A/N Folks seem interested, so I will post the story. I am finishing the final chapter. Here is Chapter 2. Thanks for all the responses. I haven't had a chance to get back to everyone, but I will try to do that.

More of our quiet college caper.

Thanks to michaelfmx for the beta work. He is the alpha beta.

Don't own Chuck.

Miss Trust?

Friday, September 1, 7 pm: The Beginning of Labor Day Weekend

Main Campus, Commonwealth College

CHAPTER 2 Romeo, Romeo

Chuck finished up in the lab. He picked up his laptop bag and left, locking up behind him.

He was working on a new cryptographic system, one that could decrypt virtually any cipher—and in a jiffy. A good word, 'jiffy'. It could also encrypt at a level of sophistication that only the system itself could decrypt. Given the nature of the project and the interest governments, including the US government, would take in it, Chuck had kept the project to himself—at least at the macro-level.

He had assigned pieces of it to the graduate students and undergraduate students who were helping him with his research, but he never gave any of them any sense of what they were working on being a piece of a larger project, or even explained why, in particular, the piece they were working on was worth the effort. That was one advantage of his (admittedly now soiled) reputation as a 'genius'. No one expected to understand him or his work, not really. The project was all but done. Not all the hardware was in place, but Chuck knew essentially how it would work and how the final pieces of hardware needed to be designed.

Chuck had taken the further precaution of not committing anything about the project to paper or to computer files. He kept it all in his head. He'd been thinking about it for years. The inwards of Chuck Bartowski's head were vast and complicated. He could picture the project as an intricate, three-dimensional shape, and could see it how the shape needed to be filled in and connected. He was at that stage of the project where all that was left was the final tinkering. The big conceptual push had been made.

One reason he took the offer from Commonwealth was that they were willing to let him pursue his research in a hands-off way, and in particular were willing to foot the bill for the equipment he needed. Commonwealth was a Florida school on the way up. It was still technically a four-year liberal arts college, but it was functioning more and more as a full-scale research university. It was a university in all but name—and getting that name was the plan. Hiring Chuck had been part of that plan. Even with his troubled academic past, his name was synonymous with serious research. It didn't hurt that he was also photogenic and young: he was intended to become the public face of Commonwealth. Or, again, that was part of the plan. Commonwealth was gambling that Chuck's troubles were over and that he would soon produce splashy research and pave the way for the school to attain its university status.

Chuck knew that the research he was about to complete could not itself be flashy. It would have to be kept top secret: for now, even from the US government. He was not going to hand it over to just anyone. It would in effect rewrite the balance of power in the keeping of secrets, giving the government who controlled it a huge advantage over every other government. He wasn't going to give it over to the US government until he knew something about who would be using it and how it would be used. He was also going to have to make clear to the government certain crucial features he had built into the project that would limit their ability to exploit it.

No, it would not itself be flashy. But peripherals he had designed for it would be and could be treated as modular, separated out from the larger project and turned to their own uses. He would make a splash for Commonwealth before all was said and done. He appreciated them taking a chance on him.

Chuck normally headed home after he finished up his research for the day, but he felt restless. Years of work had come to an end, even though the project was not yet physically realized. But oddly enough, that was not the source of his restlessness. He had known it was all but done. The source of his restlessness was Sarah.

Every day he came to campus he hoped to see Sarah. But he never did. It was like she'd become a ghost. It was frustrating—but maybe it was for the best. So much of Chuck's troubled past was wrapped up in a woman. He didn't need to make that sort of mistake again. But he had really and truly begun to get over Janet. It had taken a while. Admittedly, he sank into a funk—yes, call it a 'funk'—that lasted an embarrassingly long time. But he had climbed back out. Maybe he wasn't all he had been before her, or especially when he was with her, but he was better. He felt like himself—more than he had in years.

But the mere sight of Sarah sped that change. He went from being uninterested in seeing anyone, dating anyone, to wholly enamored in a nanosecond. He was like Romeo seeing Juliet for the first time. "She doth teach the torches to burn bright!"

He laughed at himself out loud. That was rom-com craziness, Shakespearean magic. "This lanthorn doth the horned moon present." No, this was real life. And anyway, in the rom-com, he and Sarah would have met cute: she wouldn't have snarled at him and made threatening gestures with a champagne flute, or sprinted from a conversation with him the next time she saw him. No, if this were a rom-com, its writer had no idea how to handle the conventions.

