Walker's Eleven

Chapter Twenty-One: Sarah the Princess

by Moonlight Pilot

Sarah wasn't quite sure what had woken her, though she immediately felt off. Chuck wasn't a sleep cuddler, but he was a close sleeper, usually curled in right next to her. When Sarah woke up alone, the sheets next to her cold, she was surprised. She blinked at the alarm clock on the nightstand, which read 3:03 a.m., before it truly occurred to her that maybe she should look for Chuck and make sure everything was OK.

More curious than concerned, she slipped out of bed and pulled on panties and one of Chuck's T-shirts. They might have convinced the Nerd Herd to sleep at their own hotel tonight rather than crashing at Sarah's again, but she wasn't taking any chances.

Her worries were unfounded. The living room/kitchenette was empty of all nerds, including Chuck. She frowned. Had his gone back to his hotel? Without leaving a note? That didn't seem like him. He was usually the considerate one, leaving notes or sending texts, while she was so unused to having people rely on her that she forgot. Maybe he had sent a text, and she hadn't heard the cell phone chirp. She turned to go check, but as she did so, she spotted the front door. It was slightly ajar, held open by the security latch, so that a splinter of orange light filtered in.

A-ha.

Sure enough, Chuck stood outside, leaning on the railing that overlooked the parking lot from the second floor. He looked so lost in thought that she almost let him be, but the door creaked, and he turned. He had a beer bottle dangling from his fingers by the neck.

"Sorry," he said. "I was hoping not to wake you."

Sarah had to clear the sleep rust from her throat before she could reply. "No worries, I was just curious. Something on your mind?"

"Nothing." Chuck looked down as she joined him by the railing. "You're not wearing any pants."

"They're just legs."

"I guess you would know. You've got a mile of them."

Sarah didn't bother to point out that even though it was Sin City, the motel was practically dead at this time of the night. She counted two room lights on, and she and Chuck were the only ones out on the catwalk. She leaned her head against Chuck's shoulder, still partially asleep. It took most of her willpower not to let out a mighty yawn. "Worried about tomorrow?"

"Well, today, really." Chuck sipped his beer. "We're taking seven nerds, my sister, and her boyfriend into a con and attempting to trick three seasoned conmen out of millions and, oh, yeah, robbing them at the same time. And the scariest part about that is that I'm more scared of letting seven nerds loose at Priest-Con than I am about facing the conmen. At least they won't have guns, which is more than I can say for security."

Sarah kept her face very still. She deliberately hadn't mentioned Connor's connection to the mob. "At this point," she said, pushing the back of her hand against her mouth to stop the yawn, "the plan is set and it's too late to change anything. There's no point worrying about it."

"But what if it goes wrong?"

Sarah didn't answer. The nicest option was that she would be on the run for the rest of her life, and it only worsened from there.

"I mean, I know the entire situation is crazy, and it happened freakishly fast, but I don't care about that." Chuck looked away from the parking lot and at her. Could he tell how fast her heart was beating? Probably not. "I feel like I've known you forever and at the same time, not at all, which is great because it means there are thousands of things to discover. And if we screw up today, I'll never get that chance. When I was a kid, I used to watch these movies, you know: old school action movies where the hero could do anything. Fight the bad guy, save the day—"

Sarah found her voice. "Rescue kittens out of trees?"

Chuck smiled. "Of course. And every time, there'd be a romance. Larger than life stuff, big sweeping kiss at the end, you understand."

"I do."

"And I don't know, I used to think it would be so cool to get to be that guy. But you don't do a lot of adventuring and saving the world when you work at a Buy More."

"Tell that to the people whose computers you fix."

"Ha. I'm sure."

"Hey." Sarah bumped Chuck with her hip. "You've got it all now. We're going to save the program for Boston Techtronics, con the bad guys. Hell, you've even got the girl, as the lingo goes."

"If tomorrow—today—works." Chuck pushed his free hand through his hair and took another sip of the beer. "I never really thought about what happens to the hero in those movies if he loses everything. How scary it is to be in his shoes. It adds a whole new perspective to it."

