geri_chan | NUMB3RS plot bunnies

It's National Blog Posting Month and I thought I'd make an effort to post more often, although I don't know if I'll actually be posting every day. We'll see how it goes! So anyway, I was watching the NUMB3RS Season 2 dvd set, and found myself hit by a couple of plot bunnies...

First off, I really love the episode "Calculated Risk," where Don is looking after the young son of a murder victim, a CFO of an Enron-like company who was about to blow the whistle on her employers. The kid has no relatives except for a grandmother in Oklahoma, and Don ends up taking him home to Charlie and his dad's house so that the boy doesn't have to stay in a group home until his grandmother can claim him. He's really gentle and caring with the kid (Daniel), and it made me think that he'll be a good father someday. And it made me wonder what would happen if Daniel had no relatives, or the grandmother became too ill to take care of him, and Don ended up becoming a foster or adoptive parent to him. I don't usually get non-slashy gen plot bunnies, but there you go...

As for the other bunny, I remember telling

karasu_hime awhile back that I wanted to slash Charlie, but I didn't really see him being with any of the other guys on the show. I've been watching the JAG series on dvd (never really watched it when it first aired on TV but belatedly got hooked on it, and I'm up to Season 4 now), and I've found a character who intrigues me: Clayton Webb, a recurring character who's a CIA agent, sometimes an ally and sometimes a rival of the main characters (Mac and Harm). Usually what happens is that he'll enlist their aid on some mission of his, or give them information to aid whatever case they're working on, but never gives them the full story, and that lack of info often winds up almost getting them killed. He's a very interesting character, somewhat amoral--he's the type of person who will sacrifice an individual for the greater good, who's willing to get his hands dirty, but it all seems to be motivated by a genuine desire to protect his country.

Something about him pings me as possibly gay although it's implied that he might have a girlfriend (a photo of a beautiful woman in his apartment), and I thought he could be a possible love interest for a gay or bi Charlie. Of course, Charlie has Amita, so the story would have to be AU, but in the second season, he and Amita have that awful date where they find that they have nothing to talk about outside of work. So I thought, what if I spun off an alternate reality where Charlie and Amita decide that they're better as friends than lovers? And really, it seems to be other people, mainly his dad, trying to push them together, at least at first. Actually, the whole Charlie/Amita romance turned me off at first because it would be completely unethical for a professor to date one of his students, particularly when he's her advisor. It really irritated me that his dad didn't seem to get this--hello, your son could be fired for sexual harassment! Even if Amita didn't file a complaint, he could still get into big trouble for violating university rules, and it would also damage both his and Amita's reputations--people might think that she was sleeping with her prof to get good grades. Although I do like Amita, and I was fine with them being together once she was no longer his student.

Er, anyway, mini-rant over and back to Webb/Charlie. We know that Charlie does work for other government agencies, so he could have met Webb when the CIA asked him to help with some code-breaking or something. Assuming that Charlie thinks of himself as straight, it would be fun to see him with wrestle with his feelings of attraction to another man, and he might be worried about how his family would react, particularly macho brother Don. (I think Dad would be accepting; Don would be a little freaked out, but he would come around eventually, although he probably wouldn't like Webb.) But the most interesting thing would be whether Webb and Charlie could actually make it as a couple--Charlie's obviously an idealist, and would eventually clash with Webb's "the ends justify the means" methods. In fact, Webb could well have been one of the guys arresting Charlie's scientist friend for terrorist involvement at the end of the last season, or at least, he wouldn't have disagreed with it. He probably would think that the risk of freeing a possible terrorist outweighs the harm of arresting an innocent man. (On a side note, I'm a Crossing Jordan fan, so it was fun to see the actor who played Bug as the persecuted scientist. And I totally love the sexually ambiguous Nigel on Crossing Jordan!)

Webb does have his good points. He's saved the JAG heroes more than once (although he's probably endangered them even more often). And occasionally his conscience does manifest itself, and in one episode he comes to Harm's aid even though it blows his own case. And in another episode he's willing to sacrifice his own life to keep some important technology from falling into enemy hands. I'm still not sure whether Charlie and Webb really have good chemistry (it's hard for me to define why two characters click for me and others don't), but I do think it would be fun to throw them together and see what happens.

Ooh, and I almost forgot about an old plot bunny inspired by a joke my sister made. She said that Charlie looks nothing like his dad, and wondered if maybe his mom was fooling around with the mailman! ;) (And when we see the mom in a flashback, she doesn't look like Charlie, either.) So I thought it would be interesting if the mom had had an affair, and Charlie wasn't Alan's biological son. Maybe the secret comes out when Alan gets into an accident and needs a blood transfusion, and Charlie discovers that his blood type doesn't match his father's. In one version, Alan knew about the affair and forgave his wife and raised Charlie as his own, but of course it's much more interesting if he didn't know, and he and his sons have to wrestle with this evidence of his wife's (and their mother's) betrayal.

I never write fanfic for tv shows, but for some reason, NUMB3RS seems to inspire a lot of plot bunnies--which I need like a hole in the head! I'm currently working on two Petshop fics, and have a whole slew of planned Snupin projects. And I have a couple of ideas for ficlets about Ash from my Always series that I want to write. Still, the bunnies were particularly vivid, so I thought I'd record them so I can get back to them one day.