Revelations

by MySoapBox

Chapter 2: Sarah's Confession

Sarah and Chuck let Charlie choose the lunch location. They loaded back into their car and within five minutes they pulled into the shopping district of downtown Palo Alto. They ordered their food at the counter of a local eatery and chose to eat outside at a small, round table with a blue umbrella, for a little extra privacy. They still had a lot more ground they needed to cover.

By the time Charlie had devoured his steak sandwich, Sarah had barely made a dent in her salad and Chuck was only half through with a turkey on wheat. Charlie took a drink of his soda and leaned forward in his chair.

"Are you going to eat that Mom?" Charlie asked, pointing at her salad with his fork.

"I'm not very hungry," Sarah admitted and slid her plate over to Charlie.

Charlie picked up the plastic cup of dressing and poured the rest of it over the salad. "Enough stalling! Why don't you tell me about Mexico while I finish this up."

Chuck looked down at his plate. "I've still got half a sandwich here so Sarah why don't you start."

Sarah took a deep breath. "After we left Aunt Ellie's, we drove all night to the border. We crossed without problem. My partner must have given us enough warning to get a good head start. Within a week we had picked up new IDs, a new car, and from there we just kept moving."

Charlie stabbed a tomato. "You just 'picked up' new IDs?"

"One thing I learned from your mom is that a few well-placed dollars down there can get you just about anything." Chuck took a sip of his drink. "Well, anything but a good motel."

Sarah laughed. "That's true. All our time was spent in crappy motels because they take cash and don't ask questions."

"So what did you do? How did you live?" Charlie asked, scraping together the last few bites on his plate.

Chuck had finished and he put down his napkin. "It was just day-to-day at first. I was pretty messed up, with losing my family and friends - my life basically - and your mom…well, she kept us moving."

Sarah shook her head. "I was just making it up, but I didn't want your dad to know that. Eventually, I decided what I should do…but it didn't work out the way I planed."

"So what was the plan mom? Buy a boat and sail away into the sunset?" Charlie joked.

Chuck glanced over at Sarah. She knew from his eyes that he was gauging her reaction. He was concerned. She had decided to tell Charlie everything. If he was going to understand what happened, he would have to know it all. And this next part of the story specifically reflected the kind of person she had been. She wasn't going to gloss this over.

Charlie must have noticed the unspoken exchange between his them, because his face was full of anticipation.

"Maybe Charlie and I could take a little walk?" Sarah said to Chuck. "I think that might be easiest."

"Sure, sure," Chuck said quickly. "There are some things I'd like to do on campus anyway."

"Okay, we'll meet you at the Oval in say," she glanced at her watch, "an hour?" She looked up at Charlie and he nodded his agreement.

Chuck and Sarah kissed goodbye on the sidewalk. Sarah mouthed the words "thank you" to him as he got into the car. Chuck just smiled, nodded, and pulled away.

Charlie stood there waiting. He looked half embarrassed, half confused. Sarah turned to him and laced her arm into his. "Walk with me?" she asked.

It was the perfect summer day as they started strolling down University Avenue towards campus. This is small town USA, Sarah thought, with small shops covered by awnings and large shady oak trees dotting the street. They shared the sidewalk with many others, students on bikes, women passing with shopping bags, but they all disappeared from focus as Sarah considered how to talk about things long passed with her only son.

Charlie cleared is throat. "So Mom, I'm not sure what you didn't want to say in front of dad but…"

"Don't worry," she interrupted, "I'm not going to tell you anything he doesn't know. I just thought it would be easier this way."

"Easier? How?"

"There are some things that you need to hear from my mouth, and I didn't want you to worry too much about him…how he was feeling…when I tell you what happened."

"Ok, so tell me."

They paused at a crosswalk and waited for the signal. The signal turned green and she squeezed his arm as they crossed the street. "My original plan was to leave your father." Charlie looked over at her in surprise. "Hear me out," she said. "The CIA was looking for both us. It would be too dangerous for us to stay together. Or at least, that is what I told myself." Sarah took a few more steps and added, "The truth was, I thought I could never be with your dad - in any kind of romantic sense."

Charlie turned to her in disbelief, "You guys still weren't together yet?"

