Disclaimer: see chapter 1. There's also a reference to 1-10 Dirty Bomb.


51. Guilt

"I'll leave the two of you alone then," Alan said to Don in a low voice. Despite the insecurity on both their sides, the joint visit had been a little easier on Alan than his first visit in Charlie's machine-filled room in the ICU.

Even now, his chest was still trembling with suppressed feelings, but at least he'd managed to convince himself by now that Charlie was better than he had been at his latest visit. True, he still wasn't responsive, at least not until Alan felt he had to leave, but he also knew he couldn't wait until he was, not if he wanted to maintain control over himself. Besides, he knew he should update Amita, Larry and the others on Charlie's condition.

He left the hospital building and turned his cell back on. For a moment, he savored the fresh air, which after the stuffy and sterile hospital seemed to him like a new-found freedom, and then turned his attention to his cell phone.

His head jerked back, startled, when his eyes fell upon the display: five missed calls. He took a closer look upon the matter and realized that all the calls came from Amita, all during the past night.

Alan sighed. It seemed as though it was going to take him a while to convince Amita that everything would actually come out all right again.

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After his father had left them alone, Don sank back into the somber depths of his mind. He was still having a hard time pretending that everything was alright again, because he knew that it wasn't.

This whole time, Don had been longing to find his brother. Eventually, they had found him, and Don had been wishing that Charlie would make it. Now Charlie had made it, but still… somehow it hadn't given Don the release, the relief he'd been hoping for so much. The reason for that was so simple that Don wondered how he'd ever been able to think that finding Charlie would solve all his problems, for finding him couldn't change the fact that he was the one that had let everything happen that had led to this precarious situation.

A soft sound made him jump. It had been hardly audible, but Don's oversensitive senses had enabled him to distinguish it from the monotonous background noises.

Tense and filled with an inexplicable nervousness, Don regarded his brother with heightened watchfulness, and now, it wasn't hard to detect the source of that sound: Charlie's hand. It jerked, slightly, again, causing a slight rustle on the white sheet that most others would never have noticed. There wasn't much movement, and it was more of a reflex really, but still it fascinated Don so much that he feverishly let his eyes fly across the rest of his brother's body, eager to see more activity.

His attempt was successful. For a moment, he wasn't sure, but when he continued looking into his brother's face, there could be no doubt left: Charlie's eyelids were twitching, too.

All of a sudden, Don's mouth was dry, even more so than it already had been, and as though that wasn't enough, now his throat started constricting as well. Signs of panic. He didn't know what to do. Where was his dad? What was he supposed to do if Charlie actually woke up now? Maybe he'd be in pain? What was Don supposed to do then? Or maybe Charlie would be confused or scared and wouldn't know where he was and –

He closed his eyes, concentrating on his breathing, trying to calm himself down. He reminded himself of the oath he'd sworn: he'd be strong now. He had sworn himself to be there for his family now, to find back to his old self. He wouldn't let them down now.

He still wasn't completely sure whether he was doing the right thing, but at least he was doing something now: he laid his hand on Charlie's twitching one. As soon as the twitching stopped, the slight movement becoming smoother, calming down, Don knew that he was doing the right thing, and he tightened his grip.

For a few anxious moments, he stared at Charlie's eyelids, praying that they might open and at the same time that they might remain closed. At last, they opened.

The slit wasn't wide and thus, it took a few seconds for Don to realize that Charlie's pupils were flying across the room, searching.

"Hey, buddy," he whispered, and this way, both of them could ignore the fact of how broken his voice sounded. The tears, however, couldn't be disguised, nor blinked away, and thus it took Don a while before he could go on talking. "Finally decided to wake up, did you?"

The moment the words left his mouth, he felt utterly stupid. It was the first thing that had come to mind though, the only thing to be exact, and after all, he wasn't even sure whether Charlie had heard him. On the other hand, he was now looking at him directly.

For a while, they just stared into each other's eyes, just relishing a sight they had both thought they might never see again. However, Don could see that there wasn't just relief in Charlie's eyes, there was more to be found in that expression. Pain. Confusion. Insecurity. And something else…

When he thought he could see that Charlie was just about to express his confusion with words, he pressed his hand a little harder. It had been days since Charlie's throat had been in contact with fluids, so it didn't really seem advisable for him to speak now. Besides, Don could certainly do without seeing the pain on Charlie's face increase even further.

"Hey," he said, trying to cut off any attempt of speech his brother might make. To do that, however, he somehow had to guess what he wanted to say. "Are you in pain? Should I call one of the nurses?"

Charlie slowly shook his head, and even though the movement was incredibly small, his face became contorted with pain.

