FIC: Chase Reality Away
Title: Chase Reality Away
Author: serotonin_storm
Fandom: Numb3rs
Rating: PG
Pairing: Charlie/Don
Warnings: incest
Word Count: 400 words
Summary: They are never a broken family.
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Notes: For numb3rs100 (prompts: encounter, room key, secret, reservation). Nominated at numb3rs_awards. Edited 12/9/08.

...if we deny it ever happened, it never did--

They are never a broken family. They always smile, always laugh, play boardgames on Friday nights and go on picnics together every Sunday afternoon. Their parents never fight, the look in Don's eyes is never hopeless, and Charlie never feels completely, irrevocably lost.

And there is never a night, when Charlie is thirteen and Don is eighteen, that Charlie goes too far, says too much, until Don has him up against the wall with a dangerous gleam in his eyes. Don never punches him in the stomach, and Charlie never cries all night.

It never happens. Never.

--take this key and twist until you bloody my heart...

This is not a key. This is an electronic impostor. A key is not smooth and flat, or rectangular, or laminated and sharp-edged. Therefore, reasonably, this cannot possibly be a key.

Simple. True.

Behind this door is not his brother. Brothers play, fight and comfort without words, and that's what they would do if it were his brother waiting for him behind this door. But Charlie doesn't play with this man, and if this is comfort, it's only in the deepest perversion of the word.

No, the things Charlie and this man do together are nameless.

...because of all your secrets I already know--

Acacias don't mean secret love.

Every day for a week, a yellow acacia flower on his brother's desk. He leaves it during breakfast, while everyone is preoccupied with doughnuts and heavenly frosting. Pretends not to watch it from the corner of his eye until inevitably each day at noon, it disappears.

On the seventh day, he asks his brother about it, as if he had no idea where they were coming from in the first place. And his brother looks up from his file absently, says he thought they were dandelions and threw them away, and wanders off.

--how many readying breathes you've taken, and all for nothing...

This isn't a door; it's a fortress, an impenetrable barrier. It separates him from a gasping, dying mother, a frail shell of a woman in a hospital bed. He never wants to see her – not like this...

So simply, so ruthlessly, could what lies behind this door rip him in two. It's more bitter, dangerous than all the problems he's never solved, all the solutions he's never found, and there will never be a number that can make him whole again after this.

He takes his hand away from the knob. Not now; another day.

Soon.