audrarose

Title: Connection to Reality
Fandom: Numb3rs
Pairing: Don/Charlie
Rating: Adult. Very.
Warnings: Incest. Duh.
Summary: I guess this is Day After fic, and would come after Absolution and Resolution, but it’s really just an excuse to write romanti-angst where there is couch smut. But they do actually talk. And there’s sort of a plot developing.






“Come over tonight.” Don’s voice on the phone is low, not bothering with preamble.

Charlie glances over at their father who’s rummaging in the refrigerator and wondering aloud when Charlie decided to make avoiding grocery shopping a lifestyle choice.

“Who’s that, Charlie?” Alan asks, his face muffled by the refrigerator’s hum and the milk carton Charlie should have thrown out days ago.

“It’s Don,” Charlie answers, distracted.

“Donny? Ask him if he remembers seeing horseradish in here.”

“Did you hear that…?” Charlie says into the phone. “Dad wants to know --.”

“Charlie.” Don’s sounds a little impatient. “Come over. I have to talk to you.”

“Oh. Okay. When?”

“Later. Now.” Amused and irritated. Something else, too. Something that makes Charlie’s neck heat.

“Yeah, okay.”

“Now?” Don says, in the voice people usually use when they want to make sure Charlie’s actually been paying attention to the conversation.

“Yeah, now’s fine. Bye.”

Charlie hangs up the phone as Alan straightens up.

“Well?”

“What?”

“Did he remember seeing horseradish?”

“Oh. No. He didn’t say… He needs me to go over there.”

Don’s only been gone an hour or so, leaving after hearing about their father’s Napa trip and taking half a case of Sterling with him. Alan had talked and they had listened and it should have been weird but it wasn’t; like the combined sum of Don and Charlie and Dad was no different than it had ever been, even if Don and Charlie together were now something entirely different.

“You boys working on a case?”

“Kind of.” Charlie thinks about Professor Sorenson’s dead research assistant and her blood all over the street, all over him. “It’s not going well.”

“That’s too bad. Don’t let your brother get too worked up. It’s Sunday. He can save it until tomorrow.”

****

Don’s drinking the Sterling when Charlie gets there. “It’s good,” he says. “The cab’s not ready, but the pinot’s perfect. Here.” He hands Charlie his glass to taste and Don’s right. It’s really good, and Don’s had quite a bit already, Charlie can tell. Enough to redden his lips and soften his eyes. He notices Charlie looking at his mouth and his face flushes a little, too.

Charlie turns to the counter, tries to remember which cabinet Don keeps the wine glasses in. Don’s against his back, suddenly, arms around his waist and warm, wine-soft breath against his cheek. Just one brush of Don’s mouth against his neck before he moves away and Charlie’s world wobbles. This might take some getting used to.

They sit on the couch, closer than they usually do. Don is leaning forward, elbows on his knees, swirling the wine in his glass like he’s going to start analyzing the vintage.

“Sorenson’s still not ready to talk. I guess he thinks his research is worth his life. And Rita Bowman’s, too.”

“Are you taking him in?” Charlie makes the question casual, like it doesn’t matter, even though after yesterday he didn’t think Don would ever bring the case up in his presence again.

“Protective custody. We’ll let him stew over it.”

Charlie looks down and remembers he’s holding a wine glass, drinks some. “I still think he’ll talk to me.”

Don sighs, scrubs his forehead with one hand. “You might be right.”

“You can’t exactly fire me, you know,” Charlie says, and hopes it doesn’t come out as sullen as he thinks it does.

“Yeah, I know that. I can ask you to quit, though,” Don says, still staring at his wine like there are answers in the dregs, before tipping it up in a long swallow while Charlie watches his throat.

“You think you’re protecting me,” Charlie says, staring at Don’s profile.

Don looks at him, his expression sharp. “Yeah, Charlie. I am protecting you. I think I have a right to. You’re in this because I asked you to help. That could be you in the morgue right now. You think I could live with --” Don stands up abruptly, goes to get the open bottle from the table in the kitchen.

“You need me for this,” Charlie calls after him, going for reasonable. “You know you do.”

