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Don steps into Charlie's office at noon on a Tuesday, and immediately knows something's wrong, freezing in the doorway as he assesses the situation. Charlie's working at the chalkboard with his back to the door, and--Don squints--he's got some kind of straps going over his shoulders, like he's wearing a backpack backward, and he's muttering to himself in a high sing-song. Whatever's going on isn't dangerous-wrong, just weird-wrong, so Don steps inside and says, "Charlie?"
Charlie turns, smiling, but Don barely sees that because there is a baby strapped to Charlie's chest like a bundle of dynamite. The baby is smiling too, and she--definitely she, he can see the tiny red glints of earrings, and flowers on her shirt--has dark curly hair and wide dark eyes and a smear of chalk on her chubby pink cheek. Her hands wave wildly and Charlie places a steadying--possessive?--hand on her belly over the backpack, and Don says, "Did I miss something important?"
He raises his eyes to Charlie's face as Charlie barks half a laugh and then cuts himself off, wide-eyed, shaking his head, "No, she's not--Don, this is Amita's niece, Rani." Ducking his head and shifting his steadying hand to gesture from the baby to Don, he says, "Rani, my brother, Don, second in wishful thinking only to my father."
Don smiles and looks around for Amita, but she's not in the room, and he didn't see her out in the hallway, either. "That wasn't wishful thinking, it was terror. Did she--Charlie, are you babysitting?"
Charlie's smile turns a little sheepish, and he says, "Yeah, well, I told Amita about how well the last time turned out..."
It's Don's turn to laugh, disbelieving. "Did you tell her you left Daniel in the garage? Because I had to hear about that one from Dad."
"No! See," Charlie says, brightening like he does when he's had a breakthrough, "I can't do that with Rani." He tugs on the strap of the baby-backpack, and Don has to admit that physically attaching Charlie is one way to keep him from wandering off. Amita is obviously not screwing around with her niece, despite having left her with Charlie. "Plus, if she needs something, she cries--built-in alarm system."
"Uh-huh," Don says, stepping further inside, spotting the diaper bag sitting under the dry-erase board, which has a brightly-colored diagram scrawled on it. "And also Amita drew you a flow chart."
"Okay, yeah, it was an emergency thing, some insane family crisis," Charlie says in a confessional rush, almost as soon as Don looks away from him. "Amita will be back in about fifteen minutes. She said I owed her one, anyway."
Don glances back at Charlie to find him looking down at Rani, patting his palm against her hand. "Owed her one for standing her up?" Charlie shrugs, a tight, please-let's-not-talk-about-it motion, and Don takes pity. "Well, she can't be too mad at you, or she'd have found a baby who screamed all the time to dump on you."
Charlie looks up at that, brightening. "I didn't think of it that way."
Don smiles at the renewed enthusiasm on Charlie's face. "Yeah, come on, if she left you with her niece, she's probably trying to see how you do with babies. She's probably still got designs on you."
Charlie takes his hand away from Rani, scrubbing it through his hair and turning half away, though Don can hear a smile in his mumble of, "I don't know about designs..."
Don moves to lean his hip against Charlie's desk, watching the way Charlie's arm curls automatically around Rani as he looks at the chalkboard. He lets Charlie stare at the board until he's stopped blushing, watching the way Charlie stands there with a baby strapped to his chest like she belongs there, patting her hand against the slate almost without sound. Apart from the jewels at her ears, she looks like Charlie in miniature.
Don knows he ought to leave--Charlie is, clearly, busy and not interested in grabbing some lunch--but he says, "Do you think about it?" Charlie goes still but doesn't look over, and Don knows Charlie knows what he means but clarifies anyway. "About having kids? I mean, not necessarily with anyone in particular."
Charlie nods slowly, acknowledging the question, and Don expects to be deflected with a long explanation of Charlie's statistical predictions of his and Don's respective success in reproduction. But Charlie shrugs and looks down, picking up a piece of chalk. "I dunno," he says, his voice light and badly belied by the way he won't look up. "I mean, I'd probably be that dad who drops his kids on their heads or loses them in the mall or something. And anyway, if you consider reversion to the mean--geniuses tend to have children who aren't geniuses. I'd probably be disappointed in them, or not understand them, and they'd probably hate me."
