The Detective and the Tech Guy
Authors: Steampunk . Chuckster & dettiot
Rating: T
Summary: A case of mistaken identity and murder brings Sarah Walker, Pinkerton agent, to sunny California. Protecting the heir to the Bartowski Electronics Corporation should be just business - but Chuck Bartowski fills out a suit nicely and makes a mean martini. Chuck lobbied to hire the Pinkerton Agency, but had no idea the detective they'd send would be as alluring, intelligent and fascinating as Sarah Walker. Will the detective and the tech guy solve the mystery, distracted by the riddle in their own hearts? An homage to The Thin Man movies co-written by Steampunk . Chuckster and dettiot.
Disclaimer: We don't own Chuck or The Thin Man series. And we're making no monetary profit from this story.
Author's Note: Well, we both feel terrible. We left you at the worst spot. But to make up for it, here's a good long one written by me (SC). Much much more to come very soon!

XOXOXOXO

It was nearing two in the morning as Sarah Walker pushed back the sleeve of her blazer to look at her wristwatch. The bar wasn't quite at capacity, but it would be getting there the closer it got to three.

By then, Sarah hoped she would be tired enough to get back to her hotel where she could collapse and fall asleep immediately. No room for tossing and turning, being plagued by thoughts and emotions that were better kept buried. Just sleep.

And then tomorrow, she would wake up tired, guzzle a gallon of the complimentary hotel coffee in the lobby, and get back on the beat. As it were.

She was so tired. Tired from interviews. Tired from dealing with ass hole pricks who thought it was cute that a pretty woman in a business suit was asking them questions about the missing wife of a Manhattan club owner.

Rolling her head back and forth on her shoulders, Sarah looked down at the ginger ale she had ordered at least an hour earlier. The bartender had simply refilled it anytime he noticed it empty, which was nice of him, the detective thought idly as she flicked the side of the glass with a manicured nail.

As loud as this bar was, it wasn't nearly as loud as her thoughts. No matter where she went, she couldn't escape them. By focusing on a bobbing ice cube in her ginger ale, watching the crack in the cube elongate, biding her time until it popped into two pieces, she was able to push thoughts of the man she left behind almost three months ago out of her head.

It was a wonderful respite, as difficult as it was to follow the crack in the ice with the dimmed lights of the place. Stupid atmosphere. Who needed it? And why wasn't this place louder? There were so many people in it? Somebody should turn on music.

Sarah turned from where she sat and let her eyes sweep the room. An old school jukebox rested against the far wall, completely untouched. She took it as a good sign that the face was lit up. That meant it worked, right? Sure.

She hated to give up her seat at the bar, but people didn't seem all that keen to sit down, so she chanced it and leapt up from the barstool, digging in her purse for coins as she stole across the room.

She swept through the choices robotically, settling on Blondie, slipping her coins in the slot, pressing the buttons and walking away as the thumping drums of "Call Me" flooded the bar. Once Debbie Harry's smooth as silk voice drifted out of the jukebox, a group of drunken middle aged women belted along with her as loud as they could.

Sarah thought she might buy them another round of drinks for doing her a favor and upping the sheer loudness of the bar just that much more. But then she was worried more booze would knock them out completely and that would defeat the purpose entirely. So instead she flashed them a grin as she walked past, accepting their hoots and cheers.

As she slid back in her seat at the bar and looked at her ginger ale, she remembered the cardinal rule at Harvard law. Never leave your drink unattended. So she called the bartender over and asked for another ginger ale.

He nodded, took her glass away and left her sounds around the detective were incredible in their sheer disruptiveness, and yet thoughts of a man back in Burbank, a man who regularly wore canvas sneakers with suit and tie, a man who made said suit and tie look so good it should be illegal…thoughts of him still threatened to swallow her whole.

Sarah cursed silently and was almost overjoyed as she saw the bartender rushing back to her. It was stupid, freaking ginger ale. And she was overjoyed about it. What has my life become?

But…

That wasn't ginger ale at all. It was…

"A martini for you, miss. From the gentleman at the end of the bar in the striped tie." Sarah stared at the beautiful concoction, a twisted bit of peel from an orange perched on the rim of the glass finishing off the simple elegance of the thing.

She couldn't breathe, couldn't move. All she could do was stare down at the martini in front of her, remembering the last martini she had finished instead of tossing it down the sink or giving it to someone else to drink. The way his lip had curled in amusement as though he'd sensed the hunger in her gaze when he revealed that he'd made it for her. Like he got as much out of making her a martini as she did drinking it, if only because of her reaction.

