Chuck vs. the Beautiful Letdown Pt. II

Author's Note: This is a complicated one to explain, so bear with me. This story continues on as a sequel to Chuck vs. the Beautiful Letdown, Chuck in a Moment, and Thanks for the Memories. In this AU, sometime after the events of those stories, certain elements of Chuck Season 5 took place, including the Intersecting of Sarah Walker and the wiping of her mind. This story assumes that she has largely recovered, but that there are certain seemingly minor elements of her memory that were irrevocably changed.
Additionally, this AU takes place concurrently within, shall we say, a larger "cinematic universe" that features thrilling heroics and alien gods. Bear that in mind – it's going to be a pretty important part of this story.
On an unrelated note, for those of you looking for completion of outstanding stories, bear with me… I'm working on it. This one happened to come about due to the combination of a certain new movie and a certain band, both of which I saw within a five day span at the beginning of April.

Chapter 1 – The Beautiful Letdown

2:01 A.M., Pacific Daylight Time
Thursday, April 3
rd, 2014
Newport Beach, California

Night had long since fallen over Newport Beach. A sort of quiet covered the city – well, as quiet as any community in Orange County ever really gets.

In the white house on the southern end of Lido Isle, where Via Lido switches between "Nord" and "Soud", a family slept soundly – the husband, a successful software developer and intelligence contractor; the wife, a semi-retired intelligence operative; and their three and a half year old twins.

At any rate, the husband and the twins slept soundly.

The wife was wracked by horrible dreams – not-quite memories trying to piece themselves together in her mind. A horrible trauma two years earlier, brought on by a malfunctioning piece of software introduced into her head, in conjunction with a series of stimuli that acted as a sort of computer virus, had wiped clean – or, as it eventually turned out, very deeply suppressed – nearly five years' worth of memories. About ninety-nine percent of her memories had been fully restored, but fully two weeks prior to the incident were "unrecoverable".

"They're stuck in a bad sector," she joked with her husband, although she could always tell that even that bit of computer parlance didn't lessen his guilt about it. He would always feel responsible, for in his mind, it was his fault that she had had to put herself in position to be "wiped" in the first place.

But the memories weren't fully gone. For more than two years, they were what manifested themselves in her nightmares – nightmares that left her shaking, that left her blood pressure through the roof, that caused her to wake up in a cold sweat, nearly screaming but unable to remember anything that occurred.

And they didn't come every night. No, they came seemingly at random. There was neither rhyme nor reason to the nightmares – not a certain time of the month, not a culinary trigger, not an environmental trigger.

She had sought counseling, and had been told that neither psychiatric care nor medication would end her struggles. "They will end on their own, in time," she was told, "but you'll just have to wait it out."

To be sure, the nightmares had gotten less frequent, but they had, in recent weeks, grown far more intense, and after she awoke, though particular memories did not remain, images did. Images not of her own history, but images that came from outside – images that must have been introduced via the defective software, and deeply implanted by the "worm" that the corrupt CIA agent had triggered.

But she soldiered on. She had served her country well, and now had a husband and children to love and care for. Nothing implanted in her brain would ever stop her from being the best mother and wife that she could be.


What Sarah Walker didn't know was that the images that were left behind were, indeed, intentionally introduced into her mind by Nicholas Quinn.

What Sarah Walker didn't know was that those images were intended to, when activated, turn her into a sort of Manchurian candidate.

What Sarah Walker didn't know was that every time she had one of those dreams, a black fishing boat with a logo painted on it – a logo that she, like most Americans, recognized and trusted – had been moored at the pier three houses down from hers.

And when she awoke from her nightmare in the wee hours of the morning of April 3rd, Sarah Walker didn't know that that boat had just sent its final burst of sound waves, activating the last sequence in her mind.


6:36 A.M., PDT

As the sun began to rise over the California coast, a black-clad operative seated below the deck of the black boat noted motion on one of his monitors. "Asset is awake," he stated, causing his colleague to sit up and take notice.

"Sequence complete?" the second operative asked.

The first nodded. "Affirmative," he replied. "Sequence is complete and ready for activation."

The second turned and picked up a bulky satellite phone handset. As he pressed #7, the phone dialed a pre-programmed number.

An odd series of rings, chirps, and whistles emanated from the phone's speaker, and then a mechanical voice sounded. "REPORT."

"Ascending encrypt. Alpha eight one eight, Romeo seven one four, Delta five six two, Yankee three one zero, Hotel two one three," the operative said.

"AFFIRMATIVE. AWAIT INSTRUCTIONS."

The second operative disconnected the call and put the phone back down. "Now what?" asked the first.

"Now we wait."


7:15 A.M., PDT

"Chuck, the kids are gonna be late for preschool!"

Chuck Bartowski smiled and shook his head. He loved his wife. He loved everything about her. He loved her personality, her smile, her deadly aim with a Colt M1911 handgun. He especially loved the fact that she took preschool WAY too seriously.

Quite frankly, if John and Lisa were a few minutes late for preschool that particular morning, then so be it. They had, the night before, after he had finished reading them Goodnight Moon, VERY politely asked if they could have chocolate chip waffles in the morning. And who was Chuck to say "no" to such a polite request from two incredibly adorable children such as his pair of three year olds?

"Don't listen to your mother, kids," he whispered as he opened the steaming waffle iron. "You take all the time you need to eat your waffles."

"Charles Irving Bartowski, I heard that!"

Chuck whirled around to see Sarah standing in the kitchen doorway, trying – and utterly failing – to put a stern look on her face. Even as he looked back at her, his face the picture of innocence, a waffle-bearing fork in his left hand, he could see the smile threatening to crack the no-nonsense visage she was trying so desperately to put forth.