"Alright, Charlie, don't move, okay? I get it, just don't move. We can figure this out some other way." He paused, frantically searching his mind for another way to communicate until he found the answer that was standing there flashing brightly as if to ridicule him that he'd taken so long to come up with the idea. "Just blink once for 'yes' and twice for 'no', alright?"

One blink. Charlie had understood.

Okay, this seemed to be working. Now he just needed to figure out what it was that Charlie needed. "So… you're probably wondering where you are," Don guessed. He noticed the corners of Charlie's mouth twitch slightly upwards, the ghost of a smile. Still, it managed to calm Don down a little. "Or maybe you don't," he corrected himself. "Looks quite a lot like a hospital, I guess."

The ghost of a smile was still there when Charlie blinked again, once. The smile, however, quickly vanished when Charlie apparently was overwhelmed by a new wave of pain.

Don felt the sensation of helplessness steadily increase, unlimited. "Listen, buddy, Dad should be back in a moment, he just wanted to make some phone calls. We're in Montana, you know, and Amita and Larry will be dying to get some news." He hesitated. "Look, I don't know whether you remember how you got here or what happened." He tried to read from the expression on Charlie's face whether remembered, but all he could see in Charlie's eyes through the slits was pain and sadness and suddenly, he was scared beyond measure. What if Charlie didn't remember? What if he'd suffered a relapse? Maybe he didn't even remember him?

Don pressed his brother's hand harder and went on talking before Charlie could react to his last words, unwilling to think about those questions now. Charlie was back, he was alive, that was all that mattered now. They'd see about the rest later, step by step. "Anyway, you were abducted, from CalSci. Apparently they claimed they were arresting you, but that was obviously a lie. From what we know, we think that they took you to the Yellowstone Park and that at some point, you got free in one way or another, maybe they released you. In any case you left us clues where to find you, the pis, remember? We've been in the area for some time, but even with the pis it took us a while to find you, and when we did… Well, you were in a pretty bad shape. You must have been lying there for quite some time with your leg broken…" The image of his brother lying there among the rocks helplessly, lifelessly, came back with all the emotion attached to it, and he had to clear his throat before he could go on. "Anyway, the doctors said that you're out of the woods now. I guess you'll have to stay here for another couple of days, but things will get better now."

He knew he was starting to utter nullities, so he stopped, unsure how long he would have been able to go on anyway. All the time he hadn't been able to help himself from looking for some form of indication that the story he'd been telling wasn't new to Charlie, that he remembered what had happened. However, he still couldn't see beyond the pain.

"You remember?" he asked eventually, half against better judgment.

Instead of blinking, whether once or twice, Charlie closed his eyes. Don waited for him to open them again, to give an answer and end the tension, but they remained closed. For a moment, Don wondered whether his brother had fallen asleep again, but then they opened again, confronting Don with an amount of sadness that almost made him tumble over backwards.

He had to swallow hard. He just didn't know what was wrong, all he knew was that he couldn't stand seeing his little brother like this. "Hey… It's gonna be okay, I promise." He couldn't promise that, and he knew that, and what was worse, Charlie probably knew it as well. He was uttering nullities and nothing he was saying was helpful. "Is there anything I can do for you?"

The sadness remained, the look in Charlie's eyes interrupted only by the blinking. Twice.

With that, Don had reached the end of his tether. He just couldn't do it anymore. He couldn't go on seeing Charlie like this, not being able to do anything for him, at the same time knowing that all this could have been prevented.

"Listen, buddy," he whispered, his voice getting more broken again, and he bent down close to his brother, their noses almost touching. "I'm sorry. You hear me?" God, he couldn't do this, his brother was lying here, and all he'd done… "I'm so sorry. I know we should have found you sooner, I shouldn't have given them the opportunity to take you with them in the first place, but I just didn't… I'm so sorry, buddy."

He felt the burning moisture in his own eyes as he watched his brother's eyes close again.

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"Alright, so the way I see it, we've got three suspects that don't talk, a witness that can't talk yet, a dead woman that won't talk anymore and at least one more perp out there who can get further away with each further minute we waste," Blake summarized. "Any ideas what to do about that?"

"Make the three perps that we got talk," Ian said.

"And how do you plan to do that?" Colby wanted to know. "We already tried everything, every interrogation technique taught by Quantico. It's no use. They know the handbook inside out, if they decide that not talking is their best strategy, which they obviously have, there's nothing we can do to throw them. It's useless, there's just no getting to them." He shook his head slowly, resignation showing on his face. "I've never seen something like this, not even in Afghanistan."

"But I have," David suddenly said. The others were looking at him a bit strangely, but he didn't even notice that, he was completely taken in by his sudden inspiration. "I have seen something like this before, and we did manage to make them talk!" He turned to Megan and Colby. "You weren't on the team then, it was about a dirty bomb and the suspects weren't talking and then Charlie just pulled out some mathematical bauble out of his hat and all of a sudden, they decided to talk!"

