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“Now, a lot of folks think: Black Friday, biggest shopping day of the year, is over. Time to sit back and relax.” Big Mike stopped pacing for a second to give Lester and Jeff a narrow-eyed glare. “A lot of folks are wrong. Dead wrong.” He resumed his pacing, wagging a finger as he went. “In this economy, at this time of year, we do not sit back behind the Nerd Herd desk and surf the internet while our customers wander around like stray puppies. We do not just disappear whenever the hell we feel like it!” He turned his dirty looks on John and Chuck before returning his attention to Lester and Jeff. “And we sure as hell do not hoard products in the storeroom to sell on eBay and then get passed out on a pile of the hottest tech gadgets of 2010!” He turned his head so quickly it was a little unnerving, even to Casey. “Am I stepping on your toes here, son?”
“Oh, no. No way, man,” said Grimes, looking a little dazed. “You’re golden.”
Mike wasn’t done, and they’d already been standing like chastened schoolchildren around the BluRay display for way too long, so Casey put years of training in mental compartmentalization into action and listened with half an ear. He was as much in favor of good, old-fashioned American free enterprise as much as anyone, but sometimes good, old-fashioned American security had to take priority.
Objective #1: Find the damage Volkoff had done to the Buy More security and fix it. And then make it better, because if some flunky of Volkoff’s with a laptop could knock out the best of what the CIA’s technical analysts had to offer, then they had way bigger problems than Mary Bartowski’s crazy-ass boyfriend.
Objective #2: Run some assessments on Chuck. He’d probably whine about it, but Casey—and Sarah agreed—wasn’t taking any chances that whatever new computer Orion had uploaded into his brain would give him out-of-date information, or make him flash every time he talked to Sarah or Casey, or hell, give him seizures or brain hemorrhaging. The guy’s brain was clearly wired a little differently than most people’s, but it’d been overwritten and deleted and filled with data so many times that Casey was frankly amazed he’d only suffered some headaches and nightmares.
Objective #3: Destroy Volkoff. Casey didn’t care how many times Sarah told him to leave it alone, he didn’t trust Frost as far as he could throw her—actually, less, since he could probably throw her a fair distance. If she was on the side of the angels, she needed help to bring Volkoff down; if she’d really gone bad, as Casey suspected, he didn’t have any problem bringing her down, too. He was pretty sure he could get Chuck on his side, too, as long as he left that last part out. Chuck wasn’t the kind to let sleeping dogs (or sleeping criminal masterminds dating his mother) lie any more than Casey was.
“Casey!”
Casey switched gears and focused on Big Mike’s stern face. “Yes, sir?”
“Now, that’s what I like to hear!” Mike said, pleased. “This is the time of year people are buying computers, big screen TVs. The heavy stuff. I want you ready and willing to help the customers get it to their cars. Don’t even wait for them to ask. Offer.”
Sure, whatever. He’d been the muscle often enough. “Understood, sir,” he said. “Maybe I should also check on the inventory on the TVs before the store opens. Make sure I know what’s gonna need to be back-ordered.” He elbowed Chuck in the side. Time to get to the real work.
“Good thinking!” said Mike. “You know, John, if you showed this kind of initiative all the time, you might actually see a promotion one of these days.”
Casey guessed that Bartowski’d been trying to meet Grimes’ eyes over Big Mike’s shoulder, because Grimes jerked out of his coma and said, “Hey, Chuck, why don’t you help Casey out?”
Mike frowned. “Bartowski? On inventory? You don’t think we’ve got enough problems at the Nerd Herd desk?”
Grimes sucked at trying to interpret signals subtly. Casey only hoped to God that Bartowski was a little better at giving them. “Oh, yeah,” said Grimes with fake casualness. “I thought we’d let some of the new Nerd Herders take some shifts there. Earn their wings, as it were.” The agents he gestured toward, Davis and Moore, weren’t technical analysts, but they sure as shit knew enough to cover whatever petty problems got thrown at the Nerd Herd.
“If you say so, son,” said Big Mike dubiously, eyeing Grimes’ managerial jacket with something between envy and concern. Casey, not for the first time, felt what was probably sympathy for Mike. It rankled him even to pretend to take orders from the little twerp.
