Episode Tag: Vector
Prompt: 072 Fixed
"I can't tell you, Don. It's uh… it's top secret."
"Why, you little-" Don lunged at his younger brother, tickling him mercilessly.
Sitting a few feet away, Zillah watched with her tail wagging. She liked seeing her humans playing together, though it rarely happened. They weren't exactly an overly physical mob, except when it came to her.
After a while, the brothers lay on the patio side by side, watching the stars, and Zillah trotted forwards to lay across their legs, trapping them both there.
"Zillah, gerroff," Don muttered, though without much conviction. While heavy, her furry mass wasn't actually uncomfortable.
"Hey Don," Charlie turned to look at him, "when I turned up at that quarantined house… had you been talking about me?"
"Maybe," Don looked up, firmly refusing to meet his brother's questioning stare.
"Why were you?" Charlie continued, not put off by the evasive answer.
Realising that he wasn't going to leave it – and with Zillah lying on top of him, he couldn't go anywhere – Don sighed and shrugged.
"Because the CDC lady said that we'd need a top-level mathematician. And I figured that since you've come up with some pretty good results when we tell you something isn't math-related, I wanted to see what you could do when it was."
"Oh, you were curious." Charlie seemed to accept that – but the canine glare told him that Zillah didn't. So, strictly in the cause of being able to move again sometime in the near future, Don decided to add a bit more.
"And there's the fact that I don't understand that kind of math. I need to trust something that I don't understand, and that's less likely if I don't know the person doing the numbers."
"You trust me?" Charlie whispered, sounding disproportionately happy. Don turned to look at him and smiled.
"Well, yeah. You're my brother."
The smile he got in answer told him that had been the best thing he could have said.