Chuck Versus the Birthday
By Steampunk . Chuckster
Summary: Agent Bryce Larkin's puzzling attempt to look up an old college friend after he disappears with U.S. Intelligence's top secret Intersect sends Larkin's betrayed partner Agent Walker to Echo Park, Los Angeles, California as Chuck Bartowski's birthday approaches. Slight AU of the pilot.
A/N: HAPPY BIRTHDAY, CHUCK! I LOVE YOU, DUDE!
Disclaimer: I don't own CHUCK or its characters. I'm not making money posting this.
September 18th
"Haaaappy Birthdaaaaaaaay, deeeeeeeear geeeeek guuuuuuuy…"
He ignored the voice that just so happened to rise above the others, wishing Ellie wasn't so quick with the murderous glares as if she still had to protect him from things like this.
"Happy Birthday to yooooooooou!"
The whole crowd cheered and he held up his hands. "Hey, thanks. Thanks guys, I appreciate it." He smiled at them all, trying to get it to reach his eyes.
"Blow out the candle, bro!" Captain Awesome said, clapping. "C'mon! We want some cake!"
Nodding, sending his sister's boyfriend a grin, he knelt down and blew out the giant 26 candle Ellie had taken great pains to find. Sure, maybe she just bought a two and six candle at a party store, but still.
Awesome's arm went around him as Ellie started cutting slices from the massive cake. "Hey, Chuckster. Listen. Don't mind Brandon, okay? He still hasn't matured past high school. In fact I shouldn't have invited him. I just—Ya know, El wanted us to pull people in for your birthday. Fill the courtyard," the blonde muttered so the others couldn't hear.
"Ah. Yes. No, no. Please. I'm an adult, I can handle a little ribbing. No problem, Awesome."
"I'll punch him in the dick if he does it again, okay?" And with a wink, he was off to hand plates to Ellie.
Chuck was all too familiar of how his big birthday bash was set up. His lack of friends outside of the Buy More meant Ellie assigned both her boyfriend and Morgan to bring as many people as they could in for his twenty-sixth birthday bash, probably using free booze as a lure. And for her own part, Ellie had invited a bunch of the hospital staffers, nurses and aides and med students, admin. Women.
He'd already tried to talk to two of them, and neither young woman seemed all that enthralled with the idea of continuing to talk to him so he politely excused himself and moved away, saving them from his rambling about the things he typically rambled about.
He imagined the other women would be similar, and he simply had to make peace with that. Ellie did her best and he appreciated how much she tried to help. Most of the time. Tonight especially.
And still…he needed to find Morgan and hide.
Or he could just hide on his own, he decided as he looked across the courtyard and spotted the Beard. It looked like Morgan and Anna were in a deep conversation off to the side now and Chuck sure as hell wasn't interrupting that for his best bud, after all the mooning the guy had done over the Nerd Herder.
"Happy Birthday!" another guy Chuck had never met before called out, lifting his glass of alcohol to him as he moved past towards his apartment.
"Oh, hey! Thank you. Thanks. Appreciate you being here," he said to the stranger, smiling. The smile stayed on his face as he went into the open apartment door, and then it died just as quickly. The bedrooms were off-limits to guests, signs on each of the doors, and he figured that'd be the only good place to hide. No one would be there.
And he could play video games or keep working on that game he was trying to program on his own. Maybe he'd do that, something useful.
He felt bad, because Ellie really jumped through a lot of hoops to throw him a big birthday party, bringing people to him, trying to make him feel loved. And it wasn't that he didn't feel loved. He did. He knew his people loved him and he loved them back. But he was stuck in this constant loop of going to work, coming home, video games, TV, not sleeping well, going back to work, saving the place from being burned down, going back home again. No variety in his days except whether he biked home or drove the company car.
He didn't want to seem ungrateful after this big party was thrown for him. He was in a slump though. And he'd seen the looks on the faces of the women he'd tried to talk to. Disinterest. Pity. None of that made him feel much better.
Granted, maybe he shouldn't have told them about the whole girlfriend cheating on him in college thing. Ellie warned him not to and he did it anyway. He couldn't help it. It still made his chest feel like it was imploding. He thought that no one had crashed so hard and fast from such a high point, except maybe Icarus who flew too close to the sun and plummeted to his death when the wax wings melted.
Had he flown too close to the sun? Was he not meant for great things?