“What I need…” Don laughs a little, a sound without humor, and pours himself another glass. Charlie’s watched Don get drunk before, witnessed the slow slide into melancholy that lets the darkness show, and wonders if he should try to stop him or just give in and join him.

“Maybe I need to do this, though,” he tells Don, who is coming back into the living room with the bottle. “Maybe I need it just as much.”

“What are you talking about?” Don’s question isn’t hostile, just confused.

Charlie isn’t sure he can explain. “Do you know why I chose to work in applied mathematics?”

“As opposed to…?”

“Theoretical. Something more esoteric.”

Don shakes his head, joining Charlie on the couch again. Charlie pulls his leg up onto the couch and turns toward his brother.

“When I started studying at Princeton, all my advisors pushed me toward the theoretical side – studying mathematics as pure, abstract concepts.”

“And what? Didn’t you like it?” Don fills Charlie’s glass and leans back, and Charlie wonders how much of this is Don humoring him.

“I was good at it,” Charlie says softly, remembering empty rooms and chalkboards and time measured only by the changing shadows cast by sunlight on the floor. “I saw… connections. Things the people around me didn’t see.”

“Okay, you were brilliant at it. Surprise. So what was the problem?”

“I wanted,” he began, deciding how much truth to tell. “I needed to see the results of my work. All those connections I saw in the purely conceptual sphere… they had no connection to this.” He gestures toward the room, the world. “To something real.”

“Uh-huh.” Don’s gaze is flat. “Was Rita Bowman’s death real enough for you?”

Hurt, swift and searing, and maybe he shouldn’t have expected Don to understand. Probably visible on his face, impossible to hide, because Don says, “Fuck, Charlie. I’m sorry. Look, let’s not talk about this now. Just be here, okay? With me?”

Charlie doesn’t trust his voice, just nods, takes another drink. Don’s found the remote, turned the television to baseball being played halfway across the country and Charlie thinks about leaving. Almost gets up, but Don takes his glass away; sets both on the coffee table and slouches closer to Charlie, so their arms and legs touch. It’s warm and solid, a connection Charlie craves now, and he can’t move away.

He’s closed his eyes before he realizes it, the wine and the tension making the game blur, and Don is shifting back, tugging him down.

“Come on. Lay down, Charlie. You can sleep for awhile.”

Don’s thigh beneath his cheek is hard and warm, and the fingers tangling in his hair are gentle. He remembers wanting this, long before it was allowed, one of those connections he’d tried to explain to Don before. He could have told Don more of the truth, perhaps, that working with Don is more than just wanting to work on something real. Sometimes he just needs something outside himself to hold onto.

Because the places Charlie goes in his head are real, too. Sometimes he feels like he could get lost there, with ideas like exploding suns that swallow him up and the bridge that takes him there too fragile to hold. He wants to tell Don that sometimes he’s afraid; that he wonders if someday the bridge will break apart and maybe there won’t be any way to get back.

Don is real, though, more real than anything else in Charlie’s life sometimes, so instead he just rubs his cheek against the soft denim. “I like this.”

The hand in his hair stills for a moment, then slides down to the back of his neck, knuckles rubbing into tense muscle.

“I like touching you.” Don’s voice is soft but his hand is firm, slipping beneath the collar of Charlie’s t-shirt to run the backs of his fingers over skin, brushing over the bones of Charlie’s spine.

Charlie doesn’t feel sleepy anymore. When he sits up Don follows the motion with his hand, cupping Charlie’s neck and keeping him close.

“Charlie,” Don breathes, inches away, but he sounds a little broken, and his eyes are closed like he doesn’t want to see.

“What is it?”

“Just.” A long pause where Charlie starts to think he isn’t going to answer, then finally, quietly, “You want this. Right?

A kiss to answer that, warm and soft against the red of Don’s lips, the brief taste of wine on the tip of his tongue. “Don’t you?”

It turns out that Don answers questions with kisses, too; his hands cradling Charlie’s face, tracing over the shape of Charlie’s cheekbone with his thumb before following the same path with his mouth. Every shift of Don’s lips, every new angle, gives Charlie new places to taste, too – Don’s jaw, his cheek, his temple. Slow exploration, sweet and mind-melting – so very different from the desperation of last night and somehow more intimate than anything else they’ve done.