“Right,” said Chuck. “Inventory!” He clapped his hands and rubbed them together like it was the most exciting thing to happen to him all day, and Casey made a mental note to get Walker to run some scenarios with him later. If Chuck was gonna be back in the game full time, he needed to work on his acting. It was a wonder they were even managing to fool Big Mike.
The Castle looked exactly the same as it always did, which just made Casey’s spine crawl. The appearance of security was absolutely worthless without the actual security—all it did was make you complacent, ripe for attack. The Castle was supposed to be their home base. It had to be impregnable. That was the whole point.
He gestured towards the main computer. “Well?” he said.
“Well?” Chuck said. “You didn’t actually tell me what was up. Something exciting?” He threw a couple of ridiculously floppy practice punches in the air. Goddamned Intersect, thought Casey, and wondered why Orion had even stuck the martial arts in there if he didn’t want his son to be a spy.
“If by ‘exciting’ you mean ‘assessing the flaws in our computer security and fixing them,’ then sure. Real exciting.” He gestured again towards the computer, less patiently this time, and Chuck dropped his fists with a disappointed sigh.
“Right. Right. ‘Cause, of course, now that I have a massive supercomputer filled with government secrets and kung fu fighting skills back in my head, you need me to be the IT guy. Totally the best use of resources.” But he sat down. Which was good, because Casey was in no particular mood to kick his ass at the moment.
“Spy work’s not always glamorous, Bartowski,” he said while Chuck logged into the system. “I’d think even you would have gotten that into your thick head by now. You do what you need to do, when you need to do it.”
“Yeah. No, I know.” He sighed again and added, “Sorry. I just kind of—well. Never mind.” Already that little burst of snottiness seemed to have passed. Casey probably should have been happier about it, but at the moment, he’d have liked it better if Chuck could hold onto the same mood for more than five minutes running.
“Find out how they got in,” he said firmly. “If you can fix the biggest security problems yourself, do it. If you can’t, make a list of recommendations and we’ll pass it on to the CIA’s tech support.”
“Got it,” said Chuck. “Security problems. Fix ‘em. If I can’t do it, they’ll call out a real agent. I’m on it.” He was logged into the system now, and had clicked on something that had resulted in a whole page of code on the screen. Maybe it was just Casey’s imagination, but he seemed to be banging on the keyboard harder than strictly necessary.
He weighed the benefits of saying something, if only to ask if there was anything he could to to help with the computer nerd stuff. It wasn’t really his forte, but he’d gotten a lot better at it after a few years of having his own CIA fortress in the basement of a Buy More. Not good enough to keep Volkoff’s cronies out, obviously, but it wasn’t like they kept Casey around for his computer skills anyway.
They didn’t keep him around for pep talks, either. Chuck looked pretty safely engrossed in whatever it was he was typing, so Casey turned around to leave. One of his other goals for the day was impressing on Jeff and Lester the horrible fate he would inflict on them if they ever, ever let someone into the store after closing hours again.
“Hey.”
Casey mentally let go of his dream of knocking Jeff and Lester’s heads together. He should have known it wouldn’t be that easy. “Yeah?”
Chuck was still typing rapidly, but he sounded more unsure than distracted as he asked, “Do you and Alex…you know, do you guys ever, well, not fight exactly, but maybe have this kind of big tense thing between you?”
Casey, who’d been prepared for the Greatest Hits of Chuck Bartowski’s Insecurities and Self-Worth Issues, was completely caught off-guard. “What?”
“Sorry. Sorry, I know you probably don’t like to talk about it.” Another flurry of typing, and then, “Hey, you know, it is actually worth updating your anti-virus software. Not that I think that’s how Volkoff got in, just. For future information.”
There was pretty much nothing on Earth John Casey wanted to talk about less than his relationship with his daughter, the sense that he was constantly fucking up with her and the nagging guilt he felt every time it hit him how many of Walker and Bartowski’s issues came from their parents. He’d rather have undergone torture than talk about it. But since he would have bet good money that Casey’s family issues weren’t at the top of Chuck Bartowski’s list of favorite topics, either, something that wasn’t quite curiosity and not quite an alarm bell went off in his head. He sat down, took a deep breath, and said, “What are you talking about?”