Rani squirms and makes a half-discontent sound, and Charlie offers his fingers, not seeming at all disturbed when she grabs one and immediately begins to gnaw on it. "So, really, no," Charlie says, "Not seriously or anything. I mean, Dad doesn't even really expect me to, y'know."
That's true; Don's aware that their dad has refrained from putting the cart before the horse with Charlie. He won't say a word about Charlie having kids until Charlie's actually living on his own, any more than he encouraged Don to have kids while he was still in high school.
Charlie scrubs out something on the board with the side of his hand and starts writing again. He doesn't even seem to notice when he tugs his hand out of Rani's grip, but Rani immediately starts to cry. Charlie jumps, looking stricken, turning to consult the flow chart on the board behind Don, and Don says, "Hey, hey," catching Charlie by the shoulder. Charlie freezes, looking to Don for help, and Don reaches out and lifts Rani out of the backpack. She flails a bit but starts to quiet as soon as he settles her against his shoulder, and Don says, "First rule of crying babies, pass them off to somebody else if you possibly can."
He bounces her a little, rubbing her back, as much showing off to Charlie as helping to soothe Rani. Kim's sister had kids, one of them younger than Rani the first time Don went to a family function, and Don had had a baby pressed into his arms at every occasion for the year they were engaged, with lots of broad winks and hints about getting some practice. He and Kim had talked about having kids when they'd been dating a few months, and he'd said he wanted to, which he did, in the same vague way he wanted to retire someday. He couldn't picture that life, but he knew it was the goal ahead of him.
But over that year, going to family parties and getting his practice in, learning to quiet babies, those kids he wanted had stopped being quite so vague. He'd gotten to know the weight of a baby in his arms, gotten an idea of what Kim's eyes would like in a baby's face. He was running the field office; Kim was talking about transferring to another agency, getting some kind of a desk job. Those kids they wanted kept getting closer to real, shaping their lives even before they actually existed, and then Don got a phone call from home and the family he already had became more important than the one he was going to have, pulling him back to California, putting him back in the field with a gun in his hand.
He'd watched his mother dying, watched his father helpless to help her, and he'd imagined Kim lying in a hospital bed, going inexorably away from him. He'd worked cases and imagined those babies--babies with wide hazel eyes and dark hair, babies who laid heavy in his arms when they slept and drooled on his shirt--grabbed by strangers, dead in ditches or shot in their own preschools.
When the kids had been just an idea, so was the danger. But he knew Kim, he almost knew their hypothetical children, and the danger to them was more than he could bear while he watched his mother dying, got his hands dirty on every nasty case the LA office could throw at the new guy. He broke up with Kim on the phone, when she called to tell him she was flying out to LA to see him.
"What about you?" Charlie says, and Don blinks and looks up from Rani, half asleep against his chest, her hand hooked on the pocket of his shirt. Charlie is watching him intently, so Don smiles and shrugs.
"Nah," he says. "Not really. I mean, Dad has made sure that I'm aware of the concept, but it's not like kids would really fit into my life."
He looks back down at Rani before he's done talking, so he doesn't have to see whether or not Charlie buys a word of that. It's not like Charlie fools him, and it's tempting to tell Charlie that his fears are silly, but Charlie would come back with statistics about how many kids don't get kidnapped or raped or murdered and tell Don he doesn't have any valid objections either. When he looks back up, Charlie isn't watching him, he's watching Rani, and he looks kind of pathetic with an empty baby-backpack on his chest.
"Here, take that off," Don says, "Why don't you try holding her?"
Charlie looks startled at the offer but starts unbuckling straps immediately and says, "You'll spot me? Because really, Amita will kill me if I drop Rani on her head."
"Yeah," Don says, laying her in Charlie's arms as carefully as Kim's brother-in-law had first laid a baby in his, "Don't worry, I won't let you break her."
He stands there with his hand hovering under Charlie's elbow, watching Charlie get to know the weight of a baby in his arms, and they don't speak again until Amita comes back.