A/N Trying to justice to the moment.
"Our best man, madam?" said Lester into the phone, smoothing his tie, not that the caller on the other end, an obvious female and therefore ripe for the plucking, could hear it. "That would be me."
"You are the famous Bartowski?"
Lester stopped fiddling with his tie. "No, ma'am, but I would be famous, if Apple had more market share. When you said 'best man' I naturally assumed you meant you had a Mac, the Rolls-Royce of computers. If your problem is Windows based I'll have to get our best 'Ford' man, to the extent that there is such a thing. Unfortunately he's off today. I told him it was a mistake. Is something wrong with your phone?"
"Clearly not, you idiot, since I'm calling you on it. I was just about to beat level 10 of Lazerbitch-"
"Ah," said Lester, nodding wisely, which she could tell by the sound of his stubble scratching against the mouthpiece, "The game that redefines 'downhill'." Not the best tagline in the world, but appropriate.
"Exactly. And then my rig and my screen went on the fritz, and now I'll have to start all over again, and if you aren't here to fix it immediately I'll be blaming you." She launched into a technical description of her system.
"Eh-heh," said Lester. "Fortune smiles upon you tonight, madam. I happen to have a certain familiarity with the operating system of the TV you're using. I will attempt to rouse my indolent fellow to activity, but if the problem is in your screen rather than your rig it would speed matters along if I took a look at that myself. Perhaps we can spare Mr. Bartowski the necessity of rising at all."
On the other end of the call...
Sasha was quite looking forward to getting a rise out of Mr. Bartowski, so this proposal was less than ideal, but she could see no way to get out of it, especially since the problem was in the TV. Decker scanned the script for something they could use. They had a lot of options planned for the call, but a switchboard underling taking the master spy's place wasn't one of them. "I'm a late-nighter," he read. "See if you can make it by midnight."
"You have until midnight," said Sasha, slamming the phone down. Fortunately it was on a pad of paper, so she didn't crack the screen. "Dammit," she muttered, picking up the phone again and disconnecting. She missed landlines.
"Not particularly sexy, but it works," said Decker, tossing the script. "If you'd tried to use any of what they supposedly taught you in Seduction School, that agent you just spoke to would probably have caught on immediately. Good call."
"I'm saving all of that for Bartowski," said Sasha with a smirk, "I want, I mean we want him, but we don't want him suspicious."
"He won't be, not about that. Of course," Decker smirked, "It does mean you're going to have to leave this poor guy in some shape to go in to work tomorrow." He knew how much she liked to...throw herself into her work.
Sasha's lips curled up, all Grinch-like. The mean one. "You don't think I can do this kindly? Delicately? I will show you." A captive audience, is there any better kind?
Decker paled. "Please don't."
Back in the clean world...
Eventually even the best dinners had to end, and true to Ellie's word, Morgan left right after, not without a few last-minute winks and nudges. Chuck and Sarah felt a little awkward going back to his place, mostly Chuck. Sarah gave every appearance of being smitten, which perhaps accounted for it.
"You mind if I...check my email?" he asked when the door closed behind them.
"Not this time," Sarah said, heading for his bedroom. "Don't take too long."
He sat at the desk and brought the system up to activity, moving the mouse and entering a few keystrokes. He opened a second desktop, blank except for a number of icons, clumped together. He clicked on one and it opened a window which opened another window, with lots of text. After a quick scan of his recently received messages, he muttered quietly under his breath and entered a key combination.
"God-dammit!" shouted Gruber.
"What now?" asked Decker.
"He's doing a system restore. That'll wipe out everything I put on there."
After the day he'd already had, and the night he was looking forward to, Decker wasn't about to give Chuck the respect due a capable adversary. "He's a tricky little bastard. Just as well we're going to ruin his evening with Miss Hottie."
"Can we take him out into the desert now?" asked Tommy.
"Not while he might yet have useful information," said Thing.
"I'll ask," said Decker, "But Adelbart's right-"
"That's Aldebert," said Thing, as he so often did.
Like Decker would start caring now. "Whatever. Thing's right. Don't expect Shaw to say yes. We'll let Sasha have him. She'll ruin all his evenings whether he survives tonight or not."
A knock came on the door. This was confusing to Chuck, since it was his bedroom door, and there was no reason for Sarah to be knocking on it. He left his system to its work and went to the door, opening it.
An angel stood on the other side, beautiful, luminous. Blue eyes, deep blue, hypnotic. Her voice, soft and melodious. "Mr. Bartowski?"
Voiceless and incoherent, Chuck nodded and waved feebly at himself, indicating that in spite of appearances, he did in fact know his own name.
The angel took a step forward, a smooth, flowing step. Chuck stumbled back as she said, "I have a small child that needs to take computer lessons, can you help me?"
"And now they're role-playing, just great," said Decker tiredly. "Turn that crap off, we've got to get ready to support Sasha with her own role-playing and I for one don't need the distraction of amateur hour. We'll see how Bartowski likes the real thing, when we get him here."
Gruber snapped off the sound.
Chuck looked down, noticing the yellow chuck's on the angel's feet. "Uck...urgh...um..."