“Well, I know you’re the government and all, so I’m sure you’ve got some excellent software, but you have to keep up--”
“Not that,” Casey interrupted, already regretting what he was about to say. “The thing about me and Alex.”
“Just. Like, I thought, you two do okay now, right? Talking and everything?” At Casey’s cautious nod, he said, “Cool. That’s cool. So, I mean, I know you and her had it out over the whole Morgan thing, right?”
Casey certainly hadn’t told Chuck about that, which meant either that Alex had told Morgan who had told Chuck, or that Chuck just sat around and thought about it. Casey wasn’t real fond of either option, but he managed a grunt in the affirmative.
“But you get along okay now. So, you know, at some point you must have done something about that. To fix it. Like, you apologized, or she apologized, or maybe you had a long thoughtful conversation about your control issues and how she’s an adult and the two of you are still getting to know each other and….” He trailed off before saying, “Well. Probably not.”
“Is there a point to this, Bartowski?” growled Casey. He and Chuck weren’t dating. He was pretty sure the guy could save the emotional stuff for Sarah.
Chuck shrugged and hit a key decisively. He’d been typing the whole time, and Casey took a minute to appreciate the display of multi-tasking. Bartowski was getting better at compartmentalizing. He got over the warm little jab of pride in the long moment of clicking keys that followed. What the hell had that little heart-to-heart been about? And then, a strange idea occurred to him. “Is something wrong with Ellie?”
“Ellie?” Chuck let out a weak laugh, and Casey knew he’d hit on something. “Oh, no. Ellie’s great. I mean, I assume she’s great. We haven’t really talked since, you know, Volkoff family dinner. Not that that’s been very long. I mean, a couple of days is a perfectly reasonable time for a grown man not to talk to his sister, right?”
“Reasonable” wasn’t a word that had ever sprung to Casey’s mind about Chuck’s relationship with his sister. He knew teams of bomb-defusing Marines who cared less about protecting each other than Chuck and Ellie. And yet, somehow Chuck had managed to lie to her for years now without, as far as Casey could tell, letting it create some dark family tension. For nowhere near the first time, he wished he had been at the not-Thanksgiving dinner. By all accounts, it had been a class-A mess. He had to admit, though, he would never have expected this kind of mess.
“What’s up? Is she pissed that her mom’s dating a crime boss and her brother’s been lying about being a spy?”
Chuck actually stopped typing and swiveled the chair around at that. Casey shrugged. He found he was getting a lot better about talking about personal problems that weren’t his own. “Just apologize, Bartowski. And then tell her you’re gonna keep doing what you do and she can’t stop you.” It was on the tip of his tongue to add, “She’s not your mother,” but it didn’t take much thought to realize that that would be a bad idea.
“It’s not like that,” Chuck said defensively. “She’s not pissed. I think. I hope. I don’t know, maybe she’s pissed. But it’s not about that.”
“Well, that was clear as mud.” Casey looked pointedly at the computer, hoping they could at least go back to getting things done while they hashed out the personal shit.
Chuck, ever oblivious, didn’t take the hint. “It’s like, she raised me, you know? And I love her, and I’d do anything to keep her safe. And I know she’d do the same for me. And that’s the problem! I mean, she can’t. Keep me safe. And she doesn’t want that, and I don’t want to tell her that, because she’s done so much for me, and I can’t do this little thing for her? But it’s not little to me. It’s everything. I mean, besides you and Sarah and Ellie and Morgan.” He paused. “And Awesome. But I think Awesome really is pissed at me.”
It took Casey way longer than it should have to process that little rant. Maybe because he was hung up on the fact that Chuck had stuck him in that little list at the end, but probably because Chuck was really good at talking without worrying about being coherent or taking breaths in between his sentences. “You know, Bartowski,” he said at last, “secrecy’s pretty much a lost cause at this point. Just tell her. Not about the Intersect, but….” He shrugged. He was probably the last person who ought to be going around spouting “honesty is the best policy” like some kind of sap, but there was something to be said for being straightforward when the situation called for it.
“Yeah, okay, but how do I go about doing that if we’re not even talking?” Chuck asked. “I’ve tried calling a couple of times, and it just goes to voicemail. She’s probably on-call. I’m totally paranoid, right? She wouldn’t totally disown me over this, would she?”
