A/N: Alright, this is almost it! This is the "last" chapter, but there will be an epilogue, which is mostly written, so it should be up this weekend, if all goes well. Thanks for all the reviews! The response has been amazing!

Disclaimer: As always, I don't own any of the characters from Numb3rs. The only one I can claim is Dr. Gibson, and I don't really like shrinks, so I'd be willing to auction him off.

Don was pretty miserable when he woke up the next morning. The shrink had promised that talking with his family and team would make things better, but at the moment, Don couldn't see it. He had learned that his team didn't trust him because he had lied to them, and that really his problems stemmed from his own mind. True, he was much surer of his support system, but the task at hand seemed so much more daunting now. Before talking with Dr. Gibson yesterday, Don was beginning to think that he was pretty close to being better. Now it seemed like he hadn't even started to really deal with his problems, only the symptoms.

After eating a pancake breakfast with his father, Don's mood was still dismal. He didn't know what to do with his time off. His team wasn't expecting him back at work until after lunch, but he wasn't sure what to do until then. Another hour passed, leaving Don bored to tears. It wasn't that he didn't like spending time with his dad, but Alan had work of his own to get done, and Don didn't want to be in the way.

Finally, Don decided that he should use this time to face some of the issues that had come up in the last twenty-four hours. He quickly found that his mind was going in circles, unable to break free from the guilt and self-destructive beliefs he held. Before he could talk himself out of it, Don whipped open his phone and dialed a number from memory.

"Dr. Gibson, this is Don Eppes. Do you have any openings today?"

"Two visits in two days. To what do I owe the pleasure, Don?"

Don slumped into his seat. "I followed your advice."

"And?" Dr. Gibson raised an eyebrow. Since when had Don ever taken his advice this quickly?

"It didn't go quite as expected." Don sighed, leaning back and intertwining his fingers behind his head.

"How so?"

"Well, they all agreed to give me some space if I ask for it."

"Isn't that what you wanted?"

"Yeah, I guess."

"So what went wrong?"

Don leaned forward again and started to tap his fingers on his knees. "It's all my fault," he said after a long pause.

"What is?"

"They don't trust me. I lied to them, and now they can't trust me."

"Who?"

"Everyone."

"Did you learn anything else?"

Don nodded. "I assumed that everyone else thought I was weak and stupid... no one does. Except me."

It was Dr. Gibson's turn to nod. He had guessed as much, but it was something Don needed to figure out on his own. "So what are you going to do about it?"

"That's why I'm here," Don said at long length, shrugging. "I tried to change my own mind, but it was just going in circles. I couldn't do it."

The psychiatrist leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "Now, Don, I know what you're going to say about this, but hear me out. Typically in therapy, we would have discussed your past from the very beginning. You were pretty adamant on day one that you didn't want to do that, but now I think you should reconsider."

Don's jaw was tensed, and Dr. Gibson sighed, knowing that he was going to have to fight the Agent's stubborn streak yet again. "Don, this will help."

"You've said that before," Don retorted bitterly.

"And I meant it before. I still do." Seeing that Don still wasn't convinced, he continued. "You developed this mindset, probably a long time ago. You can't just keep fighting it in the here and now – it will just keep coming back in other ways. That's why you need to fight the root of the problem. It's similar to a disease; you can't just attack the symptoms, you have to kill the bug that started it."

Finally, Don acquiesced, remembering that in a battle of wills, he stood nothing to gain, and everything to lose. "Fine. But for the record, I'm not buying into the program."

"Give me the next forty minutes. If it doesn't go anywhere, I'll never bring it up again."

Don agreed, albeit reluctantly.

Dr. Gibson leaned back in his chair. "What is the first thing you can remember?"

Don squeezed his eyes shut, trying hard to think. He was only a few years from being forty, and he was now trying to remember back to when he was very young. "I remember being really excited about having a baby brother," he said at long length.

"When was that?"

"He was born when I was five, so it must have been right around then."

"When did people realize your brother was a genius?"

Don glanced sharply at the shrink. "I know what you're trying to do, and it won't work."

"What do you think I'm trying to do?"

"You want me to blame my family for my problems. I'm not going to do it. I don't accept a bad childhood as a legitimate excuse for why people commit crimes, and I won't accept it as a legit excuse for why I cut."

Dr. Gibson suspected that Don's vehemence against talking about his childhood meant there was something there, but he wasn't sure what. Not yet at least. "I'm not trying to assign blame." Don arched an eyebrow. "I promise. Just give me the benefit of the doubt."

When Don gave in, the doctor repeated the question.

"My parents started having him tested when I was eight. When he could do my math homework faster and better than me."

"How did that make you feel?" Don mouthed the words silently as Dr. Gibson asked them. The shrink was altogether too predictable.

"I dunno. At first, it was pretty cool. 'My brother is a genius' and all that. Bragging rights."

"But then?"

Don shrugged. "It got old after a while. Everyone was always asking about Charlie. Eventually, he needed special tutors. That can get pretty expensive, y'know? So my parents both had to work extra hours to be able to pay for it. Pretty soon, it seemed like they were always busy with work or taking Charlie to his tutoring sessions."

Dr. Gibson nodded. Maybe they were getting somewhere. "That must have been hard for you. How did you cope with it?"

With a sigh, Don responded. "Everyone always said Charlie was special. I wanted to be special, too. I tried to pretend I was really smart, but I couldn't really fool anyone. I was pretty average as a student, but where Charlie could make A's in his sleep, it took me hours of hard work just to pull off B's and C's."

