Work Text:
Dis: Not mine. CBS's. And boy, does Rob Morrow look good.
Author's Notes: Written for one of the weekly challenges at 15minuteficlets. The word of the week can be found at the bottom of the fic. This ficlet was written in 12 minutes. [Everything's numbers.]
Headshot
By Perpetual Motion
He goes to the batting cages once his arm fully heals and takes swings until he gets his twenty-seventh strike. As he hands the bat back to the guy at the counter, he considers how 27 goes into 3, and he realizes that he struck out nine times which means he got enough outs for one and a half innings of a regular game of baseball.
Don wonders if this is how Charlie's mind works all the time. He can't help but wonder, as he has since Charlie first showed signs of being "exceptional" (quotations used by Charlie all through adolescence to curb the teasing he got), if Charlie ever thinks of anything without thinking of it mathematically. Do the potatoes at dinner break down into number of calories versus amount of nutritional value? Does he know exactly how many liters of water come out of the showerhead per minute? Can he look at a vegetable garden without mentally pie charting the number of tomatoes versus the number of carrots?
Charlie's a genius, a whiz, a math nerd to the nth degree. Don used to hate him for it. He used to wonder why his little brother had to be so much smarter than him. He used to make faces at anyone who told him how "brilliant" Charlie was. Now, he just wonders if any of those people understand the strain Charlie is under. Numbers aren't as dispassionate as most people think. Numbers can hurt.
Numbers meant that Charlie knows *exactly* Don's chances the next time he ends up head-to-barrel with a gun. Don doesn't envy his little brother anymore.
The word for the week is: strike