"You're kidding, right?" Blake said, skepticism clearly showing on his face. He must have noticed the hopeful looks on Colby's and Megan's faces, for he continued talking, explaining his view on things almost as if he were talking to a child. "Look, I get it that your math geeks may be invaluable when it comes to figuring out how to find a mathematician leaving behind clues, but I haven't seen a suspect yet who decides to talk with the help of just some numbers. Except maybe for the number telling him the years of prison he'll get if he doesn't cooperate."

"It worked," David insisted. He was frowning, concentrating hard. "It was something about risks and… I don't really recall the details. But it worked, and we do have the experts on hand that know how it should work, so why don't we just try it out? At this point, we don't really have that many options anyway."

Blake's team still seemed everything but convinced, but there wasn't much they could counter other than their doubts. "And what do we do if that too doesn't work?" O'Hara asked.

"That's something you can wrack your brains about if you feel the need to do that," said Colby, one of the doubters who had learned their faith in mathematics by now. "For I can guarantee you, it is going to work."

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The phone call with Amita had been less complicated than Alan had feared when he'd noticed the five missed phone calls. She did assail him with questions, albeit not with every imaginable variation of, 'How is he?', and instead choosing them from the type, 'Is it really true?'. It was only in the course of their conversation that Alan put the pieces together and figured out that Amita had already gathered the information from Megan. It seemed as though women were actually undefeated concerning the velocity of passing information. Accordingly, all that had been left for Alan to do had been to confirm the news, to give Charlie Amita's and Larry's best regards, to calm Amita down and to tell her that they would soon return home – even though Alan had no idea how soon that 'soon' would actually be.

Filled with a kind of anxiety that he was pretty sure would stay his companion for another couple of days, he returned to Charlie's room. In the meanwhile, the ICU had lost a lot of its terrors, and Alan was almost inclined to pretend it was just another patient's room. His relatively calm state, however, was soon lost when he turned around the corner and was almost run over by a man exiting Charlie's room.

"Donnie, what's wrong?" he asked surprised – no, alarmed – when he realized that the upset man was none other than his eldest son.

"I'm going out for a moment," was the evading reply, and when Alan gave him another look, he noticed that even the look in Don's eyes had become evasive.

He watched him leave, wondering what he should think about this. He knew that Don was fighting demons of his own, it had become obvious during the past night, but still his behavior could also mean that something had changed, that Charlie –

With a queasy feeling in his guts, Alan quickened his steps until he finally stood in Charlie's room again. After a second or two, he dared to breathe a sigh of relief: it seemed as though nothing had changed, Charlie was still there, still alive and still getting better. Maybe Don had just needed to get some fresh air, maybe it was that simple.

Since it was accompanied by his memory of his eldest crying softly in his arms just a few hours earlier, the thought brought a wry smile on Alan's lips. There was no denying it: his optimism was back. Even when he could see clearly that everything was far from fine or normal, his mind kept telling him that everything wasn't as bad as it seemed. It was going to be fine, soon – why should he doubt that? If the past was any indicator, he was right, things weren't as gloomy as they seemed at first, and if he just had a little patience, time would soon make everything alright again. Time could indeed heal wounds, and now that it had become apparent that time was their ally and not their enemy, Alan allowed himself to hope again. Everything was going to be fine. Charlie was going to wake up soon, he'd get better, they would go home and this would finally be over, Alan was sure of that.

He regarded his son, the calm, motionless face that now didn't seem quite as ghostlike to him as only few hours earlier, and sat down at his bedside. And waited.

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When Charlie woke up again, he didn't see Don sitting at his bedside, but his dad. In his eyes, too, he could see tears brimming, but somehow, they didn't have quite the devastating effect that the moisture in Don's eyes had had on him.

He felt a little more rested than the last time. At any rate, his exhaustion seemed to be almost entirely physical, for he felt remarkably fit mentally, he was only taking a little longer than usual to get his bearings. However, he had definitely no difficulty recognizing the worry that had kept his family in suspense and that was apparently still occupying their minds. The worry he had caused.

"Hey, little one. How are you feeling?"

Charlie lightly turned his head to his side, following the softly spoken words and trying to get a better view of his father. He looked old. Tired.

"Okay," he wanted to say, but instead, a hardly definable sound was emitted from his throat, which suddenly seemed to be blazing fiercely. At least that made the other painful sensations retreat out of the focus of his attention. What a consolation.

"You need something to drink?" his father asked and at the same time reached for something near the head of Charlie's bed. He couldn't follow the hand with his eyes, but when it came back, it was holding a cup that held, as he soon found out, not just a spoon, but also an uncountable number of ice chips.