"You could look at it that way," Sarah said, taking the beer away from him and setting it out of reach on the railing, "or you could look at it this way: you've got a great team, an even better plan…and I'm not wearing any pants." She eased between Chuck and the railing, one hand sliding up Chuck's shirt so that she could rake her nails along his back, gently. She felt him shiver as she pulled him down to her. She wasn't as with words as Chuck was—not when the words meant something—so she tried to pour as much of herself as she could into the kiss. It wasn't flash-fire urgency, but something much slower, more pleasurable and more tortuous because of it. Chuck kissed her back, shifting nearer to her and wrapping an arm around her, perhaps subconsciously to keep the railing from digging into her lower back.

When he lifted his head, though, he was frowning. Sarah felt her heart jolt, but Chuck said, "I know what you're trying to do."

"Figure out exactly how many steps there are to the bedroom and how many before I lose my shirt?" Sarah asked, keeping her look innocent.

Just like she knew it would, Chuck's expression went slightly glassy. It's too easy sometimes. "You're trying to distract me from my very valid concerns with sex."

"So?"

"Valid, Sarah. Very valid."

Sarah sighed. "I can't tell you it's going to be OK, Chuck. I'm scared, too."

"Really? Because you don't look it."

"Well, that probably has more to do with the fact that I've been conning people since before I could walk or talk." When Chuck gave her a surprised look, Sarah sighed. "My dad used to put me in a stroller and would steal cash out of the purses of the women who came to coo over me."

"Oh. Cold."

"So I've got a little bit of a poker face," Sarah said.

"A little bit?"

"What do you want me to say?" Sarah withdrew her hand out from under Chuck's shirt so that she could fold her arms over her chest. "I'm scared. I like my life in Burbank, as unorthodox as it can get, and if tomorrow or today or whatever goes wrong, I'm going to lose that because I'll either be on the run or in prison, and even worse than that, you might get in trouble, too."

Chuck's face darkened briefly at that.

"But we've been committed to this the second you walked into the Boston Techtronics. It's too late to jump ship now. So what's worrying about it going to do?" She had to stand on her tiptoes to kiss Chuck this time.

"Uh-huh." Chuck idly rubbed the side of his thumb against the skin of her lower back.

"It's three a.m. pre-con jitters," Sarah said. "Everybody gets them. But really, there's so much…else we could be doing right now."

That seemed to do the trick, as Chuck's face cleared into a smile. "I'm being really insane right now, aren't I?" he asked. "I'm freaking out when I could instead be having sex with a beautiful woman."

"You said it, not me," Sarah said, shrugging.

Chuck glanced over at the hotel room door. "You ever figure out how many steps it is to the bedroom?"

"Nope. But we can find out."

It was a futile gesture; by the time they reached the fifth or sixth step, Sarah forgot all about how to count.

"Wow, you two are sure relaxed this morning," was the greeting from Morgan when he ambled into the hotel room the team was using to get ready the next morning. "Have a good time playing cards all night?"

Though Chuck colored a bit, Sarah looked up from where she was tying on her second combat boot, completely deadpan. "We didn't have time what with all the sex."

This time it was Morgan that went bright red and seemed to stutter. Skip, coming in behind him, seemed to be suffering the same affliction. Sarah glanced at Chuck in confusion, and he sighed. "When a hot blonde uses the word 'sex' in regular conversation, it tends to break nerds," he explained. "Probably best to avoid that from now on."

"Ah." Sarah tucked her laces into her combat boot and carefully bloused out her pants leg like the picture on the table showed. She had donned most of her costume already—the odd tank top that they had had to alter so that the straps went cross-wise instead of horizontal, the gray jumpsuit. She had a set of dog-tags hanging around her neck, and her hair pulled back into a ponytail. She would don the jacket when they headed downstairs and into the convention. At the room's table reviewing the convention map for the fifth time, Chuck was dressed almost identically to her. He had his jumpsuit jacket tied around his waist so that he wouldn't misplace it in the mess that had become the hotel room.

