Various pairings: Don/Colby, Don/Ian, Don/Colby/Ian, Colby/Ian, brief mention of past Don/Ian/OMC.
This fic is explicit in places.
Next day it was clear to anybody within a five mile radius that Don wasn't in the best of moods. He didn't do well with failure at the best of times; when someone ended up getting hurt because of something he thought was his fault, he was like a bear with a sore head. Colby kept his head down, along with the rest of the team, as they trawled through hour upon hour of surveillance video from the bank, businesses around the area, and traffic cams.
Don's frame of mind wasn't improved by Charlie's briefing. Not least, Colby thought, because Charlie explained his processes in excruciating detail when he could have skipped straight to his gloomy conclusion.
"…So I've managed to identify areas with elevated geographical probability, but we're still looking at a large number of potential targets."
The street map of LA that he brought up on the screen had a depressing number of red dots on it, each representing a potential target that met all the criteria.
"The difficulty is that without a lot of information my projections are going to be fairly general. There has to be a pattern to the location of the banks chosen and the origin points of the stolen cars, but I need more data in order to assign values."
Don sighed. "Have you got anything that'll tell us when they're likely to hit again?"
"As for that Don, it's very interesting. For both robberies, there was a heavy rain shower in progress, which had been accurately forecast."
"Aw, come on, that's got to be a coincidence," Nikki broke in, so dismissive that Colby almost winced for her greenness when it came to Charlie.
Charlie of course jumped on the chance to educate yet another FBI agent on the mathematical reality of coincidences whilst simultaneously pointing out the odds of heavy sustained rainfall in LA and the odds of the same crew robbing two banks during that occurrence. Colby could feel a math headache coming on.
Liz was frowning. "I get that it was part of their planning, but what advantage is there to robbing a bank in the rain?"
"Fewer people on the streets, those people minding their own business hurrying to get places without taking any notice of what's going on," Charlie posited.
"And less customers in the bank to either get in the way or be witnesses," David added.
Don shrugged. "Makes sense."
"Is there any way you can work out why these guys are hitting LA instead of, say, Seattle, if they're going with wet weather?" Nikki asked. At least she was embracing the math, even if she did seem to see it as a magical solution.
Charlie shook his head. "I don't have enough information."
Colby was sure he was about to explain in minute detail the type of information he might need and which mathematical principles he would be violating in attempting to answer her question without that information, so he broke in quickly with a thought of his own.
"Maybe there's other bank robberies by the same crew but with different masks or clothes. Any way you can broaden your search to look for unsolved robberies with a similar but not identical MO?"
"Sure," Charlie said. "It'll take me a while, but if I can start data mining your records for, say, the last six months to start with and then –"
Don cut in on what sounded as if it was going to be a long and enthusiastic explanation. "See what you can do, Charlie, okay?"
Charlie nodded absently, staring at the board again, mind obviously off somewhere on its own path already.
"There's fuck all else we can do tonight," Don said, sounding really pissed about that fact.
Nikki raised her eyebrows in pointed comment after Don had left the war room, but none of the rest of the team met her gaze as they filed out after him out into the bullpen. It didn't sit well with any of them, Colby knew, to be stuck with no way forward unless they got lucky with the previous week's security footage from the bank. And there would be a fair amount of luck involved in identifying the one person out of hundreds who was really there only to case the place.
Rotating his neck and shoulders to ease the stiffness from where he'd been hunched over staring intently at a screen for most of the day, Colby tried to work up some enthusiasm for more of the same tomorrow. Maybe they wouldn't have to; maybe Charlie would figure something out.
"You coming, Colby?"
It wasn't so much a question as a summons. He grimaced slightly at David as he got his jacket from the back of his chair, and followed Don out of the office. There was sympathy in David's expression, but it was mixed up with an expression that Colby could only read as 'What the hell are you doing, Granger?'
Colby didn't know how to answer that question because he didn't know what he was doing. All he knew was that it was Don, and with all the good stuff that went along with that there was other stuff that, yeah, maybe wasn't quite so easy.
He'd worried a bit about the thing with Don bleeding over into the job, but years of Don't Ask, Don't Tell meant it was still second nature not to let it; at work Don was the boss and that was all there was to it. Apart from the times he sucked on those coffee stirrers, because Colby was only human after all. Then there were the thigh holsters, of course; they might cause the occasional lapse from complete professionalism but whose brain wouldn't stutter when Don looked like that? Those vague fantasies about Don holding him down and fucking him hard in the locker room were sadly never going to come true, but he supposed the whole point of fantasy was keeping it just that. So yeah, keeping it out of the office wasn't really a problem.
The trick sometimes was figuring out when Don stopped being the boss and became Don, because that line seemed to move daily, depending on Don's mood. And sometimes it wasn't that Don was the boss, but that Don was just Don – stubborn, uncommunicative, and infuriating as hell.
Just like he was when they got back to his apartment. Colby knew better than to say anything. He knew that he should just keep his head down and let Don work through it, but since when did he ever just shut up when he should? And he hated that Don was so hard on himself the whole time, and figured that maybe he could get through to him.
"Look, it's not your fault, Don. It's not anyone's fault except the scumbags pulling this shit."
Don whirled round on him from where he'd been pacing round the living room, his strides jerky and full of anger.
"You don't know what you're talking about – I'm responsible for this. If we'd found them last time, this would never have happened." He jabbed his finger at Colby to underline his point. "Maria Torres would still be alive right now if I'd done my job properly."
Colby spread his hands appeasingly where he was seated on the couch. "You can't go through life thinking like that. You can only do the best you can and then let the rest go, or you'll twist yourself up so badly you'll end up really screwing up."
