Numb3rs Fic: Stages of Grief 1/2
Title: Stages of Grief
Disclaimer: All recognizable characters and storylines are the property of their writers and producers. No money is being made from this work of amateur fiction and no copyright infringement is intended.
Word Lenth: 2,278 of 5,119
A/N: I wrote this story as a one-shot, but Livejournal's being a dick, and making me post it in two parts.
Summary: Alan dies. Charlie copes, in his own way.
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There was a long high-strung pause and then Don murmured in a voice like broken glass, “Charlie…”
Part One
The cell phone vibrated on the hard wood of Charlie’s desk, and the sound vaguely punctured the mathematical haze that enveloped Charlie’s mind. It still wasn’t enough to distract him, even though in his subconscious he was counting the intermittent buzzes.
The phone vibrated once, twice, six times and then fell silent again, and Charlie went on scribbling against the whiteboard, his conscious mind focused entirely on the problem at hand, not having heard the phone at all.
Just a moment later the phone started up again, rattling against the wood, the vibrations sending it closer and closer to the edge and spinning in slow circles. Charlie shook his head once in negation and frenetically erased half of the equations he’d just scribbled, and then even more frenetically re-wrote them with slight variations.
The phone went to voicemail again, vibrating once to signify a received message. The screen glowed blue for a moment, then went dark to conserve battery power.
A moment later it lit up again, vibrating dully against the desktop.
“No, no,” Charlie muttered quietly, erased the line of thought he’d just scribbled down, then darted across the room to another board, a previous line of thought - back to the data.
His cell phone fell off the desk and cracked loudly against the floor, bringing him unpleasantly out of his own head. He stared at it darkly where it lay in three pieces on the ground. Sighing, he reluctantly capped the marker and went over to pick it up, sliding the battery back into place and reattaching the cover, then pressing the power button.
The phone buzzed once as it powered on, no worse for the wear after its fall. The screen pattern danced for a moment while it loaded, and Charlie took the time to stare at the expressions on the boards with fresher eyes, scanning along their lines of thought and plotting new courses and new destinations.
The screen flashed at him out of the corner of his eye, and Charlie looked down.
Three missed calls
Don cell
Charlie frowned and let his hand drift towards Don’s speed dial, but before he could press it, the phone buzzed to life in his hand. Incoming Call, Don cell.
Charlie flipped open the screen.
“Yeah, hey Don,” he murmured into the phone, and he heard, distinctly, Don let out a breath like a sob of relief and anguish. All at once, every facet of Charlie’s powerful mind was concentrated solely on his brother’s voice.
“Don?” he asked, surprised. His back straightened a little from his normal half-slump.
“Charlie,” Don said, and his voice was ragged, gravelly, pained. “Why don’t you answer your phone?”
“I didn’t hear it, Don,” Charlie said, and he could already hear his own voice losing its customary low timbre, becoming higher, hoarser, and strained. “I was working on some expressions, I…”
“Charlie,” Don said again, cutting him off, knowing Charlie’s penchant for going off on tangents when he thought there was something coming that he didn’t want to hear. Charlie shut up and felt a icy chill creep down his spine. “Charlie, it’s Dad.”
Charlie knew. He heard it in the ragged pain in his brother’s voice, remembered when it was he who had to make this phone call, years ago when their mother died. Remembered when he’d called his brother up in the middle of the night, his own voice high and trembling as he told his brother, brokenly, that she’d died in the night.
That had been right before he’d spent four straight days in the garage.
And now the tables were turned. Now it was Don’s voice who trembled with the weight of what he had to say.
Through the roaring in his ears, Charlie heard. Hospital, and heart attack, and it was quick, and lastly, where are you?
But by then his voice had locked in his throat, and his fingers had gone numb, and his phone fell unresistingly from his hand and broke into three pieces on the floor. Charlie watched in numb fascination as the battery bounced and spun across the floor, his mind automatically calculating trajectory and concluding that it would come to rest one point six-two meters from the doorway.