Getting eleven people ready for a convention was a messy business, Sarah was discovering. Parts of costumes lay like carcasses across the floor and all furniture, waiting to be claimed. Nerds had been racing in and out of the room for the past half hour in various states of undress and makeup.

The door opened again. "Donuts!" Devon announced, holding up a pink bakery box.

Everybody in the suite came sprinting. Devon had to leap back out of the way quickly to avoid the carnage of a group of hungry nerds with a sweet tooth.

Sarah smiled at Chuck when he handed her a chocolate éclair, taking a jelly donut for himself.

"You can never really be sure what the food situation at a con might be like," Chuck explained in an undertone, dropping down to sit on the arm of the couch next to her. "Always best to fuel up as much as you can."

"Uh-huh," Sarah said, watching Lester and Harry Tang bicker over who got the bearclaw.

Ellie who, unlike the others, wasn't dressed as a nerd but rather in something approaching casual Friday wear, came up. "Are you sure that I'm the only one that can work the booth as the designer?"

"You can wear the oddly revealing wartime costume and switch places with me if you want," Anna offered, looking up from her coffee. The guys must have feared her, Sarah figured, for she held a sprinkled donut and didn't look any the worse for the wear.

Ellie paused. "No thanks." Anna's costume would be even shorter and more revealing on her, as the brunette had several inches on Anna. Sarah didn't blame her.

"Relax, El, you'll be fine. We went over all of the details you would ever need to know, and Anna will be right there if you have any problems."

Ellie nibbled on her lip, looking doubtful.

"We'll be all right, babe," Devon said, coming up. He handed her a coffee. Unlike Ellie, he wore his costume for the day; they had dressed him as the main character from their fake video game because, as Chuck had put it, "Why wouldn't you want to play a game starring Captain Awesome?" He had a mix of a military uniform and armor, and Chuck had requested that he avoid shaving for a couple of days in order to get a good scruff going on. "Our jobs are the least important today, anyway."

"Every job is important in the con," Sarah said. "Are you three ready?"

They confirmed that they were, and that they had all of the gear. Even so, Chuck double-checked the bag they were taking into the con, and nodded. "Remember, don't acknowledge any of us," Sarah said as Chuck handed the bag to Devon. "If you need to talk to us, be like Skip and send a text."

A second later, her phone buzzed. Message from Skip: :) Sarah looked over her shoulder and smiled back.

"Good luck, guys," Chuck said, and they ambled out of the hotel room.

The con lines wouldn't open for another hour, giving the people inside the room more time to get into their costumes. Sarah longed to voice the question: wouldn't it be smarter to keep the costumes separate and let everybody get into them in their own rooms, where there would be far less chaos. However, getting ready for the con together seem to be some kind of nerd rite of passage. She wasn't going to interfere. Every crew-leader had his or her quirks. This appeared to be one of hers, now.

"Hey, hey, hey, what's this?" Chuck's outrage made her look up. He was holding a white chest armor plate—one of the Stormtroopers' armor plates, Sarah corrected herself. There was a starkly silver streak of duck tape across the whole thing. "What happened here?"

Morgan raised his hand. "Marshmallow battle."

"What?"

"Apparently even marshmallow battles aren't as safe with Stormtrooper gear as you think. But don't worry, I ran out to the Rite-Aid across the street and got something to fix it." Morgan held up a small white bottle.

"Wite-Out?" Sarah asked. "Isn't that going to stand out?"

"They still sell that in liquid form?" Chuck asked.

Morgan ignored his best friend. "Unconventional and weird fixes are just part of the con experience, Sarah."

Even though he sounded like he knew what he was talking about, Sarah glanced at Chuck for confirmation. She got a shrug in return.

"Is that your armor?" she asked.

"Yeah, why?"

"I want you to switch with Harry Tang."

This made the other man look up in indignation from his tug-o-war battle with Jeff over the bearclaw. "What!"

"You're switching chestplates with Morgan, Tang," Chuck said.

