Spring was in the air in Los Angeles, California.
And as a result of spring being in the air, there were a number of other things in the air as well. Together, they were all conspiring to make Special Agent Sarah Walker, CIA, completely miserable.
Nothing she had tried was working. Benadryl, Claritin, Zyrtec – she had tried them all at some point in the last week, and they had all failed her.
Things had gotten so bad that she had had to forgo a stakeout the night before. Not that it was that great a loss – Casey and Chuck had agreed that it had been boring as hell.
What really annoyed her was that she was supposed to go out with Chuck tonight. It didn’t look like that was going to happen, not the way she felt.
In frustration, she blew out her breath – through her mouth, since she couldn’t seem to breathe through her nose – picked up her phone, and called Chuck.
Three rings, four rings, five – and it went to his voicemail. He must be with a customer or something, she thought.
“Hi, you’ve reached Chuck Bartowski. I’m sorry I can’t answer the phone, but if you’ll leave your name and number, I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. If this is a Nerd Herd emergency, please call the Nerd Herd desk at…”
She took as deep a breath as she could so that she could actually talk without dying. The tone sounded.
“Chug,” she garbled out. “Dis is Sarah. I’b sorry, bud I’b feelig miderabuh. I cad barely breed, and tawging is a real probbeb ride dow. I’b defididly dot godda be able to go adywear todight. I’b so sorry.”
She paused to cough, then took another breath. “Gib be a call lader… I lub you.”
Sarah hung up the phone, set it down on the desk, and threw herself on the bed. This was a serious mistake, as it puffed out something that set off a sneeze attack.
After a minute or two, the sneezes finally stopped. She lay curled up on her bed, almost in the fetal position.
“I hade sprig,” she moaned.
Chuck had felt his phone vibrate, but he’d been on the Nerd Herd line with a customer frantic about the crash of his brand new Macbook Air just then. Turned out that it hadn’t crashed after all – the customer had installed Windows Vista for a dual boot system and forgot to read the instructions on how to boot the computer with two OSs.
When he finally got off the phone, he checked his iPhone. He’d missed a call from Sarah. He tried to pull up the voicemail-to-text option, but his iPhone told him that it was unable to translate the voicemail.
Well, that was odd. It had never done that before. Dialing “1”, he put the phone to his ear to listen.
He shortly found out just why his iPhone couldn’t decipher the voicemail. He could barely understand himself what Sarah was saying. However, he got the gist – her allergies were making her miserable, and she wasn’t going to be able to go out tonight.
“Well, time to create a Plan B,” he muttered to himself.
Chuck took off from the Buy More early, hoping to catch Ellie before she headed off to work. Luckily, he reached the apartment just as she was getting ready to go.
“Hey, sis,” he panted, out of breath from speeding the whole way home and running from the car to the apartment.
“Chuck?” Ellie said. “Have you been running?”
He nodded.
“Why?”
“Wanted to catch you before you left,” he wheezed. “Sarah’s got allergies from hell, and nothing over-the-counter OR prescription has been working for her. Got any advice?”
Ellie didn’t say anything, just dug in her purse, pulled out a small bottle, and tossed it to Chuck.
He looked at it and rolled his eyes. “Hista Drops?” he said. “Come on, Ellie, you know those don’t work worth crap.”
“They don’t work for you or Devin,” she corrected him. “They work GREAT for me, and you have no idea how they’ll work for Sarah until she’s tried them.”
“Alright,” Chuck said. “You’re the doctor. I just fix computers.”
“That’s right,” Ellie replied. “I’m not here telling you that DDR II RAM is crap, am I?”
Chuck glared daggers at her. “You know far too much about computers to be making those kinds of comparisons, and you know it.”
Ellie just laughed. “Yes, and that is why your big sister always wins.” She gave him a little hug as she passed. “I’ll be back around, oh, five in the morning. Have a good night!”
He set the bottle down on the kitchen counter. What the hell, he’d give it a shot. They might do something for her. Ellie was right – he didn’t know if they’d work for Sarah until she tried them.
What he did know was that he wasn’t going to totally abandon the date he was supposed to go on tonight. In fact, remembering that she hadn’t had a clue what “Ron Macy” had been going on about at I Spy, he decided it was time to introduce her to the world of Firefly.
Around five o’clock, he put a call in to Pizza Buona – a large supreme pizza, NO OLIVES. He emphasized that part three or four times – “My girlfriend doesn’t like olives, and she will hurt me if there are olives on her pizza,” he said, only half-joking about the second part.