Chuck could almost hear his sister's voice, the fed up tone, saying, "Oh God. You didn't fly too close to the sun. That fucking asshole screwed you over. It has nothing to do with you or what you've done. It was him. He fucked it all up, not you. Because he's a shithead."
He could hear it because she'd actually said something similar before. On more than one occasion.
"Uh…hey, you live here right?"
Chuck stopped, turning slowly, abject fear in him as he looked at the guy hanging halfway out of their bathroom. "Uh, yep. I do…?"
"Oh. Cool. You guys got a plunger?"
Chuck just stared at the other man, blinking once.
Yes, a happy happy birthday to him.
}o{
September 11th
She was trained not to let anything show, not even to the man who'd pulled her out of her life to plunge her into this one. A man who, for all intents and purposes, should be more of a mentor than he'd been. More of a guide, an enforcer, who created an enforcer of his own so that he could sit back and kick his feet up while she did his dirty work.
The emotional distance between them worked to her favor, however. Because it meant she'd gotten better at guarding her feelings from him, and from everyone else.
Keeping them under a mask was easy.
Bryce had called it a "spy mask", making her snort and roll her eyes. He'd be so intense, so focused and solid and dependable on a mission, and then behind closed doors, she'd get dopey shit like that out of him.
And still, the dopey shit had been most of what she got behind closed doors. Because he hadn't shared anything else with her. Neither had she shared anything with him, save for during those moments after missions when they'd tangled themselves together, reaching new heights, having fun—something the CIA wasn't technically supposed to know about.
But it wasn't that serious, so they figured it would be easy to keep it from them. Just fun. A little stuff between partners around their missions.
She hadn't kept from him any plans to fucking steal highly dangerous intelligence programs from the CIA and disappear into the night, the way he had kept it from her. Not even a whiff of it. A hint something was going on. Everything had been perfectly normal. And then he'd been gone. And with him went the Intersect.
The Intersect.
Sarah still wasn't entirely sure what all it even was. Only that it had been worked on for most of her life, if not longer, by U.S. Intelligence's best scientists and engineers. Something that would change the intel community for generations. And now Bryce had it. And she had no idea what he would do with it.
Graham was the most uncomfortable and angry she'd ever seen him as he slammed his fist on his desk. "This fuckin' kid."
"Sir, I'm…sorry I didn't know. I know I said this already when you first told me a few days ago but…I want to just reiterate that I didn't… I should've seen something. I should've watched him more closely. It didn't seem in character, you know?"
The CIA director shook his head and let out a long breath. "No. I don't want you to take this on your own head. There's no reason he would've told you, or let you become suspicious he might be plotting any of this. This is what Bryce does. He's a spy. He's a liar. He's good at lying, to me, his superiors…even to you."
Sarah wondered if there was some deeper meaning to the way he'd said that. As if he knew they'd been sleeping together. That there was something else between them besides just the partnership in the field. Something she'd seen there, felt there, that Bryce hadn't obviously. If he had, maybe he would've said something about this, warned her, enlisted her help.
Not that she'd ever betray her country. And maybe he'd known that.
So he'd left her behind.
"So we find him. And stop him. Director Graham sir, let me take point. I'll find him. I'll bring him and the Intersect back," she said, aware of the possibility that her inability to peg Bryce as a traitor when they'd worked in such close quarters was a bad mark on her reputation. As a spy. As Graham's best agent.
She would turn that around if she found Bryce and stopped him from whatever it was he planned to do.
"We've done some extensive research, and a few of our analysts were able to pinpoint what sorts of activities he was engaged in on his devices. He tried to break the chain, but some things you can't erase. Such as this." He tossed a file in front of her then flipped it open. "He wanted to know where to find this guy."
Sarah looked down at the picture clipped to the dossier, and she reached down to pick the whole file up. "Charles Irving Bartowski? Who is this?" She glanced up at the director, then back down at the picture of the young man. With his crooked, sort of sad smile. Dark brown, curly, almost moppish hair. Brown eyes. Twenty-five years old, six foot four, living in Echo Park, Los Angeles. Working at a place called the Buy More. She thought she recognized it… "Buy More? Why would Bryce need to find someone who works at a Buy More. Don't they sell, like, TV sets and barbecues? Is Bryce looking for a deal on a new washing machine?"
Graham sent her a flat look. "He was looking for this man…who just so happens to work at the Buy More."
"What's the significance of this guy?" She flipped through the dossier but didn't find anything all that interesting. The guy didn't even own a car. And he had almost no savings, hadn't made any investments. Like he was existing day by day.
