gasp! SHE LIVES!!!

Ahem.

Hello all. I am so very terribly sorry about the huge wait between this chapter and the last. I love this story, but I have recently lost either my mojo or my muse, and whichever one up and went on vacation, took quite a while to drag its butt back here.

The sugar high that renewed my determination to GET THIS FREAKIN CHAPTER DONE was fueled by a late night escapade partaken of by my roommate and I. Late night food cravings will never be ignored, and so we got high on stolen ice cream and lighter-smores (only after one of my marshmallows caught fire did I suggest that we should've just microwaved the stupid things) and spent about ten minutes in sugary hysteria. Mother of Bob, I love college:)

In response to the huge number of reviews I got for this chapter: blinks Wow. If this is what I get for pointing out the lack of awesomeness in readers who don't review, I should totally do this more often. To all my reviewers: You guys are awesome! To all of my non-reviewing readers: You guys are great! But not awesome. Awesome is reserved for reviewers.

You may notice that this chapter is considerably longer than any previous ones. Enjoy.

Anyways, without further ado, may I present to you the moment you've all been waiting for! (Seriously, I've gotten more reviews about people anticipating this particular moment than anything else in the story.)

Disclaimer: Mandarin oranges are the best oranges in the world.


Chapter 5: Rise in the Morning

The raspy bleating of his alarm clock roused Don from an unfulfilling four hours of slumber. With a groan, he waved an arm in the general direction of the offending noisemaker, succeeding in knocking it to the floor. Unfortunately, the fall failed to silence the damn thing.

'My aim is off,' he thought as he dragged himself from between the sheets. 'I need more sleep.' Scooping the alarm from the floor, he turned it off and left it in its usual place on top of the nightstand. Then he left his comfy bed behind and headed to the bathroom for a shower.

If phones could talk, this one most surely would have been shouting "Answer me you idiot!" Eric had ordered a wakeup call the night before, but even though he had been awake for the past three hours, his ears simply refused to admit the incessant noise of the handset on his nightstand. A combination of nerves and jetlag had woken him up for an east coast morning, even though west coast dawn was still hours away. And as long as he was awake, he may as well go over the material on the Coast Killer again. After all, he was going to have to meet the LA FBI team assigned to this case within a couple of hours, and it wouldn't do for them to get the impression that he had no idea what he was talking about.

Bloodshot eyes scanned another three of the pages before him before the ringing phone finally made itself heard. With a glance of surprise and a brief "Oh", Eric dragged himself up from the desk and shuffled across the room, massaging cramps from his long-immobile legs as he walked. When he finally silenced the phone, he glanced back to his desk, which resembled more the aftermath of an exploded printer than the workplace of a nationally acclaimed math consultant. Taking a minute to go over his options, he considered. He could go over his materials yet again, taking so long that he would have barely any time to shower and no time whatsoever for breakfast, leaving him cranky, irritable, and an all around bad-first-impression kind of guy for the rest of the morning. Or, if he listened to the angels whispering in his ear, he could leave the papers be, take a nice leisurely shower, and enjoy a pleasant breakfast, leaving him happy and ready to attack today's challenges with a smile. Eric really, really wanted that nice shower and breakfast. But it wouldn't do to look like an idiot.

The SUV's engine rumbled to life as Don twisted the key in the ignition. Releasing the key, he pulled out of his apartment building's underground parking lot and steered out onto the street. Mingling with the morning traffic, Don kept half an eye on the road, and let the other half drift back to last night.

After his blunder with his father, the rest of the evening had sported the occasional half-hearted attempt at casual conversation, but for the most part had passed in silence. Not awkward silence, but potentially awkward silence, the kind that might become awkward with the least nudge in the direction of awkwardness. Awkward.

Don hated himself for screwing up last night. As if his relationship with his father wasn't already messed up enough, he just had to go and pull out the big neon "RETARD" sign and stamp "JERK" across his forehead.

