Title: A Place in the Stars
Author: Artemis Rain
Fandom: Numb3rs/Power Rangers
Spoilers: Some for Power Rangers Zeo and Power Rangers in Space
Warning: Extraordinarily bizarre second-person slash crackfic.
Pairing: Charlie/Billy
Rating: K+
Feedback is love.
Disclaimer: None of it is mine. Except the crack.
Summary: Charlie becomes infatuated with the strange new professor at CalSci.
A/N: This was written for the LiveJournal community Taming the Muse with the prompt "kleptomaniac." There are not words to describe how cracked out this is. My muse is taking me in some pretty weird directions. I don't think I can actually explain how this one came about. Umm… enjoy?
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A Place in the Stars
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You've succeeded in wrapping up your work for Don's latest case, taking the congratulations with your usual modesty, and you still have time to return to CalSci to finish your class preparations. Idly, you wonder how it was that you ended up dividing your time between two jobs.
Your work is flowing so easily these days, and every time you step away from it to help with a case, it feels so tragic, like this run will be over any minute, and ever second you don't take advantage of it is a second wasted. All the lives you help to save can't quite conquer this feeling of irrational frustration.
When you reach your office, your work is waiting for you, as always. No matter your mindset, the numbers will always be there for you, with you, and it gives you comfort.
You have several hours before you need to get home for dinner. Forgetting tomorrow's class, you go to your chalkboard, covered with the beginnings of a new idea, and allow your latest theory to blossom in your mind, gushing like a river down your arms and to the chalk. You begin to write.
Your cell phone lets you know you've stayed too long.
On your way out, you see two figures outside the building, wandering toward the parking lot. The sun is beginning to set, but there is still enough light to make out the identity of one of them. Your car is in that lot too, and as you walk toward them, the figures spot you.
"Charlie!" cries Mildred, "What good luck!" The man next to her looks you up and down, smiling enigmatically, and something in his eyes makes your blood run a little warmer. He is youngish, no older than twenty seven, and quite handsome in a boy-next-door sort of way. He is wearing jeans and a dark sweatshirt, head topped with a tidy mop of sandy blond hair. The strange thing about him is the feeling you get, like you're not meeting a new person, but a new kind of person
Millie continues, "I'd like you to meet Professor William Cranston. He's been hired by the Engineering department. He starts tomorrow. I was just showing him around campus."
You extend your hand and he takes it. "Charles Eppes, Applied Mathematics. Please call me Charlie. It's nice to meet you, Professor Cranston."
He smiles at you. "Please, call me Billy. I don't know how likely we are to run into each other on campus, being in different departments, but I do hope to see you again soon." He flashes that same enigmatic smile.
You turn to Millie. "Forgive me for asking, but why are you giving him the tour? Shouldn't someone from Engineering be doing that?"
She sighs, but keeps smiling. "I was the only one available to come out tonight. Billy just arrived in town, so it was a challenge to find someone at the last minute. Besides," she wiggles her eyebrows at you, "I just love it when Engineering owes me favours!"
The three of you chuckle, and wish each other good night, going your separate ways. As you reach your car, you turn back the way you came, and find him watching you, an indecipherable look on his face.
That look stays with you all the way home and doesn't leave you; not even in your dreams.
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Your morning class shuffles out the door and you breathe a sigh of relief. You were woefully unprepared, but were able to improvise, and you wouldn't have traded those hours of work yesterday for anything.
You return to your office to sink back into that current of logic, thinking also of the chicken sandwich waiting in your backpack. Stomach satisfied, you put chalk to board, and are immediately interrupted by a knock on the door.
At your call of "come in" he opens the door and steps inside, marveling at the treasures lining your walls, shelves and desk. You are surprised to see him, to say the least.
"Prof… Billy." You stammer out. "What brings you to this part of the campus?"
He pulls a gumball out of the bowl, and before you can say anything he is marking his selection down on the sheet next to it.
"I… well, I was curious to see where you worked. Everyone in Engineering has been great, but they all seem very close and I just… didn't feel like I was connecting with them." He wanders over to the other side of your desk, examining the far wall. "You feel like the only person here I actually know."
You frown. "We only met last night."
He looks at you, that haunting expression ghosting over his features. "Weird, isn't it?"
You can't help but agree, and though this visit seems strange (it is, after all, quite a walk from the Engineering building to his office), you're oddly glad of it. You notice him picking up a lodestone paperweight off your desk and smiling at it, and you feel suddenly conscious of being grateful for the attention of a man you barely know.