He could feel it coming, the unstoppable compulsion that drove him to his boards whenever something wasn’t right, in math or in life. The same compulsion that forced him to stand at his chalkboards day and night while his mother battled her way through three tortuous months of cancer.
His fingers itched to grasp a marker or a piece of chalk, and he almost…he almost took a step towards the boards.
But he remembered Don’s face those years ago, looking at him with his face covered in hurt, and anger, and grief, and confusion.
Charlie spun around in mid-step, lost his balance and his trajectory, staggered and fell into the door as his feet stutter-stepped. His hand grabbed hold of the doorway for balance, and Charlie fell forward out of his office, his numb feet carrying him towards the parking lot. He staggered more than once and was peripherally aware of passing masses of bodies. Students and faculty, a many-hued mass of blurring vision, and a cacophony of voices through the roaring in his ears.
“Charlie…?”
“Professor Eppes, are…”
“…whoa…”
“…okay?”
He pushed his way through them, trailed a hand along the wall. His body cycled through waves of reaction. One moment, he couldn’t feel his feet on the floor or his hand on the wall, and the next his breath burned in his lungs and his fingers ached at their point of contact and he felt everything too much…!
His mind raced, darting along mathematical paths, shying away hard from the very thing occupying a huge portion of his brain, like a black hole. He had to actively struggle away from the thought.
And then he was out of the front doors and into the sunshine, gasping because air suddenly didn’t seem enough to keep him alive, because he needed something more.
He stumbled then, his vision going gray at the edges, and through the white noise he heard his brother’s voice. An echo. A memory.
“Charlie, it’s Dad.”
Wild now, shaking his head hard to clear it of unwanted thoughts, Charlie focused his whole mind on the suddenly monumental task of putting one foot in front of the other, whiting out all other thoughts.
His car loomed before him, the blue stark and bright and too clear in front of him, like sudden, inexplicable photographs imprinted on his eyes. The car in front of him, then another snapshot, at a slightly different angle. Bright blue against the black/white contrasted world.
Then he suddenly had his keys in his hand, out in front of him, pressing the button to unlock the doors. The car beeped at him, the sound sudden and too loud, piercing the haze over his ears. He fumbled and curled his tingling fingers under the handle, forcing them to contract, to pull open the door.
Another snapshot. One minute he was outside, and the next, seated in the car, key in the ignition, the console lit up and the engine running. On auto-pilot, Charlie shifted into reverse.
Then he stopped.
Hospital, Don had said, but he hadn’t said which one. Part of his mind immediately started calculating probabilities based on time of day and proximity (it was nearly noon, and Dad would have been at the golf course, and the hospital in closest proximity is…), and the rest of his mind stuttered, stalled, and screamed, and that irrational, emotional part drowned out the tiny rational voice that coolly rattled off statistics and likelihoods and routes sorted according to speed, calculating shortest route against busiest roads and stoplights and traffic, and it was that crazed part of Charlie’s mind that shoved down the gas pedal and relished in the squeal of tires as his poor, faithful Prius spun its wheels, caught traction, and flew backwards out of his parking spot.
From far away, the distant and rational part of Charlie’s mind noted interestedly that his hands, usually tentative and careful on the wheel - “Overthinking everything,” Don had said, years ago now - had suddenly become firm, decisive. They spun the wheel smoothly as the car shot out of the parking spot, and the nose missed the car to the left of him by a hair but Charlie had already calculated and factored in that variable and wasn’t worried.
Then Charlie’s right hand moved and yanked the gearshift from R to D as he simultaneously stomped on the brakes, and the brakes squealed once in protest, the car rocked to a full stop, and then he planted his foot on the gas again and pressed it all the way to the floor and the car was suddenly accelerating at an unbelievable rate, pressing him back against the seat as the parking lot and its brightly colored cars flashed by in an ever-increasing blur.
