ficlets

For trixiesfic: "Timbertrick. World War II AU."

The office was tiny and covered in papers and books, and the air was so still and stagnant that Lieutenant Kirkpatrick thought that he might choke just from walking in. He didn't see Timberlake immediately, and crossed the room in four steps to peek at the upside-down notebook (full of obscure mathematical symbols that, Kirkpatrick thought, bore only marginal resemblance to English) on the desk.

Just as he was about to reach out and turn it around for a better look, something burst into quick motion behind him, and he jumped and turned as a body lunged through the door and across the room to slam his hands down on the notebook. Kirkpatrick blinked a few times, and the figure resolved itself into a tall man, with military-shaved head, out of uniform and wild around the eyes. "Don't touch anything," he blurted out, in an accent that Kirkpatrick thought might have been southern colonial. "Don't touch anything. I'm. You can't just come in here and touch things. I've got everything right where it needs to be."

"Doctor Timberlake, I presume," Kirkpatrick said.

The humor was lost on the kid -- for kid he was, he couldn't be more than twenty-five, and even that was being generous. "Yeah. Look, I know that they said that they were sending me someone to take care of things but I don't need you, I've almost got today's decrypts done, you'll mess up my system. Just. Don't touch anything. Do you know math?"

Genius American, Kirkpatrick's superiors had said. Vital to the war effort, they'd said. Most brilliant mathematician of his generation, they'd said. Ridley and Turing swore up and down they couldn't work without him, they'd said. None of them had mentioned that the kid was a looker. "Not a word of it," Kirkpatrick said.

Timberlake looked him up and down, then sighed. "All right. Do you have any idea where someone might be able to turn up a cup of coffee in this Goddamn place, then?"

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