After his dismissal he went to the bar. He spent precisely two hours and thirty-six minutes staring at a glass of Johnnie Walker, wanting to drink it but knowing if he did, another would follow, and then another.
When he got home he found it stripped of everything but the furniture, and most of that was in disarray. But a bonsai was on the table: a new one…just a seedling. He didn't have to ask what had happened to the old one. Uprooted and tossed aside when they were searching for the laudanol.
He had the feeling the bonsai was Walker's doing. It seemed like the sort of thing she'd do. As he'd told Chuck, she was a good woman. Chuck's idea of consolation was of course to dredge up feelings and try to talk about it and then before he left, invite him over to play "Call of Duty". The look on his face as he realized what he'd just said would have been funny if he was in the mood for it. But John Casey, formerly Alexander Coburn, didn't need to think about the call of duty. Every time he sold that damn game (or any one like it) at the Buy More to some nerd who thought war and killing people was entertainment, it made him want to shoot something.
He'd done his duty to his country for twenty-one years, and in the space of a few days, lost his honor. He should have figured that his personal matters, after so much denial, would someday explode back into his life. He hadn't been hatched, after all, and everybody's life before they entered espionage left a paper trail with details that could be used against them. That was part of why Alex Coburn had ceased to exist when he became John Casey. It gave another layer of protection to those he had cared about.
Bartowski, bless his naïve nerdy little romantic heart, didn't understand. There wasn't going to be any Hallmark moment. He couldn't show up on Kathleen's doorstep after all this time and just casually explain he'd allowed himself to be declared dead to help keep her safe as he joined the NSA. He'd let his own fiancée think he was gone. She'd had his child, their child, and raised her alone for twenty years now…Alex, for Alexandra? He didn't even know that much. The bridges had been burned long ago and to reopen old wounds and ask her to forgive him would be selfish.
Not to mention even if he lied and only said he had left the NSA without telling them the details, he would always realize along with his desire to know them would be shame and a need to prove himself honorable to someone. It would have been different if he had found out and then perhaps chosen to resign. But if he went to them now after being fired, it made them the rebound, the second best choice, the fat chick.
Kathleen and Alex were far better off without him than taking him back that way. They were far better off without him and his NSA entanglements to begin. Despite his safeguards—the faked death, the new name, never calling or investigating them no matter how he yearned to do so—he'd still almost gotten them killed.
He wanted to drive back to that house and give Alex Coburn a second chance at life. He wished he had one of the guns they'd confiscated, just for the soothing, mindless distraction of cleaning its parts. He prayed he wouldn't have to go to the Buy More tomorrow, even as he knew this barren apartment and the crappy job was what he deserved. He hoped Beckman's dismissal was a fairy tale for Bartowski and that she was sending an assassin after him right now as clean-up.
Because more than not telling Kathleen, not knowing Alex as she grew up, not coming clean to Bartowski and Walker he had a singular regret that he knew he'd always carry. Covert actions always had repercussions, and unfortunately they sometimes hit civilians who had no clue. Agents came to accept that blowback as an inevitable consequence, a trade-off. He'd shrugged it off before, coolly, dismissively. It was far different when the consequences caught someone he had loved in the crosshairs, and more than treason and more than deceit that was the thing he couldn't forgive in himself.