“Chuck, you moron,” said Casey, unable to restrain himself any longer. It never ceased to amaze him how ridiculous this stupid kid could be. “Ellie’s not going to disown you. Your mother’s a rogue agent who abandoned you when you were kids without ever explaining why, and Ellie invited her in for dinner and charades. It’s like you said. She raised you. You really think she’s gonna disown you because she disapproves of your job? Jesus Christ!” Casey was actually yelling now, but it didn’t seem to have much of an effect on Chuck, who looked kind of like a deflated balloon.
“Just. You know, for a long time, after Stanford, it felt like I wasn’t good for much, but I was an okay brother, you know? And now I’m—I’m not even a spy without the Intersect, I’m the guy who gets kidnapped by Belgians and brings some murdering psychopath into his sister’s house. And I don’t even get why you and Sarah--”
Casey’d heard about as much as he needed to of Chuck’s rambling, which was getting higher-pitched and wobblier as it went. He got up and pulled Chuck out of the chair—not as easy as it felt like it ought to have been, since Chuck was actually a pretty big guy—and pulled him into a tight embrace. “Shut up, you moron,” he muttered into Chuck’s hair. “‘Not a spy without the Intersect.’ I should kick your ass.”
“Like to see you try,” Chuck mumbled. “Intersect, remember?”
“Yeah, whatever,” said Casey, making a few mental notes about getting Chuck into some legit combat training. He didn’t trust whatever software was in Chuck’s head to keep him safe. That was his and Sarah’s job. And Ellie’s. And it was past time for it to be Chuck’s job, too.
If they just could have kept that moment on pause, Casey thought it would have been okay. He wasn’t a huggy kind of guy, but it was different when it was a member of your team, right? Chuck knew about most of Casey’s weak points anyway—he had to have guessed by now that he himself was one of them.
But the moment passed, and Chuck pulled his face from Casey’s shoulder, his face drawn and tired but his eyes dry. “Thanks,” he said.
Casey let go and stepped back. He felt uncomfortably warm, and for some reason, meeting Chuck’s eyes seemed harder than usual.
Chuck gave him a small, exhausted grin. “This is gonna be one of those things where we just kind of pretend it didn’t happen and don’t talk about it until next time, isn’t it?”
Casey wasn’t as good at interpreting tones as, say, Walker. He never devoted a lot of thought to the differences between “nervous” and “resigned” and “unsure,” so he wasn’t sure which, if any of those, Chuck was at the moment. All he had to go on was the words, which sounded just about right.
“Yeah,” he said. “Now let’s finish this up and get to the storeroom before the store opens. Focus on the biggest security flaws. We’ll do the fancy-pants updates later.”
“Gotcha,” said Chuck, turning back to the computer. Casey stood there awkwardly for a moment before leaving and going back upstairs. He really did want to get a rough estimate of how many LGTVs they had on-site.
**
Ellie stretched out on the couch, took a deep breath and let it out slowly, and tried to relax. Walnut did a weird little kicky thing and turned a little bit, but it was more disorienting than actually painful, and she couldn’t help but smile as she put a hand to her stomach.
Walnut was about the only uncomplicated thing in Ellie’s life at the moment.
She picked up her phone from the coffee table, thumbing through the missed calls. Four from Chuck, who had never, since he was a little kid, gotten over the habit of calling her over and over again when he couldn’t get a hold of her the first time. Ellie couldn’t complain, because she got the same way sometimes. Sometimes you just had to touch base, to make sure everything was okay. She just wished that being an E.R. doctor came with more phone breaks.
She wondered absently if Chuck remembered to turn off his phone when he was doing whatever he did as a spy. Maybe he had a separate phone for that. Her little brother, turning off his phone before he hacked into government computers or infiltrated top-secret facilities. Keeping all of it a secret from her.
Something roiled in her stomach, and it wasn’t Walnut. She struggled to sit up. “Devon,” she called, “do we still have some Tums in the medicine cabinet?”
Devon popped his head out of the kitchen. “Your stomach’s upset? Are you in any pain? Is the baby--”
She waved a hand at him irritably. This mother-hen thing he had going on was kind of adorable, but it was getting more and more in the way the bigger Walnut got and the more spy stuff happened. “It’s just indigestion,” she called. “I can get them, I just wanted to know we had any.”