Chuck's restless feet took him, he realized as he broke off his reflections, to Sarah's building. No harm in looking, really, right? So said the man who was about to stare into the sun. He went inside. The bottom floor had a study lounge and a few students were there, each sitting looking at a computer or a phone. Except for a couple in the corner, a tall, thin young woman and a red-haired young man who were sitting across from each other and actually talking, no electronics in sight. Chuck sometimes wondered if students knew what human faces unframed by gadgets actually looked like. Of course, he was partly to blame for their umbilical cordage to the gadgets: he'd designed much of what made the best gadgets do what they did. He'd intended to for the gadgets to make their lives better—not to become their lives. Chuck himself owned a cell phone (he had built it) but he left it off unless he had to make a call or expected an important call. There was nothing inherently wrong with technology (if there was, Chuck would be a villain), except that it offered scope to the strange need so many had to enslave themselves to something. Man is born free, and he is everywhere in chains—right, Rousseau, right, but all too often chains of his own infernal forging.

Chuck got on the elevator. He knew Sarah's office number, 3232. He didn't forget numbers. Other things sometimes, yes, but not numbers. The elevator counted the floors for him in a weird robotic voice. Chuck did not really pay any attention; he was reading the leaflets taped to the walls of the elevator, announcing new classes, clubs, guitars for sale. He got off on the third floor. He walked to the 200 Quadrant, knowing Sarah's office must be nearby. It was: just a few doors down the hall on the right. He stopped in front of the closed door.

Unlike many of the doors that were decorated with nameplates or with cartoons or political flyers or learned quotations, hers was unadorned. A small index card was taped to the door just below eye-level (although Chuck had to bend to read it) had her name written on it in careful print. Beneath her name, the same hand had supplied her office hours as well as the names and times and room numbers of her classes. Nothing else was there. Nothing that might indicate anything about the books she read, about her sense of her vocation or political leanings, even about her sense of humor. The door was shut in every sense.

Except that now it wasn't. Sarah had just opened it and was looking in surprise at Chuck. He was still bent over as he had been when he was reading the card, but this now meant that he was bent over and (effectively) looking at her chest. He stood at the same time that she gasped.

"Chuck!"

Chuck's first reaction was a mental fist pump: she remembered him. But she had run from him—that she knew who he was sort of seemed required by that, so it should not have surprised him that she remembered him.

"Sarah! Ah, um, hi! I was just out walking on campus, clearing my head—long research day—and I, um, I thought I would walk through some of the buildings since I'm new here and…"

"And you just happened to find my office and to be staring at…the card on my door?"

"Well…something like that, yeah."

Chuck could see that Sarah felt trapped. She couldn't really get out of the office given where he was standing. Chuck didn't want her to feel trapped, but he also didn't want to chase her. He had the strongest feeling that he would never catch her. So, he compromised. He backed up a step (the dance he now felt he would keep dancing with her), far enough for her to step out of her office and leave if she chose. But near enough for her to have to pass quite close to him if she did choose that. She seemed to understand the logic of their spatial positions immediately. She didn't move. She stayed where she was.

"Is there something I can do for you, Dr. Bartowski?"

Chuck realized she hadn't exactly stayed where she was. Using his title was her stepping backward. That she used it hurt Chuck's feelings more than it should have, given that they barely knew each other.

"Um, no, Sarah. May I call you 'Sarah'?"

"You already have twice, I think. Might as well go on."

"Thanks, call me Chuck, please."

The way she looked at him promised nothing. She just stood there, eyeing him. He noticed her color rising, however.

"Well, Chuck, as my mom would say, move your ass. I have places to go."

"Your mom is a crafter of phrases, I see."

She stalled for a moment. He could see she was fighting laughter. She lost—she laughed. "Yes, Mom rarely indulges in cliché, one of my favorite things about her, the freshness of her verbal imagination."

Chuck fell, fell for her, fell for good at that. Forget Janet. Forget all that crap in the past. This was a woman. This was the woman.

That woman stepped out of her office, pulled the door closed behind her and squeezed past Chuck in the blink of his smitten eye. The next thing he knew, he was chasing her…again. She seemed determined not to break her purposeful stride or to acknowledge that he was behind her. He reached out to touch her shoulder and…

"Chuck Bartowski!" He stopped. He looked behind him. John Casey was standing at the other end of the hall, near the stairwell door. He looked alarmed—or as close to alarmed as Casey could get. "I saw you come in here from across the quad. There's an alarm going off in your lab. We should get over there."

Chuck then recognized that Sarah had stopped too. He glanced at her and she glanced at him. She seemed transformed to him, galvanized; she had instantaneously become something…she had once been. A compressed energy radiated from her. She was focused from head to toe.

