Four Times Sarah Walker Really, Honestly Cried
A/N: So, it's been forever (or roughly two and a half months) since I last posted something, but I was seriously drawing a blank on Chuck inspiration... and then Phase Three came out, and I seriously can't even begin to describe how many thousands of stories popped into my head. Top three Chuck episodes, absolutely.
This is another oneshot (shocker), and... well, the title pretty much says it all. The fourth time you guys should recognize. ;)
Disclaimer: If I owned Chuck, seventy-five percent of episodes would be Sarah Walker-centric. The rest of the episode would be dedicated to CS. Luckily, I don't own it.
i. She's five, and she's at that age where literally sitting in a pile of dirt just seems like an ideal pastime. She's sitting on her couch instead, curled up with miniature Hot Wheels cars, watching them roll across the soft suede of the cushion. A noise, passable for a car but probably better mistaken for indigestion, escapes from her throat while she works, her eyebrows knitting together in unbreakable concentration.
"Sweetie, time for a vacation," a voice pipes up from behind her. She whips her head around, sees her dad standing at the other end of the room, his trademark carefree grin just barely tugging at the edges of his mouth.
Concentration broken.
"Vacation?" she says, but it comes out more like "Vacathion" with her little five-year-old lisp. She screws up her face in determination, looks like she's going to try again, but relaxes it again when she catches sight of one of her cars. "Mommy's not supposed to get home until tomorrow. Then we leave."
She's five. That doesn't mean she's stupid: she knows the drill. Either Mommy or Daddy leave to pull off some sort of elaborate money-making scheme. The other stays home and does grown-up things like laundry and watching the news.
Her dad - currently under the alias Johnathan Watson - is wringing his hands nervously and he's not looking at her and before he even opens his mouth, her five-year-old mind knows. She doesn't cry, just looks at him, because even though she's five, she needs him to say it. If he doesn't, it's not true.
"It's just gonna be you and I for a little while, kiddo," he finally says, and he takes the one step across the room to pat her head in what could probably pass as being in an affectionate manner. "Mommy's gone on a vacation of her own. She'll be back eventually, but we have to get a head start, okay?"
He leaves the room then, and her cars suddenly seem a lot less interesting.
She doesn't cry then, though. She waits until her bedtime rolls around, and, six-thirty on the dot, she curls up on her bed and makes a tent under her covers, where her imaginary friends and her little stuffed dog Floppy are sympathetic enough to actually hug her instead of pat her on the head.
She sobs quietly enough, and if her dad hears, he certainly doesn't come in.
(For twelve years, she thinks her mother's dead. It's only when she joins the CIA that she discovers her mom got enough cash during the con to ditch her and her dad. When she finds out, she grips her gun a little more tightly and punches a little harder during training.)
ii. She's twelve, situated in one of those small towns in Montana that nobody's ever heard of, alone in the small apartment with one room because Dad's at a con and it's been a year and a half since she refused to go with him anymore.
The apartment really is small, essentially just a fridge and a microwave and that one room decorated only with her bed, a suitcase, and Floppy. The Hot Wheels cars are long gone, left in their last house along with all of her other possessions, at her father's insistence. Floppy had been hidden in the cars for months, though, so he survived the trek, even when they ditched the car on their detour to Canada.
Her dad's been gone for a week and she goes to school everyday, takes her time getting back, and heads to bed at 5:00 because there's really nothing else to do. She's not allowed to have a library card, not allowed to wander the streets alone, not allowed to shop, and, even if it's not explicitly stated, it's implied that she's not really allowed to have friends.
But it's Saturday afternoon, and she's almost thirteen and entirely restless in the tiny apartment, so she opens the door to the porch, goes down the fire escape because the landlord will be suspicious if he finds out she's alone, ever, and heads out the alley, makes her way to the park.
She hasn't been on a swing since Seattle and it looks way too tempting, sand underneath pretty much begging her to run her toes through it and to play in it, even though she's twelve and too old for that, anyway.
And it doesn't disappoint: she swings, and then goes down the slide, and then runs home because it feels infinitely cooler than walking.
Then she trips.