Not that last night was anything new. For a long time now, Don had been having problems with his father. Actually, he'd been having problems with his entire family…and they all started because of the one family member who wasn't there. Don knew, beyond all shadow of a doubt, that he was to blame for his brother's disappearance. His whole family knew, although his parents never said anything. His aunt had done a poor job of concealing her shock when she learned the story of Charlie's kidnapping; her speechless stare, the way she couldn't seem to look away from him when she first learned that her youngest nephew was gone because he had been left alone, had stung badly. But it was the eternal sorrow in his parents' eyes, the way they would quickly look away so he couldn't see their welling tears…that was what cut him to the core.

Don loved his family more than anything. But after he had failed them so miserably, who on Earth could possibly believe that he deserved such wonderful people in his life?

He had had to do a lot of growing up in a very short period of time when Charlie was taken. Part of him felt like some sort of warped butterfly: at the beginning he was a caterpillar, a child in the world, but his cocoon had been woven early, spun of pain and sorrow. It had been so strong that he almost couldn't break free, but ultimately he succeeded—although the end result hadn't been nearly as lovely as the average butterfly.

His eventual breakout had resulted in maturity, and consequently a heartbreaking realization: he had hurt his family, was still hurting his family, and the only way to fix that was to remove the cause of the hurt: he had to leave. He tried to stay strong for his parents, all the while formulating his plan of departure. He comforted them as best he could while at the same time distancing himself from them, both removing such an unworthy son from their lives, and punishing himself for losing Charlie. That was part of the reason he spent so much time away from California: if he wasn't with the remnants of the Eppes clan, he couldn't fail them. He came back when his mother got sick, to try and make her happy, ease her last moments, but it wasn't the same. Nothing was the same.

Perhaps the most jarring difference between his childhood and his return as an adult—besides the obvious, that is—was that, at long last, his efforts to break down the ties between himself and his parents had succeeded.

For months, he sat beside his mother, and his heart ached with the realization that he no longer knew her. The woman lying in the bed was a stranger: he knew only his memories of her, so long ago. It was for these memories that he stayed with her, holding her hand, unable to stop her illness, his heart dying a little more with each new sign of her frailty. In the end, when she lost the strength even to prop herself up in her own bed, he throbbed with sorrow, hidden tears burning, the spark of life in his eyes buried deep. But his memories of her found new life at the same time that Margaret approached death.

When she told him that she had accepted her death, he listened. And when she asked of him a promise, his world fell apart.

It had been a simple, but oh-so-complicated, request. He had expected it. But when the time came for it to be put to words, it had frozen the very blood in his veins.

"Donnie," her words were softer than a whisper: she didn't have the strength to raise her voice. "You have to keep looking for him. Promise me that you'll never stop looking for your brother."

He had promised, of course. But it confirmed something in his mind. Even after all these years, she was as he remembered: finding Charlie was her single greatest goal in life. She had often worked herself sick during her decades-long search. She pursued every lead she could find (which were despairingly few) with a single-mindedness that barred such meager things as sleep, food, and health from her radar of importance. She had continued her search until she got sick, and only then had she at last been persuaded to at least scale back the intensity of her endeavors. It took hours, the combined efforts of Don and Alan, and the explicit orders of a roomful of doctors to convince Margaret that, no matter how much one obsessed over something, extreme attention will not spawn new information from exhausted resources.

Time is supposed to heal all wounds, but time had apparently stopped for Margaret Eppes, until, suddenly, she had no time left.

But that was in the past, now. Dwelling on it would not help Don right now, nor would it help him patch a purposely-severed relationship with his father. But still—after all this time of searching, he had not yet succeeded. And his promise to his mother, a mere echo of one made long ago to Charlie, weighed heavily on him when he let his failure get to him.

But that only happened when he lost control. Right now, he was in control. In control of his emotions, in control of his life, in control of his actions, in control of this drive to work. He was in control of everything that mattered right now.

