh? Uh, no, I don’t think so.”
“Okay, well, there’s this conductor, English guy, Sir Thomas Beecham. Really famous, anyway,” Colby grinned as Jeremy launched into one his stories, hands (exotic, out of place, flowers in a breeze) fluttering, “he’s in the middle of rehearsing the cello concerto when he stops and snaps at the soloist, ‘Madam, you have between your legs something that could give pleasure to thousands - and all you do is sit and scratch it!’”
Colby’s bark of laughter was half surprised as much as anything. Jeremy’s stories went over his head half the time, lost in musical jargon and intricacies. Sitting next to him, Jeremy soaked up the laughter the same way Colby soaked up the storms. And when he leaned up (leaned in) to press clumsy lips to Colby’s still laughing mouth, it wasn’t much of a surprise.
II. Affrettando : Winchester, Idaho 2005
Ghosts of the past lived here, in the sealed cardboard boxes and the ones still open. Others still sit, collapsed, alongside markers and packing tape next to the door waiting to be filled. White walls, never painted, are still damp from the brisk wash, the photographs that hung there had long since been pulled down. Collected together on the last remaining table (dining room table, a house warming gift never used), Colby hasn’t glanced at the framed memories. All of them will end up in one of the boxes not yet set up, labeled and tossed on the back of a moving truck. Then the box, like all the others with brick a brack (and sentiment) will be neatly tucked away in a Los Angeles closet, a million miles from home.
Whatever that meant.
Colby had never been strong on sentiment or memory. He had too many of one and tasted too much of the other for any romantic notions to survive. A quick look around, the boxes that were his life, said everything by saying very little; thirty years of life, packed away in two days.
He smiled ruefully at another box, unlabeled; from his mother’s place. She didn’t want his old things cluttered in the attic, and he didn’t blame her. Colby wasn’t exactly fond of them either. The box cutter felt different in his hand, he knew the weight was wrong but could be compensated for on a downswing.
The twenty year old tape ripped open with one slice (efficiency is important, always make sure it’s neat). Colby tossed the box to the floor and rifled through its innards with practiced ease. A few notebooks he barely remembered from high school, the first page filled with notations he remembered too well.
Twenty years of too many memories; notes on Chopin’s prelude.
III. Agiato : Winchester, Idaho 1987
“Damn!” Nerves, it was just nerves. Colby had lost his fifth lure of the trip, he hadn’t even known it was possible to lose five lures in less than a day.
“Hey, language, Colb!”
“Shit. Sorry, Dad.”
“Here,” Colby’s father was laughing as he set down the tackle and rod. It didn’t take long in his hands (big and calloused, used to guns and lures and wrestling throws) and a new lure took shape. “Wooly bugger, best damn lure you can have in your kit. Try not to lose this one.”
“Thanks, Dad, I appreciate that.” Colby rolled his eyes as he took the lure, running his thumb over the furry body (back and forth and forth and back and over again).
“Well, maybe if you talk about it, you won’t keep losing lures.” The fans around his dad’s eyes were a pale white when he smiled, shining against a weathered face.
“I’ve just - I’ve been thinking.” Colby traced the feathered tail (swish, swish, swish).
“Yeah, that’s always a bad idea.”
“Um, well, it’s just - I was thinking of not going out for the wrestling team next year.”
“What? Why? Did something happen? Is it your brothers, Colby you know -”
“Nah, it’s got nothing to do with them. It’s just -”
“Just? C’mon, would you spit it out?”
“I’ve been, um, I’ve been talking to the music director at the school and he -”
“Whoa, whoa, hang on a sec, the music director?” Colby knew. The second he heard the tone (incredulous; ‘my son is talking to a music director? When the fuck did the high school get one of those).
“Yeah, the music director. I’ve been thinking more and more and music, maybe a conservatory or -”
“The hell? Colb, what’s gotten into you? We had this figured out, remember? The Grangers have been in the military for -”
“For four generations, yeah, I know, but Dad -”
“No. I don’t know where the hell you came up with this, but we’re not discussing it. You need to get your head screwed back on straight.”
V. Estinto : Winchester, Idaho 2005
Colby doesn’t have to look for a box. The letter and the clipping are tossed at the bottom of his duffle bag.
Jeremy, with his features too fine, never fitting in had killed himself the day before a concert. An overdose of something because being told (always, always told) that you were this or you were that and god damnit people had expectations; especially for geniuses, had finally broken the weird kid from high school.
Colby had been Kabul when he got the news, two hours away from an IED attack on his Hum-Vee and a lifetime of owing Dwayne Carter. The letter came from a high school sweetheart who always wrote when she was having fights with her husband.
Jeremy’s suicide had been sandwiched between a thinly veiled offer for when he got home and a second child learning how to walk (‘Oh, before I forget, remember that musical kid? Jason - Jacob - Jeremy, something like that, anyway, turns out he offed himself a few weeks ago. The local paper just got the story, what a weirdo. So, about Maggie-”).
Two hours after the attack, Colby had been in the hospital bed sick with the knowledge that Carter owned him; like a father. Another roar of thunder and his life derailed, again. Alone, (recuperating), Colby had read the letter driven half-frantic from desperation to have something from his old life to shine. All there’d been was more death.
Paper crumbled in his hand, teeth sunk into his wrist to stop from screaming or crying because Grangers did neither.
He had two seconds to let it matter. Two seconds to grieve when the best and the brightest he knew was dead and Colby would have done anything, killed anyone else (especially himself) to change the ending.
Then he pretended not to care, again. He was good at pretending, it was the only talent he had.
“Fuck!”
VI. Espirando : Winchester, Idaho 1987
The car came up from nowhere. No one says the word drunk driver (no one says anything at all). There’s tears from the girls and tight jaws, tight fists, taut tempers from the boys (Granger men don’t cry, never, never ever. Sometimes they explode.).
Colby can’t hold his father’s hand. It’s all he can do to stay in the room (clean and beeping, faint and high when it should be rumbling crashes, dissonance and strength).
“I’m sorry,” he can’t recognize his own voice. It’s a voice that belongs to this room, just a rasp of breath (stirs only dead leaves). “I’m so fucking sorry. You were right. You were right. Five generations, Dad, I don’t want you to worry.”
Granger men don’t cry, never. Never, ever, but sometimes they run, sometimes running is all they can do. Colby didn’t look back (didn’t see the flinch, didn’t see the second thoughts).
His father is buried on a perfect day, clear and cloudless and soundless.
Codetta : Winchester, Idaho 2005
The last box doesn’t fill up the moving truck (thirty years of life contained in less than eight feet of space). As Colby pulls the door down it rattles, rumbles like distant thunder.
A box in the apartment is open (notebooks and song books and the ghosts of the past); the label (‘Junk’) in Colby’s neat handwriting fills one side.
This fic was written for the Angst vs Schmoop Challenge at numb3rswriteoff. After you’ve read the fic, please rate it by voting in the poll. (Your vote will be anonymous.) Rate the fic on a scale of 1 - 10 (10 being the best) using the following criteria: how well the fic fit the prompt, how angst-y [or schmoop-y] the fic was, and how well you enjoyed the fic. When you’re done, please check out the other challenge fic at numb3rswriteoff. Thank you!