Sarah peered over into the shop window they were passing. "No, not really. I thought that if he truly knew me, if he knew all that I had done, he wouldn't want to be with me, so… I hadn't planned on even giving him a chance."

"Why would you think that mom? Dad loves you more than anything in the world."

Sarah looked away from him. It was time for her to start telling the hard stuff. She knew she wasn't good with words so she had rehearsed a speech. Over the last few days she had gone over it a hundred times in her mind. She knew what she had to say but now that she was here, she was nervous.

Your insecurities haven't changed so much over the years, have they? she silently berated herself.

She steeled herself and plunged in. "You know, Charlie, if there is one thing I learned from Grandpa Jack, it's that a person can tell themselves a lot of things to justify what they do. In the CIA I was trained to put my emotions aside and do the job. I was told that what I did was for the greater good, to keep the world safe, and I believed it. When I did something that didn't feel right, I told myself the lines and it helped me sleep at night.

Charlie kept his eyes on the sidewalk ahead, but reached over with his left hand and placed it on hers to show that he was listening.

"But after a few years as an agent - I didn't have to tell myself the lines anymore, because I just cut out the part of me that felt – felt anything at all. It helped with my work, made things less complicated, but sometimes, when I would see a happy couple or a family, I had the sense that I had lost something along the way." She paused for a moment as a group of young people passed. "Then I met your father." Sarah shook her head. "I didn't understand exactly how or why at the time but, he brought some of those feelings back. To say having those feelings complicated my job was an understatement. But I couldn't let them go because…for the first time I saw a glimpse of what my life could be. That maybe what I thought was impossible - was possible." She paused for a few seconds remembering. "I think that is why I was willing to leave the only life I had ever known to save him. And that is why I was going to leave him, because I knew he deserved more than what little I had to give."

Charlie looked over to her, amazed.

"I know, I know, it must sound crazy to you given where your father and I are now." She sighed at looked up at the gnarled tree branches overhead. "It's hard to even remember feeling that way." She turned to him to drive her point home. "But that is what the job does to you; it consumes you, and makes you into what you have to be to survive. Even if that means loosing your humanity along the way."

They stopped and waited for traffic to cross to the other side of the street. Sarah let go of his arm as they crossed, but once on the other sidewalk he reached out and grabbed her hand. He is more then I deserve, Sarah thought again.

"But you didn't leave him," Charlie supplied.

"No," she said. "I just couldn't bring myself to do it."

Charlie playfully bumped into her arm, "I'm glad you didn't."

Sarah smiled at him, "Me too, because things got a lot more complicated." She looked down at the sidewalk. "I found out I was expecting…you."

Charlie stopped and turned to her. "Oh my gosh, Mom!" His eyes were as big as saucers. "Dad knocked you up?" he cried.

Sarah heard a little gasp from a trio of older women window shopping nearby. She ducked her head down and rolled her eyes. Charlie got his subtlety from his dad.

Charlie must have noticed the stir he caused because then he leaned in said "Sorry, what I meant to say was…" Then he cupped his mouth and stage whispered "Dad knocked you up!" He held her gaze for a moment and then cracked a sly smile.

Sarah slapped him on the arm, "You can laugh about it now, but at the time it was very frightening," Sarah gave him a serious look, "with very real consequences for your dad and I."

They began walking again. "I thought you said that you and dad weren't together, in a romantic way, I mean."

"Technically, we weren't. It happened only one time." She glanced up at bird slipping into one of many nests built in the store sign above. "It was the kind of thing we've told you not to do since you were old enough to understand what we were talking about." She puffed out a breath, "We had been on the run for a few weeks. We thought that any moment we would be caught or killed. I hadn't slept well and then one night…" she paused. "Hey, why am I telling you this? This actually is none of your business. You just have to know it happened and that it was stupid."

"Hey now! Look who you're talking about here!" he said pointing to himself with his free hand.

"I was talking about how it happened not the result," Sarah said, "It was just…terrible timing."

"So, what did you do?" Charlie asked.

"I didn't want to tell your dad. I knew he'd want to do the honorable thing." She did air quotes for the word 'honorable.' "So my first thought was to…well…end the pregnancy." She choked on the last few words. "I'm so sorry Charlie, so sorry for even thinking it."

