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Numb3rs fic: Certainty
So, after shuffling through a series of bandom-ish ideas for the ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
picfor1000 challenge, it suddenly occurred to me to write Numb3rs, instead, not least in hopes of guiding my brain back round to that epic I'm going to be finishing any time now. Of course, instead of anything like the spirit of the epic, I wound up writing, you know, established relationship incest schmoop. At least it's the right characters?
Don/Charlie. Incest. Schmoop.
1000 words for
Many thanks to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
iuliamentis for her beta. And for being diplomatic about it.
There was such a thing as a body at rest.
Certainty
Charlie woke up hot, sticky with sweat and half smothered under Don's arm and the sheet that had somehow wrapped itself around him. He had a certain amount of practice extricating himself from these kinds of situations, and he managed to slip out of the bed without waking Don or hurting himself. He even looked down to check whether he was wearing clothes before he got to the door, and turned back to grab a pair of boxers off the floor: maybe Don's, maybe his own old ones, with stretched-out elastic. He even remembered not to let the trailer's screen door slam behind him as he stepped out of the stifling heat into the blazing afternoon.
He walked around to the shady spot between the trailer and the hedge, where the grass grew thick and soft, and flopped down to stare up into the blue of the sky. If he closed his eyes, he could be almost anywhere--anywhere with clear air and this motionless heat and thick, soft grass. Anywhere good. Grass nearly always felt the same in the aggregate, under his skin, even though every individual blade was different and new.
And this particular patch of grass, this particular shaded spot under this particular summer blue sky--this was familiar by now. He and Don had been coming back here every year since things between them finally settled on this dizzying status quo. Charlie couldn't remember anymore whether one of them asked it of the other, but they'd agreed to this, back when they thought they could lay down rules that would make this work. That was before they realized that it would work because it had to work, because they didn't know how not to make it work--though the rules did at least give them specifics to fight over.
But this had been one of the rules: a vacation together, every year, no matter what. Even if Don was about to catch public enemy number one, even if Charlie was about to nail down a theory of everything, there had to be this, like there had to be gravity, like blood had to pump through veins. They had to have this time, this place, just like they had to have each other. After the first year, they'd made their reservation for the next, and they'd just kept coming back here, every year, to this nowhere place that was important because there was nothing important about it. It was far away from everything else in their lives, far away from everyone they risked hurting just by being themselves. Just by being together.
It always worked out about the same. They were inevitably irritated with each other and barely speaking by the time they got here. The first year it had been a huge fight, a grim game of chicken. They'd both had better things to do and both stubbornly insisted on coming anyway, acting on a combination of spite and possessiveness that had reminded Charlie of exactly why it wasn't generally deemed a good idea to have sex with somebody you used to fight with over whose toys were whose.
Of course, all the cool toys had been Don's. Charlie had always been Don's, too.
That thought made him open his eyes, glancing warily toward the trailer to see if that errant, dangerous thought had somehow woken Don from a sound sleep. There was no sound, though, nothing but the too-bright shine of afternoon sun off the silvery surface of the trailer.
Charlie closed his eyes again, went back to thinking. This year had been much better than the first--they seemed to get better at it with every repetition, settling into a groove. It was like sex that way, really. They'd learned each other by now, knew just how to get it right. Charlie twitched a smile at the logical conclusion to that thought: it wouldn't be long now before they were ready to start experimenting with variations. He was sure there was an obvious analogue to sex toys for summer vacations, though he wasn't sure what it was. International travel, probably--difficult, expensive. Don would know.
For now they were in the comfortable, familiar second day of the vacation--the one where they mostly just sat around, or laid around, or slept. Later they might fuck, slow and time-consuming, not so much because they were savoring it as because they were both feeling too lazy and satisfied with everything to really exert themselves for anybody's orgasm, even their own. This was the day when everything just held still--after they'd gotten done being irritated with each other, before they started trying to make the most of their time. The second day was the stillest of all.
Charlie found himself thinking of good old Heisenberg, his particles whose direction and position could never both be known. Uncertainty, the basis of quantum physics. But Charlie had never actually been a physicist, even if he did their math for them, and Charlie wasn't feeling too uncertain just now. There was such a thing as a body at rest. And if a body wasn't moving at all, then you knew where it was going: nowhere. And you knew where it was: right where you left it.
Charlie lay at rest in the grass, under the sun, letting photons bounce off him without altering his momentum at all.
The screen door slammed, and Charlie opened his eyes just in time to see Don round the corner, wearing an old pair of shorts that sagged low enough to show he'd skipped the boxers. Possibly because Charlie was wearing them.
"You moved," Don muttered, and flopped down next to Charlie in the grass, not quite touching. He pillowed his head on one arm and closed his eyes again.
"Sorry." Charlie wondered if watching his brother sleep would ever get old. "I didn't want to wake you up."