"Ooooh, Daddy's in trouble!" Lisa piped up. "Mommy said ALL his name!"

Not even the tough-as-nails "Operative" of CIA legend was able to resist her tow-headed three year old daughter's charm. Stifling a laugh, she covered her unstoppable smile with her hand. "Yes, Lisa, Daddy's in big trouble."

"Oh, no!" Chuck said, a mock look of horror coming over his face. "Whatever shall Daddy do?" Depositing the first waffle in front of Lisa and returning to the waffle iron to retrieve John's, he looked at Sarah and waggled his eyebrows. "I think Mommy will have to punish me!"

Sarah crossed her arms and glared at her husband. "Chuck!" she scolded him. "Not in front of the kids!"

Chuck laughed. "Come on, babe, they don't know what I'm talking about," he replied, setting John's waffle down in front of him. "Now give me a minute, kids, and let me get the syr-"

"Daddy?"

Chuck stopped in his tracks and looked down at John, who had the look of intense concentration on his face that only toddlers can pull off. "Yes, Johnny?"

"Does pun… puns… puni…"

"Punish," Lisa finished for him, with the unique note of exasperation in her voice that, again, is common only among toddlers.

"Does that mean you and Mommy are going to have playtime?"

Chuck's eyes went wide and his face turned bright red as he realized that, indeed, his children – or, at least, his son – had figured out his not-so-subtle dirty "code" that he used with Sarah, even if they didn't understand all the ramifications. Meanwhile, Sarah had actually turned and walked out of the room so that she wouldn't double over in laughter at what would be a truly inappropriate moment.

"Um… well… you see, John… ummm…"


The satellite phone rang.

The second operative picked it up. "Sand Station."

"Descending encrypt. Golf nine four nine, November nine zero nine, India eight zero five, Romeo seven six zero."

"Confirmed."

He disconnected once more. "That's an execute order," he told his colleague. "Let's go."


Sarah had beaten a hasty retreat from the kitchen, moving to the living room to further muffle her laughter. She absolutely did not want her kids to think that she was encouraging them to talk about "playtime", because the last thing she wanted was to have to explain to the preschool's principal why exactly her children were so enthusiastically talking about it.

As she sat on the couch, Sarah heard Chuck trying – unsuccessfully, it seemed – to explain to his children that they needed to forget everything that had just happened and eat their waffles. "After all," she heard him say, "you wouldn't want your waffles to get cold, would you?"

"But Daddy, what about that time you let your pancakes get cold so that you could help Mommy wake up?"

Sarah's eyes widened. She didn't realize that her kids were old enough to retain that kind of knowledge, especially since the "wake up" in question had been on Mother's Day the year before. But then, of course, her children were also Chuck Bartowski's children, and if their brains were anything like his –

God help me if I say one wrong thing while they're teenagers, she realized, the sudden horror of that thought rushing through her mind. She made a note to be VERY careful about what she said around them in the future.

As Lisa and John continued eating their waffles in the other room, Sarah busied herself with making sure their backpacks were ready for preschool – John's favorite Richard Scarry book and his blanket in his, Lisa's plush Ironman doll and her pillow in hers. Noticing that Tony Stark had apparently taken a head-first dip in a jar of peanut butter, Sarah pulled the doll out and began wiping off as much of it as she could, and had almost gotten him cleaned up when the doorbell rang.

Setting Ironman down next to the backpack, she crossed to the front door, and opened it to see two men standing in front of her. "Sarah Walker?" one of them asked.

"Yes, that's me."

"I'm Agent Foote," he said, holding up an identification card. "Could you tell me if you know this man?"

He held up a picture in front of Sarah. She looked at it, then shook her head. "No, I'm sorry, but I-"

And it was as if the world stopped. All sound seemed to go dead. Everything but the picture went blurry. Sarah felt like her mind was being sucked out through her eyeballs –

It all stopped. Sarah looked at the two men, then turned around, heading back toward the kitchen. As she neared the threshold of the kitchen door, she reached behind her back and withdrew her Colt M1911 from its familiar resting place in the waistband of her pants.

"Mommy?" a voice asked as she lifted the gun and aimed it at the man standing on the other side of the kitchen. "Mommy, why are you pointing that at Daddy?"

As the words left the little girl's mouth, she saw the man's body stiffen. His hand moved away from the waffle iron, toward the microwave –

SILENT ALARM, she thought. "Don't," she said mildly. "Turn around."

"Mommy!" the little girl said again, alarm now present in her voice. "Mommy, what are you doing?"

The man turned around slowly to face her. "Sarah," he said, his face betraying the shock that he hid from his voice as he saw the gun pointed at him, "put the gun down."

She wavered. Hearing him say her name set off a sort of battle inside her mind. She knew her orders, but at the same time, she could hear a voice screaming inside her head, NO! CHUCK! NO, DON'T YOU DARE HURT HIM! NO!

"Sarah, everything's going to be okay," the man – Chuck? – said, approaching her slowly. "Look, the kids are here… nothing's happened. I love you. You love me."

YES, YES I DO LOVE YOU! OH, GOD, NO, THIS CAN'T BE HAPPEN-

SHUT UP.

"Be quiet," she ordered him.

He shook his head. "You don't want to do this," he said. "Sarah, your kids are here. They're looking right at you."

I SWEAR TO GOD, CHUCK, I WON'T HURT THEM! I PROMISE YOU THAT I-

She leveled the gun. "Hail Hydra."

The gunshot sounded like an exploding bomb.


with

YVONNE STRAHOVSKI as Sarah Walker
and ZACHARY LEVI as Chuck Bartowski