"Sounds like something you'd know about, Colby."
And shit, Don knew how to aim low when Colby overstepped his boundaries.
Colby started counting to ten to stop himself saying something that would blow everything up beyond repair. He got to eighteen before Don dropped some takeout menus on Colby's lap.
"What d'you fancy?" he asked.
"Italian?" Colby didn't really care, but figured it best to take the olive branch when it was extended.
Don phoned the order through then went to take a shower, coming back in faded FBI sweats. Colby followed suit – he'd taken to leaving a small duffel in his car with a change of clothes for the office and gym clothes – and came back through in time to find Don paying the delivery guy and taking in bags with savoury smells that had Colby's stomach rumbling within seconds.
He trailed Don through to the kitchen and got his wrist smacked hard when he tried to snag a meatball, only for Don to pick it up, tossing it from hand to hand till it cooled enough to pop into his mouth.
"Get some glasses," he said, or at least that's what Colby thought he said through his mouthful.
Snagging a meatball successfully this time – and damn, they were hot – Colby opened the cupboard where Don kept his wineglasses and pulled out a couple, all the while sucking in air over the hot mess of spiced meat in his mouth. He didn't know if Don wanted red wine glasses or white wine glasses so he just went for the biggest ones. It'd been that sort of a day.
Don was opening the last bottle of wine from the rack when Colby put the glasses on the counter.
"Thought that was for your Dad," he said.
"I'll get some more before Sunday," Don said, shrugging. "Anyway, this way we get to find out if it's any good – you know Dad's picky about his wine."
Colby snorted. "Just a bit."
Alan Eppes invited the team round for meals fairly regularly and it had become an informal team bonding activity to panic over what wines were and weren't acceptable to take as a gift. All had been good when Megan was still with them – they'd simply sent her to the liquor store with a stack of bills and she'd bought a suitable bottle from each of them – but now they were left scrabbling.
They took loaded plates and glasses of red wine through to put them on the coffee table, and watched the game while they ate. Rather, Don watched the game; hockey wasn't Colby's thing, so he ate his food, enjoyed the occasional fight on the ice, and watched Don, seeing the way that food and wine and a lack of demands being made on him began slowly to smooth the lines of strain from his face.
Some days Colby thought it might have been the best thing to happen to Don that he didn't make it into the majors back in the day because he would have felt responsible for each and every defeat, and nobody could function for long under that sort of pressure. He felt the same responsibility at the FBI of course, but at least there Don had a good team round him who'd try and tell him it wasn't all up to him – and he had his family too, which was important to Don. Was important to most people, really, but he knew Don would feel rootless without Alan there, and Charlie too.
"Hey, you not watching this?"
He looked up from his thoughts to find Don had turned sideways, one arm propped on the back of the couch, and was looking at him.
He shrugged guiltily; he hadn't a clue what the score was. "I was hungry."
Don made a soft noise in his throat and leaned in, his hand going to Colby's cheek to hold him in place as his mouth covered Colby's. Colby opened up to Don's heat, just as he did every time; it'd been one thing that had really surprised him, just how much Don liked kissing. And how damn good at it he was.
Don's tongue pushed between his lips and Colby came back at him, until it ended in a tussle as both were intent on kissing but also trying to find a way for this to work on the damn couch that was really not the right shape for this. Colby ended up astride Don, knees splayed either side of Don's thighs as they kissed, and trying to get those sweats off so he could touch skin.
"Damn it, Colb," Don said with something that was almost a laugh when Colby had to grab the back of the couch to avoid falling off after Don pushed forward a bit too enthusiastically, "You're too big for this."
"Never had any complaints before," he grinned, bending down to get at Don's mouth again. For a moment Don melted under him, opening up and letting him take the lead, but he should have known better, because Don's hands were working their way into his sweats, finding the hot length of his cock, and then all Colby could do was pant unevenly against Don's neck.
"Bed," Don said, and who was Colby to argue. Specially if it got them off this damn couch that might look fancy but was not designed to have sex on. Don's bed, on the other hand, was a thing of beauty and Colby had been thinking about replacing his own ever since he first saw the acres of California King that dominated Don's bedroom. Right now he wasn't so much seeing it as feeling it because somehow he'd ended up out of his clothes and on his back under Don, and he wasn't complaining – oh, God, he so wasn't complaining about either of those things right now.
Don was pushing into him and Don was above him and in him and Colby pulled him down for a bruising kiss, messy and deep and so damn good. The muscles in Don's arms were limned in the orange light that filtered through the blinds from the streetlamps outside, the same light that masked his eyes, and Colby wanted to touch and lick but Don had that rhythm going already, the one that always brought Colby to pieces under him and it was too late for either of them to do anything but hold on.
Afterwards they lay tangled up on the comforter and Colby knew that soon the cooling sweat and come would become unpleasant, but not yet, not while they were both still breathing hard and not yet quite sure whose body was whose.
After a few minutes though Don made a regretful little noise and moved away from Colby. He headed for the bathroom to dispose of the condom while Colby managed to rouse himself enough to pull the covers back and get into Don's bed. For the first few weeks he'd gone home after, till Don had said one night he might as well stay as it was closer to work. That way, he'd added with a grin, they'd get to have morning sex as well. So now Colby stayed, and the bed was big enough that they could share it all night and never touch until he'd wake up with Don's hands and mouth on him, bringing him up through the last layers of sleep for a morning hand job or blowjob. And then it was all business and rushing to get into the office.
One of the unexpected side-benefits to screwing the boss was that Colby got into the office earlier these days. He wasn't entirely convinced that was a benefit rather than a drawback, but he couldn't see how to refuse an incentive package like Don.