Don said that Charlie couldn't keep a secret; that he was awful at it.

He said that Charlie had no touch with reality.

He also said that his younger brother had abandoned their mother when she got sick.

If only he knew... If only Don knew anything about Charlie.

Though maybe it was better that he didn't. At least sometimes, most of the time, it was better the way it was.

Nothing comes easy. Everything takes their time. And everything has a cost. Charlie wasn't even an adult when he learned all of this first hand.

One thing he learned for sure was that good night's sleep never came easy, and it always had the highest cost.

It felt great to be sixteen and send his mom back to LA, to graduate from Princeton and have an entire world at his feet to study.

And one day the world came to him.

Classified was from this moment on the entirety of his work.

He told his parents that he was going to a seminar, then to work on a joint project with some professors. And all was true. Except the location never was. Charlie was on a training camp, taking seminars and listening to lectures, learning how to use his knowledge and brilliance to help other people. That was the time when he learned how exactly Mathematics could be applied to things that mattered, and what the term 'deadline' meant. He never had weeks or even days to meet his deadlines, always hours. The more he learned, the better he understood what life really was about. And the 'deadline' meant exactly that: a line of death. He never got any marks for his progress; failing to do his job in time meant one more life lost, one more soldier dead, one more civilian never going home.

At first it was flattering and exhilarating that various agencies came to him because they needed his help. It wasn't easy to work for them, with all that confidentiality agreement, and Charlie had to write his master's degree and then take on a Ph. D. just to keep up the appearances. But after a few years the initial excitement wore off, and he started understanding what exactly standard error in his calculations meant in reality: innocent lives lost. Charlie had lost many nights of good sleep before that because of his eagerness to work on this, and now he couldn't shake off images of horror he had seen on TV and thoughts that maybe those were his calculations that had led to the deaths of those soldiers', and how many more weren't being shown on television. Gradually it became a routine that as if on schedule once a week he would receive a phone call in the middle of a night asking for his help to 'save the world', yet again. But now he wasn't so anxious to say goodbye to another bit of his conscience.

He thought he found a way to escape them all: eager agencies, worried parents and an estranged brother. Cambridge was on a different continent, way too far for anyone to reach him, right?

Wrong. He was given only a few days to settle in when Interpol contacted him; their turf was an entire world. At least this time he had only one group of law enforcement to worry about, for awhile anyway. An occasional short job he could handle. And some time later he even found himself creating a sort of social life for himself. He even went on a date! A real date with Susan which escalated into a close relationship. But even the many bolts on their shared apartment's doors weren't enough to keep the world at bay. 'Just a few hours of your time' became 'a couple of days', then 'a few weeks'. The innocent young woman thought that his career was taking off. She was right in a way: Charlie was given a top security clearance. It wasn't a reward for his job, no. More like eventually it was easier for them to take him to the sites and give him all the data they had than answer billions of his questions. He could find those answers faster than them anyway.

Charlie was a patient man. Being a professor he needed that. But one trip overseas was enough even for him to draw a bottom line to his consulting on sites. He hadn't liked the feeling of being a snow ball thrown into the pits of hell. Hell. It was the most accurate description of the place. Literally as well as figuratively. Blazing sun, flames and bullets flying all around him. Most of the time he didn't know from where the stains of blood on his clothes came from: him, his friends or the enemy. And hope of survival seemed like a long lost dream. He didn't like finding out what it meant to be considered a 'collateral damage'. It was the first time Charlie shot a man; it was also the first time he killed someone. It was also the first time he got shot himself, luckily he didn't die. Or was he really that 'lucky'? How can a person live on when one moment you are talking and joking with a fellow soldier, both making plans for your futures, and after a few minutes you find out that the young man was dead? Death. A month was more than enough for Charlie to familiarize with it. Not that there was a shortage of it, no. Charlie was more than glad to dash away from it as soon as they were freed.

Susan welcomed him with open arms. She was so innocent and easy-going. The young woman saw that something must had happened to Charlie, but she wisely kept her mouth shut. Not that he would have been able to tell her any of the truth anyway. She let him go.

No. Cambridge wasn't safe at all.

Charlie's parents welcomed him with open arms. He wasn't as jovial as he used to be, but they wrote it off to a failed relationship with Susan. All was quiet. Except for nightmares. They never went away, but he learned the merits of strong sleeping pills and submerging himself into his own research. It was only a second week after he came back when they called. One of the main of his demands was 'no overseas consulting'. The NSA, CIA and a few more from the alphabetical soup were only too happy to comply with this request. Interpol, on the other hand, had to rethink their consultant's future role before engaging him again.