There were pictures of him with his arm around a very pretty young woman with dark brown hair like his, but green eyes. She was labeled as Eleanor Faye Bartowski, his sister who was twenty-nine. But things were murky about their childhood. She wasn't finding much at all about their teen years. Interesting…
"Notice the college he went to?"
"Stanford? Wait…Stanford. The Stanford. He went to Stanford and he works at a retail store now? What's that about?"
"He was expelled before he could finish his last year. Caught cheating on a final. Stole the test answers and they were found in his drawer in his room. He was expelled immediately, sent home."
Sarah winced. "Oh God, that was stupid."
"Mmm." Graham nodded. "The point I'm trying to make is that Agent Larkin also went to Stanford. That's how we recruited him."
Agent Walker raised an eyebrow. "…Agent Larkin went to Stanford University?"
Graham snorted, but didn't seem all that amused. "Don't act so surprised. We do a lot of recruiting from that place. He tested high his freshman year and we groomed him from that point on."
At least he was admitting to the grooming part. She'd also been groomed, but unlike Bryce, she'd only been seventeen when Graham found her, half blackmailing her into the Farm. And even then, her experience with the Farm had been very different. Graham had snuck her into a sort of dark Farm, the one nobody else knew about, where she learned things at a faster pace, a more intense pace… There were nights she'd spent curled into a ball on her cot, trying not to cry from the pain in her ribs after a bad training session.
Sarah Walker shook herself, clearing her throat, lifting her chin. "So they went to school together."
"Mhm. Seems like a pretty unassuming guy, this one. Exactly the type of deadbeat you'd expect someone who fucked up his life by doing something stupid in college and getting caught to grow into, and now he's at a dead end job wasting away his young life. Nothing much in the way of extracurriculars. No real wins since getting expelled, no accolades except for being Employee of the Month a few times at this retail store. Certainly no evidence of any sort of dating life."
"That last part does sound like he'd be the perfect target for a hostile spy organization. Wouldn't be hard to recruit someone who probably feels like he's gotten screwed over by the system, by society…by women."
"Exactly," Graham said. "He was double majoring in computer science and electrical engineering. Absolutely brilliant kid. There's a lot in that brain of his, and it's all trapped behind a desk at this Buy More in Burbank. We think he's the likeliest target for Larkin to reach out."
"You think maybe Bartowski is a courier of some sort? Agent Larkin is taking the Intersect to him so that he can deliver it to an adversary? Russia? Maybe China? The Saudis?"
"Or Bartowski is an agent with an organization that contracts with them, sells them weapons and intel… We aren't sure. I've already sent agents to the other potential targets, but this is our best bet."
Their best bet was this random guy in LA who fixed electronics behind a desk for, what, like…fifteen bucks an hour? It seemed ridiculous, and maybe the ridiculousness was why it sort of worked.
"What do you want me to do with him?" she asked Graham. She looked at him steadily. They were both on the same page. She was asking that question.
"For now, keep an eye on him. Make sure Larkin isn't trying to contact him. Tap his phone. His email. You'll have to sneak into his residence. He lives with his sister and her boyfriend in Echo Park, so it might be a little tough. But they both work long shifts at the hospital, so it shouldn't be too much trouble."
She wasn't really up for another kill order at the moment and she fought to keep her relief from showing. This, she could do. She could definitely keep an eye on him.
Sarah nodded. "All right. And if Agent Larkin tries to reach out?"
"Stop the correspondence, take Bartowski in. Whether he trusts you and comes willingly, or not… it's up to you. We have some questions to ask him." He smirked a bit.
"If I'm able to retrieve the Intersect?"
"All the better. The Intersect is priority. As long as we get it back, he can go into hiding if he wants. We'll find the little bastard eventually, no matter how deep he buries himself."
Sarah nodded, closing up the file on Charles Bartowski and tucking it under her arm.
"Think you're up to the task, Agent Walker? I…know Agent Larkin's betrayal must've been hard on you. Everything that's happened lately, it's…been a lot."
Unblinking, she shook her head, then sent Graham a smirk as if none of what he'd just said hurt her deep down inside.
"This guy?" She wiggled the file. "Piece of cake."
}o{
September 12th
It wasn't ideal, breaking into his apartment in the middle of the night while he was asleep. It wasn't like she hadn't done something like this before. Only one of her targets had woken up in the middle of her planting the bug, and that was the last breath he'd breathed. Nobody pointed a gun at her and lived to tell the tale.