Harry Tang let go of the bearclaw and drew himself up very much like an outraged rooster. "I will not stand for this," he hissed as Jeff wandered boozily away, victory in hand. "This is playing favorites!"

"Or first come, first served," Lester pointed out without looking up from his game on his phone.

Tang looked vindicated. "Or that! You expect me to walk around all day looking like an idiot to begin with, but now you want to add broken armor to it? No. I refuse. I won't do it."

"It's not playing favorites," Chuck said, and Sarah suspected he had clenched his teeth together. Thankfully, the entire time they had been in Vegas, he had been with her, which meant that nothing could have really exacerbated his dislike of Harry Tang. Except now it appeared to be back in full force. "It's simple logic. Morgan's part of the con is that he needs to blend in, and that's going to be harder with him running around with a whited-out chestplate."

"Hey, I happen to think this looks pretty good!" Morgan said, looking up from his ministrations on the armor.

"Not now, Morgan," Chuck said.

"I don't think you understand how this works," Harry said, his face turning an odd, mottled red that Sarah found fascinating despite her dislike. "I'm the one you have to keep happy here. That is how blackmail works!"

"By this point, Tang," Morgan said, "you're just as guilty as the rest of us."

"I am not! I haven't done a single thing wrong—we haven't even pulled the con yet. But I'll have no problems going to the police and telling them all about how you've been hiding her!" Harry Tang pointed an accusing finger at Sarah.

Though she could feel Chuck shaking with rage, Sarah nearly had to smile. Every crew had a power player, and in some ways, it was nice that things never changed. She had to put a hand on Chuck's arm to keep him from actually leaping at Harry Tang.

"Your math skills suck," she told Harry Tang.

That was clearly not the answer he was expected, given that he blinked stupidly at her.

"Look around you," Sarah said, rising to her feet, languidly. Calmly. In control. Every bit, she thought, Jack Burton's con-woman daughter. "There are ten of us pulling this job. And only one of you."

Harry had to crane his neck to look up into her face. It was petty and small, but Sarah felt a stab of triumph at that. "So?"

"So who are the police going to believe? Nine respectable citizens…" Sarah trailed off with a glance at Jeff and Lester, and had to correct herself. "Well, respectable for the most part. Or…little old you?"

Harry sputtered and the mottled rage increased. But all he did was glare. "This is not the end of this," he hissed at her, and snatched the chestplate from Morgan's hands, ignoring the bearded man's "Hey!" in protest. He stalked out. He really was quite the vile little man, Sarah couldn't help but think. She couldn't blame Chuck at all for his dismay that Harry was on the team, even if he did fulfill the necessary position in the crew of being the power player.

"Man, I hate that guy," Chuck said into the ensuing silence.

"He has his uses." Sarah cleared her throat and looked around. "Jeff, is your make-up done?"

"Big Mike's hogging the spirit gum," Lester put in for his friend.

"Well, tell him to share, then," Chuck said, pinching the bridge of his nose. "Lester, go help him with it and then get into your armor. You two should have been getting ready twenty minutes ago. You know how hard the forehead ridges are to do."

Lester scowled at the taller nerd, but obligingly reached over and snatched the bearclaw from his friend's hand. "C'mon, bubala," he said, leading Jeff from the room with the donut very much like a rabbit with a carrot and a stick.

"Twenty minutes, people!" Chuck called. "And then it's go time!"

Even though Morgan and Chuck had told her all about what to expect at a con—with helpful text message asides from Skip—Sarah wasn't prepared for Priest-Con. At all. No amount of preparation on the planet earth could have made her ready, she was positive.

The first thing she noticed was the smell. It was…unusual, to say the least. An odd mixture of too-much-cologne, unwashed body odor, plastic from the various costumes, mingling with the stale reminder of cigarettes, since the convention was taking place one floor up from a casino, though the event itself banned smoking. There was a strange amount of color from the various costumes, though most of the nerds not in costume wore what seemed to be a uniform of black T-shirts with witty sayings or logos, and blue jeans. Sarah and Chuck went through the security line alone, separated from their group since they would all be coming in waves—Jeff and Big Mike together a few people ahead of Chuck and Sarah, with Lester, Morgan, Harry, and Skip following as Stormtroopers five minutes later.

