A/N: Thank you for the comments.


CHAPTER THREE


Gauze


A breeze wafted across the skin of her shoulders, a cool caress.

She stretched languorously, loose-limbed but warmly heavy, still partially submerged in sleep. For a moment, her consciousness coalesced around a word, a single word, or around its echo: 'vacation'.

She was on vacation. The encounter with Ch—, with Bartowski, that had never happened. The stinger had been removed from her heart.

No, there'd been no stinger in her heart. No somersaults, no tumbles, no bright colors, no bounce house.

Just this breeze, these crisp, cool sheets (she could feel them against her skin), this scent of pine. She'd gone someplace cool, fallen asleep, and had a nightmare. She tried not to think about what the nightmare had taught her about herself. The nightmare was self-generated, involuntary fiction, a bad dream, bad, but the whelming emotions she felt in it — she was unsure those were fiction, a dream. They had felt real, all-too-real. They still echoed in her too, along with 'vacation'.

She hadn't yet opened her eyes although she could feel the sun on her face, could tell from behind her eyelids that sunlight was falling on her face and on her hair.

She'd finished her mission and gone on vacation and had a dream. That was all.

Vacation. She'd had a vacation with Bryce, the Cabo beginning of the end of whatever she had with Bryce. In Burbank, just before she was reassigned, Bartowski had asked her to go on vacation with him. She had refused. In one of the many sad ironies of Burbank, she refused and she was reassigned — to DC and to Bryce. Her refusal had cut Bartowski deep, to the quick. But the computer program caged in his head, her reason for being in Burbank anyway, was gone. He did not need her. And he did not want her — not really, although he was confused about that. He wanted a Sarah he had created, a self-generated, involuntary fiction, the by-product of his crazy circumstances, his constant danger, his frequent exposure to her: his good dream. But that good dream, that Sarah, was fiction. The real, all-too-real Sarah was a nightmare. Bartowski deserved better. Sarah could only allow herself to have him — to the extent that she did, not much — for so long as he needed her, needed her skillset, needed her as an agent. He did not need her as a woman.

She was not a woman, not really. Not as he understood the term. She had all the right parts in all the right places, but it was all illusion. It was wrong to say she was empty inside. She simply had no inside. She was all surface, two-dimensional — no range, no depth. Only rangefinders and death.

She had agreed to reassignment and later asked never to be partnered with Bartowski because, despite knowing it was a dream as he did not, Sarah had been as invested in Bartowski's good dream as he was, as invested in that Sarah. Sarah did not want to take that Sarah from Bartowski. So she took herself from him, took herself to DC.

Another gust of the breeze. Sarah shook her head at the memories and slowly opened her eyes. She was naked beneath the sheet, she realized. When she realized that, she also realized her arm was sore, the inside of her elbow. She held up her arm and finally opened her eyes.

She closed her eyes and reopened them, the sun causing her eyes to water. A piece of tape held gauze against her arm. She could see traces of bruising around the gauze.

And then the knowledge she had been delaying, denying flooded presently, undeniably through her. She was not on vacation. She had not finished her mission and threw a dart, so to speak, at the Departure Board in Sea-Tac. No, a dart was involved but not like that.

She grabbed at the sheet and pulled it up around her shoulders, to her chin.

Someone chuckled drily.

"Good to know you are still not a morning person, I suppose, although I can remember one morning…"

Chuck.

Eyes adjusted, Sarah looked. He was seated at the foot of her bed. He still had on the dark clothes, the watch cap. His eyes were still somehow obscured from her — she could see them but not see them.

He still had the frown on his face but he now also had a gun in his lap. Her eyes lingered on it there.

"So," Sarah said after a moment, finding that her tongue felt like gauze when she spoke, "you drugged me. Yesterday."

He stared at her as he had in the abandoned room. He shook his head. "No."

She boggled and he chuckled again, the chuckle still dry. "Not yesterday. The day before yesterday. Yes, I did drug you."

She glared at him, pushed herself toward the head of the bed with her feet, squirming so as not to use her hands. They were keeping the sheet around her.

"And my arm?"

"I needed to leave blood on the scene. Your blood. It was a crucial part of the tableau vivant, although perhaps 'vivant' is not the right word." He shrugged without humor. "But I won't speculate on the correct French antonym. No doubt you know better than I do."

Sarah had no response to that. She could barely process it. French? "You...took blood from me?"

Bartowski stared at her with a discomposing, disappointed mildness. "Shit, Walker, you really don't know me, do you?"

He took the gun in his hand and stood. She pulled the sheet tighter, only to realize that she was causing it to reveal the outline of her naked body. Bartowski's eyes swept along the swells of that outline but did not linger.

"You're feeling okay? No after-effects from the dart?"

She had too many questions to ask any one of them. She just shook her head and answered his.

"Good. I'll go out on the porch. I need you to get dressed, then we'll talk about what you are going to do for me."

He turned from her and walked out of the room. It took her a moment to look at anything but the door he had closed so firmly.

She was in a bedroom. Evidently in a cabin. Outside the window, she could see woods, thick green beneath the thin blue sky.

A chair stood by the bed and clothes — not the ones she'd been wearing in Seattle — were draped on it. She slid to the edge of the bed and let the sheet fall. She looked at herself. With the exception of her arm, there was no mark on her.

And then it hit her. Bartowski's comment about mornings. He had been referring to Barstow, to the morning after the night they had shared a hotel bed. Nothing had happened that night, but something almost happened that morning, something had begun to happen before the sudden but inevitable interruption.

The thought of it made her flush all over.

She wanted Bartowski to see that flush less than she wanted him to see her naked, so she quickly began to dress.