She just hoped this guy didn't sleep with a gun under his pillow.
But by the looks of it, only gun she would have to worry about was the one attached by a wire to what looked like a video game console on the floor of his bedroom near his TV.
Agent Walker chastised herself. She needed to have her guard up, and she needed to keep from underestimating him. He was fresh meat for a backwards organization that made profit off of undermining U.S. Intelligence.
Like Graham said… a "loser" who felt wronged by the cards handed to him. Even though it sounded like he'd screwed himself over by trying to cheat in college. Didn't make sense, trying to cheat when he was obviously smart enough to get into Stanford in the first place, and for all intents and purposes, he had excelled in all of his classes. Or had he cheated then too and just wasn't caught?
She'd studied his dossier on the flight and still wondered what was going on with him and his sister. Their parents had fled, leaving them virtually alone at a young age, but still they'd signed documents for both their children's school trips and wavers, and the bills were still paid and a roof was kept over the teenagers' heads.
None of it made any sense.
How were the parents gone…and then not? How hadn't child services stepped in? Was nobody looking out for them?
He'd done swimming, basketball, and he started and ran a tutoring program for kids in the projects, helping them learn how to use and fix tech that they otherwise wouldn't ever have access to. On top of a weighted GPA of 5.0… No wonder Stanford picked him up.
Still, she had a hard time figuring out how all of that was possible when it seemed to be just him and his sister Eleanor. By the time adults in their lives realized the parents weren't around, Eleanor was already old enough to be a legal guardian and she had whisked herself and Charles off to an apartment near UCLA where she was attending school. Nobody could say anything about it.
Sarah finished planting the bugs in his room, using a device to hack his email and his phone to keep tabs on his correspondence on both, and she crept back to the window she'd come in through. She heard a soft grumble from the bed where her mark slept, and she spun around silently to watch, her hand hovering near one of her throwing knives…
But he merely turned onto his back, smacked his lips, and scratched his chest over his T-shirt he was wearing, all crooked on his torso from sleep. She let herself study him for a long moment, how incredibly young he looked asleep. Different from the pictures she'd spent time studying in his dossier.
He looked exactly like the sort of person who would recognize a disparity in the society he lived in and seek to do what he could to remedy it. The fact that he'd worked at that at sixteen years old, and kept the program going even after he left for Stanford by pulling others in to tutor in his stead, was kind of incredible.
She'd admittedly gotten a little lost in Charles Bartowski's dossier. It was thorough. And it told the tale of someone who certainly wasn't anything close to the loser Graham had deemed him as. She almost felt a little bad for accepting the director's explanation of this guy without looking further into his existence. Sure, he'd gone to Stanford, he'd fucked it up, and now he fixed computers and phones at a consumer electronics retailer and lived in an apartment with his sister and his sister's boyfriend.
But the story the dossier painted made her feel like that wasn't all he was.
And she'd gotten a bit hooked, looking at the pictures of him with friends and family. The pictures of him getting awards in high school. A lanky shivering sixteen year old in a speedo with his swimming teammates, his whole head nothing but a big ol' grin. A picture of him in his dark blue grad cap and gown with his arm over a shorter guy with a beard and the same grad outfit.
But mostly, it was hard to pull her head out of the way things just didn't seem to line up with this guy. For all the good deeds and excellent behavior and hard work she'd found all the way up through college, the cheating scandal, the expulsion from Stanford, felt so out of character and bizarre.
Apparently there was a lot of shock surrounding it, from the school administration, officials, professors.
Nothing in any of it had any clues about Bryce. Though there'd been a few pictures of them together, their arms around one another's shoulders at football games, or at frat parties with stupid hats on and white button-ups unbuttoned, and boxers. All from old social media posts that Bryce had neglected to erase. Because unlike Sarah, he had family in Connecticut who knew him, family he'd gone back to see to chat about his "accounting" job. He'd had friends in high school, in college. And it wasn't necessary to scrub himself from existence or change his name unless he was literally on a mission.
These pictures of him were when he was much younger, five or six years ago, before the CIA had scrambled up his insides.
It had almost made her miss Bryce until she remembered the way he'd screwed her over. And then she'd felt the spite rise in her again.
Both of these men were trying to screw her over. Or maybe not her specifically. She doubted this guy knew anything about her.
Sarah crawled out of the window again and slid it shut, leaving the courtyard and heading back to her car. She wasn't going to let them get the upper hand. She wasn't going to allow herself to be distracted this time.