Don just shrugged. "It's okay, buddy. Not like I didn't know where to find you."
picfor1000 challenge, it suddenly occurred to me to write Numb3rs, instead, not least in hopes of guiding my brain back round to that epic I'm going to be finishing any time now. Of course, instead of anything like the spirit of the epic, I wound up writing, you know, established relationship incest schmoop. At least it's the right characters?Don/Charlie. Incest. Schmoop.
1000 words for
Many thanks to
iuliamentis for her beta. And for being diplomatic about it.There was such a thing as a body at rest.
Certainty
Charlie woke up hot, sticky with sweat and half smothered under Don's arm and the sheet that had somehow wrapped itself around him. He had a certain amount of practice extricating himself from these kinds of situations, and he managed to slip out of the bed without waking Don or hurting himself. He even looked down to check whether he was wearing clothes before he got to the door, and turned back to grab a pair of boxers off the floor: maybe Don's, maybe his own old ones, with stretched-out elastic. He even remembered not to let the trailer's screen door slam behind him as he stepped out of the stifling heat into the blazing afternoon.
He walked around to the shady spot between the trailer and the hedge, where the grass grew thick and soft, and flopped down to stare up into the blue of the sky. If he closed his eyes, he could be almost anywhere--anywhere with clear air and this motionless heat and thick, soft grass. Anywhere good. Grass nearly always felt the same in the aggregate, under his skin, even though every individual blade was different and new.
And this particular patch of grass, this particular shaded spot under this particular summer blue sky--this was familiar by now. He and Don had been coming back here every year since things between them finally settled on this dizzying status quo. Charlie couldn't remember anymore whether one of them asked it of the other, but they'd agreed to this, back when they thought they could lay down rules that would make this work. That was before they realized that it would work because it had to work, because they didn't know how not to make it work--though the rules did at least give them specifics to fight over.
But this had been one of the rules: a vacation together, every year, no matter what. Even if Don was about to catch public enemy number one, even if Charlie was about to nail down a theory of everything, there had to be this, like there had to be gravity, like blood had to pump through veins. They had to have this time, this place, just like they had to have each other. After the first year, they'd made their reservation for the next, and they'd just kept coming back here, every year, to this nowhere place that was important because there was nothing important about it. It was far away from everything else in their lives, far away from everyone they risked hurting just by being themselves. Just by being together.
It always worked out about the same. They were inevitably irritated with each other and barely speaking by the time they got here. The first year it had been a huge fight, a grim game of chicken. They'd both had better things to do and both stubbornly insisted on coming anyway, acting on a combination of spite and possessiveness that had reminded Charlie of exactly why it wasn't generally deemed a good idea to have sex with somebody you used to fight with over whose toys were whose.
Of course, all the cool toys had been Don's. Charlie had always been Don's, too.
That thought made him open his eyes, glancing warily toward the trailer to see if that errant, dangerous thought had somehow woken Don from a sound sleep. There was no sound, though, nothing but the too-bright shine of afternoon sun off the silvery surface of the trailer.
Charlie closed his eyes again, went back to thinking. This year had been much better than the first--they seemed to get better at it with every repetition, settling into a groove. It was like sex that way, really. They'd learned each other by now, knew just how to get it right. Charlie twitched a smile at the logical conclusion to that thought: it wouldn't be long now before they were ready to start experimenting with variations. He was sure there was an obvious analogue to sex toys for summer vacations, though he wasn't sure what it was. International travel, probably--difficult, expensive. Don would know.
For now they were in the comfortable, familiar second day of the vacation--the one where they mostly just sat around, or laid around, or slept. Later they might fuck, slow and time-consuming, not so much because they were savoring it as because they were both feeling too lazy and satisfied with everything to really exert themselves for anybody's orgasm, even their own. This was the day when everything just held still--after they'd gotten done being irritated with each other, before they started trying to make the most of their time. The second day was the stillest of all.
Charlie found himself thinking of good old Heisenberg, his particles whose direction and position could never both be known. Uncertainty, the basis of quantum physics. But Charlie had never actually been a physicist, even if he did their math for them, and Charlie wasn't feeling too uncertain just now. There was such a thing as a body at rest. And if a body wasn't moving at all, then you knew where it was going: nowhere. And you knew where it was: right where you left it.
Charlie lay at rest in the grass, under the sun, letting photons bounce off him without altering his momentum at all.
The screen door slammed, and Charlie opened his eyes just in time to see Don round the corner, wearing an old pair of shorts that sagged low enough to show he'd skipped the boxers. Possibly because Charlie was wearing them.
"You moved," Don muttered, and flopped down next to Charlie in the grass, not quite touching. He pillowed his head on one arm and closed his eyes again.
"Sorry." Charlie wondered if watching his brother sleep would ever get old. "I didn't want to wake you up."
Don just shrugged. "It's okay, buddy. Not like I didn't know where to find you."