Hi. A longer chapter this time, have fun :)
Disclaimer: mehmehmehmehmeh
Gonna Set your Soul on Fire
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CHAPTER THREE
Change
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"Sarah!" There was brief pounding on the door before another lull, "Rise and shine, sunshine. Daddy says up and at 'em!"
When there was no response, Carina huffs exasperatedly and impatiently knocks again.
"Hey Squirt!" She yells, "Don't make me come in there and find you hiding a guy!"
A pause.
Then she laughs to herself, "Yeah right."
From the inside, an audible grumble floats through the door, and it is swung wide open. Carina steps in, hands on her hips.
After she looks around at the undisturbed bed covers and pajamas lying folded on the pillow, she cocks her eyebrow curiously. Striding straight to the slightly ajar cupboard, she rolls her eyes.
The beam of light from behind her manages to pierce through the darkness inside, and she can see a sliver of pale skin illuminated.
"What are you doing in there?"
Sarah has a bewildered deer-in-the-headlights look on her face as she tries to shield her eyes from the bright sunlight streaming through the open window. Carina is unsympathetic, moving even more to let the beams past her body.
"Um," Sarah says with a pretentious smile, "Erm, it's warm...and it's cosy in here."
Narrowing her eyes, her sister points wordlessly to the pile of clothes beside her.
Sarah's smile widens to impossible dimensions, hoping Carina couldn't tell her hands were shaking with nervousness behind her back. "I accidentally knocked them down from the hangers when I came in here."
Thin eyebrows raised, Carina just shakes her head. "You are one odd child, Sarah."
Before Carina could continue her interrogation, a sound outside makes both of their eyes dart to the open door of her room.
Stumbling steps thump against the hardwood of the second floor where they are. They stop when a door creaks open.
"Good morning, sir." A deep, alert, voice greeted.
Carina smiles, completely ignoring Sarah and exiting the room.
Sarah deflates in relief behind her.
"John!" Jack Burton's voice resounds, "Morning, young man. Come down to breakfast...after you put a shirt on."
The bass rumble grunts in assent before there were diminishing footsteps down the stairs and another two pairs of feet heading back down the hall.
Sarah, after making sure there were no bystanders, pulls the cupboard door closed.
"Mffmph."
An apologetic look on her face, Sarah turns to the source of the noise and pulls the sweatshirt off Chuck's head.
"You smell nice," He says dreamily.
At Sarah's expression, Chuck amends hurriedly, "Like your clothes. You know- the smell of freshly laundered clothes!"
He pulled a t-shirt off the pile and held it to his nose, "See?" He sniffs, "Yum."
Shrugging her shoulders, Sarah just reaches out to tousle Chuck's hair. Chuck stays quiet as he waits patiently for her to excavate him further from the mountain of clothes.
"So," He says after she clears away the last article, "What happens now?"
Sarah looks as confused as he does. She shrugs her shoulders helplessly. "I didn't think that far."
Chuck taps his chin, "Well. Without my daily phone call back to my sister, she'll be pretty worried."
Leaning back on the wall opposite him, Sarah picks at the fluff on the knees of her pants, "Are you going to tell her about the Stanford incident?"
His finger raised, Chuck shakes his head sagely, making a tutting noise instead of answering.
"That incident will no longer be referred to the Stanford incident." With a long pause to think, he declares.
"It shall from this day forth be called the INCIDENT OF '03, with a capital 'I'. There must be a kind of 'dun dun dun' or you know, some kind of... Star-Wars-Death-Star-approaching kind of quality that must be present in the voice while saying the aforementioned INCIDENT- A looming, dark, or menacing sound."
Frustrated with himself for not being able to communicate the particular 'tone' that needed to be used to speak those words, Chuck looks despondently at Sarah. His head sinking, his playful attitude disintegrates quickly.
"She's gonna kill me, Sarah."
Ellie had seemed like a decent big sister from what Chuck had described, and she couldn't imagine Ellie having anything but sympathy for him, and outright anger at Stanford.
"Come on Chuck, Ellie can't be that-"
He holds up a finger again.
"Uh uh Sarah, you haven't met her. I swear, when she finds out, she'll be like an unstoppable heat-seeking missile, a... she-hulk! A lioness protecting her cub! A government tearing, official demolishing, bullet train-"
"Shut up, Chuck."
He immediately falls dead silent.
With a smile, Sarah speaks, "Would it make you feel better if I went with you?"
Chuck's eyes widens as he gapes like a fish. "You'd...you'd do that for me?" His smile appears again.
"Yeah. I got nothing better to do while waiting for graduation," She remarks offhandedly.
Clapping his hands, Chuck smiles beautifully, eyes bright, not flinching a bit from the mention of graduations. "Okay! Um-" His face falls as he looks shyly at Sarah, "What about your dad?"
"What about him?"
"Won't he be mad? He doesn't like me very much.."
Sarah laughs, "No. He was being nice," She punches his shoulder playfully, "He nearly brought out the shotgun when Carina took John home for the first time."
Chuck's eyes were wide, and he tries to downplay his shock by cracking a weak joke.
"Maybe I just don't look like a threat?" He chuckles skittishly, "There's absolutely no need for firearms of any kind."
Sarah grinns. "It's okay. He won't. Plus, I like nice, non-threatening boys anyway."
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An appreciative whistle nearly startled Chuck from his utmost concentration, and he hugs a sturdy branch to his chest in fright.