She had eyes and ears on this guy.
She wasn't going to fail the CIA again. She'd prove she was every bit the agent they needed her to be.
She'd go through hell to get this done.
}o{
September 16th
"Avocado? Are you nuts?!"
"Chuck. Dude. It's avocado."
"Yeah, exactly. You cut open an avocado and leave it on the counter for, like, five minutes and it goes brown. How do you think it'll fair on an island? Gross!"
"No no. No matter how brown an avocado is, it's still delicious. You can always make guacamole."
"More like guacaMOLDY."
"That was terrible, even for you, Chuck Bartowski."
And still, his bright laughter rang out through the speaker.
Even in all of her misery at having to listen to this pointless and mind-numbing conversation, Sarah couldn't help cracking a smile at the sound of his laughter. It lifted something in her.
"Pastrami," her mark said then. "A little mustard. Maybe some swiss. That'd be pretty safe on a deserted island."
And without even thinking about it, Sarah muttered, "Turkey and cheddar on rye. No mayo, no mustard. Dry."
Was she seriously…?
Shaking herself, she cleared her throat and went back to listening.
"See, this is the life, Chuck. Ya know? Just chillin' in your room, whooping extraterrestrial invaders together. Bros, ya know? Who needs anything else?"
"I could really go for some of those pretzels that are like…you know…the little pillow pretzels that have peanut butter inside? That'd be amazing right now."
"Okay the pillow peanut butter pretzels are a definite yes. Agree. But we don't need anything else. Especially no bitches."
Bartowski groaned as Sarah raised her eyebrows, rolling her eyes. And there was the typical mid-twenties dude comment she'd been waiting for. For days now. Granted, it took three days of listening to Bartowski and his friend Morgan Grimes for it to hit, so cheers to them. They did better than she'd expected.
"What? Why the groan?"
"Can you maybe not call them 'bitches'? We bemoan our troubles with women to each other, like, all the time, and we don't get to keep doing that if we also call them 'bitches', dude. Come on." Sarah tilted her head at that. She hadn't expected a correction.
"Okay fine fine. I'm just not over the Trish thing, okay? She asked me out on a date and then she didn't show up!"
"I agree it's fucked up, but that also happened a year ago…"
"Jilted at the arcade, man. Took a piece of my heart right outta my chest. Like with a…what're they called, the hammer and the little metal thingy you flake off the stone with to make like…a David statue."
Bartowski let out a chuckle as Sarah smirked, taking a bite out of her granola bar. "Hammer and chisel?"
"That shit! Yes! She hammer and chiseled pieces of my heart…offa my heart."
"Boy, Keats has got nothin' on you, Morgan."
"Shut up. Asshole."
"You're an asshole."
"No you are!"
"You!"
"Your moth'a smells like elderberries!" Morgan yelled, making Sarah wince and move the earphones from her ear a bit. What in God's name were they doing? This was torture. Miserable torture. And she hated Bryce Larkin more than she ever had before.
}o{
September 16th
Chuck glared at his best friend for reaching up to ruffle his hair before he climbed out of the window. It was nearing midnight and he almost offered Morgan up the couch or a place on his floor so that he didn't have to bike home, but he also knew Morgan had an early shift at the Buy More and he was off and he really didn't want to be woken up early with Morgan's cacophonous morning wake up habits. Banging things around, whistling…he'd heard it all before. For almost two decades now.
He didn't have the strength for it at the moment.
Sliding the "Morgan door" shut, he pulled the curtains cloesed and moved the controllers over to the console, shutting everything off and then plopping down into his desk chair with a grunt.
"Mama tooooold me not to come," he sang under his breath, spinning his chair in a circle. "That ain't the way to have fun … sonnnnnnn…" He stopped the chair with his foot against his desk. "That ain't the way to have fun…NO!"
"What?"
He jumped, spotting his sister in the doorway, the same tired look on her face that he'd grown accustomed to after she got home from one of her twelve hour shifts at the hospital. "Oh. Hey. I was just…singin'…"
"Is that what that was?" she teased.
"Nyeeehh haaaaa," he drawled, making a mocking face as she giggled and came into the room. "How's the hospital?"
"Well, it's a hospital."
"Got it. So bad."
"They aren't all bad. Sometimes people are there for good things."