“Oh, no you don’t,” Devon said sternly. “I’ll get them. You just stay there.” With that, he vanished into the bedroom, leaving his scrambled eggs to burn on the stove. Ellie sighed and got up to stir them. Devon was going to be the most ridiculously over-protective father in the world.
There was something to be said for that, Ellie thought. There was also something to be said for having a husband who was a lousy liar. Not that he’d ever cheat, she was sure of that, but if he did, she was pretty sure she’d know, like, immediately.
Devon had to know that she knew he’d given Chuck the computer. He knew better than to think she believed he’d accidentally broken it and thrown it away. He knew better than to think she’d bought his false alarm at the hospital. And he certainly knew better than to think she hadn’t understood what had happened that night at their house. Even Sarah’s perfect poker face hadn’t been able to hide the fact that she was freaked, and Chuck and Devon’s “cup of sugar” act had been about the opposite of subtle. Oh, well. It had been nice to think for an evening that her mother really wasn’t some kind of international terrorist or something.
Something hurt inside. She decided to blame it on Walnut and gave a reproving glare to the rounded curve of her stomach.
“Hey, Devon?” she called.
“Yeah, babe?” he called from the bedroom.
“You wanna have Chuck and Sarah over for dinner tonight?”
Silence. “Um. I was actually thinking we could go out. I made reservations at…at…Giulio’s. For two.”
No, he hadn’t, because you didn’t make reservations at Giulio’s. He was still angry at Chuck.
Ellie was, too. Or anyway, she wanted to be. Her mother had left her to be a spy. Her father had left her to be a spy. And now her baby brother, her only family, pretty much the polestar of her life pre-Devon…
Well. He hadn’t left her, anyway. Just lied. Just put himself in danger, probably dozens or hundreds of times. She looked again at the four missed calls on her phone. He had to be pretty good at being a spy, if he’d been able to keep it from her even after everything that had happened when their father died—even when she’d been keeping her eyes wide open for suspicious, spy-like behavior. When had Chuck gotten so good at lying to her?
Devon reappeared from the bedroom, worry written all over his face. “Shouldn’t you be lying down?”
“I’m fine, Devon,” she said, verging on irritated. “The Tums?”
“All out,” he said. “You want me to run to the store and get some? I could get some Pepto-Bismol, too—and maybe some fruit for smoothies, too. Don’t want to get run down now, especially with the holidays coming up.”
It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him not to bother, she didn’t even need the damn Tums now, but it occurred to her that it might be nice to have the place to herself for a bit, and so she said, “Okay. Would you get some cereal, too? The box in the pantry’s getting kind of stale.”
“You got it, babe,” Devon said, getting that kind of determined look Ellie sometimes thought of as his OR face. “Lemme just--” He dashed over to the door to pull on his shoes.
“You don’t want your eggs?”
He looked torn for a moment and then ran back over to grab a fork and take a few quick bites right from the pan. “I’m good!” he said, running to the door again. “Thanks, El! Back soon!”
In the silence that followed, Ellie took a deep breath and looked around their apartment. It looked good—a little messy, but nothing too bad, just some magazines scattered on the coffee table and a few dirty dishes. There was nothing to suggest that it was a cover for some undercover operation, some spy hideout. It looked real. It was real, and it was hers, a home she’d worked for and fought for and one she deserved, damn it.
The only secret she kept in this house was behind the towels on the bottom shelf of the linen closet. Devon was too tall to be bending over for towels all the time, so he kept his on the top, which made the bottom shelf a perfect place to hide presents. She hadn’t had a chance to shop for Devon yet—it was still November, for crying out loud—but she’d actually picked something out for Chuck before Thanksgiving, and now was as good a time as any to wrap it, even if she wasn’t feeling any too inclined to give Chuck a present at the moment. Ellie was a planner, and there was no sense in putting things off. You never knew what might pop up in December.