"So."
Chuck tries to look around the best he can , but that would mean giving up his desperate hold onto safety. He didn't want to give Ellie an excuse to go all intern-doctor on him.
A dark shape at his peripheral vision catches his attention again, and twisting his neck painfully, he's met with the intimidating bulk of John Casey.
"John?"
The older man growls, and with ridiculously light footsteps, he walks gracefully from branch to branch with perfect balance as if he weighed nothing less than a feather until he stands in front of Chuck.
Shoving his face close to Chuck's, his ice blue eyes narrows.
"It's Casey to you."
Then as if he had bipolar disease, his mood changes quickly with his next line.
Firmly thumping Chuck on the back (who winced), he laughs.
"What a bull, you lanky geek! Managed to get little Sarah laid, did you?" At Chuck's pale face and glowing red cheeks, he snorts. "Didn't think you had it in you at first, runt."
Chuck's hands went slack for a moment, and he hopes fervently that Mr Burton did not crack open a window just as Casey had said that.
I don't like shotguns.
He tries to laugh along with Casey, but nothing comes out except a half strangled hiccup.
Still chuckling, Carina's boyfriend continues his easy descent out of the tree, leaving Chuck to cling onto his position.
"Help?"
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"Chuck?"
The hissed whisper comes from behind him, and Chuck maneuvers his limbs to face the sound.
Sarah peers closer at the clump of bush from the side of the road.
"It's okay," She said, smiling. For a moment Chuck is just entranced with the way the sun highlights the glinting parts of her hair.
"-My dad's out right now."
Two hands come searching in the leaves for him, and quickly, Chuck stands to avoid any accidental grazing of any kind.
Sarah takes a step back with his proximity, surprised at his sudden appearance. Taking his hand casually and skipping a bit as they walked down the sidewalk, she asks him, "Are you ready?"
Trembling with nerves, Chuck just manages to nod.
"Yeah."
He thinks the shock hasn't quite worn off, and he attributes this to the reason why he hasn't blubbered like a girl yet about the whole INCIDENT OF '03 and the loss of his girlfriend to his best friend.
Plus, meeting Sarah's whole family was an adventure on it's own. It diluted the powerful emotions of the event at least temporarily. Maybe when he finally saw Ellie, it would hit home and he'd finally express the tumultuous feelings bottled up inside his chest, the cork screwed in tightly.
Like either a stupid romantic comedy or a horror movie, it starts raining just as Chuck works to squeeze both him and Sarah into the phone booth. When he tries to cram himself in, Sarah shrinks further into the box to allow him more space. She takes his hand and pulls him in. Edging tentatively inside, Chuck tries to avoid any bodily contact, awkwardly trying to close the door behind him with his left hand.
He really needed a new phone. The stupid thing died on him, and the charger was still with his personal belongings sitting in a box somewhere in Stanford waiting for him to take the vestiges of his perfect dream life back home.
It's lucky Sarah is so small, because they both barely fit in the cubicle, with merely his arm stuck awkwardly out of the partly closed door. The glass is freezing against his denim-clad ass, but the air is warming between them, and his cheeks are starting to burn.
Sarah picks up the plastic communication device from its cradle and hands it to him.
Taking it, his fingers slip a little from the sweat on his skin and he laughs shyly as he fumbles while the contact with the object in his grasp makes a horrible little squelching noise.
Chuck sticks his tongue between his teeth as he holds the phone under his arm, at the same time using the same limb to reach into his pocket, leg pressed against the wall of the booth.
His knuckles crush painfully against his leg in the confined space, and he strains just a little more to get enough angle to barely brush against the coins.
"Ow."
He extracts his hand again, his shoulder banging against the money box.
"Uh," Clearing his throat, he starts again, "Sarah. Could you-"
He indicates his pocket.
"You know... I've got some change..."
She lifts her hands, "Oh yeah, sure-"
Chuck tries not to squirm as she reaches for him.
"HA!"
Sarah freezes.
"Sorry, ticklish."
He can feel her hand sliding into his pocket, only a fabric's width between their skin, the hard unyielding material of the jeans making Sarah's extraction of the treasure even more difficult.
A furious banging on the window makes both of them turn around. Chuck's breath fogs up the glass, impairing the face of their intruder.
It's so isolated in the box that they can barely hear what the woman is shouting about outside, shaking her head and pointing at them, her other hand firmly clasped over her young daughter's eyes.
Sarah freezes, mortified. The view from where the spectator was wasn't terribly conducive to any less innocent assumptions of what was going on.
When the lady huffs one more time, throwing her hands into the air, Chuck turns back to her with a laugh, trying to shrug it off. She just tries to hide her embarrassment, concentrating on her task.
Finally pulling the money out, Sarah makes a huge show of counting the individual pieces, trying to ignore the heat in her cheeks, her head ducked out of his sight.
"You're short."
Without another thought, Chuck hits the change slot of the machine hard, and after a little tinkling noise, the exact amount needed rolls out to clatter noisily onto the metal plate.
"Perfect."
It works. I swear. Slam the part above the coin box and loose change falls out. Most of the time :)
By the way, is it even possible for Sarah to be graduating? There's a glitch in my timeline I think... and yep, I know, my tenses are all messed up.
Was going for subtle, hope you people were perceptive enough to read between the lines! And yes, they seems very immature for university students, but... come on, they should lighten up a bit! Plus, Sarah's not involved with the CIA so it's not too odd.