FIC: "Not thinking about you," Part 4/5 (David/OMC, David/Amita, PG-13)
Part 4/5... I'm not going to say anything about it, except that I still don't know what to think of it. I love it and I hate it at the same time. Weird. :S
Enjoy.
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Title: "Not thinking about you" - Part 4/5
Characters/pairings: David/OMC, David/Amita, mention of Charlie/Colby, mention of OMC-Daniel, mention of OMC-Patrick Garner.
Genre: Het/Slash
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Insane behavior... ;)
Summary: Amita is really going crazy after all she's been through.
A/N: This happens during chapter 16, 17 and 18 of The Connections Series (those are already posted). There's references to my fic " I'll show you what's smooth".
Disclaimer: I do not own anything related to Numb3rs except my OMCs.
Betas: Thanks a lot to toomuchfandom and irena_adler , who helped with this particular chapter. :)
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Go to "Not thinking about you," Part 3/5 (PG-13)
Go to "Not thinking about you," Part 5/5 (NC-17)
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“NOT THINKING ABOUT YOU” - Part 4/5
Once David and Amita were at her apartment’s door, she pulled out her keys from her bag and looked at David. He cleared his throat and muttered, “Um, I’ll help you with this,” pointing at Amita’s suitcases.
She opened the door; he carried some of her luggage inside and left it by the little rustic couch she had in her tiny living room. The place was clean and peaceful, but it was slightly messy as there were books and papers everywhere. For a moment, David thought he was at Charlie’s house. No wonder why he and Amita had gotten along so well. They had the same thought processes. Or at least they used to, until Colby had changed all that.
They hadn’t talked on the way to the apartment. David had made several attempts to start a conversation, but every time he’d done it, Amita had said something that made the conversation come to an end very quickly. Then, silence had come between them again, and there had been nothing left to do but hope that the trip was short.
Still, David had no idea why Amita had asked him and not someone else to take her home. She had rejected his help earlier, and now they were together in her living room putting suitcases on the floor. They weren’t pretending that nothing had happened between them, though. There was a weird tension and the atmosphere was a bit unpleasant. Maybe it was because of the fact that the lights were soft and that the colors of Amita’s apartment were tones of oranges and ochre, and because of that peaceful coloring, David started to feel dizzy and drowsy. I’m so tired. I can’t even feel my body after everything that has happened. The conversation he’d had with Colby on their way to the FBI had made him remember some of the most horrible moments of his life, and that hadn’t exactly contributed to making him feel better.
They had talked about how terrible Colby felt because of knowing that Charlie was right about a lot of things. David’s best friend had confessed him that even if he liked Charlie, he’d had to admit that dealing with people’s reactions would be something very difficult and that maybe neither of them was prepared for that.
David had gone through that same emotion in his twenties. After a long time of keeping his pain to himself after Daniel had rejected him, his parents had ran into Daniels in a market near his house. At that time, Daniel had told them about what David felt for him. Daniel’s parents had started a fight with David’s because they had said that their son had been traumatized after what David had said. They had also told David’s parents that Daniel would never come near their son again. They stated that David was a very sick person for trying to make their son Daniel sin against God by turning gay.
Of course, until that moment, David’s parents had had no idea of what had happened between Daniel and him. They had wondered for a long time what had made the two friends stop seeing each other, because they had been the best of friends ever since the day they had met. Now they had gotten their answer. They had come home, thrown the bags with the food on the table and started to yell at their son. David had been just doing his homework at the table, and he had found himself being judged by the people he loved the most.
“David, why?” his mother had asked him. She had been almost crying, her hands had been shaking and she had been acting like she couldn’t find the correct words to express her feelings.
David’s father had been furious and he’d kept punching things when he approached them. “I can’t believe this, I can’t believe this…”
It all had happened so fast that David had just stared at them, feeling numb and empty. He hadn’t expected his parents to get to know about what he felt for Daniel. His worst nightmare was at that moment taking place in front of his eyes, and he hadn’t been able to react to it. He had swallowed his words, his pride and his pain and listened to his parents ranting in complete silence. He had suffered his father’s insults and his mother’s tears and he had never confronted them because in the bottom of his heart, David had known that they were right.
A gay black boy with a white boyfriend. That’s insane. One part of his mind had thought that it was ok to feel attracted to someone of the same sex, and the other part had kept reminding him that the majority of the population judged same sex relationships and discriminated gay people even if they said they didn’t.
After his parents had stopped ranting about how wrong David was and that he should go to church and pray, he had locked himself up inside his room and spent the entire night crying. He had gotten enough already with Daniel not wanting to be his friend anymore, and now that his parents had shown so much disgust towards him, he’d felt like he had lost his freedom in every sense of the word.
The next months had been pure hell for David. His parents had observed his behavior every time a school student came to the house to work on a project. It was like they had been expecting David to jump on the boy without being able to control himself.
But as time passed by, things had started to change. It seemed that David’s parents had started to think that his son had come to his senses again and that his gayness had been only a confused stage of a normal adolescence. Little by little, David had gained back his freedom and had begun to live a normal life again. He hadn’t had to see Daniel because school was over. He had needed to focus on getting a proper job or getting into college. He’d had to figure out what to do with his life, and even if he’d cried sometimes at night when he dreamed about Daniel, he’d known he had the strength not to break again.
What was happening between Charlie and Colby had started to break him. He knew what Charlie was experiencing; it was pretty much what Daniel had felt. And he understood exactly how messed up Colby’s head was at the moment. He had gone exactly through the same thing.
He had tried to help Colby, he had told him that everything was going to be ok if he gave it time. It was sad that he also knew that the memories of being rejected by someone you love were going to be in his mind for the rest of his life, so the only way to deal with them was taking things are they were and keep going.