"Ummmmmmmmm that sounds false. I'm dubious." He snorted, reaching up and squeezing her hand as she came in and ruffled his hair. What was with his people ruffling his hair tonight? Jesus. "Want anything? I can make you some food if you're hungry. A sammich. A bowl of ice cream. I think Captain Awesome left his protein powder out; I can make you a protein shake!"
"Uggghhhh," she groused, coming around to lean back against his desk and cross her arms. "I don't know half the things he puts in his body. But I'm not hungry, thank you."
"I was thinking of making myself a bowl of ice creeeeeeam."
She wrinkled up her face thoughtfully. "Welllll. If you're getting some for yourself…"
He laughed, and still, he thought they were both just tired and lazy enough to stay exactly where they were. He took a deep breath and leaned back, folding his hands behind his head. "Ellie?"
"Yes, Chuck…"
Staring at his ceiling, he felt a frown slowly grow over his face.
"Hey… What is it?" Ellie asked, reaching out with her fist to nudge his leg propped near where she leaned against the desk. "Something happen?"
"Nothing happened. Guess I'm just kind of having one of those days when things feel like… I dunno, you ever feel like you're in a box and the walls are kind of closing in on you? I feel like that today."
"Okay…" She sighed, biting her lip. "So what's that actually mean?"
"Guess I'm just thinking about the Buy More, the fact that I drive around the company car and it looks like a fuckin' Tylenol capsule."
Ellie snorted and he sent her a flat look. She stifled it with a soft, "Sorry."
"This sounds so lame, but it's not exactly a chick magnet. Neither is the Nerd Herd get-up. Or the job altogether. Or the sixteen bucks an hour."
"Will you give yourself some slack please? I mean, we can all agree that your brain was meant to be used for more than fixing phones and laptops and tablets for people. But you aren't any less of a person, or any less of a really good guy, because of your job, your clothes, or the car you drive in." He sent her another look and she shrugged. "Yeah, I know. Easy for me—the surgeon—to say. But I love you and I don't want you dragging yourself like this. You were dealt a rough hand, Chuck. You could've used that as an excuse to slack off and instead you keep that freaking store from burning to the ground."
Chuck sighed and nodded. "No, I know. This was just a hard brain day."
"Tell your brain to chill out a little, huh?" She got up from where she leaned on his desk and squeezed his shoulder. "Come on. You said you'd make me ice cream. Let's get a move on, huh, nerd?"
He chuckled, climbing to his feet and nodding. "A'right, a'right. Here I come. The best brother eevvverrrrrr!"
"I'm not denying it, not even for the joke. So there."
Grinning, feeling a little better because his sister had always come through like that and likely always would, he followed her out of his room and down the hallway to the kitchen.
}o{
September 18th
Agent Walker was forced to step to the side as two men staggered through the open gate that led into the courtyard.
One of them caught her in his peripheral and his jaw fell open, his feet stopping against the sidewalk so suddenly that his sneakers squeaked. He stared at her, then reached out to stop his friend, his eyes fastened on the blonde.
"Holy shit, hellooooo—"
"No."
His mouth snapped shut. "Oh. Fair enough."
The two men staggered away again, obviously drunk.
Some party…
Letting out a low whistle, she stepped in through the gate and looked around the courtyard. It was beautiful, with Spanish architecture and a majestic fountain in the middle. There had to be around sixty people milling about in the courtyard, some drinking, some playing beer pong near the fountain, others dancing to the music.
When she deemed the place was free of immediate danger, no one paying attention to her as if wondering why she was there, she slipped into a corner and scanned the party crowd for anyone who was tall, had dark curly hair and brown eyes, was lanky but with a slight self-conscious hunch to his shoulders.
She hadn't been expecting a big party when she drove up to surveil his apartment some more, but it seemed like the Bartowskis had thrown it. And the boyfriend of her mark's older sister had orchestrated it.
Sarah didn't quite know what it was for, and listening to nearly every conversation in Bartowski's bedroom meant she would've heard if they'd talked about a party. She decided that it was too hard to continue surveilling from afar when there was a crowd of people sardined into this courtyard and in their apartment. And it was easy enough for her to blend into shadows here. And maybe she could even strike up some conversations with someone who knew him well enough to fill in some holes in the story.
She needed more information about Charles Bartowski—or Chuck, as his loved ones called him. So far over the last few days, she hadn't gotten any sort of indication that Bryce had tried to reach out, or that this man had any affiliation with him or some anti-U.S. spy organization.
