She calls him into the home theater room to tell him that the third attempt to recreate the Intersect is scheduled to come online in two days. She barely has the third word out when Morgan is paging Chuck; Morgan's pet name for him today is "Chuckles McGee." Casey is glowering in their direction from next to the GrillMaster.

Chuck has named that glower the "Chuckles McGee" glower. It's one of Morgan's particular favorites.

The CIA front this season has Sarah making elaborate confectionary flower shapes. She wears a patterned sundress, looks decidedly perfect-fifties-housewife. The irony isn't lost on him. Nor is he any less immune to her sharp glances or perfectly-tossed hair. He dreams of her in decidedly un-handlerish, certainly less than housewifely ways.

"So what do we do?"

Sarah furrows a tweezed brow at the scene going on behind him. Morgan is hanging upside down from the Nerd Herd desk, knees hooked over the counter. Casey stalks toward him, price scanner poised like a six-shooter. Somehow it never gets old, this game of mouse and intercontinental ballistic missile. "So, in two days... I guess, I head for the other end of the earth."

She tries a smile, but Chuck is not fooled. He may not know Sarah's real name or how old she was when she first saw Star Wars, but he knows how her eyes look when she isn't really smiling.

"Yeah, but, that hasn't worked out so well, yet," he points out, his voice rising on that hopeful, nakedly optimistic note. He clears his throat and fidgets with the MP3 player he had been repairing.

"It will this time." She doesn't look at him. Casey rattles the home theater room's door, moves on. Sarah sighs, then stares Chuck full in the face. "You're going to get your life back."

It still rings false, even with that wide smile to back it up. Chuck's heart sinks a little. If their time together has taught him anything, it's that maybe he doesn't want his old life back, not without whatever is between them. And, to his horror, he stammers that out, to the last uncertain syllable, and he can't breathe as he waits for her response.

"I can't keep saying goodbye to you," she says, and it's not a reciprocation, but an epitaph.

--

They have had this cover story worked out for months. Her "father" has been growing steadily sicker; she's flying out to see him, she'll be gone for a while. Ellie and Awesome and Morgan won't question it as much, this way.

She's down to a suitcase, and she comes over late, wearing little makeup, her fingers twisting in her cuffs.

"Are you really getting on a plane in the morning?" he asks, and she nods. He's not sure how he knows she's been crying.

They listen to the Arcade Fire album, and don't talk. The only time he's seen her more flustered is right after their kiss, after they found Bryce. He hugs her, brushes his teeth, and when he comes back, she's wearing a tank top and a pair of red lace-trimmed underwear, and his first thought immediately ducks for cover behind the much more reassuring certainty that this is just how she sleeps, even when she's not Sarah. They're just this comfortable, now that she's not putting on a show anymore.

"I'm gonna miss you," he says, on his back, staring at the ceiling.

Sarah wipes at her face. "I'm gonna miss you too."

He takes her to the airport in the morning, both of them bleary-eyed and jittery, and he would have said a thousand more things, he just needed more time. Time they don't have.

She smiles. "I'll write you."

He smiles, and hugs her very tight. Her face tips up to his and he does what he has always wanted to do: he kisses her with every bit of force and will he possesses, the way she did as the seconds ticked down in that warehouse, and she is just as desperate but it isn't enough. She pulls away from him with a soft noise, her lips swelled from the press of his, fear and warning in her gaze, and he watches until she's swallowed by the crowd, his heart breaking.

When he goes to bed that night, having gone through the entire day frozen, numb, his fingertips brush a folded piece of paper tucked under his pillow. He pulls it out and reads it by the moonlight, halfway expecting to see one of Morgan's convoluted escape plans or Klingon epithets.

He's so glad when it isn't.

wait a year for me. i'll come back.

-s