At a quarter after, he left the apartment, taking the Firefly DVDs and the bottle of Hista Drops with him. He stopped by Pizza Buona and picked up the pizza, getting a two-liter of Diet Coke while he was at it.
Five thirty found him pulling up in front of Sarah’s building. He couldn’t help but remember the first time he came here with a pizza – he had so desperately wanted to know something real about her. He’d asked for her name, her first name, her middle name – nothing. Now, oddly enough, he knew her entire name – but she wanted him to know her as Sarah Walker.
Upon reaching her floor, he turned to head from the elevator toward her room. About halfway there, he heard the distinctive sounds of somebody having a sneezing fit behind a closed door.
“Good Lord,” he whispered. “She must have it really bad.”
He paused for a moment before knocking on her door, wanting to make sure she wasn’t sneezing her head off and would therefore hear the knock. After a few seconds, he rapped a few times on the door.
The door opened, to present a rather frightful looking spy. She was dressed in a faded Green Bay Packers t-shirt and basketball shorts. Her face was almost completely red. The area around her eyes was puffy, and her eyes were watering. Her hair was tousled, and she just looked absolutely miserable.
Despite all that, her face lit up when she saw him, a smile crossing her face that said she was truly happy that he was there.
“You said you couldn’t go on a date tonight,” Chuck said, “so the date came to you!”
Sarah’s smile got a little bigger. She reached up and kissed him gently. “Dis is by I lub you,” she sniffed.
“I’m just going to assume you said, ‘This is why I love you,’ and leave it at that,” Chuck said with a grin.
Sarah nodded, and then stepped back so that Chuck could enter the room.
Chuck handed the small bottle to her. “I’ve got this herbal thing my sister said you should try for your allergies. It doesn’t work for me, but she said it might work differently for you.”
Squinting, Sarah read the directions on the bottle, then pulled out the dropper, and dropped the recommended dosage on her tongue. Almost immediately, her face wrinkled, and she stuck her tongue out. “Blah,” she said. “Dat tasdes lige ass.”
With a weary sigh, she sat down on her bed. “I readdy hobe you weren’d exbectig to be eddertaid, Chuck. I readdy feel lige crab.”
“I know,” Chuck replied. “Which is why, I expect you to do nothing more than have a couple of pieces of the best pizza in Echo Park, and experience your first exposure to Firefly.”
“Firefdy? You bead the show wid dat sogg about ‘The Bad Dey Call Jayde’?”
“You mean the song that Casey… um, I mean, ‘Ron Macy’ sang at the club?” Chuck asked. “Yep, that’s the show.”
“I don’d dow, Chug. I bide fall asleeb.”
“I promise you won’t.”
So, she agreed to give Firefly a shot. By the end of the original pilot, Sarah was interested, and by the end of “The Train Job”, she was hooked.
“How exactly did FOX cancel this?” she asked.
“They’re a bunch of – hey, your voice is sounding better,” Chuck noticed.
“Yeah, I actually feel like I can breathe,” she replied. “Looks like your sister may have been right after all!”
“Well, I suppose it wouldn’t be the FIRST time,” he allowed.
By the end of “Bushwhacked”, Sarah was feeling a little sleepy, and by the end of “Shindig,” her head was resting on Chuck’s shoulder, her eyes drooping.
“I think it’s just about bedtime,” she said sleepily.
Chuck started to move, planning to retrieve his DVDs, bid Sarah good-night, and head home, but as he did, she grabbed his arm.
“Why don’t you stay,” she whispered.
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?”
Sarah propped herself up on an elbow and looked Chuck directly in the eyes. “Chuck Bartowski, you are my…”
She smiled. “My boyfriend. If anybody has a problem with you spending the night here, they can deal with me.”
Chuck arched an eyebrow. “Sarah Walker… I am definitely not a boy.”
Her smile got even bigger. “And if I didn’t feel absolutely miserable, I might ask you to prove that to me.”
And with that statement, Chuck’s face turned bright red. “Uh… you know…”
“I know,” she said. “That’s something we should really talk about at some point. Like, soon.”
She yawned. And didn’t stop yawning for several seconds. “Not right now, though,” she said wearily. “Right now, it’s time for sleep.”
Without warning, she reached up and turned off the lights. “Thanks for letting me get ready for bed before casting me into the darkness,” Chuck snarked.
“Oh, shut up. You’re a big boy, you can handle yourself.”
“I’m not a boy,” Chuck grumbled. He quickly shucked his jeans and his collared shirt, leaving him in his boxers and his undershirt. He crawled under the covers – and froze.
Sarah unfroze him by answering his unspoken question and cuddling up against him. “I think that if I tell you that I’m in love with you, it’s safe to assume that you’re allowed to cuddle up to me,” she whispered.
