Fic: Lost Cause, Chapter 1/2 (Numb3rs, Don / Martin)
Title: Lost Cause, Chapter 1/2
Pair: Don Eppes / Martin Fridegord
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Not mine, etc.
Feedback: Always Welcome
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“I swear I didn’t peek, they just fell out and I-” Don snapped his mouth shut when he realised the office was empty. He walked across the room to Martin’s desk and placed the blue folder next to the deserted laptop.
“What are you doing?”
Don looked up and saw the man at the door and grinned. He could remember how Martin had described his new assistant: More than capable for the work, but also Los Angeles personified in several ways. A reformed party animal, who had gone back to school after he had screwed up his modelling career and given up his dreams of a future in Hollywood spotlight.
“I just brought some papers, Martin forgot them in my car. You must be Mick.”
“Rick, and you still haven’t told me who you are.”
“Don Eppes, FBI.” Don flipped his badge open. “Enough for you?”
“Why are you here?” The kid glared at him. He had seemed more friendly when he had thought Don was just a nosy intruder going through his boss’s papers.
“Like I said, I just brought the papers.” Don pulled out his wallet and showed the guy one of the photos he kept there. “Believe me, your boss knows me.”
“Can never be too careful.” Rick gave him an uncertain smile. “Last place I work got raided, and the next thing I knew the whole place was shut down and I never got my last paycheck.”
“I’m not here to raid the place.” Don assured and pointed at the folder. “I thought that might be urgent. When’s he coming back?”
“Probably not today, he told me to reschedule everything.”
“Why?”
“No idea.” Rick shrugged. He picked up the folder Don had brought and opened the filing cabinet. “He got a call and then left.”
“What kinda call?”
“I don’t listen to other people’s phone calls.”
“Didn’t he say anything?”
“No, just told me to say everyone that he had a family emergency and he’ll be back tomorrow. Called a cab and left.”
“And he didn’t say where he was going?”
“No.” Rick slammed the cabinet shut. “Anything else? I got stuff to do.”
“Nope, and by the way… if that was your normal performance, it’s no wonder that acting career didn’t work out.” Don stepped out of the office and pulled out his phone. He made it all the way to the elevators before David answered.
“Sinclair.”
“It’s me. How’s everything?”
“We’re waiting for those lab results and Colby and Megan are chatting our less than grieving widow.”
“Good. Can you hold up the fort for a while? I got a family emergency.”
“Something serious?”
“I don’t know, it’s so exclusive I wasn’t even informed.”
---------------------------------------------
The living room was empty, and Don walked straight into the kitchen. On the counter was a wide assortment of tea, unopened bottle of bourbon, and fixings of a sandwich without bread.
“Martin?”
“Shouldn’t you be working?” Martin walked in and Don took a quick look at him. The man’s eyes were slightly red and his shirt was unbuttoned almost the middle of his chest. The green tie he had worn that morning was nowhere to be seen.
“You too. I went to bring you that stuff you forgot in the car and that kid said you cancelled everything and left.”
“Yeah, I got some news from my parents. I couldn’t focus on anything so I came home.” Martin looked embarrassed and began to collect the things from the table. “First I thought a drink would calm me down, but it was too early for that so I was going to make tea, but I got fed up waiting for the water to boil, so-”
“You wanted a sandwich and then noticed you weren’t hungry?”
“Something like that.”
“You should have called me, I could have come to give you a ride.”
“I thought you’d be busy. And it’s probably a good time to get a new car, that thing is spending more time in the shop than on the road-”
“Are you going to tell me what the big emergency is? Are your parents okay?”
“They’re fine. Not fine, but… they’re not fine. They had some bad news and… my mom’s about to snap, but she can’t and dad doesn’t know what to do with her. They don’t even know how to tell the kid about it. Therapists should know how to deal with it, but I guess it doesn’t work when it’s about your own family.”
“What’s going on?”
“You know… When I talked about Joanna and how she was always… unpredictable.”
“I remember.”
“This time she did exactly as I predicted.”