"Hey, hey," Charlie said, wrapping his arm around her shoulder. "That sounds rough. I can't imagine."

"That's nice of you to say. But it must be really horrible for you to hear." She wiped away one renegade tear.

"Well, yeah, it isn't like I'm going to make it my Facebook status or anything." He laughed at his own joke but Sarah could tell that his heart wasn't in it. He was so much like Chuck that way, putting aside his own feelings to try to make her feel better. "But you didn't go through with it, right?" Sarah shook her head. "Of course you didn't, what am I saying?" and he laughed again. "So tell me, what changed your mind and stopped you from making the biggest mistake of your life – and mine."

"It was your father, after I finally summoned the courage to tell him…"

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Sarah lay in bed, but she couldn't sleep. They had opened the windows before retiring, but the hot air just stood stale in the room. How much she wished that a fresh wind would come and blow it all away. Chuck had manfully given her the bed but she heard his slow breathing so she knew he faired much better then she, even on the floor. She cursed the heat as she tossed again to try to find a comfortable position, but if she was being honest with herself, it wasn't the temperature keeping her awake. Her body already felt the tell tale signs of breast sensitivity and mood shifts; it ached. But she knew it wasn't her body that kept her awake either. It was her mind's relentless clamoring.

I'm so stupid, she berated herself. How could she have allowed the two of them to do something so utterly foolish? It happened when emotions were raw and they didn't know if they would live to see another day. She was not prepared. As an agent she was trained to always have an exit strategy, always have a 'plan B' in case things went south. But she could see no clear exit this time. There was only one easy way out of it. She shifted again and an involuntary moan escaped her lips.

She looked over at Chuck's sleeping frame. He did not stir. She covered her head with her pillow. She knew that this kind of raw personal honesty was costly, even in the dead of night. Could he love her? The real woman, behind the mask? She remembered watching Star Wars, that last movie when Luke takes the mask off his dying father. Under that black powerful mask was an ugly white blob of a head, ashen face, and lifeless eyes. She and Darth Vader were alike in some ways.

She shook her head to clear the image from her mind. That was the movies and this was real life.

Sarah moved her hands to her still flat stomach and thought of the life inside her. If she remembered her biology right her baby was just the size of a peanut, a little space alien peanut with large black eyes, a curved spine and tail, and little hands with stubby fingers. Another white blob, she laughed darkly to herself and then sobered. This white blob was different from the one in the movie. This life was not at its ending, but at its beginning. It hadn't become - it was becoming. This white blob peanut had infinite possibilities. She had already taken so many lives from this world. Could she really take another? This life was so different from the others. Sarah Walker killed the evil to protect the innocent, not the other way around. And maybe, just maybe, having this child could somehow fill the emptiness she had been feeling.

Just as she had this last thought, she knew it was screwed up. Babies are not solutions, they are problems. Problems that needed a loving mom and dad to handle them. But she was not mother material. Her only examples of moms had been on TV sitcoms and she was pretty certain that those were not real moms either.

She moved her hands across her stomach and imagined it growing big and round. She thought of running away to some town, totally off the grid and giving birth alone in some back woods hospital. What kind of life could she offer this child? She took a shuddering breath. She could not do this. She simply could not do this. A wave of despair washed over her with more force then her emotional levees could contain. Under the pressure, Sarah Walker broke.

Drowning and drowning, she was only vaguely aware of the squeaking of the bedsprings, or the weight that shifted the balance of the bed. The fingers brushing away her damp hair from her face were like a breath of life giving air. His arms, placed gently around her, were a raft and she turned to him and clung to him to save her life.

He wrapped his left arm under her, pressing her securely against his chest, and with his right hand he began to stroke her hair again, pushing golden strands up and over her ear.

"Shhh" he said to calm her. "It's going to be alright. Sarah, I'm right here. I'm right here." She didn't hear everything he whispered to her, but after a few minutes of just being near him, she began to calm. She could feel her heart slowing, the waves coming less frequently, the flow of her eyes drying.

"Are you going to be okay?" he finally asked.

Sarah sniffled, "I'm not sure," she confessed.

"Do you think, at least, that you could loosen your grip on my neck? It's kind of hard to breath," Chuck asked.

