"Chuck."
Sarah sits bolt upright, heart racing, panting for breath. Gradually the room forms around her. There are no more mirrored walls latticed in white, no cafe table at the balcony door. She's in one of Bryce's t-shirts, the fabric worn from so many washings that she can feel the air conditioner clearly through it, and hugs herself, rocking back and forth.
Her face is wet. Her throat is sore, like she's been screaming in her sleep again, but once her heart's pounding has slowed a little, there is no answering pound of the super's fist on her door.
Sarah rakes her hair back from her face, a few strands catching in her earrings, her throat constricting. She can feel him, so clearly, feel him like he's right next to her.
It shouldn't be like this. She slept with Bryce. She never slept with Chuck.
But she hadn't seen Bryce die, she thought, drawing her knees up to her chest. She had been spared that particular hell.
She had seen Chuck die, though.
--
The newest incarnation of the Intersect project is going on without her, but then there had been no choice. Casey went back to his team within a week. Sarah had spent a month in counseling, shaken to the core, her grief leaving her powerless, more powerless than she'd ever felt, even when she'd watched her father being taken away.
It took a second, only a second. She was broken, after. Chuck was gone. She had failed. The loss of him had felt like another dying, over and over again.
The cruelest part, and there were so many, was that sometimes she dreamt he was still alive, that she had been close enough, that her fingers had closed around his wrist and pulled him back to her. Sometimes he walked into the Orange Orange (she had set foot in it exactly once after, completely numb, blinking and nodding at the General even though absolutely nothing made any sense anymore, and the thought of it while she was awake made her shudder with revulsion and longing), and she was behind the counter and he just smiled, made some joke, his lean, warm body whole, so close she could touch him.
Ellie didn't even know why her little brother had died. Casey had taken care of that part, the incredible strata of lies, and she and Ellie had held each other and cried as Casey mumbled something about a Nerd Herder losing traction on the 5 and crashing into a guardrail. It was exactly as senseless as the truth had been. He'd died on a mission but the intel they'd been after was gone.
She hadn't cared about intel. Or about eating or sleeping or feeling anything ever again. When Beckman's concern had grown too pointed, Sarah had lashed back that he wasn't even really an agent, not the way they were, that he hadn't chosen to become involved in this life at first, and he had died right in front of her. For absolutely nothing. Her tone had been so far beyond insubordinate that she'd expected walking papers, not the shrink, at her door the next morning.
From the outside it felt like she was luxuriating in her grief, wallowing in it, not even trying to escape it. From the inside it felt like she was drowning in it, like she was nowhere near the bottom and she simply didn't care.
--
In Seattle, her team is a group of dedicated programmers, working to recreate what Chuck destroyed when he uploaded the second incarnation and destroyed the source, what he took to his grave. For now, they've decided, it's too risky to upload the programming, even to an experienced agent.
She could have told them that. Not that they were asking.
While she's dressing that morning, in the clean but shabby apartment the agency found for her, she has to sit down on the bed and take a deep breath just to summon up the energy to finish. She's had to buy new clothes. Her frame has always been on the slender side, but dresses that had clung seductively to her hips now hang shapelessly over her wasted curves.
She used to spend her days making contingency plans, judging every angle. Now her lists all follow the same useless trajectory. From the moment she wakes up until the moment she falls into a tranquilizer-induced sleep, she imagines what she would have done differently, what she would have done given another second, another hour, another week with him. All her worries about what General Beckman would have said just make her feel ashamed now.
She knows what he was. What he could have been is so much more.
The knives at her ankle, she's decided, aren't for her own protection. She might partially hate the Intersect project for what it took from her, but she can at least protect the people working on it. She met them a few days before, and despite herself, all she can feel for them is a sense of maternal protectiveness. They would be utterly useless at protecting themselves, just like Chuck was. And if they can perfect this, if they can take out the glitches and bugs that had left Chuck defenseless when he needed those temporary skills most, at least it was worth something, however tiny.
Sarah doesn't meet her own gaze in the mirror. No matter what she tells herself, they'll never be able to bring him back, and it will never be enough.
--
A month after she becomes den mother to a pack of socially-inept programmers, each of whom is equally convinced that she's the most gorgeous woman in the hemisphere and that she is entirely out of their reach, she's finally given another mission. In an abstract way she knows that the protection detail is important, that the banality and boredom of it only makes it harder, and that her even having the assignment at all is a testament to how much faith the agency has in her incredibly slow recovery, but even the prospect of dressing up and intercepting a package for the government only fills her with dread. She's never been one to eat her feelings and she's never able to force herself to eat more than a few bites of any meal.
She'll hate herself the day she actually sees a cleaned plate in front of her. She knows it will happen, but it will feel like a betrayal.
She'd always known her father could take care of himself, and Bryce had been able to charm and threaten his way out of any situation. If Fulcrum and the Ring worm themselves in deep enough, the scientists who spend their days pecking at keyboards and trying to make her crack a smile will be in danger too.