“She can’t be out yet, she just started to serve her sentence.”
“She’s out. Or she will be. I said that her first reaction to any kind of pressure is lashing out at whoever is near.” Martin took a packet of tea from the counter and inhaled the soothing scent. “But this time the other person was doing time for a manslaughter.”
“She got into a fight?”
“They guards say she started the fight, and I can’t even doubt that. She had some severe blows to the head and they took her to the infirmary. They checked her injuries and it looked like she had just bruises, she was talking and lucid.”
“What happened then?” Don asked carefully. He took a glass from the cabinets, poured a small drink and placed it in front of Martin. “You’re not going back to work and you don’t need to drive, you can have one.”
“Thanks, but… I have a lot of stuff to handle. Legal issues and the funeral-”
“You just said she survived it.”
“They wanted to be sure, so they scheduled some tests in a hospital. She was supposed to be transferred there, but she started slurring and passed out.” Martin closed his eyes and shook his head. “They had no way of knowing.”
“She was more injured than it seemed?”
“Cerebral haemorrhage. There wasn’t much they could do in the infirmary and the ride to the hospital took too long… There wasn’t much left to do.”
“Do you need to fly there before the funeral or can they handle things?”
“I don’t even know if I can handle things right here and now. I keep thinking about her when she was a little girl and how she was when I last saw her… and I don’t know when I gave up all hope. All of us. Mom, dad, my sisters, all of us. We couldn’t do anything to help her and she just faded to the background.”
“You said she left and didn’t look back. If she wanted help, she could have called one of you anytime, but she didn’t.”
“I used to read her bedtime stories.” Martin recalled with a small smile. “I was the oldest, so mom wanted me to keep her out of mischief when she was tucking the other girls in. Jo always insisted I have to give a goodnight kiss to her hideous toy cat. She dragged that thing everywhere.”
Don took the safest course of action and placed the filled teakettle on the stove.
“Was she a horse nut too?”
“What?”
“I remember you said two of your sisters were horse nuts.”
“No, not Jo.” Martin chuckled and leaned his head back against the cabinet door. “Our mom took her to the stables exactly one time. One of the horses was giving birth when they got there and she thought it would be a good life lesson for her. Jo ran out screaming when she saw that. Never went to the stables again.”
“Sounds like Charlie. When he was around six or seven our neighbour was dog sitting this big Doberman-” Don chuckled and corrected himself. “Big compared to Charlie, he was really tiny. The dog got out of his leash and ran to Charlie across the street.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing. He just wanted to take a sniff, but Chuck freaked out. Avoided all dogs, big and small, for years. And he grew up normal. Or at least as normal as possible on the Chuck-scale.”
“Maybe that’s why I can’t understand it.” Martin nodded. “Jo was a normal kid, little bit moody, but… I can’t put those two pictures together. The way she was and how she turned out. They’re like two different person.”
“When’s the funeral?”
“They don’t know, the officials haven’t released the body yet.” He closed his eyes and sighed. “Why is it so easy?”
“What?”
“Calling it a body. A body, like it’s a piece of dead meat. She’s… it feels like my sister is still somewhere and a total stranger died. Someone I didn’t even know.”
“I guess that happens when you loose contact.”
“I could have tried to get in touch with him over the years more than I did. I should have. I actually thought that going to prison could get her out of that cycle, get her to straighten herself out.”
“So did your parents.” Don reminded. “They did what they could and so did you, but if someone is self-destructive, there’s really nothing anyone can do about it.”
“I don’t feel it. I don’t feel like I’ve lost a sister.” Martin stated slowly. “I remember her the way she was, and that person who died… I don’t really feel any kind of sadness. I mean not more than I do when someone I hardly know dies. When we were San Diego and I went to visit her…”
“Yeah?”
“Stranger. Complete and utter stranger. Strange face, strange voice, strange woman. Like everything about her had just disappeared piece by piece and… and this was just the final step.” He turned to observe the teakettle and let out a wet little chuckle. “That water’s never going to boil if you don’t turn the stove on.”
Chapter 2/2