There are holes in her jeans, right at the knees, and, with her luck, that's exactly what she falls on. Before the actually pain sets in, she can hear her legs scraping across the pavement, hear her little "Oof" of discomfort. And by the time she's actually in pain, she's situated her legs around so she's sitting on her butt instead, legs straight out in front of her.
There's a lot of blood, she notices. And her knees are kind of black, like the pavement she's sitting on.
It stings a lot.
Her eyes burn and she wants to cry, really does, but she knows herself well enough to know that she'll get herself all cleaned up and everything will be good again, she just has to walk the block and a half to her house and every will be-
She doesn't know how to clean herself up. This seems like such a huge hole in her extensive knowledge of all things of the grown-up world. She's not entirely sure where the First Aid Kit is, and her dad's somewhere stealing money from someone who probably doesn't deserve it.
It strikes her that she's not entirely sure that he'd come rushing to her aid, anyway. It's been a long time since she's seen him as a hero.
It's late, so nobody notices the twelve-year-old girl sitting on the pavement, knees bloodied, blond hair bobbing up and down with the kind of sobs that literally make you work to catch your breath.
She's entirely alone.
And there's no Floppy to give her a hug this time.
iii. She's sixteen, and at her third high school so far this year, in the school band so teachers won't talk to her about her lack of socialization, and even though she has to sit behind Heather Chandler for four of her five classes every day, this is definitely her favourite school so far.
She's sixteen. It's because of a boy. That's how that works.
His name is David, and he's got that blond hair that's just long enough to pass for unintentionally messy (even though there's a very good chance he spends an hour perfecting that look every morning), just short enough so he can at least pretend that it doesn't actually take an hour to get it that way. He's got the smile, too: the kind that really seems genuine, but almost like he's smiling about something mysterious and unknown, on top of what it appears like he's actually smiling about.
It's the eyes that get her, though. His casual scruff is great, the fact that he's six-foot-two is excellent for her five-foot-eleven, and his slow southern drawl and comparatively quick wit is certainly heart-stopping, but it's the eyes. The kind that are blue but passable for grey, expressive but in a nonchalant way.
It takes her a full month to get up the courage to talk him.
Even then, all she can bring herself to whisper is "Need a pencil?" one day in chem when she notices him looking a little overwhelmed during a test. He turns around, nods his confirmation, and smiles that smile and she's so far gone.
She's not really good with boys, though, and she takes it as an I-like-you sort of signal. The next day, she plucks up the nerve to ask him if he wants to hang out sometime.
It's Friday and she sees him as she leaves the school, hanging out with a bunch of guys who are smoking but he's not, and maybe it's that fact that makes her think they're soul mates and that she should ask.
He drags his eyes down the length of his nose to look at her when he notices that she spoke, as though she's not fully worth the effort to actually move his head. His friends are laughing behind them, but she's watched way too many romantic movies and she's got more guts than any of them, so she stays put.
This isn't like the movies, though. He doesn't look at his friends before he answers, like he wants to say yes but doesn't want to be judged. He just smirks, moves his shoulders up like he's snorting silently but he's too cool to actually do it, and says, his voice almost seductive, "Think you're good enough for me, Burton?"
It strikes her that she did. It also strikes her that she's not.
She is, after all, the con artist's daughter.
She punches him in the face before she strides off (she's always had a little bit of Sarah Walker in her), makes it home long before she cries.
Once in the apartment, she takes a few deep breaths before going to retrieve Floppy off the top shelf in her closet. She curls up in her bed again, Floppy hugged securely to her stomach, and cries. She's not five anymore, though; she wants a real hug. From her dad, or (and she hates herself for even wanting it), from David.
Her dad gets home and knocks on her bedroom door a few hours later. When he hears quiet sniffles and muffled sobs, he offers her some Rocky Road Ice Cream and, when she still doesn't reply, he walks off.
/
She's recruited for the CIA the following year, just after her dad, under the alias Jack Burton, is arrested. She doesn't cry for him. In fact, with the exception of a few misty-eyed moments at Bryce's two funerals and after Prague, she doesn't cry - really cry - for thirteen years.
/
iv. She's twenty-nine and she hasn't slept in almost a week. There's not a muscle in her body that doesn't ache, and her fingers are missing large chunks of skin.
Oh, and the boyfriend who wants to marry her? Yeah, he's been missing for a week. Without any sort of defense... like, for example, the Intersect.
