Author's Note: I have no rights to any of these characters. This is my first and probably last attempt at fanfiction. I'm an economist, not a fiction writer. This grew out of a combination of my dissatisfaction with the ending, and a long plane ride where I had absolutely nothing to do.
Consider it my effort to wrap up the series in a manner that's consistent with canon, "realistic" (within the confines of the Chuckverse), and reasonably happy. It's also written to be read "out loud." Thus, the grammar is consistent with spoken speech.
In my mind, it's envisioned as a fan made YouTube video put to paper. Virtually all of the "scenes" in this epilogue have pretty easy parallels in the show. And I'm sure there's someone out there who could do a half decent voice over.
Call this version 1.2. Slight edits throughout.
BTW, I like reviews!
Chuck vs The Epilogue Voice Over
Hi, I'm Chuck and here are some things you might need to know.
The kiss didn't work. Well, not like Morgan intended. Sarah's memories were not restored with one magical Disney kiss. But we remained on the beach all night long, long after the kiss ended. Talking. Laughing. And when we finally parted ways shortly after sunrise, we had hope.
Two weeks before, Sarah told me she didn't feel it. Now she knew she felt something. And small remnants were coming back to her. Not in their entirety. More like memories of memories. But she was still the Sarah of five yeas ago. She didn't know me. She certainly wasn't ready to live with me, or to give up the only life she had known since she was seventeen. In her mind, she wasn't my wife, and she couldn't pretend to be. Two days later, she moved out of our apartment.
Three days after that, we both accepted General Beckman's offer to rejoin the Agency. It was spying that brought us together once. And it was spying that gave her the chance to get to know me again. Spying let us to be together, without the pressure of being together.
Casey re-joined us about a month later. The original band back together. Turns out him and Gertrude were great as lovers . . . but not so good at everything else. Alex, though, was the real selling point. He missed her. And, as much as the big oaf would never admit it, he missed us and Morgan too. As Sarah said to me at the time, when you meet people you care about, it's just hard to walk away.
Spying again was easy. Particularly the low-level, local surveillance assignments we received the first several months. Frankly, we all suspected that it was make-work. And Beckman eventually fessed up: she had the same basic idea that Sarah and I did. The primary mission goal of Project Bartowski 3.0, stage 1, wasn't fighting bad guys. It was to keep the three of us together, and to give all of us the chance to redevelop our bond, so that Beckman's best team could get back to what it once was.
The hard work for me and Sarah came during downtime. Visiting old haunts. Trying anything and everything to spark her memories, and rebuild our life. At one point, Beckman even ordered us into marriage counseling. But Beckman also did her part by releasing over 2000 hours of surveillance video from Castle, the apartment, the courtyard, and the Buy More taken over the past five years. Even Jeff and Lester pitched in, adding an additional 91 hours of video they had secretly recorded.
Sarah threw herself at the video footage and old mission reports with an angry passion. She wanted so desperately to remember. It was as strange a paradox as you'll ever see. She still saw herself as nothing but a spy, a good one. Yet she wouldn't let Quinn win. So she channeled all her fury against him into fighting for a life she didn't quite believe she ever wanted.
Watching all those recordings helped us relive what we experienced, and what we lost. Everything from ordinary interactions, to triumphs, to frustrations, to tragic miscommunications, to quiet moments, to moments I wish I could forget (Hannah, cough). After a while, neither of us could separate out what we really remembered, and what we had relived on Castle's monitors.
Still, the first few months were rough. Despite the energy she threw at recovering her old life, she remained emotionally distant from me. Cold, even. Whatever we regained on the beach dissipated in the days and weeks ahead. Every time I'd break down one wall, she'd build a new one. For every smile or laugh I coached, or glance I noticed, two days of indifference would follow. During that time, it was Morgan who kept me from spiraling into an endless sewer of cheese balls and whiskey.
But things eventually got better. Slowly, at first, perhaps imperceptibly. Yet as the months passed, Sarah and I grew closer. Maybe she didn't have most of her memories back. Maybe what she did remember was Swiss-Cheese'd. But she felt it. She felt us. And, with time, she stopped being so scared of what she felt. Besides, each day, we were making new memories. And from watching videos and reading mission reports, Sarah wound up "recalling" (or, at least, knowing) the last five years with far more detail than any normal human memory would allow. If she didn't have her memories back, she at least had a good facsimile.
Then it happened. Ultimately, it wasn't the trips down memory lane, or the stories, or the mission reports, or the videos that had the greatest impact. It was Ellie. Ellie was the real hero.
Every weekend for eight months, Ellie flew in to work with Sarah, while Awesome watched Clara. It was Ellie who discovered that the Intersect didn't erase Sarah's memories; it only suppressed them. And it was Ellie who discovered that fragments from the Intersect were still in Sarah's brain, keeping Sarah's memories suppressed - similar to how Volkhov's Intersect had suppressed his memories as Hartley Winterbottom. It took time, but Ellie found a way to remove those fragments, and trigger Sarah's memories. Her real memories.
Five months after we kissed on the beach, Sarah moved back in. Three months after that, with Ellie's help, my wife fully returned to me.
Not everything turned out as we once hoped. With us re-joining the agency, our dreams for Carmichael Industries got deferred. On paper, it still existed as a security consulting firm. In reality, it was strictly our cover: our explanation to neighbors and friends about where we went for days at a time, and why we sometimes returned bloody and bruised.
We also never did get the Volkoff fortune back. It got tied up in court proceedings. Eventually, the government dispersed it as restitution to Volkoff's victims. But that's ok. That's probably where it should have gone in the first place.
And we never did buy the house with the red door and white picket fence. It was sold to another couple long before Sarah and I got right. But we wouldn't have bought it anyway. To Sarah, it had stopped being her dream home. It was now the place where she almost killed me. Neither of us wanted to relive those memories again.
Instead, roughly a year after our night at the beach, Beckman clued us in on a special government auction of seized enemy assets, where we purchased a very familiar house in a former Fulcrom cul de sac. It was Sarah's choice: the place where she told me that she first felt like a real person again. Casey, Morgan, and Alex attended the same auction. They bought a house and moved in right across the street.
Two years, nine months, 29 hours, and several minutes of Alex's profanities later, Morgan cradled eight pounds, two ounces of pure joy in his hands. Looking into his tiny eyes for the very first time, Morgan finally got the chance to say "Luke, I am your father."
General Beckman attended the Christening for Morgan's son. It was the last time we ever saw her. Two days later, she died unexpectedly. A stroke.
As for Sarah and me, we never could get ourselves to quit spying. Not even after Beckman passed, and our relationship with the Agency grew difficult. We even spent the sixth month of Sarah's first pregnancy quelling a revolution in Zambia, without a fork. But when little Steven was finally born, everything finally changed. Of course, that's a story for a different day. . .