Oneshot.

3S: short, sweet, and sappy. :-)

Written for the summer alphabet fanfic challenge.

All usual disclaimers apply.

Amita hadn't seen much of Charlie lately. It was the end of the term and he had finals to prepare, he was putting the finishing touches on a lecture he would be giving as the keynote speaker in a conference at the end of the month, and to top it all off, Don had him tied up on some code-breaking case that had left him looking gray-eyed and harried.

Earlier that day, she stopped by Charlie's office to see if he needed any help. The top of his head was barely visible above the stack of papers and books on his desk, and when she went around the side, she saw him hunched over his keyboard. His monitor, a dual-display setup, was covered with equations—one side held the final he was writing, the other held the code-breaking algorithm he was assembling, an algorithm that currently contained an entire page of the letter "z"—Charlie had fallen sound asleep on the keyboard.

Amita had shaken his shoulder to wake him, and then she had pointed out that the FBI had their own code-breakers, but a bleary-eyed Charlie said that Don needed it sooner than they could get it. She had offered to help him, but he said that the work was top-secret and she would need to get clearance first. She had offered to bring him coffee, and he shook his head and said he'd already had five cups that day.

So she did the next best thing—she went home. She had tried to help him, but the stubborn man didn't want any of it, and besides, it was after 5. She had just sat down to crack her own books when her cell phone sounded, and she grinned as the familiar tinkle of the scarecrow's song from "The Wizard of Oz" rang out. It was Charlie's ring, the one that went "if I only had a brain", and she knew that he would be calling her to beg for help.

"Amita, I need you to get over here right away," Charlie's voice implored on the other end of the connection.

Amita grinned to herself, thinking she would have a little fun with him. "Well, I don't know—you just told me that you had it all under control, and you know hon, I have work I need to get done too…"

"Amita, this is urgent—you need to get over here now. Don and his team are already on their way over here to take a look at what I've found, but I need you to review it—I can't afford to be wrong on this."

"Whatever happened to this being top-secret, Charlie?" Amita teased, getting up from her chair and grabbing her purse.

"We'll worry about security clearances later—just get over here." The connection abruptly broke off, and Amita rolled her eyes and headed out the front door.

By the time she got back to Charlie's office, Don was already there, along with Megan, David, and Colby. She called out a greeting to Charlie, who was ducked behind the pile on his desk, and two heads popped up—his and Larry's. Her eyebrows raised—why did he bring in a physicist on a code-breaking project? Charlie jumped out of his chair and gestured for Amita to come over and look at the monitor. His face was flushed, and she noticed that his hands trembled a bit as he pushed the mouse her way.

"What is it," Amita asked, looking questioningly around the room. "What's wrong?"

"I think I've got all of this figured out, but I need you to take one final look at it—there's just something that I'm not understanding here," Charlie replied.

Amita sat down in the chair Charlie had vacated, and he leaned over her shoulder to watch what she was doing. She punched a few keys to scroll through the data, and then laughed. "Boy Charlie, you must be tired if you couldn't figure out your mistake here." She pointed to a line of code and looked up at him questioningly.

"Well, then that's my mistake—please fix it so you can rerun the algorithm," he said insistently.

Amita shook her head, smiling to herself at his intensity, and punched the key to rerun the program. Her mouth opened wide as the results scrolled across the screen, and in disbelief, she looked up at Charlie, only he wasn't there. He had dropped to one knee next to the desk chair and was holding out a small blue box to her. His face was a mixture of love and anxiety, and he bit his lip, waiting anxiously for her reply.

"Well?" Larry prompted, after a moment of silence.

Amita looked around the room, at the amused faces of Don and his team members, at Larry, whose brows were quirked in puzzlement, and finally back down at Charlie, who stared at her with an intensity beyond that of anything she'd ever seen from him before. She gazed into his eyes, drowning in their depths as she read the love and passion they held. Without glancing back at the question on the screen, she leaned forward out of the chair and threw her arms around Charlie.

"Yes," she answered, throat closing up with emotion. "Yes, I will."