"So, um, Billy," you begin awkwardly, "Where are you from?"
He doesn't look at you as he answers, but instead turns his attention to a disorderly shelf, eyes darting over the various knick-knacks. "I've done a lot of traveling; I got my doctorate by correspondence." That's not what you meant. "But I grew up in a little town just outside of L.A. called Angel Grove."
A chuckle bursts out before you can stop it.
He turns. "What's so funny?"
You feel your face redden. "I'm sorry, it's just… Angel Grove? I've heard some pretty wild stories about that place. Monsters and aliens, sorcerers living on the moon, a spandex-clad team of action heroes. I honestly didn't think there was one sensible person living in that town."
He smiles, tiredly, and for one frightening moment you think he's about to insist that the stories are true. However, he lets out an amused sigh and says, "It was an interesting place to live."
He has to leave, and you are sorry to see him go.
At the end of the day, after conversations with colleagues and office hours leading a parade of students and faculty into and out of your office, you notice that your lodestone paperweight is gone.
It could have been any one of fifty people, it could have been an honest mistake, it could just be lost somewhere in the clutter you call an office, but all you can think of is the smile that lit up his face when he picked it up.
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The next day, you lose track of time, and it is well after sunset before you realize it's time to go home. As you walk out of your building, book bag in hand, you notice a picnic blanket set up on the athletic field. Even in the dark and from far away, you know it's Billy. You're reminded of your late night conversations with Larry, and nostalgia washes over you. Space is vast, and he is one man. You hope he's alright, up there in orbit.
Before you realize what's happened, you're standing next to the blanket on which Billy is lying, gazing up at the stars.
"Do you ever wonder what's out there?" You find yourself asking.
"No… Sometimes," he responds, and laughs. "It's just that I've already seen so much of it."
You forget to breathe for a moment. He's every bit as crazy as you feared, growing up in Angel Grove. So why aren't you more alarmed? Oddities aside, he seems harmless, and he must be intelligent to have been hired. His words don't sound as strange as they should, coming out of the vague sense of otherworldliness that surrounds him. You shake your head absently, clearing it of the notion that his eyes have traveled the stars.
"Join me," he invites you, and you do.
As you lie together, watching the sky, everything goes quiet and your body sinks into the blanket. His hand brushes against yours, and you don't pull away. Your fingers intertwine.
You're not sure how long you lie there, feeling the proximity of something unnamable and alien, alluring and unreal, and denying that it is him.
He rolls over onto his side, to look at you. "There is a place for us up there," he whispers. "I've seen it. When this planet becomes our prison, we will run to the stars."
You turn towards him. His sincerity should be unsettling. When your lips meet his, questions of sanity fly up into the black.
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It becomes a nightly ritual; you and him, a blanket, the sky.
He tells you stories you can't possibly believe, about monsters, magic, empires, battles fought across the stars, an aquatic woman in a far-off galaxy who still whispers to him at night. He claims she's telepathic, but you don't think that's why.
He tells you of the warriors, the heroes of Angel Grove, free from their duty and scattered across the globe. He tells you of his year underwater on an alien world. You hear stories about the trans-dimensional being who handed him his destiny, and is now in the hands of evil beings, being pursued across the universe by a new team of warriors.
You asked him once why he didn't contact his old friends, tell them he had come home. His only response was a deep sigh and a muttered, "We're all such different people now. I can't let go of what I've seen and done. I would only drag them back into a past they can't reclaim."
"Better than staying there alone," you pointed out, allowing yourself to be sucked in, and he kissed you and said, "I don't feel alone."
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Since the beginning of your nocturnal meetings, he had stopped coming by your office. Still, every so often you would look around the cluttered space and, finding a tiny object missing, you'd know he'd been there. You have no evidence that he's the mysterious collector, but you don't let that stand in the way of your certainty, which is highly uncharacteristic, but this defiance of logic doesn't worry you, which, you recognize, is also uncharacteristic.
The night meetings have continued unbroken for over two weeks, and you haven't seen him in the daytime since that second meeting in your office. The one time you suggested going out somewhere, he laughed and said, "I can take you anywhere, Charlie. Pick a star, any star!"
You thought he was joking, but you didn't ask again. His imaginings were harmless and surprisingly charming, but needn't be encouraged.
You wonder sometimes about getting him help, but when he's not spinning stories about his "past" he's so damn reasonable and level-headed. You've been completely drawn in by his all-pervasive goodness, and you don't think you've ever met a kinder person. When you think of him, you light up all over, making it impossible to think that there might be something "wrong" with him. And though you don't like to admit it to yourself, there are times when the sincerity in his voice, in his face, has you on the verge of believing.