"Well, C'mon!" Casey shouted this as he swung open the stairwell door. Chuck kept his gaze fixed on Sarah—but it had become a question. She started past him toward Casey.

"Well, Chuck, do as the man says, c'mon." He followed her quickly to the stairwell and the three of them descended.

}o{

Sarah was sitting in her office. She'd been writing. But it was Friday night, the beginning of Labor Day weekend, and she was feeling restive. The words were coming, but only slowly, one at a damn time, and after much effort. She knew that her trouble was her divided mind. About half of it was on the manuscript. The other half-plus was on Chuck. Still. She kept replaying her insane dash out of the Union. Why had she run? She ran from nothing. Well, she knew when to cut her loses and…strategically retreat. But that had not been a strategic retreat: that was a full-on rout. If she'd been a soldier, it would have been the equivalent of dropping her rifle, dumping her ammo and rabbiting as far and as fast from the battle line as possible. Sarah Walker did not rabbit. Not unless Chuck Bartowski smiled at her. Then she rabbited like one of those nervous bunnies in Watership Down.

She marveled again at the completeness and depth and strength of her reaction to a man she barely knew. She felt like Romeo upon first seeing Juliet—"He doth teach the torches to burn bright!" When he was near her, he was all she could see. It was like her senses, all of them, contracted to one object: Chuck. And then her senses began working overtime. But she had no desire to be the leading man in her own little Shakespearean tragedy. Chuck was…beautiful ("I ne'er saw true beauty til…"). He literally made her knees tremble. But that was all the more reason to stick to her plan, so far successful, of avoiding all contact with him.

Unfortunately, her imagination was making contact with him, repetitious, increasingly fast, rhythmic contact with him. She was imagining…she was imagining making vigorous contact…with him. No wonder it was hard for the words to come. She was getting fidgety in her chair.

She stood up and shut down her computer. Enough was enough. If she went on like this, she wouldn't be fit for any company, and she'd told Carina that she might meet Carina and her date (what was his name again?) for a quick drink before she went home. Carina was strange—but she was watching out for Sarah. She'd commented more than once that she hated how alone Sarah was.

She grabbed her bag and opened her door. And to her shock, there was Chuck Bartowski, bent over, examining her…chest? No, she realized, he had been reading the card on her door. But having his gaze land where it landed, given her imagination's exertions just a moment before, made her pulse race. She gasped.

Chuck stood up straight. Before she knew what she was doing, Sarah exclaimed: "Chuck!"

He said her name in response. She wanted to high-five someone. He knew her name. But of course, he did. He was standing at her office door, reading the card on the door. He obviously wasn't there by mistake.

He seemed to have reacted as strongly to seeing her as she had to him. He launched into an explanation of why he was there, an explanation that made it sound like he was there by accident. But the explanation was lame, and he knew it.

She poked at the explanation and he conceded its lameness, although not in so many words. She was feeling…things. She was feeling things all over. She wanted to run again, but he was blocking the door. She saw him thinking. He took a step back. He was giving her room to run but not so much that running would be easy. She'd almost have to brush against him to get out of her office and close the door. She considered how much space she had and how she might use it. He was waiting for some reaction from her.

She retreated by saying, "Is there something I can do for you, Dr. Bartowski?"

God, I sound like a bitch when I talk to him. He's done nothing to deserve it except make me feel…really, really not-numb. She could see hurt in his eyes and she felt awful.

He asked if he could use her name. Bitchy again, she noted that he had been and might as well continue. She suddenly felt ashamed, ashamed and—she might as well admit it—aroused. She colored and she could feel it enough to know it was noticeable.

She wanted to ask him out for a drink. She wanted to ask him to take her home. She wanted to take him to bed. Because of all that, she told him to move so she could leave. Move your ass? Did she just say that and attribute it to her mother? She was in so much trouble.

And then his response—a carefully crafted phrase about phrase-crafting. She was officially done. If he touched her, she would surrender, surrender completely, lay down her arms and take him in her arms.

She managed to reply in kind and saw a slow burn register in his eyes. That only made her general…discomfort…worse. She took advantage of his strong reaction to slip past him and into the hallway. She was trying to get to the elevator. If she could get there without him stopping her—in particular, without him touching her, she would escape. Live to fight against him, and her thoughts' insistent gravitation toward him, for another day. Four more steps. Three more steps. Two…

"Chuck Bartowski!" Sarah knew that was not her voice and it was not Chuck's. She heard Chuck turn; he had been right behind her. She turned too. It was the security guy, Casey. She knew him from brief meetings in the Union coffee shop. Casey explained quickly that alarms were going off in Chuck's lab.