Sarah's heart rate skyrocketed, and her eyes slid up to the bartender. "Thank you," she breathed numbly, before she slowly turned her gaze down the row of barstools, taking in every face along the way until…

Her heart plummeted again when she saw the beaming face at the end of the bar above the striped tie. For a moment she thought she heard her heart slamming into the wood floors beneath her barstool and splintering into a thousand bits.

Chuck Bartowski never wore striped ties. There was that one time Sarah walked into his office to find him pouting as he tied a green and blue striped tie around his neck. He informed her that his mother had bought it for him as a "does your mother need a reason to buy you a gift" gift and he was meeting her for lunch. He had been so put out by it, so annoyed and flummoxed. It had given her a thrill, she remembered, to see how little his mother knew about his accessories preferences, when Sarah had figured it out the first week of knowing him.

Now, she didn't feel a thrill. Just sinking disappointment.

She looked away from the pleasant but discouraging visage of the man who bought her the martini, swallowed thickly, and wrapped her fingers around the stem of the glass. As she looked back at his expectant face, she smiled as politely and as disinterestedly as she could muster, then sipped the martini.

It was good.

But it wasn't what she wanted.

It was even a little bitter. So she unconsciously pushed it away. God, she wanted it to just get out of her face. She wanted all of these people to go away.

But this wasn't their fault. She should be the one to leave. They weren't being depressing and dwelling on the ghost of someone from their past. Or maybe some of them were and they were just smart enough to drown themselves in alcohol to avoid said ghost. Instead of guzzling ginger ale, for shit's sake.

God, who was she kidding? Chuck wasn't a ghost. He was real. He was so real. And human. And strong. And warm. And just…real. He wasn't a figment of her imagination, or a hunky too-good-to-be-true character from a novel. He was a real person. A man she knew existed, who was at this moment, as she sat in this bar with this bitter martini and equally bitter soul (Jesus, she was being such a melodramatic idiot), working late in his comfortable office. Or not working and merely sitting, playing with the blinds covering his large window, flicking paper clips across the room, or thinking in the dark. Chuck was real. She knew he was real because she spent a couple of months being his shadow, or at least close enough to it. She shared a handful of emotionally intimate moments with him. And a physically intimate moment that she remembered sometimes late at night when she was cold. Strange, that. How a memory could literally light an entire room on fire in moments.

Sarah rubbed her hands down her face. No, he wasn't some ghost of her past. He was a warm, flesh and blood, real man who was probably exactly where she left him.

…She left him.

And that was the crux of the issue, really. Wasn't it?

She mechanically fished in her purse and pulled from it a leather pocketbook with a pen clipped to its cover.

Perhaps she would go over some of the facts she'd scrounged up from the today's investigation—interviews and research. Just as she moved to open the leather cover, an arm covered in what looked to be a blue Armani suit leaned against the bar beside her.

"Not a martini kind of girl, huh?" the voice asked.

She looked up at the man, a bit repulsed by his striped tie, but otherwise he was attractive enough. And he certainly knew it, considering the way his smile became that much more charming when she met his green eyes. If only this guy had come around two years ago.

Feeling idiotic and cliche for thinking that, she shrugged a shoulder. "It's fine."

"More of a champagne girl? I can do that, too."

"Actually I'm more of a ginger ale woman."

He looked properly chastised and even winced a bit. It was charming, and yet she wasn't charmed in the least. She felt a little bad because it really wasn't his fault. He could probably have any woman in this bar and maybe he would even be relatively sweet about it, too. But God, she just didn't care about his crisp off white vest beneath the pristine blue Armani suit, pointed-toe shoes, trendy but not curly enough hair, his green eyes and chiseled jaw.

"Not a drinker then. That's alright by me. I like a woman who knows her limits."

"Listen, I don't want to be rude…"

"Not interested," he finished for her. She gave him a mirthless smile. "I understand. You have a good night. And don't worry about the martini. There's more where that came from." He winked.

"Good luck," she said with an amount of sincerity that surprised her.

She saw his eyes flick over her shoulder and settle on something—or perhaps someone. "Oh, don't you worry about me, Miss Ginger Ale. I'll be fine." He turned over his shoulder. "Bruno! A ginger ale with cranberry juice and a wedge of lime for my friend here. On my tab."

Sarah widened her blue eyes and smiled. "Well, thanks."

"Don't mention it." And then he was gone in a flash of blue.

She had already forgotten about him when she moved to open her pocketbook. As the non-alcoholic cocktail was set in front of her, she almost jumped when she flipped to the first few pages of the pocketbook and saw "Bartowski" in her cursive scrawl. And a lot of "Chuck".

Then something slipped from between the pages and landed on the bar counter in front of her. With impressive reflexes, she stopped it from slipping off the counter and fluttering to the ground. And as she removed her hand from it, she felt her chest constrict.