"Sorry" she moved her hand to rest on his shoulder.

"Anything you want to talk about?" Chuck whispered, still stroking her hair. It was the most intimate they had been since that one night. Sarah didn't answer but closed her eyes and breathed deeply through her nose. She could smell the staleness of the motel room, the remnants of cigarette smoke on walls and carpet. But mostly she could smell him, the smell of musk mixed with the sweat of the day. The combined scents were so totally male, that it reminded her of good times with her dad when she was a little girl, back before she was Sarah Walker, back when she was too small to really understand what was going on, but not too small to enjoy the adventure of being on the road, just her dad and her. She felt safe then and she felt safe now somehow, in Chuck's arms. She hadn't felt that way in a long time.

"Sarah?" he whispered again.

"Yeah?" she answered thickly.

"You're scaring me." Sarah opened her eyes and saw tightness in his face. "Is there something wrong? Something you're not telling me?"

"We're not in danger, if that is what you're asking," she said, "at least not any more then we already are."

"What then?" Chuck asked. Sarah turned her head to examine the light patterns from the window falling across the ceiling. Chuck sounded anxious when he continued. "We've been at this for months now, Sarah, and…I think we've made a pretty good team. Neither of us has ever been a fugitive before so…for being first timers and everything…things have gone pretty smoothly…overall." She felt Chuck's hand on her face, turning her toward him. "Hey" his voice softened intimately, "if…it's something I've done to upset you, well…then I want you to tell me; I deserve to know, so I can make it right."

He deserved to know. The truth of those words penetrated her to the very core. Why hadn't it crossed her mind before? Didn't he deserve a say in what happened to their child just as much as she did? "Their child," biting her lip, she mentally repeated the words; her walls of resolution began to wash away. "Chuck" the word caught in her throat. She could hear her heart pounding in her ears.

He must have sensed her panic. "It's okay, I'm right here," he soothed.

Sarah's breath hitched. She rolled her eyes in frustration. She needed to get a hold of herself.

"Would it help if we played twenty questions?" Chuck asked, "You could just nod your head yes or no."

Sarah wiped the tears off her face with the back of her hand and laughed nervously. Leave it to Chuck to try to put her at ease. She really loved that about him. Her mind caught on to that thought. She really loved that about him. She - loved - him. She had known it for awhile now, but she always tried to push the feeling aside. With love comes trust, right? Not the shallow, convenient kinds of love she had had in her past, but with true love, the kind that you give your whole heart to, the kind they sing about on the radio and the kind she'd seen in movies. That sort of love took trust. Sarah thought for a moment. She trusted Chuck with her life. That must mean something. The thought gave her courage.

She sighed deeply and then added voice to the words that had swirled around her head by day and danced in her dreams at night. "Chuck…" She gripped the front of his shirt with both hands, "I'm…I'm pregnant."

There, she had said it. Part of her wanted to close her eyes, to hide from him, but the other part of her, the stronger part, needed to see his reaction, every painfully honest detail. And so she didn't look away, but stared him in the face. She could feel herself teetering on the edge. So much was riding on the next few seconds of her life.

At first, his eyes went wide, unabashed. And then Chuck did something that took Sarah by total surprise.

He smiled.

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"Dad just smiled at you?" Charlie asked incredulously. "That's hard to believe. I mean if a girl ever told me that she was…well…I think I would freak."

"Well, let's not ever find out. Ok?"

"Yeah mom, but I don't see how you can even go there after what you…"

Sarah stopped in her tracks shot up her hand and planted it firmly across his mouth. "Don't you dare finish that statement Charles John Bartowski. Just because your dad and I made mistakes does not mean that I'm not still your mother." She glared at him and then added for good measure, "And remember, I still can kick your butt."

Charlie nodded. Sarah knew that he was well aware that she couldn't kick his butt anymore, but the message was understood. He could not use what she was telling him against her or Chuck, not now, not ever. She took down her hand from his mouth, dusted off an invisible piece of lint off of his t-shirt and they continued walking.

The sidewalk dipped under an overpass and then over another road as the transitioned onto Palm Drive, the road that led right into the heart of Stanford University. Palm Drive was aptly named, Sarah thought, as she looked down the straight rode lined with palm trees on either side, she just wished the trees provided a little better shade. The afternoon was hot, and Sarah was glad that she had kept in shape through all the aches and pains that had set on after forty.