Each one of them carried two of the thumb drives shaped like frogs. Only one of them carried the software key.

"So that's Priest, huh?" Sarah asked, craning her neck to get a good look at the twenty-foot by twenty-foot poster of the video game character posted on the wall over the convention doors. Matt Priest, for whom Priest-Con was named, did not appear to be a terribly large man, despite the size of the poster. He wore all black—black trousers, a black shirt, black trenchcoat, black fingerless gloves—save for the square of white at his throat. He carried a silenced pistol in one hand and his face was in shadow.

"That's Priest," Chuck said.

"Do you like the video games?"

"They're OK. The graphics are pretty good, the user interface is well-done. The story…" Chuck shrugged. "I'm not always the biggest fan of antiheroes. But at least there aren't any zombies."

"You don't like zombies?" Sarah asked, surprised.

"No." And Chuck proved it by glaring at a posse of the undead a few places behind them in line.

Chuck wasn't the only one who had a thousand things to discover, Sarah thought.

They made it through security without any trouble and showed their passes to the appropriate people, receiving a high-five for their costumes from somebody who was apparently a fan of Battlestar Galactica. "Told your our costumes were brilliant," Chuck said as he slipped his pass around his neck. "Where to first?"

Sarah gave him the Are you kidding me? look. He grinned. "OK, OK, let's go steal millions of dollars and we'll skip the booth about the new Rock Band game until we've done that. Got it."

"Thank you," Sarah said primly, checking her watch. They had an hour and a half until the appointed meet-up time. They had emailed the location and time to the email she had given Scopes, and they were now inside the con. There was nothing left to do but get to their appointed places and wait.

Even so, moving through the con proved harder than she had thought it would be. If she had been by herself, it might not have been a problem, but it turned out Chuck's fears from the night before weren't so unfounded as she had hoped. The con itself, with all of its booths and flashing lights and roaming costumed nerds, turned Chuck into an ADD head-case. He had to stop and see every other booth, to crow over how cool everything was, and how he needed to come back later with Morgan and check out this video game and such. Sarah figured out quickly exactly why Chuck had said to give them over an hour of lead time.

Still, Chuck's nerding-out stops provided her with an opportunity to keep an eye out and make sure that they weren't being followed. With all of the masks roaming around the place, and the thick crowds, it wasn't easy to tell, but she was reasonably sure that Terrence, Scopes, and Connor weren't tailing them. Of course, that proved to be the least of her problems.

"Maybe we should have gone with a helmet after all," she said after she had dragged Chuck away from an in-depth conversation about Nolan's influence in the Batworld.

He blinked at her. "What? Why?"

Sarah jerked her head. Chuck looked around. "Ohh. I get it now. How long has this been going on?"

"Since we walked in. They're about to start drooling." She was somewhat used to drawing stares since she had undergone the duckling-to-swan transformation at eighteen, but never on this scale. It was like twenty Jeffs, all gaping at her.

Chuck laughed. "They really are. I think—yep, don't look now, but the guy in the corner just drooled on himself. You could have said something. It's easily solved."

"It is?" Sarah raised a skeptical eyebrow until Chuck dropped an arm around her shoulders. Instantly, half of the staring stopped, and the other half turned to glaring. "OK, wow, it really is. I like how your mind works."

"Me too."

They wandered the rest of the con and if Chuck felt the need to visit one of the booths, he at least kept a grip on her hand. A couple of times, they were asked to pose for pictures with people dressed in similar jumpsuits, or other tall blondes in a red dress. At one point, a woman in jeans and a leather jacket complimented them on how realistic the uniforms were. Chuck seemed to have lost control of his voice. "I…uh..."

"The guys are never going to believe just how much detail you put into these things," the woman went on. "Could I get a picture with you? You know, just to show them?"

"Of—of course!" Chuck hastily cleared his throat and all but sprinted to the nearest nerd, who was wearing a Superman costume, to ask him to take the picture. He then put on his biggest grin for the picture.