Charlie reveled in the few years of silence he was given. True, he still had an additional seminar of consulting once a month, sometimes two. But it never lasted more than a weekend. If he saw that it will, he took the job back home or they could find another consultant to do the job. That's how multiple safe e-mail boxes were established and his phone line secured. If anyone wanted for him to do something urgently, it was done in his garage, no dashing trips across the country anymore.

That's how his mother found out about his extra curriculum. He was talking on his phone late at night when everyone else was supposed to be asleep. She was walking by and not finding him in his bed decided to see whether he was sleeping in the garage. Margaret waited for him to hang up and then fully entered. She asked what he was doing in the middle of the night urgently talking on his phone and working on some equation. In Charlie's mind his mother was always associated with safety, so he didn't even think before saying that he was consulting for the NSA. Words left his mouth before his thoughts came back to there and then. He blinked owlishly before facing his mother. A proud smile graced her face. She hugged him, kissed his forehead and went back to bed. Margaret never uttered a single word to anyone about what her youngest son was doing, no matter how much sometimes she worried about loosing him to the world just like she had lost her oldest child.

Some time later, when life was quietly going on its own way, Charlie went to bed in the evening and woke up in the morning to see that over a year had passed unnoticed, and there was little left to live for. It started one evening when his mother sat him and his father together and told them that she had cancer, and her treatment was failing. Charlie was shocked to learn that he was loosing the only person he truly loved, and the only one who could understand how his mind and life worked. That night he was also reminded that no disaster comes alone. Instead of getting one call from them a month, he got three in one evening. And deadlines weren't days away, no. He had jobs to do as quickly as he physically could and even faster. Now it wasn't a matter of only hours, but every single moment ticking by meant lives lost. This lasted for days, new jobs coming in uninvited and unwelcome. Charlie tried to spend all his free time with his mother, but he didn't have much of it to start with, usually coming upstairs only in the middle of the night. He was glad beyond belief when Don came home; now there was someone to talk to his father and keep his mother company during days. Now Charlie could spend his time saving people and meeting impossible deadlines.

Even now Charlie cannot forget his mother's phrase that she kept repeating always with enormous love whenever he managed to drag his body upstairs, half unconscious from exhaustion, always in the middle of the night when his father and brother couldn't see him. "Help only the people you can save, Charlie. Don't waste your time on others." The underlying meaning that he should take an hour of sleep rather than sit at her side, and then go back to the people he actually could save was painful to his heart; he was loosing the only person who could understand him.

Usually he didn't even go to eat, would have wasted too much time. Only when his father refused to take no for an answer did he drag himself to the kitchen. It wasn't easy to justify indulging in his father's cooking when people were dying waiting for backup on front lines or lying in infirmaries ill from biochemical weapon attack.

And then finally all hell broke loose. Margaret took a turn to the worst and several terrorist cells put down their roots in America, one of them even in L.A. All Charlie wanted to do was be with his mother. But the world wasn't ready for him to take an extended vacation.

Margaret always had an answer. "Son, you cannot help me, but you can make sure that your father and brother have where to live and especially make Donnie's job as safe as possible. Please, protect him, but let him think that he is the protector; he needs that." As always Charlie grumbled and rolled his eyes but complied. He wanted nothing more than spend all his time with his mother, but he didn't fancy an idea of the hospital where his mother was laying, being blown up, or his brother going against fanatic terrorists.

Don and his father thought that he was working on P vs NP. Charlie did love an idea of taking up that challenge, but he never could spend more than half an hour per month on it. Well, he could, but the government couldn't afford that. It was a blessing that Don was terrible at Math, especially the advanced one. Their father was even worse. Margaret was the only one who could say a difference between an equation and expression. Just in case Larry came over, Charlie kept the main blackboard occupied with expressions for the mathematical dilemma. Others were filled with his calculations on anything but. Again luckily the goodhearted professor knew just enough Math to do his own calculations, mostly relying on Charlie to name the problem the young one was working on rather than reading it off the board.

In the end it didn't matter. Nothing did. Charlie saved the world, yet again. Only to loose the most precious person to him in his life. His brother was furious with him, and his father was disappointed; he would have gladly told them what exactly he had been doing, but neither had the clearance to hear it. What was the point in saving everybody if his own life flew out the window. Not that the many agencies cared; they all saw an incredible opportunity rather than a disaster of a family, offering him a full time job with many benefits. Eventually Charlie stopped whining, took a deep breath, told off all the agencies to back off from him -though they hoped it was only a temporary childish whim of his,- and took a position in CalSci. There people were looking up at him, not down. And if Charlie was honest, it wasn't like he had to spend all that much time at home, anyway.

His family life destroyed, men in black kept at bay looming in the background, Charlie could finally be the scientist he was born to be.