By the time he reached the end of the street, going nearly twice the legal speed limit, Charlie had a vague, wispy thought that he should probably call his brother, find out where he was, go see him and…
His mind shied away from the thought, and Charlie stomped harder on the gas and flew up the on ramp and onto the freeway heading north, his car’s engine growling louder than he’d ever heard it.
Flying, he came up behind the car in the right-most lane in front of him, flicked a fast glance over his shoulder, and swerved into the middle lane without bothering with his blinker. He glanced at the car in front of him - rapidly coming closer - and repeated the move.
Then open lane stretched out in front of him, a rarity in L.A. but it was only noon on a Thursday, and he flattened the gas pedal against the floorboards and his little car shot forward obediently, swiftly gaining on and overtaking the car in the lane over. His hands - set loosely and distractedly on the wheel - tilted slightly and guided the car into an easy curve.
Then the world degenerated into a series of snapshots again, flashes of time where images imprinted themselves on Charlie’s brain. Once, he was overtaking an older model Chevy, going so fast he never got a clear glimpse. Another, city towers loomed on the horizon. Yet another, his hand reaching up to pull the visor down to block the blinding sun.
Once, flashing lights caught the attention of that tiny bit of rational thought, and Charlie reached out and yanked on the parking brake and dropped his foot from the gas. The little car’s nose dropped as it decelerated, and by the time Charlie passed the cop, sitting on the side of the road behind another parked vehicle, Charlie was only doing twelve above the speed-limit, not enough to catch the distracted officer’s attention. He had the presence of mind to wait until the freeway curved and took him out of sight before he released the parking brake and pressed on the gas again.
He had to slow down a few minutes later, traffic thickening and slowing. Ahead, brake lights flashed on, cars easing up to each other, piling up. Charlie slowed when his turn came, and was suddenly hyper aware of his trembling breaths, the sweat trickling down his neck and back and gathering at his temples. His heart hammered in his chest, and he took a deep breath and held it until he grew dizzy with the lack of oxygen. He coasted to a stop in the fast lane and sat there, feeling the blood rushing in his ears, hands clenched hard on the wheel.
He sat there, stiff and overheated, staring blankly at the red brake lights of the Dodge truck in front of him, the lights illuminating the ram head guard frames. The license plate was vanity, he noted distantly. SEMPRFI it read, and the frame; Once a Marine, Always a Marine.
He noted distantly that the truck’s engine was loud and rumbled through a glass-lined muffler, growling and masculine. A Marine’s truck.
Semper Fidelis, Charlie thought absently. Always Faithful. The motto for the United States Marine Corps since 1883.
In realization, he tried half-heartedly to stop it before it started, but he didn’t really want to…not when the alternative was thinking about where he was going, or what he was running from.
The United States Armed Forces, he thought bleakly. Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, and Coast Guard. ‘This We’ll Defend.’ ‘Non sibi sed patriae: Not self but country.’ ‘Semper Fidelis: Always Faithful.’ ‘Above All.’ ‘Semper Paratus: Always Ready.’
And then, moving past mottos and onto other things. June 14th, 1784. October 13th, 1774. November 10th, 1775. September 18th, 1947. August 4th, 1790.
Faster and faster, Charlie’s brain spiraled downward, flashing on dates, times, numbers number numbers, and Charlie felt his fingers begin to tremble on the wheel and nearly punched the gas again, regardless of the Dodge truck in front of him. But that tiny rational part insisted that he wouldn’t like propelling his car into that truck, no matter that his screaming irrational mind thought he might.
And then, blessedly, traffic started moving again, and Charlie’s mind slowed and calmed with every mile hissing past beneath his tires, and his heart stopped hammering quite so hard, and breath started to come easier. It was a sensation not unlike surfacing after being held under water too long, and Charlie let his mind go reassuringly blank and just let the miles drift past.
If driving kept that drowning feeling away, then he would drive forever.
Part Two