All that confusion had made him want to help Amita to understand. He didn’t want Colby to suffer the looks David’s parents had given to him, and Amita seemed the most likely to judge Charlie and Colby in the worst possible way. Don probably would do the same, but Don didn’t know yet. And David found himself wishing that Charlie wouldn’t have to go through his family’s rejection either.
“Please, have a seat, David,” Amita suddenly told him, and that made David lose his train of thought. He sat down and accepted a glass of water that she had brought for him. He still didn’t even know why Amita had taken him to her apartment after refusing to receive his help.
“I thought you didn’t want to talk to me anymore,” he managed to say, and he slowly drank some water.
Amita sat down by his side with a glass of water in her hand too. She stared at it and then she muttered, “Well, I changed my mind.”
David nodded and kept quiet. He waited for Amita to start talking about what was bothering her and the reason why he was with her now.
Amita said, “I realized that I really need to know how a man can fall for another guy. I didn’t expect that to happen at all and it’s making me crazy to know that Charlie is replacing me for some other man.”
“I noticed that when we talked.”
Amita barely smiled, and she sipped her water. “So, what was your experience like?”
So she is finally asking. “Ok, if you really want to know…”
“I do,” she assured David, nodding firmly.
In a few minutes, David summarized the story of Daniel and him, and when he was over, he felt a little better than before. He had let it all out, and it had been good. Or at least that’s what he thought, because Amita’s eyes were wide open and she was crying.
“Are you ok? Do you want me to get you some more water?” David asked her, and he put a hand on her shoulder and gently squeezed it.
“No, no. I’m fine.”
“Just as fine as you told everyone outside Charlie’s house today?” David had to ask, because it was obvious that Amita was broken.
“Yeah… kind of,” she answered with irony in her voice. Then her tone became dark and weird. “But I still don’t get it. You liked Daniel so much, and he didn’t feel the same. He made you feel like crap and you never said anything to him. You just let it go.”
“I was eighteen. I didn’t know to handle that yet. And life took us separate ways, so I didn’t have the chance to talk to him afterwards.”
“Mmm.” She seemed to be organizing her thoughts. “But you kept being into men. You never became completely straight, even if Daniel hurt you that much.”
David shook his head. It was a good point. “I don’t know… I guess that to some extent I’m still trying to change the past when it’s not possible. I think Megan said something about it when we had a case. She said that there are lots of underlying meanings to everything we do, especially when our actions are related to experiences from the past.”
“I see… So that means that I’ll always remember Charlie in everything I do, even if I don’t notice it. That’s such good news.” Amita’s voice was dark and sad.
David understood very well what she was feeling. His own mind kept reminding him of Daniel when he had to deal with the Charlie and Colby situation, or when he had to deal with some doomed love story case.
Amita was starting to cry. There was nothing else that David could do but squeeze her shoulder again. He even took her in his arms when she curled against his chest looking for shelter. David had never been so close to her, but he really wanted to comfort her.
When Amita spoke, she did it very close to his face. “You pretended that those women you were with were actually Daniel, didn’t you?”
The question left David speechless. He hadn’t seen that one coming, but still he muttered, “Yeah, sometimes, I guess.”
“For example, could you pretend that I’m him?”
“What?” What the hell is she saying? Where the hell did that come from?
“Please, David. I need… I need to feel that it’s possible for me to get Charlie to like me. I don’t care if he thinks of Colby when he kisses me or makes love to me, as long as he doesn’t leave me for him. I couldn’t take it.”
I can’t believe she’s saying this to me. That is just… sick. “But you and Charlie broke up a few days ago.”
“Maybe I still have a chance with him. Maybe I could convince him to…”
David cut her off. “Ok, I think you should juggle that thought around in your head, and if you still decide that you want another chance with him, then you should talk about it with Charlie, because I’m certainly not the best person to tell those things to.”
“I told you about my fears, I shared my feelings with you. Isn’t that what you wanted?”
“Yes, but I meant to help you, not to offer you get you into some kind of sick lie that doesn’t make any sense.”
“It makes sense to me!” she yelled, and she squeezed David’s shoulders with such a power that it made him squirm beneath her. “It is what I need. I need to feel that someone will have me, even if I’m not the one they want. That’s the only hope I have for getting Charlie back.”
“You’re not ok, Amita. Please, let me go, I don’t want to hurt you,” David asked her, because he didn’t want to have to push her back.
“Then you’ll have me, just to prove that I still can get Charlie back with me.”
“No. Why are you acting like this? Patrick Garner has messed up with your head…”
Amita was completely furious, and she was crying a river. “Leave Patrick out of this! He was the biggest mistake of my life, ok? He was an insane man that tortured me for days, who was obsessed enough with me to kidnap me and hurt me in front of everyone, and you know what? He never raped me!”
David’s eyes ran over Amita’s face. “And that’s bad how?”
“You don’t see it, David? He was a masochist, but he didn’t love me enough to take me when he had complete control over me! Not even a lunatic wanted me!”
You are crazier than I ever thought you would be. “What you’re saying is crazy. Look, I won’t say anything to anyone about it, but could we please calm down?”
“Stop telling me to calm down!” she yelled at him, and she slipped a hand to his side. She took David’s gun from his waist and put the barrel of it against David’s forehead. “Stop. Telling me. To calm. Down. Hands up.”
David didn’t say anything. He lifted his hands and swallowed. “You have never fired a gun.”
“But I’ve seen you all use it.” She clumsily deactivated the safety device of the gun and ran it over David’s dark skin. Her hands were shaking and her fingers ran dangerously over the trigger.
And David started to sweat. He didn’t have a clue about how he had gotten into this situation. And he had no idea about what he could do to control Amita before she did something that couldn’t be repaired afterwards.