Consequences (Holes 3), Part 1: Readiness
Title: Consequences (Holes 3) (1/?)
Sequel to Holes and Both Sides of the Wall (Though I summarize the previous stories in part 1 of this story.)
Holes Series Chapter List
Fandom: NUMB3RS
Pairing/characters: Charlie Eppes/OMC
Rating: NC-17
Summary: Charlie has given NSA Agent José Daniels the program he promised, and José comes to Charlie's office to express his thoughts.
Part 1: Readiness
Charlie gets an eagerly awaited text. / José has an agenda.
Word Count: 2167
Notes/Warnings: Rough sex, hate sex
Part 1- Readiness
Charlie was elbow-deep in grading papers in his office when he got a text. He grumbled to himself. He'd been putting this grading off for too long and he'd finally got into a rhythm. The text was probably from his dad, asking if he was coming home for lunch.
Charlie dug his phone out from a pile of papers and looked at it.
Instantly his annoyance vanished, burned away in a blaze of anticipation.
The text was from a number that Charlie had only ever texted once, to arrange a drop-off of a thumb drive containing a program that he had worked on obsessively and in secret for almost a month. He'd done the drop-off a long 13 days ago. Charlie's mouth went dry and his heart started pounding and his body felt flushed and hot.
It was a text from NSA Agent José Daniels.
It just said, Be ready.
With shaking hands, Charlie gathered up the papers. He had worked day and night for 28 days for this possibility. The program that he had developed to help Daniels was ground-breaking, and it could probably help the whole NSA, and catch a lot of criminal activity, but Charlie didn't care. He had built it for Daniels. To prove to him that Charlie could be an asset, that Charlie could be indispensable. That Daniels needed Charlie, for reasons other than sex.
For Charlie, the sex was more than enough.
It was everything.
Seven and a half months ago, Charlie had first met Agent Daniels. At the time, Charlie didn't know who Daniels was. Charlie had been at the sex club he'd frequented, one with a posh secure glory hole, waiting like he did many days for an anonymous male cock to suck off. He'd no idea that Daniels had followed him there, and that Daniels thought Charlie was a con man who faked math to trick agencies like the NSA. Charlie hadn't known that Daniels hated him fervently. Charlie had only enjoyed the rough sex Daniels offered. Daniels had given Charlie the exact sort of sex he craved - sex without complication, that didn't coddle him or pity him, an anonymous man taking his pleasure from the callous use of Charlie's body.
Daniels had obviously enjoyed the sex as well. They had met 18 times over the next two months, and Charlie had believed Daniels' story that he worked at the club so was always there when Charlie came in. Instead, Daniels had been tracking him, sure that he was stopping Charlie from meeting with his intelligence sources. For Charlie's part, the forceful sex with Daniels cleared Charlie's mind, allowing math to flow. No sexual partner had ever filled his unique needs more.
That could have gone on indefinitely, if Charlie hadn't needed an escalation, hadn't needed math that had never been done to save a kidnapped child. Charlie had asked Daniels if they could move to a private room. In that room, Daniels had shown his full brutality, driving Charlie to heights he had never reached. Charlie had experienced a moment of transcendence, broken through to a new mathematical plateau. The breakthrough that Charlie reached that day had saved the kidnapped child - and brought great fame for an elegant equation he called the Eppes Divergence. But Daniels had disappeared.
Only after running into Daniels at the NSA office four months later, did Charlie learn the truth. That Daniels knew who he was, that he had been running a personal mission to discredit Charlie, and only in that moment when Charlie had experienced his mathematical breakthrough did Daniels realize that Charlie was exactly the mathematical genius he claimed to be. The even more shocking truth Charlie realized that day was that the power of the sex hadn't been the anonymity, but it had been the strength and single-mindedness of Daniels' hate. Daniel had fucked Charlie's face right there in his NSA office, just like Charlie craved, and Charlie had sworn to never let Daniels go again. Daniels had taken Charlie's eagerness to keep a hold of him as a blackmail threat that Charlie would expose Daniels' ruse to his NSA boss. That unless Daniels continued to have sex with Charlie, that Charlie would ruin his life. Charlie didn't understand why Daniels wouldn't just continue to have the sex he obviously enjoyed, but he told Daniels that he'd find a way to help Daniels become a superstar agent.
That had been a lot harder to do than Charlie had assumed. It turned out that Daniels was already a superstar, a genius-level linguist that had native fluency in eight languages, high fluency in 10 more, and could be understood in 28 other languages and hundreds of related dialects. He specialized in pidgins and creoles, the dialects that formed when multiple languages interacted. Charlie at first was at a loss how to help Daniels. Natural languages were terribly difficult to crack mathematically. But Charlie had left Daniels at the NSA office that day, determined to find a way to do it.
It had taken Charlie twenty days of little sleep, ignoring all other responsibilities and voices, to figure out how to do it. He'd told Don that he was working on something for the NSA which required complete secrecy. The credibility that Charlie had earned for the Eppes Divergence gave him space and time to work. Others would have been astonished to learn that Charlie's fevered work was driven by Charlie's desperate need for another taste of Daniels' gloriously rough sex.
Charlie had vowed he wouldn't contact Daniels until he had something to share, and there had been moments when Charlie despaired of ever finding it. Finally, Charlie had realized that he didn't need to crack natural languages, that he needed to mathematically describe the interaction of languages, the multi-lingual space that Daniels worked in. After that it had only been a matter of quantifying and characterizing those interactions, and of following the assumption that the more a communication attempted to obfuscate its message in layers of language, the more likely it was to be related to criminal activity. It took eight more days, but by the end he had wrapped those algorithms inside an elegant filtering program, put it on a thumb drive and handed that off to Daniels, via a dead-drop at a secure location.
