"I should feel guilty!" Don demands, "Why should I feel guilty?"
"Didn't say you should," Charlie grumbles to the window, "said you would."
"Why would I, then?"
Charlie didn't like the way Don was watching him. Usually Don focuses on a spot just above the person he was talking to, so that he appears to be looking at them but isn't. It was an interrogation trick that he'd brought with him from Albuquerque: a means of listening to the substance of a statement without being distracted by the speaker's expression. Today, though, Don had been watching Charlie like a hawk, angling to see his face when he talked, turning to watch him like a lip-reader. And Charlie, watched by students in class, by colleagues at conferences, by gawkers his whole life (that's the genius kid; he can do, like, really hard math totally in his head) didn't know why his brother's scrutiny was making him so jittery.
"I may or may not know much about guilt," Charlie begins slowly, "but I know a fair amount about you. And I know you're going to blame yourself. Because—" Charlie bounces out of his chair and starts walking the length of the narrow room, unable to sit still under Don's stare, "because you think you should have seen it coming, or acted more quickly on what you did see. Because you think there was a really solid pattern, with clear thoughts and motives, and that you missed it. Because that's what you're used to seeing, or finding, or creating. But there's no pattern." Charlie comes to a sudden stop, bracing himself to keep from crashing into the window, talking to his reflection. He'd been moving pretty fast and the whomp of his hands against the window frame makes Don jump.
"This is how crimes look to regular people, Don. People without access to FBI data and police files and Interpol networks. They look sudden and senseless because that's what they are. They come out of the blue and they change everything. To most people, their husband being shot in a robbery, their pension getting embezzled, their neighbor being attacked—that's not a data point in a larger scheme, that's a god-damn tragedy and there's not a thing in the world you can do about that."
"Hey!" Don says, loudly; Charlie cursing is enough to shake him out of his shock, but then Don realizes he had nothing else to say. He'd opened his mouth to tell Charlie that patterns helped find criminals, patterns helped identify and protect potential victims. But the thought that he would have to sell Charlie on the value of mathematics in law enforcement make him shut up.
"If I'm the one feeling guilty," Don asks finally, for lack of anything better to say, "then what are you?"
Charlie hunches his shoulders; now he's the one uncomfortable with the topic at hand. "Betrayed," he says at last, "I'm the one betrayed."
Whatever Don had been expected, it wasn't this. He can't even remember the warm, confident speech he'd planned to help Charlie come to grips with the attack. It was a good speech, too; he'd offered it to a lot of colleagues and a few victims. Not that I lump them together, Don tells himself; it's just that, in his line of work, there are so many of them. If he had to create new, heart-felt things to say to each of them, he'd run out of words completely. Was it possible that he'd made their tragedies routine? Probably. Certainly. Of course. As an FBI agent, you become inured: no one can tolerate being devastated all over again by each new variation on the old, old themes of jealousy and deception. None of that was any help to Charlie, attacked in his own home by one of his own students after thirty years of being wanted, even celebrated, wherever he went.
Don unbuttons his cuffs and starts methodically rolling up his sleeves. He does this, unconsciously, to buy time and calm his buzzing thoughts; it's the last of the nervous habits Terry had warned him against years ago. Some days are so hectic that he arrives at the office with his sleeves already rolled up beneath his jacket, just from driving through LA morning traffic. He'd come to accept that days like that were doomed from the start.
"Charlie?" he says quietly to the figure at the window. His brother doesn't move, just stands seething and rigid, his shoulders locked like he expects to be hit from behind. Don turns away. It's easier to talk at the blank white wall. "People…people hurt each other, Charlie. Maybe we have to; maybe it's just part of living together on the same little planet. Sometimes we mean it, and sometimes we probably deserve it, but, you're right, a lot of times we don't. We both know that." Don thinks about how helpless he'd felt when Dr. Powell and Terry had been discussing his deafness without him. How frightened and how furious he'd been, at that pompous doctor, at Charlie, who wasn't even there. And that had only been temporary; how would it feel to be told that your life-changing tragedy was only a symptom of something larger? That your pain was significant as part of a pattern, but not meaningful in itself?
"I can't do it, Charlie. I can't see each case the way a victim would see it. I can't even see things the way a perpetrator might, even after Terry did that CD thing. And I don't want to. Even if there isn't a cure, buddy, I've got to keep looking for one, and that means looking at the big picture, with each hurt and every crime as part of a pattern that can be found and broken. Otherwise, I…my heart would just explode, Charlie. I'd never get out of bed in the morning."
Actually, Don feels like his head is going to explode. The nurse had warned him about getting worked up, but he'd promised to be careful if she'd just let him up and about. Now he had a headache that makes him wonder if some kind of surgical instrument had been left in the suture by accident. God, he thinks, I'm going to be sick. Dizzy, he lays his head down gently on the cool tabletop.
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