A/N: We're right at halfway through our novella.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Palmolive
Chuck's words lacerated her — but Sarah's decision steadied her, kept her from tears or anger.
The thumping of her heart steadied her. Her vertigo was gone, dropped with the butcher knife.
She meant it. Done. The CIA was past. She was dead to it and alive to new possibilities.
Go. Going. Gone. Someplace else.
She marveled at herself.
Maybe, when she asked for the extended vacation, she'd known that she was done without acknowledging it — maybe she'd subconsciously plotted her own version of Chuck's post-Barstow plan to move her away from the Agency in half-measures, a step at a time. A plan to do it before she had quite discovered she had done it.
As she watched Chuck open the door and go inside, she realized that she had intended never to return to Langley. She had not formulated that intention to herself — before herself — in foro interno, but it had been hers nonetheless: it would have dictated her subsequent actions even without being dictated to herself. She had not known where she was going because all that mattered was leaving.
She had known — well, in the glass-darkly way she knew things about herself — what she was running from but not where, not who, she was running to.
Until he ran into her in an abandoned building.
Chuck.
Before, she had made Barstow seem to mean nothing when it meant everything. Now, Chuck was playing her game, trying to turn everything into nothing. They had replayed Barstow and now he was replaying her reaction to it.
The question was why.
He was not going to get rid of her as easily as he thought. No. He could say what he wanted. Just a few minutes ago he had been inside her and his body, all of it, and his eyes at all the crucial moments had not agreed with what he had just told her.
There was a reason he ducked his head, avoiding her eyes.
Chuck loved her. She had not been sure when she woke up, dreamy and drowsy, but she was now, her consciousness sharp, her eyes wide open.
He loves me. I have to make him confess it.
Something was wrong with Chuck. His scarred temple was proof enough. But Sarah's whole situation was additional, undeniable proof. She did not understand her situation, or what had happened to Chuck, or what he was doing, — but she disbelieved his claims about what he was doing.
She would work it out. Patience, patience was necessary.
Patience like that biblical guy, patience like Job.
She would play along, consistent with what she had just said to Chuck, with what he had told her. She'd unearthed Burbank Chuck in his bed. Maybe she could unearth him again, out of it.
Chuck was in the kitchen, standing in front of the sink, up to his elbows in suds. He was washing the breakfast dishes. The gun was still in the waist of his pants; the butcher knife rested on the counter beside him.
He glanced up at her for a second, his eyes stolid.
She joined him, careful to walk behind him and to station herself on the side opposite the knife. She picked up the neatly folded pink dish towel and shook it out. Chuck put a clean dish in the drainer, and Sarah picked it up and began to dry it.
The scene was surreal; she knew it. How had they gotten from broken glass in a deserted room to doing breakfast dishes in the mountains? She wanted to touch him so badly she ached, but she focused on their task, drying the next dish when he put it in the drainer. She let the task continue, let it continue to cast its spell of normalcy.
Needing to interact with Chuck somehow, to start him talking, she nodded toward the dishwashing liquid, the safest of the props around them. "Palmolive?"
He wiped his forehead with the back of a sudsy hand, looked at her, looked at her like she was borderline crazy. "Yes?"
"I've never used it before — I don't think I've ever seen it before."
He shifted his weight on his feet, gave her an unselfconscious smirk. "You don't know how to wash dishes while keeping your hands soft? About loads of suds that last? About Madge?"
The conversation, such as it was, seemed to Sarah to have shifted into an alien language. "Madge?"
Chuck smiled. His eyes showed a flash of merriment, a break from their dull guardedness when she came inside. "Years ago, Morgan and I used to have this DVD of old commercials. My mom used Palmolive, so we watched those commercials. Madge was this manicurist. She was the Palmolive spokeswoman. In the commercials, a customer would come in with rough hands, and Madge would recommend washing dishes with Palmolive, and the woman would be all shocked at the recommendation, but Madge would point out that the woman was soaking in it. You're soaking in it. — That was Madge's line."
Sarah had done it. She'd gotten him to talk, to uncoil some.
Chuck laughed quietly, shut his eyes, shook his head. 'I eventually had to trash the DVD. Morgan got a bit...obsessed...with Madge, with that line of hers. Morgan told me he thought it was the sexiest line ever on television. I guess it was a precursor to Irene Demova."
Sarah shook her head. "You're soaking in it?"
Chuck looked at her, his gaze desert-flat, waiting.
Then Sarah understood. "Ugh. Oh, God. — This Madge, she was beautiful, seductive, like Demova."
Chuck gave her another long look. "Oh, hell, no. Middle-aged, fleshy, kinda…" he shrugged, hunting for a polite phrase, "...post-maternal. Miles from Demova. Both their voices were sorta raspy, I guess."
He looked out the window above the sink but she knew he was seeing Burbank, Morgan, not the trees outside. His smile returned, a wraith.
"When did you see him last — Morgan?"
Chuck refocused, dropped his head, and began washing the silverware, engrossed in it, his eyes dulling, the smile dispersed.
Sarah let the question go unanswered. She dutifully dried each of the utensils as Chuck put them in the drainer.
He finished with the butcher knife. When it had been scrubbed, he held it for a moment, then rinsed the suds off it.
She looked at it, then up at him. "You really shouldn't dunk a knife like that. It's not good for it."
He nodded, deferential. "You would know." A few seconds passed. He handed it to her, handle first. She took it.
He waited to see what she would do, a tension between them. She looked into his eyes, then she dried it and returned it to the drawer.
"Whose cabin is this, Chuck?"
She did not think he would answer, but then he gripped the edge of the sink. He sighed. "It was my dad's."
"Was? Did he sell it?" She was working to keep the tone light, and so failed to be circumspect.
"No, Sarah. My dad's dead." His voice seemed to echo around the cabin, sepulcher-sad and matter-of-fact simultaneously.
Sarah froze, her hand still on the drawer, tears welling. When she'd left Burbank, Stephen Bartowski had been very much alive.
Chuck yanked the stopper from the sink and the water began to vortex out, making a sucking sound.