No, that wasn't right. It was more that her entire world had tipped on its head, or maybe some higher power had a vise-grip on her middle.

When she left Stephen J. Bartowski's office that day almost two months ago, she literally snuck out of the Bartowski Electronics Corp building, got into her car, and drove twenty miles per hour over the speed limit to her impersonal hotel room. Once there, she shoved everything in her suitcases as fast as she possibly could, speaking to her superior on speaker phone to close the case for good.

Having packed in record time, and having booked the first possible flight from LAX to O'Hare, she thought perhaps she could make a clean break. The breaths she took in that time were shallow, true. And perhaps there was some moisture sitting in the corners of her eyes. And her hands might have been shaking. But she was ready to get out of Burbank, out of California.

She was ready to leave behind the emotional explosion she had just experienced with the most disarming man she had ever met. The way things had escalated over the past few months—it was unreal. From the physical attraction to the mental and physical, back to physical, and then to the intense emotional attraction, on top of the physical attraction, and it was all just a mess inside of her that she couldn't keep straight.

Sarah Walker, one of Pinkerton Detective Agency's best and brightest, had even lost sleep numerous nights during the case, for no other reason than she couldn't stop thinking of him. It was cliche and incredibly silly. And it was not normal.

It wasn't normal to be so entirely lost in someone the way she had been lost in Chuck Bartowski. To walk into a cafe and order a coffee and wonder if he would like that particular roast. Or to think about how much he would enjoy this view, or that suit. Or just pondering in general about him.

And the way she sought out that connection as though it wasn't entirely unprofessional. The lack of control she had during aikido lessons, and the fact that neither of them cared how overtly sexually charged each session was. Not to mention how often she found herself becoming so comfortable with him in certain situations that she literally had to stop herself from crawling into his lap and snuggling him. Or playing with the curls on his head.

It was like when you put a pot of water on the stove and as it boiled it slowly rose in the pot, higher and higher and higher, the bubbles becoming bigger and more intense as the water kept rising, up up up…

And the kiss had been it.

The boiling water exploded over the top of the pot, knocking the lid straight off, bubbles and steam and froth spilling over the rim and bursting into the air.

It was all too intense, too powerful…

And it was too much for her to handle.

Especially with how many times she had admitted to herself silently that she was in love with him. In love with him, for shit's sake! It had been like a mantra—over and over and over in her head as she stood in that office with him, then on the way to his father's office.

As difficult as it had been, and as much as she had wanted to go back to his office to talk to him, explain everything she was feeling, tell him why she had to go…It would have been so much worse if she'd seen him one more time. Because she knew without a doubt that she would not have left that office without making some sort of promise. A promise she knew she wasn't prepared to make.

She left. And she knew, as much as it hurt—and God it hurt so incredibly bad that it took everything in her not to just curl up into a ball and scream—that this wasn't what she needed in her life now. She wasn't ready for something that intense. She wasn't ready for an explosion. As good as said explosion would feel, she knew it would hurt her eventually.

And maybe that only made sense to her. But she just didn't have it in her three months ago. She wasn't sure she had it in her now. In fact, she wasn't sure of anything these days but her work with Pinkerton. That, she could depend on. As long as she kept getting positive results.

Sarah let the backs of her fingers gently drift across the soft, white, flat petals and drew a shaky breath into her lungs, letting it out slowly.

She had been so ready to go. Her pep talks had worked. Her bags were packed. Her taxi called. The fifteen minutes the driver said he would take to get to her hotel came and went.

Then there had been a knock at her hotel door. Frowning and wondering why the taxi driver saw fit to get out of his car and take the elevator all the way up to her floor to tell her he was waiting, Detective Walker swung the door open to reveal a grinning youth in the hotel uniform. He held a sweet, loosely arranged clump of white gardenias deposited tastefully in a cube-shaped glass vase.

Blinking in confusion, but still unable to resist the beauty of the flowers, Sarah took the vase from the man and moved to grab a five dollar bill from her purse to tip him. But he shook his head. "I've been tipped, Miss."

He bowed his head respectfully, immediately making himself scarce.

She could still remember how instantaneous her realization that Chuck sent the flowers had been. It had been a throwaway comment during one of their countless, bantering, flirtatious encounters at her cubicle, and she had mentioned in an off-hand sort of way that gardenias were her favorite flower, loosely arranged. Of course he would remember all of the smallest tidbits about herself that snuck out when she was feeling supremely relaxed and comfortable. Her favorite flower probably wasn't even a small fraction of what he must know about her now. (That should have frightened her more than it did.)

As if getting her favorite flower from Chuck wasn't enough, and arranged in just the way she loved it most, she saw the small, sealed envelope wedged into a a plastic skewer type thing that came up from the arrangement. With shaking fingers, Sarah pulled the tiny card out and flipped it over to read.

