A/N: Preliminaries end.


CHAPTER NINE


Breakfast in the Ruins


Sarah kept wondering as she ate her way through the awkward tower of pancakes Bartowski pushed toward her when she came out of the bathroom.

And kept wondering. Burbank, Bartowski's sister, Bartowski.

Bartowski.

While she showered, the table had been set: plates, forks and knives, napkins, maple syrup, butter, coffee. A mason jar of wildflowers was on the table as if by magic.

To Sarah's amusement, she saw the cream in the creamer ripple as Bartowski offered it to her for her coffee. His hand was shaking.

His face had been red still when she came out, and it remained that way as he ate. She had deliberately left her damp hair hanging and put the robe back on, wearing it to the table. She had tightened the belt but it was clear that Bartowski was suffering aftershocks. He tried to hide them but the blush could not be hidden.

Each time he looked at her the blush re-intensified.

So, he kept his head down, as much as he could, eating his own stack of pancakes, treating her to a view of the top of his head, the scarlet thread of his angry scar. Her impulse to touch it, to soothe it, returned, and she managed to fight the impulse back by tightening her grip on her fork and butter knife.

Although the icy shower had chilled her skin, banishing any blush of hers, she was not feeling cool herself, not internally, and not below the waist. There, she felt warm and swollen, like she'd swallowed too much mulled wine too fast. But there was no mulled wine — just scalding black coffee she was slowly sipping.

The circus inside her had returned; she thought she heard a distant calliope on the wind outside.

Bartowski looked up and he grinned. He actually grinned, ducked his head self-consciously, an old habit.

"Sorry about the cream, you know, before. You drink your coffee black. I know that. I was just...um...rattled."

She let herself laugh again as she had in the shower but without the complication of chattering teeth.

He stared at her then his grin slipped lop-sided and he laughed too, for a moment.

"That shower — every time I've used it, it's turned the bathroom into a steam room. No visibility. Zero-zero."

She gave him something for that: through her laugh she said. "I was taking a cold shower."

"Oh," he said without thinking, then he stiffened in his chair and his blush reddened. "Oh!"

And then — right then, like a storybook epiphany, the calliope sounding nearer, faster — she knew what she had known for years but denied.

She, Sarah Walker, was in love with Chuck Bartowski. With Chuck. In love.

Almost from the beginning, she had loved him. She had loved him when she accepted reassignment, and she had loved him since leaving Burbank. She still loved him.

Still.

Once she started loving him, she had never stopped. She had just cloaked it from herself, offered herself explanations for her misery after Burbank that were fatuous, wholly fatuous.

Sarah Walker, CIA agent par excellence, was full of shit. So vastly full of shit. She had managed to yearn for a man for years and somehow not know it.

She loved a man she had abandoned, ruined, and now she was having breakfast in his ruins.

Chuck. It was always Chuck.

But the man she loved had kidnapped her father — and was coercing her into helping him advance in Fulcrum.

What a fucking mess. All mine.

She glanced up at Bar —, at Chuck, and his face showed immediate concern. It wasn't until he reacted that she felt the hot tears running down her cheeks.

What can I do about those?

Always Chuck.

"Really, Walker," he said, his tone soft, pleading, misunderstanding. "I'm sorry about the shower. I shouldn't have...I shouldn't have just stood there...staring. I...I may be a blackmailer, but I am respectful, a gentleman. I try to be."

Overcome, she laughed again and wiped at her tears with one hand. "A gentleman blackmailer?"

He shrugged with effort. "Call it a variation on Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief — or on Arsène Lupin, the fictional French gentleman thief."

She shook her head at Lupin; she did not know the name. The Hitchcock movie she'd seen in Burbank with Chuck on a fake date night.

"Fulcrum enlists gentlemen, do they?" Her voice was edgier than she intended and he recoiled.

His smile flatlined. "You know, Walker, Maybe Fulcrum and the CIA are versions of the same thing, both dark, not one dark, the other light. The lights are on at Langley but they shed no light." He paused. "You've worked for the CIA for long enough to know — does the CIA enlist gentlewomen assassins?"

She tried to smile at that but her lips refused to take shape.

He leaned forward, knife and fork clenched in white knuckles. "No answer? Tell me. Did the CIA treat me as property, Walker? For two years, did they treat me as property?"

Finally, she managed a movement, a concessive nod.

"So why would you think I owe them a goddamn thing? Why should I think Fulcrum is worse?"

"But in Burbank, Chuck," she did it, she said his first name, "we fought them, Fulcrum. We did good."

His eyes seemed to retreat from her though he sat still. "I don't want to talk about this."

He stood up and walked toward the other bedroom door. It was still shut.

Stopping at it, he turned around. "As soon as I was no longer government property, your property, you left Burbank. It wasn't just them, Walker. It was you too."

She jumped up, in front of her chair, knocking it down, facing him.

"No, Chuck! Not me. Barstow. In Barstow…"

"In Barstow...I was still your property."

He looked at her, a gathering of pain in his eyes that choked her breath.

"As soon as I was free, a man, not property — a man, not a thing — you dumped me like refuse, obeyed orders, and left me for Bryce Larkin. You should've gone on vacation with me, Sarah. It was what you really wanted, no matter what you said or now say.

"You accepted reassignment because you couldn't handle me if I wasn't property — because you are government property yourself. Freedom would crush you. You are clueless about being human: you're a thing, not a woman."

And then he disappeared into the bedroom; the door closed behind him. The calliope slowed, died on the wind.

Tears blurred Sarah's vision.

She broke, half howled, half cursed.

Leaving her chair on the floor, she hurdled it soundlessly and ran to his bedroom door, throwing it open. He was standing at the foot of his bed, arms crossed, and he wheeled around as she bulleted into him.

She tackled him violently, her shoulder ramming his chest, and expelling his breath.

Her momentum carried them into the air and onto his bed.