What she did get from this party, however, was that these people had very interesting friends. And she could at least admit to herself that it was kind of nice, standing in the midst of people in their twenties and thirties, having fun. Drinking, singing sloppily to the music, dancing, playing drinking games…simply having fun. Normal people who weren't deeply entangled in the spy world, under the CIA's watchful eye, always working, never letting up for a second… this was how people her age lived.
Normal people her age.
Agent Walker was smiling at it all, even as she felt envy in her chest. Roiling there. Threatening to make a moment that felt like it should be kind of nice permeate with toxicity.
But then, almost as if he was summoned, the mark appeared.
He stepped out of his home, the front door gaping open for the guests no doubt, and he balanced his arms full of reusable cups filled with clear liquid and ice. She imagined it was ice water. He handed it out to grateful drinkers, beaming at them, chuckling as they patted him on the shoulder in thanks.
He even good-naturedly took an annoying pinch to the cheek from one drunk guy who looked like he'd stepped off a Hollister runway. When Mr. Hollister couldn't see him anymore, Bartowski glared and grit his teeth over his shoulder at the man, turning back and rolling his eyes, continuing to pass out life-saving hydration to others.
Sarah was careful to slip behind a large eye level fern that protruded out of one of the planters against the wall of an apartment so that he didn't see her. She wasn't sure if she wanted him to see her, meet her, any of that. In fact, she planned for him not to see her. She wanted to just watch. Him, his friends, his family, how they interacted. And she wanted to see if Bryce showed up…
Maybe she also enjoyed studying this man from afar. Watching how he existed. This was the first she'd done more than hear his conversations in his room, or the sounds he made while playing video games alone, the cursing and the "Take that, ya beeeeyiiiitch!" that made her snort to herself. The way he was with people was very different from what she'd expected.
And again, she felt like she'd been unfair to him at first glance. That picture they used in his dossier, those cursory details on page one, had given her a bad first impression. Was that all Graham had seen and that was why he deemed this guy a "loser"?
This guy wasn't a loser.
Sure, after being at the party for an hour, taking everything in, following him with studying eyes, she saw him strike out with two different women, and then a third, and finally move away for a beer. Which he'd downed quickly, wincing, letting out a quiet belch, and tossing the bottle in the recycle. She didn't blame him for it. And still, he'd taken it really well instead of with animosity.
But in most situations, he was getting along just fine. Even with the slumped shoulders, hands in his pants pockets, he obviously wasn't a complete wallflower the way she'd sort of expected. She'd underestimated him.
Agent Walker was aware then of the fact that she was creeping around a bunch of ferns and if anyone studied her the way she was studied Charles Bartowski, they'd think she was pretty suspicious.
She went to the coolers in the corner. A short guy with a beard stood there with a short woman in fishnets clinging to his arm, smiling as she whispered something in his ear. He laughed and turned to the woman. "Not here…" he teasingly admonished.
But then he saw Sarah approaching and she recognized him, both from the pictures in the dossier, and from the sound of his voice when he exclaimed, "Oh dear God!"
Sarah stopped short before she could stoop and get a bottle of beer out of the ice. "Uh…"
"S-Sorry. Erm. Ahem…" Morgan Grimes went bright red, then pointed down. "Beer? Want a beer? I'm…I'm beer duty guy for right now. Trying to keep Captain Awesome's friends from triple fisting beers…"
"Morgie Corgie…people only have two fists. You can't do more than double fist." She sent Sarah a surveying look, almost as if she couldn't decide if she wanted to smile at her or fight her.
Agent Walker had to respect it.
"False, Anna Banana."
Sarah ignored their strange little spat, wondering when this had developed. Last time Morgan had mentioned women in Chuck's room, they were "Bitches mannnnn" or however he'd said it. Bemoaning some incident where he got stood up a year ago, apparently.
Now he had this pretty girl hanging on him.
Well, good for him.
She moved to grab a beer out of the ice and quietly slipped away, hoping Morgan wouldn't recognize her at some point in the future. She then stooped down once she got a far enough distance away from the…couple? Were they? She didn't know. And she popped the cap off of her beer on the edge of the nearby planter. The cap shot straight up and she swiped it right out of the air.
She was on a job and therefore wouldn't let herself drink too much, but she could at least sip it so that she didn't stick out like a sore thumb.
The party went on, some people sobering up and leaving, others getting drunker—free booze tended to do that. She knew that well enough even with how disconnected she was from regular life, the real world at large.
In her CIA bubble.