She just hadn't been aware that her life had constricted to that job in Burbank, the job that had been a twenty-four hour smash and grab when she'd boarded the plane and had turned into two and a half years of her sweat and blood and tears. And she was going to find the other end of this, somehow, kicking and screaming, and bury him again, again, for the last time. She was going to live. Just not quite yet, and not tonight, even in a fiery-red gown that somehow manages to make her look curvy again. She slowly draws the long white gloves up over her elbows and pins the silk flower in her hair.
It's amazing, what makeup can do. Her tired eyes, shadowed and purple when she drags herself out of bed in the morning, are firm and smooth. Her bare, creamy shoulders are straight and squared. She's been seeing the world through a warped pane of unbreakable glass for months now, but tonight she's only aloof and dismissive, and that's the way it should be.
Something else she finds herself wishing, that she'd been able to dance with him one last time.
--
A man asks her to dance, then another. It takes too much energy to refuse, so she nods and murmurs appropriate responses to the desultory conversation, a glass of champagne burning in her otherwise empty belly. The room is all dark paneling and crystal teardrops hanging from chandeliers, stiff white tablecloths and rich red velvet curtains. She's been in this room and rooms exactly like it a hundred times.
The shrink asked her, early on, what her reason was for staying with the agency. It was all she really knew, and her desire for some semblance of a normal life had died with Chuck. Trying to find her way as a civilian had felt daunting, impossible.
She drifts, almost floats, through the crowd, through the dances, on autopilot, and centering herself in this moment is just as impossible. The second and third glasses of champagne fizz going down and hiss angrily in her growling belly. Her dance partner makes some ridiculous joke about the ice sculpture on the buffet and Sarah puts her half-smile on, the one that doesn't quite reach her eyes.
Chuck always noticed that.
The realization is like a fist to the heart, and her step falters for a second. Her partner does notice that. "Are you all right?"
"Fine," she smiles. "Never better. And I've never met anyone so fascinated by ice sculptures."
He grins. "I've never met someone so... fascinating."
He's found someone else just as fascinating, she notices, when she leaves half an hour later, a microdot concealed in a matchbook in her miniscule handbag. It makes her feel rather like a ghost, even more like a ghost than she does, startled to find flesh on her bones when she gasps herself to wakefulness every morning.
She will live again. Maybe that's the one thing she owes him that she can still pay back.
--
In the cab, on the way back, Sarah's phone pings with a message, and still in her long gloves she listens. The third-shift programmer sent out an alert when the system showed a breach, but it's gone now, and she doesn't have to go back to the office. Sarah tilts her head back, crushing the elaborate arrangement of curls cascading down her back, and the reflections of the streetlights drift over her eyes. Her bones ache and the champagne is swelling in her head, in a glorious warm cloud.
The flashes come to her at entirely inconvenient times, these brief snatches of frayed memory. Chuck at her door with a veggie pizza, no olives. Her longing for him swells through her chest, burning through her heart, bringing tears to her eyes, and she carefully blinks up into the night sky, the haloed lights fracturing in her blurred vision.
She is alone in the elevator, alone in the hall. In other circumstances she'd be planning a cover date, she'd be on a mission, but there's no one to see her, her steps slowing and slowing, as she fishes her keys out of her purse and fits them into the lock, careful in her white gloves.
She knows there's someone in the room as soon as she opens the door, but when she sees him, all she can think is that too much champagne on an empty stomach might have been the worst mistake she's ever made.
"Sarah," Chuck says, pushing himself out of the sole armchair. "Oh my God."
"Chuck?" she bleats out, her voice cracking, and her knees go momentarily weak before she grabs the doorframe to recover. "How— you—"
"I think they brought me back. They told me no one was looking for me, and I guess they were right—"
"We saw you—" She is shaking. "The car exploded—"
"It wasn't— I wasn't—"
He's talking and she keeps playing it over and over in her head, and he doesn't look like he does in her dreams, he doesn't look untouched. He looks hollow, feverish, bright.
He looks real.
She pitches forward and he catches her, wincing as her weight falls on his arm.
"You can't— You aren't..."
He wraps his arms around her and his lips brush her temple and she is sobbing, the weight of her grief gently pulling free. "I dream about this every night."
"I do too," he murmurs, and she's swaying on her feet, in some grotesque parody of a dance, her arms up around his shoulders. "Every day I prayed you'd find me."
"Oh, Chuck."
He smiles; she can hear it in his voice. "Guess now Casey might finally be proud of me, huh."
"Coming back from the dead can do that." She puts her face against his neck. "Look, I know this is just a dream—"
"It isn't, Sarah."
She smiles, anyway. "Just dance with me, all right? Before I wake up."
He gives up and smiles back at her. "You mean before I do."
His hands slide down and his arms wrap around her slender waist, and he's too solid to be a hallucination, his smell is too familiar to make him anything less than real. She tells herself sternly that if he's still here in the morning, she'll believe it.
They sway together, gently, to some imagined melody. "Before I change my mind, before the champagne wears off... I have to tell you this. I love you. I loved you the day after we met."
"And I loved you from the first moment I set eyes on you, Sarah. As though you didn't know."
"We have to tell Ellie. And Beckman. We have to tell them you're alive."
"Tomorrow." His lips brush her temple again. "For tonight it's just us."
Her lips touch the pulse beating in his throat and in that second, her heart starts beating again.