Involuntarily, without realizing it, Sarah immediately slipped back into her cloak-and-dagger mindset. She was ready for action. She stepped past Chuck and headed toward Casey, calling for Chuck to follow. He did, and they were soon running down the stairs.

}o{

Outside the building—in the main parking lot to which a jogging Casey led them—was an old, white Toyota Land Cruiser parked beside a brand-new, black Mazda MX5 Miata. Chuck pointed at the first. "We can take my car!"

Sarah pointed at the second and, simultaneously, said: "We can't take my car!"

Casey growled. A campus security car was off to the side, parked next to a stand of bushes that obscured it from view. "We'll take my car!"

They jumped in. Chuck got in the back, leaving the front seat for Sarah. Casey saw her notice this but she didn't take the time to consider it. She slid in. Casey did too. Casey started the car while looking at her. "You just along for the ride?"

Sarah shrugged at him. Casey drove them through the maze of small roads and parking lots that cut up the campus. In just a couple of minutes, they were at Chuck's lab. The alarm must have been silenced. An alert was flashing where all could see it on the laptop installed in the security car. But there was no sound coming from the building. Casey opened the glove compartment and took out a sidearm. He watched Sarah as she watched him check his weapon. Her eyes were ahead of him at each step. Yep, a professional of some kind. Not just an egghead. Maybe FBI?

Then he remembered Antonio, a security officer who worked for him, mentioning last year that the attractive new Foreign Languages prof spoke Italian fluently, as well as he. Antonio was from Rome, grew up there, before he married an American woman, a nurse, and moved with her to Florida. If Walker knew the language that well, then maybe she had done something less…domestic…than the FBI.

Then it hit Casey between the eyes. She was had been a spook. Maybe she still was a spook.

When he was in the Marines, he had gone on a couple of black ops missions run by CIA agents. There was something about Walker that clicked when he thought of her in that context. He could imagine her running one of those missions, no problem. It was there in the way she looked around her constantly, in the way she held herself, the feeling that she was coiled. A goddamn spook—former spook?—on campus. And she was now mixing herself up in Chuck's…affairs. Alarm bells went off in Casey's head for Chuck's sake, not for Chuck's lab's sake. But Casey had no time now to worry about it. She was there, and he needed to get into the lab and figure out what was going on.

Casey got out of the car. He stayed close to it for a moment, standing inside the open door, and took a long look around. He saw nothing out of the ordinary. Well, nothing other than one of the outer doors of Chuck's lab standing about two inches open. Walker got out of the car after a moment, mirroring Casey's position inside her own door. He saw her look back at Chuck, who Casey heard pull on the latch of the passenger-side rear door. Casey leaned down and growled. "Stay in the car, Chuck."

When Casey stood back up, he could see a look of agreement and approval. She wanted Chuck to stay in the car too. That told Casey a lot. He knew this wasn't just her trying to keep a civilian out of harm's way. She was frightened for Chuck's sake. The alarm bells in Casey's head switched back off, at least temporarily.

Chuck slumped back in the seat after Casey's growled warning. Casey closed his door quietly, as did Walker.

Casey walked over to the open door, his gun out but held down close to his side. Walker fell in behind him, exactly as she should have. Yep, professional all right. Huh. There was a blonde spook on the faculty. There was a break-in in the new genius' computer lab. Commonwealth had suddenly become much more to Casey's liking, even if he still had reservations about the blonde and about what it all meant. It seemed hard to believe her being at Commonwealth was a mere coincidence. But she had been there a year before Chuck showed up, months before the process began that ended with Chuck being hired. She certainly had not so far gone out of her way to attract—seduce?—Chuck. Unless she was the great master of the really-hard-to-get strategy—maybe?—she had not done anything to attach herself to Chuck. But why had she mixed herself up in this? She had to know that she was doing something that could reveal a past—a present?—she had been so far careful to conceal in her brief time at the school. Again, the math seemed to favor the conclusion that she had no bad intentions where Chuck was concerned. Maybe Casey should just accept the dumb luck of it. Chuck happened to be talking to her at the crucial moment. At least Casey had help. There was never more than one security officer on duty at a time. He had no wish to call the town police, not yet, anyway. Paperwork nightmare.