It was Chuck's handwriting, definitely. But the contents of the note almost destroyed her resolve, and certainly destroyed her spirit.

Me and you, tonight. Dinner at 7 pm.

Sarah shut her eyes now just thinking about how much it had hurt her then, and how much it still hurt her now. But she beat the overwhelming pain back with a hammer and let her fingers linger on the flattened gardenia beneath them. She had almost left the room right then, determined not to look back. But before she had closed the door for good, she marched right up to the vase, plucked a gardenia, pressed it between the pages of her pocketbook, and then fled.

It was still here, her Chuck gardenia, three months later, still so beautiful, and still so powerful. Strange though how the gardenia didn't bring her pain, so much as it brought her pure, unrivaled warmth. She cherished the feeling, the lift to her spirits as she remembered certain things about those months she spent in LA. The only thing that might surpass that feeling would be seeing Chuck himself and that…no.

How often had she tried to force herself to forget Chuck completely since she stepped onto that plane headed for Chicago?

So often. And yet, at the same time she didn't want to forget him. Because she had never known a happier time in her life than those one hundred or so days that she had spent in Burbank. Pure, unfiltered happiness was a foreign concept to Sarah Walker ever since her mom walked out on her and her dad. That was, until she met Chuck Bartowski.

Now she was such a sap and it was his fault. She should hate him for changing her life so drastically, giving her such a weird outlook on certain things. Like dinner, for instance, which somedays consisted of ice cream first, then some other odds and ends that she'd pick at because she was too full from the ice cream. And he'd obviously ruined martinis for her, the bastard.

Not to mention the attractive man who hadn't just bought her a drink but approached her, definitely interested. And damn it all, but she couldn't really even remember what he looked like except that his eyes weren't a warm, goldenish brown color. And his hair wasn't dark and curly. And the striped tie.

Sometimes she even wondered if she was losing her grip on reality. As she tucked the flower back between the pages where it would be safe, she felt a tear escape and begin to roll down her cheek.

Sarah swiped at it frantically, suddenly aware she was in public instead of the safety of her hotel room. And even though she wasn't tired, she felt another tear escape and knew she had to go back. Once she was in her hotel room, she would cry most likely.

Which was discouraging.

Because she hadn't cried since Chicago, that first night she was home after the Bartowski case. Everything that she'd held in when she packed in Burbank, the desperate grasp for emotional strength during the four hours on the plane, and the fortitude not to collapse in front of her superiors as she debriefed—all of it crumbled once the door to her apartment shut. With the fortifications and masks and supportive scaffolding holding her upright throughout the night lying in a heap at her feet, Sarah Walker had found her legs had turned to jelly and she slid down the door until she was sitting on her wood floors.

The sounds that had come out of her thereafter were sounds she couldn't remember ever hearing before. Keening moans of heartbreak and self-loathing, muffled by her hands as she'd tried in vain to shove the emotion back behind fortifications that hadn't been there anymore.

The complete and utter loneliness had been the worst part. After months of having Chuck as a companion—the romantic push and pull aside, theirs had been a wonderfully fulfilling friendship. Then, all of a sudden, there had been nothing at all. And knowing that Chuck probably felt the same had made it all the worse.

She had asked for another assignment immediately, but still spent days huddled into herself on different surfaces in her impersonal Chicago apartment, unable to stop thinking about Chuck waiting for her to arrive, watching the clock as it struck seven, then seven thirty and eight.

And then came the waves of disgust. How could she have hurt someone like that? What was wrong with her? Was she even human?

As she stepped out onto the sidewalk and let the brisk city air hit her straight in the face, she took a deep breath and let it out slowly, letting herself calm for a moment, swiping at one more tear, before she began the journey on foot back to her hotel room.

Tonight she would let herself cry one more time. She would let herself miss him and she would think about some of the best things he had said to her, she would picture the looks he would give her that made her so sure of how much he adored her. And she would remember the way it felt to kiss him—really kiss him in a way she'd never kissed any other person before.

Because tomorrow when she woke up, she would have to move forward, take control of her life, take control of her career. That didn't mean she would move on or forget. No, that gardenia would stay in her pocketbook until the damn thing disintegrated.

Happiness like that didn't deserve to be left behind or tossed aside. Sarah knew she'd never have that again. Not with anyone else. She wasn't being melodramatic for once, but instead was facing reality head on.

She would take things a step at a time, knowing the decision she made was for the best in the end. And then she would think about him every so often and look at the pressed white flower in her book. She would let herself remember.

Because Chuck Bartowski was not the type of man a woman should ever forget.