After the woman had walked away, Sarah turned to him with a raised eyebrow. "Should I be jealous?"

"What?" Chuck still looked a bit like he had been smacked in the face with a two-by-four. "What for?"

"Who was that? She wasn't even wearing a costume."

"Who was—who was that?" Chuck startled her by clapping a hand over her mouth and dragging her away from the area. He let her go before she could struggle free. "You're trying to get us killed in a room full of nerds. Don't let anybody hear you ask that! That was Katee Sackhoff!"

"Who's Katee Sackhoff?"

"Oh, god, we're going to die," Chuck said. "She plays Kara Thrace."

Sarah just gave him a blank look.

"You! Your costume. That was her."

"Oh." Sarah blinked. "I don't really look that much like her, I think. Here, let me see the camera."

"Don't we have a con to pull?"

"Says the man who has visited every booth in this place. C'mon, I'm curious. Hand it over."

Despite all of that, they made it to their appointed location with twenty minutes to spare, and found most of the others waiting in a small alcove off to the side, not far from the booth with their fake video game setup. Half of the Stormtrooper troop had abandoned their helmets for the moment, and Sarah didn't blame them. Though the hotel was pumping cold air in as fast as they could, the temperature had certainly risen with so many nerds milling around the place.

"What's going on there?" she asked, spotting a throng of people emerging from one of the conference rooms nearby.

"Panel for a TV show, it looks like," Chuck said. "Just let out. That's good, it'll give us more people nearby."

"Great," Sarah said, hoping once again that Scopes was wrong about Connor's mob connections, and that he wouldn't have a gun. She turned as Jeff, in full make up and a bright silver and black vest with fearsome shoulder pads, arrived and squeezed by to sit next to Lester, who wore most of the Stormtrooper gear like the others in the alcove.

When she turned back, Harry Tang was standing in front of her, practically in her face.

"This isn't over," he said. "I won't ever forget what you said to me, and I will have my revenge, do you understand that?"

He was probably hoping for her to get angry and start a fight. The power players, Sarah thought with a sigh, never changed. Still, she wasn't a saint, so she raised an eyebrow. "Aren't you a little short for a Stormtrooper?" she asked, snidely.

Instantly, there was the sound of mass gasping. Sarah whirled on the spot, expecting trouble, but there was nothing behind her. When she turned back to the group in the alcove, they were all staring at her, as if they had been stunned stupid. She started to ask what they were staring at, but Jeff abruptly dropped to one knee and bowed his head, followed closely by Skip and then Lester.

"Wh—"

Chuck grabbed Sarah's arm and hauled her away before she could finish her question. "C'mon, princess," he said, "I think we need to go check out a video game booth or two."

"Was it something I said?" Sarah asked, allowing her to be drawn away.

She didn't expect it, but Chuck tossed his head back and laughed. "You're amazing," was all he said, leaning in to kiss her.

Their cell phones buzzed at the same time before he could. "Our streak appears to be working against us," Sarah observed, pulling her phone out. She squeaked in surprise when Chuck ignored the phones to yank her close in the middle of the con and kiss her, amid catcalls and immature comments from passing nerds. She blinked when he stepped back. "Or not."

"Not sure I'll get to do that again," Chuck said, sounding like he was forcefully keeping his voice light. Sarah opened her mouth, though what she could possibly hope to say to him, she had no idea, but he looked down at the phone in her hand. "Is that Big Mike?"

Still a little muddled, she flipped open the phone. All of her fog cleared at the contents of the message. "It is," she said, and looked up at Chuck. "They're here."

MP's Note: Many apologies for the delay between chapters. Wish I had a better excuse than school and spending time with family over the break, where I finally got some time to write, but I don't. Apologies also to Katee Sackhoff and to anybody who's ever been to a con. I'm sure it's all the other nerds that smell bad. Muchos gracias to my mate Tobias for helping me with the nerd bits!

Disclaimer: Please don't sue me, I still have two and a half years of university left.