}o{

Sarah was cursing herself as Casey started the car. He had watched her watch him check his gun. She should have anticipated that. But her knowing witness to what he did had given her away. Her witness had not given him specifics, but it had given him generalities. He knew she knew guns and was not intimidated by them, had used them herself. She had seen Casey's file before she started at Commonwealth. Ex-Marine. He was a good man in a fight. Marksman. He had done some black ops works. The NSA had approached him with an offer to become an agent a couple of times. He had turned them down flat. He ended up at Commonwealth after retiring, when he realized that fishing and hunting, while all he hoped, could not fill his days. He needed a job, something to care about and protect; he took the job as head of security at Commonwealth.

They got to Chuck's lab. Sarah immediately saw one of the lab doors ajar. Something was going on. Casey got out and studied the surroundings. Sarah joined him. She saw nothing to draw her attention but the door. She heard Chuck start to get out of the car. Before she could warn Chuck not to do so, Casey growled for him to stay in the car. Sarah felt her own anxiety lessen a bit. She realized that her reason for being here was the man in the back seat of the campus security car. Try as she might, her thoughts and now her actions kept finding their way to Chuck. She'd worry about that more once this situation was under control.

}o{

Casey moved to the door, standing with his back to it but careful not to touch it. It was a heavy metal door with no window. He listened carefully but couldn't hear anything. He moved to go through the door, and as he pushed it open with one hand far enough to step inside, Walker took up his old position, standing with her back to the door. She had produced a gun—presumably from her bag. Huh. She nodded at Casey. He went through the door and stepped into the darkened lab. Walker spun quickly into place behind him, covering his entrance. Casey's eyes adjusted, although far less speedily than in his younger days. He relied as much as he could on his ears. He still heard nothing that seemed problematic. He saw nothing either. There were lots of little lights here and there, blinking in patterns—but none of them seemed threatening.

"Casey!" Walker hissed his name. He turned. She was standing inside the door now, her gun in one hand but her other hand on the light switch. Casey could tell that she could see him. He braced himself and nodded to her, his gun trained on the half of the room opposite hers. She flipped the switch. Casey blinked a few times in the light. He could see no one. He turned to Walker. She shrugged. They stood there for a while with their guns out, and then at almost the same moment, Casey put his into the back of his trousers and she mimicked his motion. A beat after that, Chuck came walking into the lab.

"Saw the light."

"You couldn't have gotten in here this fast if you'd stayed in the car," Walker said.

}o{

Sarah sounded bitchy yet again, cold and flinty. Why couldn't she manage to speak to him and not sound as if she hated him? She could see her tone's impact in Chuck's eyes. But it was his turn to shrug. "I couldn't leave you guys alone in here."

Chuck looked at her for a long, hard moment. He was re-evaluating her. Damn. He really was scary smart, and not just with computers. She could tell he knew her story was even more complicated than he had thought.

They took a few minutes to look around. Everything seemed to be in place. One computer, though, had been tampered with. When Chuck got on it, he was able to find that someone had tried several times to enter the password required to get into the network he had created for all of the computers in his lab—as well as his computers at home. Each of the four attempts had failed. Chuck was able to call up a program that recorded the keystrokes.

The attempts had been clumsy, none near the mark. They were worrisome in certain respects, because each was a word or name that was implicated in Chuck's past, or so he said, although, with one exception, the four words seemed ridiculous: 'hound', 'bay horse, 'turtle dove', 'Janet'. The last one was the one that made an impression on Sarah. She recalled that one of the articles she had read online about Chuck mentioned him as engaged to a woman, Janet. An obvious possible password, although why anyone would think that one of the best computer scientists on the planet would use his wife-to-be's name as his password escaped her. Or it did until she remembered that her password on her campus computer was 'password'. And she had the history she had… so anything was possible.

Sarah listened as Casey declared the incident done. He retrieved a clipboard from his car and filled out a form. Chuck signed it. He told Chuck that he would reset the alarm and change the code. He would call Chuck and give it to him so that he could get into the lab over the weekend if he wanted to work. He offered to take both of them to their cars.

No one spoke while Casey backtracked and dropped them off. His goodnight to them both was terse but not unfriendly. He made pointed eye contact with Sarah as she undid her seatbelt. He wanted her to know that he knew…something. But his gaze shifted at the last moment and he looked from her to Chuck: a warning. He liked Chuck, she could tell. He did not mistrust her, but he was not yet willing to trust her. She would have to talk to him later. She only nodded.

}o[

Sarah sighed. Chuck got out of the back of the car and opened the passenger door for Sarah. She smirked at him as she got out. "Maybe I should have belled the cat. I would've known not to open my door to you, Chuck." He just looked at her.

He had seen her past tonight. She had revealed it to their present. That was another reason why they could have no future.

Except, damn him, he made her feel…hopeful.