Don is moving them, pulling Charlie down beside him and twining their bodies closely. Don against him, over him. It’s good that the couch is big enough, because it feels like Don isn’t going anywhere, and Charlie doesn’t want him to. Don kisses him like they have all day to do this, all night to make each other crazy, and every touch of lips or tongue just scatters Charlie further.

“Don…”

“Mmmm…” A growl more than a question but Charlie keeps talking.

“Don… I can’t – I can’t think when you do that.”

Don’s low laughter tickles the hollow of his throat. “God, Charlie, what do you need to think about?”

Charlie leans down, licks Don’s ear before whispering, “What I want to do with you.”

Don makes a sound like Charlie’s hurt him, and then abruptly Charlie is beneath, held down, pressed hard between the couch and the slow, hard grind of Don’s body. He can feel how frantic Don is; can feel how Don tries to slow himself down with harsh breaths against Charlie’s neck.

“Don’t say things like that,” Don says after a minute, serious, with a soft bite to punish. Then Don is pushing Charlie’s shirt up under his arms so he can move his mouth down to kiss there, too. “It’s not your turn yet, anyway.”

“My turn?” Gasped out, and that’s so Don, Charlie thinks, always bigger, always stronger, always…

“Always telling me what to do,” Charlie says, laughing between each touch that makes him moan and shift and hitch his breath.

“And you always get your way. Can’t say no to you.” Don sucks Charlie’s hip bone where his jeans have slid down, setting off sparks behind Charlie’s eyelids so that he almost misses the rest of what Don says.

“Give you anything you want,” Don whispers against his skin, and there’s something in his voice that Charlie should answer but Don is opening his jeans now. Just breathing is a challenge as Don pulls them down and off with boxers and shoes so that Charlie is lying there, sprawled open and aching. No time to be embarrassed because immediately Don is between his legs, kneeling on the floor and pushing Charlie’s legs even further apart for Don’s mouth, his fingers.

Wet, sucking kisses to the insides of his thighs, and Don bends one of Charlie’s legs up, lets Charlie rest it over his shoulder while he brushes his face over skin so sensitive Charlie feels like he could scream. Licks and kisses and slow suction every place that makes Charlie crazy, and when Don starts touching him with gentle fingers, teasing at the smooth skin behind his balls and farther back, Charlie doesn’t hesitate. Pushes forward, digs his hand into Don’s hair, not wanting to control, but to -- connect. To possess.

A new feeling where his brother is concerned. Maybe because Don isn’t tentative; he’s knowing and thorough and perfect and Charlie wonders who Don learned this with, who else Don has touched this way. It seems impossible that Charlie doesn’t know this about him, but maybe that’s better. The thought of someone else beneath Don’s mouth makes Charlie feel fierce.

And then teasing kisses become wet, enveloping heat, and Charlie stops thinking about anything at all. Charlie’s in Don’s mouth and Don’s fingers are in Charlie’s body, and there is nothing outside of this except the need for more. Charlie wants – Charlie wants Don inside him, doesn’t know how to ask for that. Then Don swallows and Charlie rushes to the edge, feeling flayed and raw with no defense against all of this ending too soon except one. He pushes down on Don’s fingers, pulls back from Don’s mouth, taking Don deeper in unmistakable invitation.

Don lifts his head, looks up at him, eyes wide and lost, mouth wet and red, and Charlie has never seen Don look this open and vulnerable before.

“Charlie?” he asks. Uncertainty in his voice, and possibility, but sounding so unsure, where Don is never unsure, that Charlie has to pull him up, pull him close.

“Please,” Charlie whispers, kissing Don’s swollen, beautiful mouth and willing to beg, even though he knows Don will always give him what he wants.

“Are you sure?” Don is kissing him back, licking into his mouth like it’s impossible for Don to keep from tasting Charlie somewhere, and Charlie could almost let them finish just like this.

Almost.

“Yeah. I’m sure. Really, really sure.”

That makes Don laugh a little, makes him move away just a bit.