She’d gotten the idea watching those goofy “Will It Blend?” videos on YouTube. Knowing Chuck, there was no way he hadn’t seen or at least heard of them. Electronics were the most obvious choice for Chuck every year, but honestly, Ellie didn’t want to encourage his man-child ways too much, especially now that he and Sarah were getting so serious. If Morgan’s ramblings were anything to go on, Chuck was actually thinking of proposing.
Which was where the blender came in. It had been way, way more money than a blender had any right to cost, but it had a couple of advantages: it was complicated enough that it might actually appeal to Chuck’s love of electronic gadgetry, it had some nerd cred, being the same brand as the blenders in those videos, and most importantly, it might make even Chuck, whose repertoire in the kitchen was pretty seriously limited, want to experiment with cooking. Chuck had it in him to be a great husband, Ellie was positive—he just needed that little push to grow up, to do things for himself, to reach for something bigger and better.
She put the tape down in the middle of the living room and stifled a sob into her sleeve, wiping at her eyes with the other hand. It was a good thing Devon wasn’t there, or this would send him into a flurry of mother-henning. Stupid hormones.
Chuck was doing it. He’d found a job that didn’t just make him happy but actually made the country safer—he was making a difference, which she knew he’d wanted for a long time. He had a girlfriend who loved him and friends who’d do anything to protect him. Everything she’d ever wanted for him, he had—her baby brother had finally grown up, and if he’d lied about it, well, she hadn’t really wanted to hear the truth anyway. And maybe, in his own way, he’d thought he was keeping her safe, as much as she tried to keep him safe.
There was something to be said for being overprotective. But there was also something to be said for knowing when to…well, not to let go, but to accept. She could do that. She could.
She wiped her nose and finished wrapping the blender before putting it back into the linen closet and looking for her phone. She was still tired from her last shift at the hospital, but she had some time to take a nap before noon, and she’d bet everything that when Devon came home he’d make her some energy-enhancing smoothie. It would all work out. Maybe she’d even get to find out what was on that computer Dad had left them.
Hey, she texted, stretching out on the couch and resting her feet on the arm. Sorry I missed your calls. Know you’re at work now, but wanna grab some lunch at 12?
**
Duck. Punch.
Fighting Casey was a great workout. He wasn’t as fast as she was, but he wasn’t slow, and he was strong enough that there was a little extra incentive to duck, and she had to be creative in bringing him down.
“How’d the security update go?” she managed to get out. She hit him square in the shoulder, but it barely seemed to faze him.
“Not bad,” he grunted. “Looks like Bartowski figured out how Volkoff got in and plugged that hole. Got some ideas about beefing up the system.” He aimed a kick at her knee.
She stepped aside and threw a jab toward his midsection, which he dodged easily. “Good,” she said. Volkoff was a vulnerability they couldn’t afford, especially since now he knew both Chuck’s real identity and where Ellie and Awesome lived. The whole situation made Sarah nervous, and frankly, she didn’t like feeling nervous.
“We oughta get him some real fight training,” Casey added, the slight catch in his breath telling Sarah he was getting a little tired. “None of this strip-kicking crap.”
He said it like he thought she’d disagree, but they were on the same page here. Chuck’s spying skills had grown by leaps and bounds over the last couple of years, but he still relied too heavily on the Intersect when it came to self-defense. “I know the agent who does beginning wushu instruction for FBI trainees,” she offered. “I could give her a call.”
“Good.” He grunted again, in satisfaction, even as her foot caught him in the ankle and he momentarily lost his balance. He righted himself again easily. Casey was like that—you could catch him off guard, but not for long. “Private lessons?”
She nodded and took a moment to wipe the sweat from her forehead. “The problem is keeping the Intersect from kicking in. If he’s going to learn, he can’t use it as a crutch.”
“Good point.” He caught her briefly in a chokehold, but she threw him—not as easily as she might have if she were still fresh, but not with too much difficulty. He lay on the floor just a breath too long, so it wasn’t a surprise when he hit the mat with an open hand and said, “Let’s rehydrate.”
They sat side-by-side on a bench against the gym wall sipping Gatorades, and Sarah let herself revel in her sore muscles and the furious pounding of her heart. Exercise always cleared her mind. It was reassuring, too, if the workout had gone well—a heads-up that, even if nothing else was sure, she could rely on herself.
Which was totally absurd, because these days, she actually had things in her life that were sure, things and people she could count on. A family.
