50:50 4/6
Chapter Four:
Don stood outside Charlie's bedroom door, ready to knock. The genetic test results had come in and provided the final confirmation that neither he nor their father had HCM. He raised his hand to knock, but something stopped him.
Before the call, Don had been trying to figure out what reason Charlie could have for wanting his family members to have HCM.
Don left Charlie's door and walked into his old bedroom. He lay down on the bed and closed his eyes. He tried to use his training to see the world through Charlie's point of view.
'I'm a genius mathematician,' Don thought. 'I grew up too fast, I'm younger than everyone around me, I crave a normal life that I'll never have...'
Don ran through his brother's past in his head, trying to prepare himself to analyze the present.
'I have this great life, with a job I love, a woman I'm attracted to, a family that loves me and then pow. I pretty much drop dead and have to be revived. I'm suddenly put on a restricted diet and I have to change my whole lifestyle. On top of it my family might have the same health problem."
Don lay there for some time trying to think of any logical reason why Charlie would think that was a good thing.
After getting nowhere, Don finally had an epiphany. Charlie had talked about Chaos Theory once and said, "When thinking logically appears to be getting you nowhere, try thinking illogically and then negating it."
Don started running through the most illogical statements he could think of.
'I hate my family, I want them to die. I don't care if they're sick since they don't care about me. I went through a lot of pain and agony and so should they. If I'm stuck with a lifelong disability, they should be too.'
Something hit Don. When he was on the phone with Exagen, the man giving him the results had said, "Charles alone is the carrier of the mutated genes. The tests on Don and Alan were both normal."
Alone. Charlie had been alone all of his life, always different from those around him. He'd never felt like he fit in with the rest of the family and now... Now he had a medical condition that made him even more of an outsider in his own family. If Don or even their father had had the condition as well, Charlie finally wouldn't be alone. He'd have something in common with them, something they could bond over, no matter how tragic it was.
But Charlie wasn't the kind of selfish person to seriously wish ill on his family just to avoid alienation.
'Which explains the mixed feelings', Don realized. Charlie felt sad to be alone, resentful that his family wasn't in it with him, and guilty for having those thoughts at all. All those feelings combined with how happy he truly was that his family was healthy and Don could finally see why Charlie had been having so much trouble relating to them lately. He couldn't show them his true feelings, yet he couldn't fully embrace the feelings he should be having.
"Damn it," Don said, sitting up. Understanding the problem didn't help him at all with a solution for it.