Without really being able to prevent him from doing that, Charlie let his dad put one of those ice chips in his mouth. When it began melting on his tongue, he realized how dried out his body apparently was, it seemed like a porous sponge that first had to be moistened very carefully so that it could even begin to absorb fluids again. But that was okay, he was in good hands. Everything was going to be okay now.

However, when enough of the ice had melted to make his swallowing reflex kick in, his conviction was seriously challenged. He thought he was going to die, his throat was burning up more than ever and the pain made tears come to his eyes. The irony that he might lose more fluids by this method than gain them wasn't lost on Charlie, but he couldn't quite appreciate it either. This simply wasn't working, and since he was pretty sure he couldn't trust his voice right now, he tried making that clear to his dad by turning his head away from the hand and the ice chips.

In vain, of course. "You need to drink, Charlie," he heard his dad say in that tone that had managed to make him do almost everything he was asked since he was little. Still, he would have put up a fight if he could have, but since it seemed as though the only movement he was capable of was turning his head, his father had an easy victory.

While another ice chip was melting on his tongue, Charlie struggling hard not to lose the fight against the tears, he wondered what he'd done to his father to deserve this form of torture. Then, however, when the third ice chip had melted, it started getting a little better. It still hurt, but rather as though he just had a sore throat and not as though he had just swallowed a working Bunsen burner.

"Larry and Amita asked me to say hi for them," his dad now said. It didn't slip Charlie's attention that his voice still sounded a little trembling, even though it didn't seem even half as bad as Don's.

Charlie, still not trusting his voice and frankly a little afraid of how much talking might hurt, gave him a small smile, hoping his dad might understand it as a 'thanks'.

"Of course they'd like to be here now, too, but apparently they could only get a flight for the day after tomorrow, You know, they can't just leave CalSci now, especially with preparing and writing finals." He attempted a small smile as well. "I wonder if they got anything done for that those past few days, but I don't think that's very likely."

Charlie tried to keep the smile on his face, but his father's last words were making this endeavor that much harder. True, he had been hoping that Don would ask Amita and Larry for their help – but he hadn't spent even a second on thinking about their other commitments. He knew he'd been asking a lot from them and while he was quite aware that they cared about him enough to privilege him over finals, he still couldn't help but feel guilty. They had all done a lot for him, his Dad and Don had even come to the Yellowstone Park, and if Charlie had understood Don right, so had his team. They had all lowered their sights in order to save him, and he had failed to keep his side of the bargain.

This time, it wasn't the pain that brought the moisture back to his eyes, but his guilty conscience. He closed them, unwilling, no, unable to look his father in the eye. He knew his father was still looking upon him with the look of a father, a look full of love and understanding, a look free from reproaches – and Charlie couldn't bear thinking about how that look might change if his father knew what had happened. Right now, he was blissfully unaware of what Charlie had done to all of them, he didn't know that Charlie had chosen to give up. He didn't know that Charlie had chosen quiet and darkness instead of the pain that a continued fight would have brought with it while everyone else was going out of their way to save him. No, his father had no idea that Charlie had given preference to something else over life with them, over life with his loved ones, over life with the people who'd been trying to rescue him. He had no idea that Charlie had chosen death instead.

It wasn't fair, really. He'd been fighting for so long, had been unwavering in his resolve to go on fighting, to go on living for such a long time, but had given up just when rescue had finally arrived. For by now, he was relatively clear about the timeline, and he was almost certain now that the image of Don he had seen had been real. It hadn't been some gift from his subconscious, Don had really been there. He had been the rescue that Charlie had only seen as a release, so that the point when rescue had come had been the point when Charlie had given up. He'd surrendered to death, he'd acknowledged defeat, he'd been fine with dying, and he could consider himself lucky that he was still alive despite that choice.

On the other hand, he thought bitterly, he wouldn't have to bear this agony now if he had actually died back then. He wouldn't have to bear the physical pain nor the guilt that was threatening to slowly gnaw off his entire soul. If he had died at that point, he wouldn't have to live with the knowledge that he had given himself up despite all their sacrifices, he wouldn't have to bear looking them in the eye while bearing that knowledge, he wouldn't have to keep it a secret from them that he had been okay with cutting his life's path short by surrendering to death, he wouldn't –

And he was doing it again. He was thinking only of himself, he didn't stop to think about all the others, about their feelings, about the sacrifices they'd made to try and save him. About the grief his death would cause them. About the love that connected them. He knew he should have realized by now how much pain he would cause by that. After all, he still remembered the eulogies that Don had shown him after his return from the clinic.

He also knew he couldn't ignore their love, nor their pain, not again. He couldn't betray their love again, he couldn't surrender again. He'd have to be strong now and bear everything he'd have to bear. He couldn't let them down, not again.