"Were your parents disappointed when you didn't make A's?"

"A little at first, but later on, not really. They pushed me to get the best grades I could, but it was like they had accepted that I wasn't really an A student." Dr. Gibson jotted down something on his notepad.

"So did you keep trying to be special?"

"I gave up pretending to be smart. The one thing I could do that Charlie couldn't do better was baseball. My parents put me in Little League baseball pretty young, and I was decent at it. When I decided I couldn't be a genius like my little brother, I started to push myself in the one thing I was good at. I wanted to be the best baseball player around. I wanted to be…" Don trailed off.

"Special," Dr. Gibson supplied. Don nodded.

"I played harder than all of my friends. I loved the game, don't get me wrong. But at that point, it was more than just playing for the fun of it. I had to be good at something. I wanted to prove to everyone that, even though Charlie got the brains, I wasn't a nobody."

"Did your family take interest in your baseball?"

"Of course. My parents weren't there for every game, but they supported me. Charlie, though, he was my biggest fan. If he didn't have a tutoring session to attend, he was at every game. He watched me, recorded all my statistics, even analyzed my stance."

"Did it make you feel special?"

Don was starting to feel silly. The way that the shrink kept using the term 'special' was starting to get to him. He knew that he was the one who had brought it up, but it sounded so childish. When he didn't reply for a minute, the doctor repeated the question.

"I felt pretty good when I got a baseball scholarship to go to college. But then Charlie had competing offers from Ivy League schools. My mom went with him to Princeton. He was still just a kid."

"What about after college?"

"I was recruited by a Minor League team. I was pretty good, but not great. After a few years playing with the Stockton Rangers, I realized I was never going to be anything more than a mediocre baseball player. So I joined the FBI."

"That must have hurt. You tried for years and years to be great at baseball, but didn't quite get there."

Don looked away.

"When your parents spent so much time taking care of Charlie, did you feel abandoned?"

The agent's gaze was still wandering around the office. "I managed on my own. I learned to take care of myself. I did just fine," he replied unemotionally.

"That's not what I asked."

Finally, Don looked back at the shrink. "What do you want me to say?" he demanded. "You want me to tell you that I was jealous of my brother and I resented my parents?" His voice was heated.

"I want you to tell me the truth. I want you to tell yourself the truth. I want you to let down your guard for ten minutes and actually start to figure out what's going on."

Don glared angrily at the psychiatrist. Dr. Gibson decided to try again, although a little more directly this time. Don was already agitated, and it would be easy enough to push some of his buttons. Just sitting and talking wasn't going to get Don to solve the root of his problems if he didn't buy into the program. The shrink would employ some basic interrogation theory on the agent, hopefully catching him off-guard enough for it to work. It would have to be skillfully done for Don to not immediately recognize the ploy.

"Were your parents disappointed when you didn't end up being good enough at baseball?" The question itself was intended to be inflammatory, but Dr. Gibson said it as if they were discussing the weather.

Don's grip on the arms of his chair was white-knuckled, and he continued to glare ominously at the psychiatrist.

Dr. Gibson continued as if oblivious to Don's anger. "Or when they realized that you would never be smart enough to do anything significant."

A low growling sound escaped Don's throat. "Shut up," he snarled.

"How did your father take it when he realized that his eldest son, who was supposed to be the strong one in the family, couldn't actually cope with his mother's death or the stresses of his job?"

Don jumped out of his chair, barely restraining himself from decking the shrink. "SHUT UP!" he yelled, pulse racing. "How dare you talk about my family that way! Who the hell do you think you are?! You're a liar!" he ranted in a shout.

Dr. Gibson smiled ever-so-slightly. "Exactly," he said quietly. Don's fists were still clenched, nostrils still flared, but after a second, his brain caught on. Still fuming, Don forced himself back into his chair. He had been so easily manipulated, and he hadn't even seen it coming.

"Exactly," the shrink quietly repeated. "You don't really believe that the lies you have told yourself are true. Otherwise, you would have broken down just now. Instead, you were ready to bash my head in for saying those things. You know they aren't true, so now you just have to remind yourself of that whenever you start to think that way."

Don's heart-rate was still elevated, but he wasn't boiling mad anymore. Annoyed that he'd been duped by one of his own techniques, certainly. But raging, not quite. The session was over. He stood up and left.

Don went straight from the psychiatrist's office to his own. He was a couple hours earlier than he was expected to be back, but that was alright. The twenty-four hours had really just been an estimate, and he felt like he was able to return to work.

The team leader had been sitting at his desk for almost five minutes before anyone on his team noticed that he was there. Megan in particular had been absorbed in whatever task she was working on, and had failed to notice her boss arrive in the cubicle five feet away. She had stood up to get some coffee when she saw him there. "Don! You're back!"

Don laughed. "I think Charlie's had a little too strong of an effect on you all. Or maybe you just need to take a refresher course on being observant. You are the team profiler, y'know."

Megan smiled. Don really was back. The smiling, bantering Don. "You look like you jumped into a swimming pool with your clothes on," she remarked, noticing that his shirt was soaked with sweat. "What happened?"

Don looked down. He hadn't even realized that he had been sweating from his session with the psychiatrist. "Sparring match with the shrink," he replied.

"Who won?"

The team leader shrugged. "He won the battle, but I won the war." He smiled, but this time, it even reached his eyes. "Let's get to work!" he suggested.

Still smiling, Megan handed him the current case file from her desk so he could catch up.

It was good to have Don back.