Sarah stopped after she finished the one beer.
And she saw something of a cloud slowly start to wander over her mark's features. It seemed to be getting harder and harder for him to keep up the good face the longer the party wore on. Past nine, then ten, and now it was nearing eleven. There was no sign of Bryce, and still no sign of anything in Charles Bartowski that told her he wasn't exactly what he seemed. A guy who worked at the Buy More, loved his family and friends, and got almost…aggravated while playing video games.
She maybe thought it was a little cute, so sue her.
Sarah watched him morph into a good host again as people on their way out of the party clapped him on the back or shook his hand. A big smile grew on his face, reaching his eyes. And then he slumped again and took in his surroundings.
Deciding she needed to know a bit more, she thought maybe she could try to strike up some sort of conversation with somebody, learn a bit more about the Bartowskis, the brown-eyed one in particular.
She pulled out her burn phone and pulled up Graham's encrypted number, then sent a quick text as she moved across the courtyard towards a chatting group splayed out in lawn chairs set up near the window of Bartowski's bedroom. She typed out a quick, So far no suspicious movement. Will report back with more soon.
As she hit send, squeezing between a raucous beer pong game and the fountain, she felt something hard slam into her shoulder and arm, and the phone slipped from her fingers, flying through the air.
}o{
They were going to give themselves brain damage. He just knew it. More than they'd already gotten from playing college football.
He needed to find Captain Awesome to get his stupid friends to stop punching each other in the face, and also in the dick. He'd already seen one take a fist to the nutsack. And they all laughed, even the one hunched over holding his crotch in utter misery.
Apparently they didn't want brain cells or kids. That was fine. Their choice… But he also didn't want anyone dying on his birthday, especially not at his party. For fuck's sake.
He was so tired, he wasn't in the mood for EMTs to show up or for Ellie to spend her little brother's birthday trying to resuscitate an idiot.
And then one of the morons went for it, turning and cracking his knuckles into the jaw of the guy next to him. They all burst into laughter as the victim staggered back towards the fountain.
All Chuck heard was a gasp, and the plop of a cell phone landing in the fountain. The same fountain that the complex managers left turned off most of the time, and only filled it and turned it on to accomodate Ellie Bartowski's request during her brother's birthday party. Ellie Bartowski—their favorite tenant.
Chuck sprang into action, well experienced with this sort of potential tragedy. He darted to the fountain, shrugged his light Buy More jacket off to drop it on the ground behind him, and propped his knee on the edge of the fountain, stretching out his torso and arm, and plunging said arm into the frigid fountain water.
"H'oh! H'oh that's cold!"
"Shit. Sorry. Oh… definitely sorry," he heard behind him, but he wasn't listening to the piss poor apology from the beer pong player. He was too busy wondering how the hell this thing got thrown so far in.
But he finally snagged it, his shirt he was wearing getting a wet sleeve in the meantime. And he yanked it out.
"I can buy you a new one. You know I'm a partner at a law firm. We can exchange info. Maybe I can get your number…?"
He heard a surprisingly calm, melodic, "No…thank you."
"Aw crap," Chuck breathed, climbing up to his feet again, cradling the wet phone. He knew the very first thing to do when the phone's screen blinked and he switched the power off for her.
Oh.
Her.
Wow.
The moment he lifted his gaze to the person who'd dropped their phone thanks to the assholes, he realized she was easily one of the most beautiful—if not the most beautiful—things he'd ever seen in his life.
He pushed that to the back of his head, knowing it wasn't as important as rescuing the phone as she looked down at it cradled in his palm, frowning, crestfallen as she breathed, "My poor phone…" She reached for it sadly then lifted stunning blue eyes to his face. "Thanks for getting it but you might as well've left it as extra decoration on the bottom of the fountain…I think it's done for."
"You know what? I think I can rescue it. Maybe. I can try, at least."
Granted, he might sell his soul to the devil to fix this woman's phone, she was so mind-blowingly gorgeous. He was only human.
"Wait…" She gawks at him, dubious. "Seriously? It was in there for a while. Pretty sure it's got water in its freaking soul at this point."
He chuckled at that. "Follow me. We're gonna try it anyway. We will save its soul oh lord!"
She laughed.
At least he'd powered it off as quickly as possible. That might help.
And he felt her walking at his heels, not catching her wide-eyed, unsure look as she hurried after him… and they disappeared into his apartment.
A/N: Please review. Appreciate it!
-Steampunk . Chuckster