Except, he wasn't.

"List of things completed today: one introspectively depressing drive to work," Don muttered to himself as the elevator doors opened on his floor. Treading into the office, he headed straight for Terry's desk. The look on her face as she glanced up at him made him wish he hadn't.

"What happened?" he asked, preparing himself for bad news. She didn't keep him waiting.

"Natalie Belfall has been found, dead."

Don swore quietly as his mind processed this information, and jumped immediately to the obvious conclusion. He looked up, ready to voice the question, but Terry had already read it in his eyes.

"Looks like another Coast Killer vic. We're still processing DNA evidence, but when it comes back we expect a confirmed CK kill."

"Damn." Why couldn't they catch this guy? Belfall ranked as his 23rd victim, and the longer CK went uncaught, the more his vics were going to keep piling up. Don sighed and ran a hand through his hair. They needed a new angle in this case, something radical that would bring the good guys back into the lead. Something…

Don's head snapped up as he regarded Terry with the closest thing he had come to excitement in a long while.

"Terry, is that math guy here yet?"

Eric shuddered with horror, echoes of the photos of a very broken, very bruised, very dead Natalie Belfall performing a slideshow on repeat with his mind as the guest of honor. He knew it was necessary for him to receive all of the data pertaining to this case so that he could factor it into his assessment, but he could have done without the brief glimpse at that poor girl's body. He didn't want to imagine what her parents must be going through.

Pushing the photo from his mind, he concentrated on setting up the spare conference room he had been given as a work area. There were a few whiteboards hanging along the walls, but nowhere near enough to satisfy him. He was going to have to make do with paper, and save the whiteboards for presentation. That was rather annoying. Notebooks were easy enough to use, but whiteboards were just so much more convenient, particularly when he was transposing data to his laptop.

Speaking of which…Eric unearthed said object from beneath a few mounds of paper that had somehow managed to submerge it within ten minutes of his arrival. He would have to make an effort to keep this place neat. It wasn't his own office, after all, and he doubted the chaos that was this room's current state would make a good impression on the fine folks of the FBI. As a matter of fact, he was sure of it: the east coast feds had made it quite obvious.

The booting laptop screen blurred slightly before him. 'Not good.'

Finally giving in to his body's exhaustion and caffeine addiction, he stepped from the room and went in search of coffee.

A cup of coffee in one hand and a copy of the Belfall file in the other, Don pushed open the door to the conference room, and stared.

'What the hell?' How long had this guy been here? Terry had told him he had arrived only about an hour ago, and part of that time had been spent in briefing him on Belfall's demise. Was it possible that this…junkyard could be created in the space of a few minutes?

Stepping around an almost-but-not-quite-empty briefcase that lay just inside the door, Don made his way over to the table and the clouds of paperwork that obscured it. On the edge of the table sat an open laptop, but the rest of the mess was pure paper. Scanning said paper with a practiced eye, he picked out reports on the original east coast vics, and all of the newer west coast ones. He spotted a multitude of charts and graphs, and pages and pages of handwritten notes. There were dozens of itty bitty pieces of paper that looked like scrap, and had no place being in an FBI conference room—but then again, judging by the looks of this place, the FBI would just have to get used to it. The table's contents spilled over onto the surrounding chairs, and even the floor seemed well on its way to sharing the poor table's fate: several reports and loose sheets had made their way to ground level, drifting over the carpet like freakishly large and rectangular snow flakes, the monotonous white broken only by the black bulge of a shoulder bag. The only thing he did not see in this jungle of potential paper cuts was any sign of Rosavelasquez.

That changed abruptly when he heard a noise behind him.

Turning at the sound of the door being pushed open, Don Eppes got his first look at Eric Rosavelasquez—and stared.

Coffee and the Belfall file hit the ground simultaneously, but Don didn't notice. He was too wrapped up in his mother's eyes, peering out at him from the gaze of a stranger.