Chuck responded by wrapping his left arm around her mid-section and kissing her on the back of the neck. “Good night,” he said.
“Mmmm,” was her only response.
The next morning, Chuck woke up early – just after 7:00. He had the day off, and didn’t really have to go anywhere. Sarah had called in sick for the whole weekend, he knew, so she didn’t have to go anywhere either.
As he came to wakefulness, he realized that their positions had shifted during the night. He was now lying on his back, and Sarah was lying next to him, face down, her head resting on his right shoulder. His right arm was wrapped underneath her, his hand on her back.
“Well, damn,” he whispered. He couldn’t very well move from this position without waking her up, and he didn’t want to do that.
After about five minutes of just laying there, though, she spoke. “So, are you ever going to move, or are you just going to lay there until you rot?”
He looked down at her in disbelief. “How long have you been awake?”
“I woke up about five minutes before you did,” she replied, unable to keep a laugh out of her voice. “And you’ve just been lying there, not wanting to disturb me.”
Her head popped up. “How truly chivalrous.”
Chuck responded in a truly mature fashion. He stuck his tongue out at her. Her eyebrows shot up.
“Do that again and I’ll bite it,” she threatened.
“Sounds like you’re feeling a little frisky,” Chuck laughed.
Sarah smiled – and then sneezed. It was a big sneeze. It was a WET sneeze.
Chuck just sat there. “That… is disgusting.”
“Sorry,” Sarah said, but from the look in her eyes, he could tell that she was anything but.
With a sort of growl, Chuck rolled out of the bed, and stalked to the bathroom. “Do you happen to have a spare toothbrush?” he called.
“Uh, just open the left hand side of the medicine cabinet,” she replied.
She heard the door open, and then silence. A moment later, he looked out the door of the bathroom, an incredulous look on his face.
“That… is practically identical to my medicine cabinet,” he said. “Are you stalking me?”
She smiled. “No, but that’s what happens when your girlfriend is a spy.”
He shook his head. “I’m going to take a shower,” he said. He paused, as if he was going to add something else, like Care to join me?, but he didn’t
The door shut, and Sarah heard the water come on.
When Chuck came out of the bathroom, clean and dressed, he discovered that Sarah had started up Firefly again and was halfway through “Safe.”
“Aw, you started back up without me!” he whined.
“Deal with it,” she shot back.
Chuck stuck out his tongue at her again, then jumped on the bed, jostling her. She hit him with a pillow in revenge. However, she was so drawn to the show that that was the end of that, as he sat back against the headboard, Sarah snuggling up to him.
And they were still there almost ten hours, a bucket of KFC, Chinese takeout, ten episodes, and a feature film later. It was 6:00 PM, and they had watched all the way through to the end of the series, and then watched Serenity as well. Sarah had paused a couple of times to take some of the Hista Drops, but otherwise, it had been uninterrupted Firefly all day long.
Sarah was now in shock. “They killed Wash.”
“Yes, Sarah, yes they did,” Chuck replied, an amused grin on his face.
“Chuck. THEY KILLED WASH!”
Chuck looked over at her, his amused grin getting even bigger. “You can’t stand that they killed such a nice guy, can you?”
“It’s not right!”
“And yet, you’ll handle it and move on,” Chuck replied. “Now, if you’ll excuse me…”
He extracted his arm from behind Sarah’s back. “I am supposed to meet Morgan at 7:00 PM, and I will be a dead man if I don’t.”
“Well, I suppose I’ll have to let you go, then,” Sarah mock-pouted. “Although, I’d say you stand a much greater chance of me being able to kill you than Morgan.”
“I seem to recall once counting one hundred ways how you could do that,” Chuck deadpanned. “So I’ll concede that point. Nonetheless, I have to go and actually be a good friend.”
“Alright, fine…”
“Oh, don’t ‘alright, fine’ me,” Chuck said. He reached out to tickle her, but then thought better of it, realizing that her abdomen might still be just a little bit sore from her not-too-far-in-the-past surgery.
So instead, he just grabbed her by the waist, pulled her over to him, and kissed her. For quite a while, actually. When he finally pulled back, her eyes stayed closed, a smile on her face.
“Thanks,” she whispered.
“For what?”
“For the most fun I’ve had in a while,” she said.
“You’re very welcome,” Chuck replied with a smile.
He stood up and headed toward the door. He looked over his shoulder as he opened the door. “I’ll give you a call later.”
“Chuck…”
“Yes?”
“I love you.”
“I love you too, Sarah.”
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