As if on cue, her phone buzzed with a text message, and she felt herself grinning. General Beckman would call; the only person who ever texted her during the day was Chuck. She fished the phone out of her bag.
Had lunch w/Ellie. She says to be careful, but shes ok with me spying. No more lies! :-)
Sarah was surprised into a laugh and shook her head, unable to process the relief for a moment. Thank God. She was way past loving Ellie for Chuck’s sake—nowadays she loved her for Ellie’s own sake, and Chuck’s nervousness about the not-Thanksgiving dinner had unsettled her more than she would ever have admitted to him. Chuck and Ellie were her platonic ideal of the concept of “family,” and the thought of anything messing with that made her feel angry and disconnected, a nauseating echo of how she’d felt when Chuck had been taken.
That’s great, she texted back. And Awesome?
Don’t know. Ellie says shell talk to him.
“Bartowski?” Casey asked. It wasn’t exactly a question.
She nodded. “He and Ellie had lunch together. It sounds like they had a good conversation.”
A satisfied little smile curled at the corner of his mouth. “Good,” said Casey. “Maybe the dumb kid’ll calm down a little now.”
The phone buzzed again. Say thanks 2 Casey 4 me.
Ah. Chuck had had a couple of freakouts in their apartment, but to her knowledge, he’d been keeping it together pretty well in public. Casey, in particular, hadn’t mentioned anything amiss—but clearly he’d talked to Chuck about it. “Oh?”
Casey shrugged, losing the smile. “I don’t think he’s too emotionally compromised to work, Walker. I would have told you if I thought he was. Get off my back.”
“I’m not on your back, Casey,” she said, vaguely frustrated. She had a bad habit of thinking about Chuck as something to protect, all the good things she’d wanted as a child and been denied, the warmth and the family and the trust, without really realizing the ways he was just as messed-up as she was. Casey, though, was the opposite problem—he wore his issues like a “Do not touch” sign around his neck, and he hid everything soft until the exact moment it was needed, hiding it away the second it wasn’t anymore. It was the kind of thing Bryce always laughed at in her, but Sarah could never bring herself to laugh at it in Casey. Casey wasn’t the same kind of partner Bryce had been, and Chuck wasn’t the same kind of boyfriend, and all the hurts and questions that had been easy to gloss over with Bryce stuck in her craw here and now.
“It’s okay, you know,” she said. “You can care about Chuck. You don’t have to let anyone else know if you don’t want to, but don’t keep it from me. We’re partners.”
Casey’s grunt this time was scornful enough to verge on contempt, which meant he couldn’t think of anything to say. The frustration leaked out of Sarah bit by bit and left only fatigue. It was funny how someone could read your mind in a firefight, be there to back you up when the stakes were high, and then leave you to bang your head against a wall endlessly when the only thing at risk was emotional. Sarah’d become a big believer in the value of communication, but it really only worked when both parties were interested.
“It’s okay,” she said again, and this time she stood up and kissed the top of Casey’s head. It was sweaty and kind of stinky, but she’d kissed worse. “You should come over to our place tonight. We’re gonna try making homemade pizza.”
It didn’t really count as running away if she left before he had time to respond, not when she had so much to do herself today. And if she was lying to herself about that, well, it was only a little lie in the grand scheme of things.
**
Chuck was no master chef, but even he was pretty sure “parchment paper” and “wax paper” couldn’t be used interchangeably.
“Wait,” he said, “if we put this in the oven, won’t, you know, the wax melt?”
“It wouldn’t,” said Sarah, but she looked uncertain. “I mean, it’s a cooking product, right? Aren’t you supposed to put it in the oven?”
Eh. Dubious. He checked the recipe again. “It says we can use parchment paper or cornmeal to keep the crust from sticking. Why don’t we try the cornmeal?”
“Well, if we had any cornmeal….” Sarah said, raising an eyebrow. “You think flour would work?”