“Okay. Just – just wait.” Like Charlie could move from this spot, but the loss of Don’s body heat leaves Charlie cold. It’s only minutes before Don is back, his shirt somewhere on the floor behind him, pants open and hanging off his hips. A moment of old jealousy over Don’s more muscular body is swallowed up in sheer hunger when Don moves over him in one swift motion; his tongue sinking into Charlie’s mouth while cool, slick fingers ease into Charlie’s body.

Fullness, slow stretching, and rhythmic movements Charlie tries to mirror. Don watching him, just watching him with his pupils blown and dark, and his face far, far too controlled for what Charlie is feeling.

“More,” Charlie says, writhing, wanting more of everything, more of Don’s touch, of Don himself. “Be here with me,” he says.

“You okay?” Don whispers, and Charlie rolls his hips up in response, watches Don’s controlled expression start to shatter.

“Feels so good, Don.” That begging, breathless voice is his, and it does something to his brother. When he leans up to make Don kiss him Don is already diving down and they collide more than kiss, open and messy and almost brutal. This is what Charlie wants; Don out of control, forgetting to be careful.

Wanting Don inside him, now, now -- and he isn’t sure if he says this aloud but thank God Don is moving, grasping Charlie’s hips for a slow slide into him that’s easier than Charlie thinks it’s going to be. Somehow Charlie ends up sprawled over Don’s lap, both of them kneeling on the floor and connected to each other, closer than Charlie’s ever been to another human being.

Stuttering rhythm Charlie can feel in his throat and Charlie thinks he could get lost in this place, too; in the in out up down that Don lets Charlie control except for hands so hard around his hips that Charlie knows there will be marks afterward. Nothing but Don, now; in him, around him, with hard kisses against Charlie’s face and neck and shoulders, hard stroke of Don’s stomach against his cock and Charlie can’t think. Tries to pull the scattering pieces back but Don shifts then, shifts them both and with this new angle something inside Charlie fragments, shatters, and when he comes apart he takes Don with him.

Somehow he’s on the floor between the couch and the coffee table, trying to catch his breath and focus his vision even if the only thing he can see is the ceiling.

Don collapses onto him, sweat beading on his chest, breathing as hard as Charlie is, and Charlie’s entire world has become this warm, pulsing space where it feels like they are still connected. Don is mouthing the skin at his temple, nuzzling at his cheek, and Charlie tries to reciprocate but ends up simply breathing against Don’s shoulder.

“Wow,” Charlie says, feeling like he should say something, feeling a little stunned. “I had no idea…”

“That wasn’t,” Don says, then starts again. “You’ve done that before, haven’t you?”

Charlie shakes his head, closing his eyes and breathing deep.

“But last night you said –”

“I don’t think I got into specifics…”

“Jesus, Charlie –” Don sounds lost again and Charlie hates that, hates the fact that he’s the one who can make Don doubt himself so much. He feels Don’s wordless guilt surround him like a blanket, suffocating him.

“I never wanted to before.” He looks up, makes Don look at him. “This time I wanted to. With you.”

Don relaxes, slightly, still holding him, and Charlie should just let it go now, but he can’t. His first time, but not Don’s and it’s irrational that the fact bothers him, but …“So… it was okay? I mean, without making a direct comparison to the other people you’ve…”

“There’s no one else.” Don’s voice is far too quiet.

Charlie moves back a little, feeling a little angry. Don shouldn’t lie to him.

“But, Don… obviously you –“

“God, Charlie,” Don says harshly, makes Charlie put his head back down against Don’s shoulder so Charlie can’t see his eyes. “How can you think that anyone else could be like --” He breaks off, shaking his head.

“Like what?”

“You.”

Oh. And maybe that should have been obvious.

Because Charlie can’t imagine feeling like this with anyone but Don.

“I won’t ask you to quit.”

Don’s words don’t surprise Charlie. He should have known Don would understand about that part of it, too. “Okay.”

“You can talk to Sorenson tomorrow. I’ll arrange it.”

Charlie nods, moves closer. Don sounds resigned and maybe a little hopeless, but Charlie decides to let Don give him what he wants. He just needs to make sure Don doesn’t regret it.


End