Sarah walked around him, scanning the room with a small device in her hand, noting the computer as it flickered through its self-repair. "She's very small, I hope that's not too soon," she said, pushing him back with a gentle hand on his chest. "I heard it was best to start early. Let's see how well you use those fingers."
Chuck moved back into his bedroom, and Sarah followed. She closed the door, and suddenly the room was both brighter and dimmer, as she dropped whatever aspect she'd been holding. She was just a normal girl in room lighting. She walked up to Chuck and kissed him. "That's what we call seduction, or inducement of enemy personnel."
The computer in the other room was doing a better job rebooting. "Inducement?"
With a finger against his lips Sarah prevented Chuck from saying anything more, and led him into the closet. On a shelf stood a small plastic box. Inside the box was a smaller playback device, and an intact bug. She led him back out, and closed the closet door softly.
"Brain back on yet?"
Listening devices in one's bedroom tend to do that. Plus that mini-audio device looked like some really cool tech. "Mm-hmm."
"You can talk, Chuck. They think they're listening to us in the bed. That's what's on the audio, followed by snuggling and sleep. No pillow talk, obviously."
Blush. "I'm a fast operator."
Kiss. "You have no idea. You're also very skilled, with good endurance, just so you know."
Unfortunately Chuck's brains really had turned back on. "What if they got the same training as you, Sarah? Won't they recognize the sound effects?"
"Spies don't snuggle," said Sarah. "That audio isn't CIA standard."
"There's a CIA standard sex sound effects tape?"
"No," said Sarah. "They teach inducement, but you know what they don't teach? Follow-through. If we do it right we're never supposed to have to follow through on any of the promises we seem to make."
"No sex?"
"No sex. Not even a sex tape."
"That's cruel."
"That's the spy game," said Sarah. "Remember that most of our marks are rat bastards, and deserve far worse." She ran a hand down his chest. "However, as regards you and me, it means that none of the agents I've met has any advantage over you, Chuck. Not that way."
He blushed, reaching up to take her hand in his own. "I was...worrying."
"I know. You don't usually walk that slowly." She smiled. "For a lot of our male agents it's usually the opposite, since they sometimes-or often-do try to follow through, and rely on the seduction to carry them through the rest of it."
Follow through on that level of promise? "That's cruel, too." Better to leave them with the fantasy.
"It is," said Sarah.
"I'm not cruel." He didn't make promises he couldn't keep.
Sarah flowed into his arms. "I don't think you can be."
Ellie was just finished washing the last of the dinner dishes when she heard it, a low-pitched buzz. She tried to track the sound, and followed it out into the dining room, separate from the living area only by the use of tile instead of carpet. On the carpet in the living area was a phone, buzzing away like mad because Chuck put it on vibrate while they were at dinner.
She picked it up, pulling the wire to the earbuds out of the socket rather than risk being seen in the window. She entered the code, and the screen unlocked. "Chuck's phone."
A tinny high-pitched buzz came out of the speaker, and Ellie went to the window and looked at her brother's apartment, lights on low in the bedroom. "No, Lester, I don't think I will."
She disconnected and put the phone on the couch, between two pillows. Then she decided to put a good end to a good day, and went to see what Devon was doing.
"You get him?" asked agent Rye, currently alone in Echo Park, looking at a screened, softly-lit window. Pot roast and now this. Bad enough them being all intimate in there while he was all alone out here, but the guy really needed better taste in music.
"The room was trashed, no blood, no bodies," said agent Wu. "I found a leopard-skin coat. The manager remembered a classy beautiful blonde going up with Larkin."
"Hooker?"
"No," said Wu. "There was a suitcase full of her stuff, and more in the bath. Larkin probably picked her up at the airport after dumping us. His sort never seem to have problems that way."
"Now, Anna, don't be jealous," said Rye, staring at the softly-lit window. "She's a beautiful blonde in LA, that's like, what? A five?"
"Funny, Rye. I should let you report to Graham since you're so funny."
"Report to Graham?
"Larkin's his man," said Wu. "We can't report to our contact, we move up the chain. This isn't our assignment anyway."
"Maybe he'll put us on it," said Rye hopefully. "Better than this babysitting duty."
"Now who's the jealous one?"
Rye sighed. "At least I don't have to listen to any pillow talk with this musical phlegm clogging my ears."
"What's this?" asked Sarah.
"You don't know?" asked Chuck. "Oh, that's right. They don't teach follow-through at the CIA. Well, dear, that's something we call a-"
She giggled. "I meant the song, dumbass."
"Dropped, by Phantom Planet," said Chuck.
"I like it." She took a deep, relaxed breath.
"It's a song about how a guy looks at a woman and takes a mental picture of her, keeping her in his mind forever," said Chuck. "I can relate."
"Forever, huh? Just the image? The memory?"
"I don't imagine you'll be allowed to stay, once your mission is done," said Chuck. "I'm taking what I can get."
"That's tomorrow's worry," said Sarah. She held him tight, settled in for the long haul. "You're in the spy world now, Chuck," she said with a yawn. "Nothing is as it seems." Her breathing evened out and she...dropped.
He waited for the song to end, remoted the player to silence, and joined her.
A/N2 Don't worry, I haven't forgotten Lester.
Laughs, groans, and comments below, please.