And he hadn't heard from him since.
Until this text.
Be ready.
Had it worked? Had the program worked for Daniels? So that Daniels would give Charlie what he needed?
Charlie's cock was already throbbing with hope. His memory of the way Daniels brutally fucked his throat, and other incredible acts, were fading with the constant reliving of them. Charlie needed the flesh-and-blood version of Daniels here, shoving Charlie to his knees.
As Charlie nervously tidied his desk, he had a sudden terrible thought. What if the program did work, and Daniels was…grateful? Would he be appreciative and warm, just like all those other agents Charlie had helped, the ones whose gushing adulation drove Charlie to glory holes in the first place?
Charlie shuddered. That would be worse than never seeing Daniels again, because it would destroy Charlie's memories of his encounters with Daniels.
Charlie rubbed his hands together nervously and waited. He hadn't responded to Daniels text, because even an 'ok' felt wrong. It was part of their dynamic that Charlie rarely spoke, rarely even looked Daniels in the eye. Charlie was also sure that Daniels didn't need to be told where Charlie was. Charlie had checked yesterday and the tracker that Daniels had planted on his car was still there. Daniels probably even knew Charlie's daily schedule, from his time surveilling Charlie when he thought Charlie was a crooked intelligence broker. It didn't matter, though - Charlie would have dismissed any class or walked out of any meeting or gotten up in the middle of the night in response to that text.
Be ready.
He closed his eyes, gripped his desk, to tried to calm his racing heart.
Standing in the hallway of the CalSci Math Department, NSA Agent José Daniels tried to calm his pounding heart. He was shaking with anger and humiliation and arousal and hate all mixed together in the tangled mess that was his feelings about Charles Eppes.
When José had first gone after Eppes, he'd believed that Eppes was a con man who pretended to help agencies like the NSA with math when he was really an intelligence broker working for the highest bidder. José believed that Eppes used his math smokescreen to steer investigations in the directions he was paid to, and José was determined to expose him. José hadn't been able to convince anyone in his agency of these allegations, so he took it on himself to find out the truth. After several weeks surveilling Eppes, José determined that the intelligence exchange must happen at the only anomalous place Eppes went - a high-end sex club. José had followed Eppes into the club and found himself on the opposite side of a wall to Eppes…with a glory hole in between. José had used a lot of justifications for why he put his cock through that hole for Eppes to suck, but the sex that followed - rough but darkly satisfying - had changed everything. José came back the next day and fucked Eppes raw. José now had a dual purpose: Cut off Eppes from his intelligence sources… and have more brain-scorching sex.
When José's efforts to stop Eppes' con game didn't seem to be panning out, in fact Eppes was doing even more 'math', José thought that he just needed to persist, that Eppes must be burning up years' worth of hoarded intelligence. That if José just kept blocking Eppes' meeting with sources, by fucking his face or ass until they both came, that eventually José's suspicions would be born out. José was endangering his marriage and his career but he couldn't stop.
Everything changed the day Eppes asked if they could move to a private room. José had thought that Eppes was desperate to escalate the interaction so that José would balk and leave Eppes to meet with his contacts. In truth, Eppes wanted José to unleash the brutal desires, dark impulses that José had never known he'd had, in order to drive Eppes to new heights. José had done so, with chains and whips and piss and e-stim, and driven them both to peak orgasms. Then, at the moment when he thought he'd finally broken down this con man, José discovered, to his horror, that Eppes was exactly who he claimed to be - a genius who used math to help agencies like the NSA. José had given Eppes what he wanted and Eppes had experienced some sort of math breakthrough. José had fled the club, and his life had come crashing down.
He'd told his wife that he'd done something undercover that he'd found unforgivable and he'd moved out. For months, he'd done the bare minimum to survive and keep his job. He'd found out that Eppes had solved the case he'd needed that big math breakthrough for, and that the breakthrough would catapult Eppes even further into math superstardom. He'd waited, shattered, for the moment that he'd cross paths with Eppes again. Eppes would undoubtedly be furious at José's deception, and rightly so, and demand José be fired from the NSA.
As usual with Eppes, when José finally saw him again, at a chance encounter at the NSA office, things had not gone as José had expected. They'd gone to a private office where somehow José was soon face-fucking Eppes without any glory hole or wall coming between them. It was as good-or as perverted-as it had ever been. Eppes had told him that he wouldn't get José fired if José would just continue to have sex with him. Eppes had muttered something about coming up with something to help José in his job, but the real threat was obvious. José had told Eppes how much he hated him and that if Eppes ever contacted him again to try to force José to have sex with him, that Eppes better be prepared to pay in pain and humiliation.
Eppes had indeed contacted José about a month later, but it hadn't been to demand sex. Eppes had come up with a program that he thought could help José in his job. Curious, José had arranged a dead-drop of the program - he didn't want to be anywhere near Eppes - then tried the program out.
It was brilliant.
José wanted the program to be trash, but in truth it could do the grunt work of six analysts faster and better, freeing those analysts to do the more complex stuff.
But José hadn't shared it with five other analysts. He'd kept it for himself for the last two weeks.
And what that program had done over the last three days had finally driven José to contact Eppes again.
Because he needed to make Eppes pay.