"So what happened next?" Charlie prompted. "You guys just hooked up… happily ever after and all that?"

Sarah chuckled. "No, far from it. Being a spy totally screws with your ability to have relationships."

"Like, how?"

"Well, when you're a civilian, things can be pretty black and white, good and bad."

"Yeah, not totally, but yeah."

"But as an agent I had to do a lot of things that were morally grey. Things I knew your father would not approve of. You know the kind of man your father is." Charlie nodded. "Your dad needed to know what he was getting into with me. I owed him that much. So I decided to tell him everything."

They stepped off the path to let a group of bicyclists pass. "Everything you did as a spy?"

"Yes," Sarah confirmed

"Wasn't that a little risky?"

"Charlie, I have faced down terrorists; I have fought with revolutionaries; I have dined with assassins but never have I felt so powerless, so utterly exposed as I did during those first few weeks in a real relationship with your father."

"Yeah, I can get that." He kicked a rock off of the sidewalk. "So, what did Dad say?"

"Most nights he would just listen…absorbing it all. A few times he got angry to the point of yelling, or even worse, he would bottle it up and not speak to me for hours, or one time – days."

"The saying nothing part sounds just like dad, but the yelling part is…hard to imagine."

Sarah hummed her agreement. "Those were emotional times. I thought my revelations would drive him away. Every morning, I expected to wake up to an empty room. But then the sun would rise and there he'd be.

"And then one morning I woke up in a little traveler's house in El Salvador and I knew."

Sarah hadn't thought of it for a long time but the memories flooded back to her.

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Sarah watched him lying next to her, breathing in and out. His hair had gotten longer in the past months and it curled around his head like a lion's mane. His face, so lined and taut during the stressful days, lay slack and peaceful as he slumbered.

Her heart filled with love for him and she realized that this is what she wanted. This was her salvation. She laid her hand on her stomach, unnoticeably swelling now, with the new life inside her. This was their child, his and hers. She may turn out to be a horrible mother, but she had done something right; she had given her child the best father in the world. She felt that ray of hope enter her heart and fill her to overflowing. She pushed a curl back from his face and he stirred.

"What…Sarah…is everything okay," Chuck asked groggily.

"Shh…everything's fine. I just have something I need to tell you and then you go back to sleep."

"Sarah, what is it?"

"I wanted to say….that I love you." She looked at him and in the dusky light and tried to communicate with her eyes all that the words didn't seem enough to say.

He smiled, a big heart warming smile, and he breathed deeply and sighed. "I love you too, Sarah." And then he reached for her and she allowed herself to be pulled down beside him.

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Charlie interrupted her revelry. "Knew what?"

Sarah focused her eyes back on his face. "Sorry, what was I saying?"

"You just said that one morning in El Salvador you knew something."

"Yes," Sarah said looking right in his eyes. "I knew that I wanted us to be a family."

Up ahead, on the right, Sarah spotted a convenience store. "Do you mind?" she asked. She had been doing a lot of talking and the sun was almost straight up in the sky. A diet coke sounded like just the thing about now.

Five minutes later they exited the store, Sarah with her coke, Charlie with a Slurpee, and they were back on the sidewalk. The pedestrian traffic was light, for which Sarah was grateful.

After a few long drags on his straw Charlie broke the silence. "So something's been bothering me."

"Just one thing?"

"Well, no, lots of things, but one thing in particular."

"What's that?"

"How long were you gone?" he asked.

"If you mean how long were we on the run, a little over three years."

"So I wasn't born in Virginia?"

"No, you were born outside of Managua."

"Nicaragua?" He asked, stunned. "Then why does my birth certificate say Virginia?"

Sarah had forgotten about that. "Just another little gift from the CIA. A cover story," she clarified, "to avoid complications."

"To avoid complications?" he repeated.

"Yes."

"Mom, I'm totally confused."

"You won't be." She wrapped her free arm around his waist. "You just haven't heard the rest of the story yet." Sarah looked up and saw the Oval ahead. "Let's go find your father."

Many thanks to Sharpasamarble for his great beta. He continues to save me from myself. All mistakes are mine.