numb3rs fic--SOB
Title: Son of a Bitch
Author: Frostfire
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: For "Convergence"
Notes: Marshall thinks about Charlie. Kind of...not point-full. At all. 660 words.

Marshall shuts his hotel room door behind him and falls on the bed, hands over his eyes.

It didn’t work. It didn’t work.

He’d justified the years spent staring at the work of Charlie Eppes by telling himself that he was exorcising a demon, that he was beating Charlie, getting him out of his system. Staring that brilliance in the face and taking it down. Finding its flaw. And once he presented his findings, it’d be inevitable, irrevocable—the greatest mind of its generation would be cowed, Charlie would hate him beyond any possibility of reconciliation, and then maybe he could move on.

Except it didn’t work.

He felt a kind of despair, seeing Charlie’s satisfied smile, hearing that tone for the first time in oh so long—Charlie’s personal victory call, I’ve found it, I’ve got it, I win and you lose and now I’m going to tell you about it in excruciating detail. At Princeton, he heard that tone—looking back, it feels like every other day. He was always struggling, always chasing after The Great Child Prodigy, always almost understanding, almost beating him, almost almost almost.

He throws an arm over his eyes. Charlie Eppes, he thinks, I’ve had a crush on you since you were sixteen, and I’ve finally admitted it to myself.

He’s been riding a high the past few days—the heady sensation of catching Charlie off-guard, attacking his theory, stealing his girlfriend, watching him stumble and stutter in response. He thought that the Boy Wonder must have lost his touch, must have outgrown his genius—he doesn’t think he’s ever gone this long in Charlie’s presence without being smugly taken down. He thought he was making progress, winning for once.

Turns out Charlie had just focused his energies elsewhere for awhile. FBI, Jesus. Murderers. What the hell is that?

He doesn’t know and he doesn’t care, because all that matters is that he’d thought he was getting over it, moving past it, triumphing in the face of former glory—but once Charlie took a second to get himself together and focus, he was outshone.

Charlie, he thinks. I love watching you. I love listening to you. I love seeing you move too fast for me to follow. Except when I hate it.

He has a mental slideshow of Charlie-images, a little Powerpoint presentation that plays in his head whenever he’s thinking about Grand Master Eppes. Charlie at the blackboard, bent over a textbook, throwing paper airplanes, laughing and tipsy at his one and only keg party—and oh God, Marshall made sure he never threw another, because as long as Charlie was only brilliant, that was okay, but if he’d been popular, too, that would have been the kiss of death—smiling grimly as he destroyed yet another of Marshall’s theories, twirling a pencil through his fingers…

It goes on for a long, long time, when he lets it.

And now he has more fuel for the fire. And of course, Charlie looks—he’s always been too geeky for Marshall to be able to think beautiful with a straight face, but seeing him curled in the chair at his seminar made him want—and seeing him with eyebrows raised, waiting for Marshall to say something in return for years of work destroyed, made him think about—

Charlie’s already shafted him in so many ways. He just wants one more.

Marshall rubs his hands over his face and sits up. It didn’t work. Okay. Whatever. He’s going to take a shower, and jerk off without thinking about Charles Eppes once, and go to sleep. And then he’ll fly home, and maybe get a girlfriend. Someone…not Jewish. Blonde, maybe.

And he’s going to…utterly fail to stop scanning the journals for Charlie’s name.

And it’s worse now, he thinks. Because Charlie doesn’t hate him anymore. So he could—

He doesn’t reach for the phone.

Charlie, you brilliant little bastard, he thinks, I hate you so much.

end