Before you can allow yourself to examine, or disregard, this line of thinking, your cell phone rings.
Don has a new case for you, and it seems you'll be working well into the night.
Thinking of Billy, you leave your office and stroll across campus to the Engineering building, not looking forward to telling him you're about to endure your first night apart since you met.
Once you reach the office wing, it takes only a minute of searching before you're standing in front of a door labeled "W. Cranston."
You knock. There is no response, but the shuffling sounds within give him away. You call out, "Billy, it's me, Charlie."
There is no reply. You tell yourself it is concern, rather than curiosity, that prompts you to turn the knob and open the door. The fact that it is unlocked surprises you for an instant, the feeling quickly overshadowed when you see the contents of the room.
His office is every bit as cluttered as yours, and in the center stands a structure you decide might be a complex machine, an artistic sculpture or a prop from an old Sci-Fi movie. It doesn't matter, however, as it is being dismantled slowly and obviously painfully by the man you came here to see, tears in his eyes as he tenderly removes your lodestone paperweight from the centre of the structure and places it in a fabric bag, its shape revealing it to contain other small items. He grunts as he removes a few pieces of metal from the structure, tossing them to the floor, and then crumples there himself, arms around his knees, eyes red from crying.
Shutting the door behind you, you walk over and sit next to him, putting your arm around him, and pulling his head toward your shoulder.
"I thought I could do it." He says absently. "I thought I could find him. He was like a father to me, and now he's gone."
You hold him tighter, knowing he's speaking of the trans-dimensional being about whom he has told you so many stories.
"I hate to think of him, held prisoner by dark forces, his only hope a team of rangers he's never met." He leans into you. "I thought, if I could find him, if I could let them know where his is, if I could save him…"
You nod toward the half-deconstructed machine. "It didn't work, did it."
He shakes his head. "The people who have him, I've never seen their technology; I have no way of breaking through their shields. I don't even know what to look for." He sighs.
"Once, I could pull a miracle out of a hat, every time, without fail. But he's gone, and it's up to them, the new ones, it's all in their hands now."
He starts to cry, and you kiss the top of his head, knowing that whatever life he has lead, whatever it was that inspired these fantasies, he had come here to hide from it, only to seek it out again and find that it was miles beyond his reach.
Shakily, he reaches for the bag and hands it to you. "These are yours. I borrowed them for my device. I couldn't ask for them, I couldn't explain."
You assure him that he's forgiven, and the two of you sit in silence for several minutes.
When the moment has passed, you help him take apart the rest of the device, placing the components according to the loosely termed "system of organization" he describes to you, until the trilling of your cell phone and a curt, "Where are you, Buddy?" reminds you of where else you're needed.
You want nothing more than to stay, but there's a serial killer that needs catching. Billy understands, nodding as you explain, eyes wide as though he's just remembered that evil exists in many forms, on this planet and throughout the universe.
He kisses you goodbye and thanks you when you leave.
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That night, you return to the house with two boxes of data, one carried by you, the other carried by Don. As the two of you walk up the path to the front door, chatting about what to make for dinner with your father out of town, you notice a figure crouched on the steps, obscured by shadows. It's Billy.
You greet him confusedly, and Don asks "You alright?" before heading inside with the data, secure in the knowledge that you are not talking to strangers.
When you're alone, Billy stands up and meets you. "I'm sorry to drop by like this," he begins awkwardly, "but you said you were working on a case and I wondered," he hesitated, "if there was anything I could do to help."
He looks at you, eyes serious and determined. "I've been fighting an intergalactic war for too long," he explains. "It's time I let go and did what I could to help this world.
"I think," he pauses, and continues, "I think that's what I'm supposed to do. Why I left Aquitar, why I came back. I just didn't realize it until now."
You smile with relief, grateful that he has found a new focus, one less abstract, one that connects strongly with reality. Perhaps now you could stop wondering how much of his stories were eccentric imaginings and how much were genuine delusions. This kind of work is very grounding, and you know it will do him good.
Yet, when you look into his eyes, you can't help but feel haunted by his claim that he has seen the universe. When you take his hand, it is a hand that has touched peoples from planets all over the galaxy and beyond in greeting. With his feet standing on the Earth next to yours, you feel, not for the first time but certainly for the most powerful, that he really could make good on his offer to take you anywhere, if you'd only pick a star.
Shaking off the feeling, you take his hand and walk him to the door.
"Come on; I'll introduce you to my brother."
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