But she's Sarah freaking Walker. Faults aplenty be damned, when it comes to one Chuck Bartowski, she does not fail. Not when it's a matter of his life.
She kicks down the door and takes down the bad guy, barely a hair out of place, as she's wont to do. In fact, it's pretty much her trademark. Only, this time, Chuck is on the other side of the room and there are some absurd red lights sticking out of his forehead, and, oh yeah, his eyes are closed.
Unless he's in their bed and she can literally hear him breathing or he's kissing her, his eyes are not allowed to be closed.
She's not sure what's wrong with him - there's no visible blood, so it's not like he's dead - but she makes it across the room anyway. She consciously slows her breathing - it helps with the whole don't-cry-you're-a-badass-emotionless-spy thing - and rips the weird red lights off his forehead, frees one hand - the other can suffer, for all she cares - from the straps.
She whole slowing her breathing thing? Not working.
"I'm here," she only kind of semi-sobs, because she's Sarah Walker now, not Jenny Burton or Samantha Watson or whatever the hell her real name is, and Sarah Walker, even in-love-Sarah-Walker, does not cry. Misty eyes? Sure. Tear down the cheek? Acceptable. Full on, deep, heaving, please-go-get-Floppy-so-I-can-get-a-hug sobs? No.
"Chuck, I'm here." He's awfully pale, and he's breathing - she can sort of hear it - but it's rapid and quiet, like he's having a nightmare and an asthma attack at the same time.
She consciously thinks about it, really considers the situation in a way that she usually tries to avoid: This is Chuck Bartowski. 95% of the time, she's completely open with him, but the last time she wasn't... he went and got himself kidnapped because there was a small part of him that secretly thought that she was too good for him (and that's the one thing he's always done - made her feel like someone worthy of anything), and that she wouldn't want to marry him if he didn't have the stupid Intersect in his head.
And even though she privately wants Floppy right now, his hug wouldn't be nearly as satisfying as Chuck's hugs, the ones where he wraps his entire body around hers like he's trying to protect her from everything, the ones where he kind of leans into her and the ones where, every once in a while, he'll kiss the side of her head and try to surreptitiously smell her hair as though she's not a secret agent and completely in tune with him, so she won't notice.
It's time she finally just gave up and stopped trying to shield herself from him. He's Chuck Bartowski; he has no conscious intention to break her heart.
"Chuck, please, come on," she pleads, and even though she never pleads and she never cries and she never sobs, she stops thinking about the consequences.
And then Morgan's talking, and even though he was helpful the previous day (and, at some points, not-so-helpful), she thinks of him like a mosquito near her ear, buzzing and trying to bring her back to the spy-reality, which she really, really wants to avoid.
His advice is sound, though.
"Chuck, I love you. Please wake up... I have so much that I want to tell you." Like the fact that she's done with being cut off from him. Like the fact that she loves him and she's unpacked her suitcase and she never cries, doesn't let herself do it, but that she knows that he'd let her because everyone needs to cry every once in a while. "I found your proposal plan... Chuck, I want to spend the rest of my life with you, I don't care if you have the Intersect or not. Without you, I'm nobody... I'm nothing but a spy. Come back to me, Chuck... I want to marry you."
It's weird, she thinks, how saying something can make you realize just how true it is. Sarah Walker, the non-crier, is afraid of commitment: Sarah Walker, the girl who sobs into her boyfriend's shirt while she clutches his face, can't think of anything but the adorable proposal plan and her boyfriend's Harry Potter socks and the old Star Trek sheets stuck in one of the linen closets in their apartment and the Tron poster and the fact that she wants to marry that man.
And then, because she watched Snow White as a child and really can't think of any other solution, she kisses him.
His eyes open.
"Chuck."
He kisses her - which is probably better than anything on the planet, including Floppy's hugs - and then wraps his arms around her and kisses her shoulder on the way, like he's relieved that she's there (absurd).
She cries for a solid hour afterward, either from relief or ongoing fear or just an accumulation of thirteen years worth of tear-worthy moments. He's still sort of hugging her, in his awkward what-the-hell-am-I-doing Chuck Bartowski way of his, when she falls asleep on his shoulder on the plane ride home.