Honestly, Chuck didn’t care if they melted the crust to the stone so badly they had to scrape it off with Sarah’s knives or throw the whole thing away and order carry-out. He was pretty sure not even setting off the fire alarm and explaining to the entire fire department what morons he and his girlfriend were would ruin his mood, although he thought it was probably better not to test that theory. It was possible that Sarah was feigning ignorance just to make him feel better, that she was actually just as good at cooking as she was at everything else, but even if she was, Chuck didn’t care—there was nothing he’d rather be doing than trying to figure out how to make pizza with her. “We could try cooking spray,” he suggested.
Sarah winced. Just because he’d gotten a little over-enthusiastic with the Pam the last time they’d made muffins, he thought, but he couldn’t work up too much indignation. “When we’re married,” she said, “I’m banning you from cooking sprays of any kind. No Pam, no Crisco, no…whatever.”
Chuck couldn’t help himself from grinning. She’d been saying things like that ever since they’d gotten back from Thailand—not often, not making a big deal out of it, just kind of dropping “when we’re married” into conversations like it wasn’t anything to freak out about. He was trying not to push it by commenting on it, but it made something in his heart get warm and glowy every time she said it.
On the whole, he thought, he was a pretty lucky guy, lack of culinary prowess nonwithstanding. His sister was definitely still talking to him, and if she wasn’t mad, then she’d win Awesome over, no problem. He wouldn’t exactly go out on a limb to say that it was a good thing Volkoff had come over for dinner, but he was pretty psyched about the fact that he could keep the whole “lying to his sister” thing to a bare minimum now. He could pretty much avoid it altogether, in fact, and just say “It’s spy stuff” when he couldn’t tell her something.
As if that weren’t enough, he and Sarah were like, pre-engaged. Not, like, "promise rings, we’ve made a binding arrangement" pre-engaged, but a kind of “take the pressure off, we know it’s gonna happen even if we don’t know when” pre-engaged. If someone had told him five years ago he was going to get married to a beautiful woman who could kill someone in, like, seventy different ways, who legitimately loved him, he would probably have laughed a bitter laugh and gone back to the Playstation, but these days, just about everything seemed possible.
Well, he amended. Maybe not everything. After all, Casey wasn’t here, and there were some lines there you just couldn’t cross.
And then, as if sent by the gods of Gently Ironic Comic Timing, the doorbell rang. Chuck’s first thought was Ellie, and his second thought was Volkoff, which left him in some confused place between pleased and scared pantsless. His third thought was his mom, which…well, he wasn’t even touching those feelings.
It was Sarah who, frowning, said, “I wonder if that’s….” and opened the door to reveal Casey, of all people, standing in a crisp-looking button-down shirt with a vaguely sheepish expression on their doorstep.
“Walker,” he said gruffly. “Bartowski. I thought—well, you said you were making pizza.” He turned to Sarah, looking kind of like Morgan had looked at pretty women in his pre-Alex days, like he wanted something so bad that only fear was holding him back.
Chuck, having been there many a time himself, understood the feeling. “Save us from ourselves,” he said immediately. “Have you ever cooked with a pizza stone?”
Casey took a critical look at the kitchen and then sighed. “Hopeless,” he said. “Completely hopeless. Where’s your pizza stone?”
Sarah gestured at the counter, a warm smile on her face. She had such a great smile. “I’m glad you decided to come,” she said.
Too much! said the warning sirens in Chuck’s head. Too much! You had to kind of measure out the emotional moments in Chuck’s experience with Casey—he was willing to express love, it wasn’t like he was some robot, but you had to pick and choose your moments carefully, if you wanted him to respond instead of growl at you and glare.
But Casey didn’t growl or glare. Instead, he looked from Sarah to Chuck and back again, and said, “Well. Knew you two knuckleheads couldn’t be trusted to make pizza on your own.”
Coming from Casey, with that tone of voice, with that look in his eyes, it might as well have been I love you. Chuck weighed the situation carefully and decided that even a guy-hug might be too much, but a good shoulder-patting rarely went awry these days, so he let himself, and Casey let him with a crooked smile. If he never got to do anything else with Casey, well, that would be enough. He hoped it wouldn’t have to be.
He looked around Casey’s head and gave Sarah a thumbs up, hoping to convey by subtle expressions just how awesome this was. How awesome everything was. She smiled back, and for a glorious second, everything was perfect.
And then the smoke alarm came on.
“Chuck,” Sarah asked sweetly, “when was the last time the oven got cleaned?”