A/N1 This story continues canon, but shifts the dates of canon back, so that the five years of the canon are 2003-2008 (and all the other, relative dates have shifted too). This story is set in the here and now, 2018. Chuck and Sarah (in the first years of their 40s) and their son, Rider (8), are out: out of spying, even out of Burbank. And then something happens…

...of course.

Don't own Chuck.

Too Old For This

Chapter One

Greylag Gone

Sarah let the damp, slickened binoculars fall to her chest, their weight pulling the strap against her sweaty, irritated neck. Mosquitoes were swarming around her but she forced herself to ignore them, to ignore their teasing, incessant buzzing, their constant, pinprick bites. She glanced to her side, seeing the bites on Casey's face, and measuring the intensity of his concentration as he peered through his binoculars and ignored the mosquitoes she could see swilling on the backs of his hands and his cheeks.

Doing for him what she would not do for herself, she waved her hand at the insects, forcing them all back into the live cloud of their kin that encircled her and Casey. As she did it, she thought involuntarily of watching The African Queen recently with Chuck, of that scene on the riverbank, the sudden attack of swarming insects...

Casey pulled the binoculars away from his face for just a second, blinking at her in thanks, for the thought, anyway. She could read the further thought in his eyes; she was thinking it too: We are too old for this. Sarah nodded a tight you're-welcome, knowing that her face was as blotched with bites as Casey's. They were both exhausted.

She had seen Casey for the first time in about a year two days ago. But the chain of events that brought them here, here to this soaking, fetid jungle, began about a week before.

ooOoo

She and Chuck and their eight-year-old son, Rider, had been living quietly in the foothills of a mountain range in Montana for two years.

They had run Carmichael Industries for years and had been wildly successful. However, their work and their life in LA had started to seem too demanding, too stressful. At almost the same time she and Chuck had exactly the same idea: to sell the business and find someplace else to live. A place not quite off-the-grid, but on the outskirts of it, a place where on-the-grid met off-the-grid. They wanted to be able to concentrate on each other and on their son. Their married life had been good, richly rewarding, but clients and cases kept them busy, laboring under a weight of responsibility that had itself become an exhausting encumbrance, too heavy.

Sarah had marched into Chuck's office one day and told him she was tired of saving the world, as they had when they were Team Bartowski, and tired of saving the virtual world, as they had been doing as Carmichael Industries. It was time for someone else to do the saving. It was time for her and Chuck and Rider to just live in the world. Maybe to be among the ones who were being saved. She wanted to live and learn and love with Chuck; that's what she had always wanted. There was still so much of that to do. She wanted to raise and know and enjoy her son, spend time with him before his boyhood was gone. She wanted to be with the family she had always wanted, and now had, but too often had to give less than her absolute best because of the demands of Carmichael Industries.

Chuck had given her a look of total agreement, a huge smile, and that very day they had started taking steps to sell the business and to find a new place, and a slower, better way, to live. They had found it. They were close enough to Bozeman for family and friends to fly in for visits or to for them to fly to visit others, but far enough away to feel most of the time as though it was just the three of them beneath an infinite, musing blue sky.

They had built a beautiful home, large and airy, with massive windows facing the mountains. Sarah had a garden and a separate dojo. Horses. She ran the mountain paths. Chuck had a lab and a video game room. He coded when he wanted, played games when he wanted. Rider divided his time (when not in school) between accompanying his mom on her outdoor jaunts, and coding or playing with his dad indoors. But they all camped, rafted and hiked together. It had all been and had remained idyllic.

The only blot on their happiness was Sarah's inability to get pregnant again. Sarah knew she was getting older and was perhaps past the age when it made good sense to be trying, but when she found herself no longer worrying about bad-guy-ery, she started thinking baby-ly. Chuck was all for it, and they had enjoyed themselves immensely trying to get pregnant, 'practicing' together like in the months leading to her pregnancy with Rider. But it hadn't happened; it now looked like it wouldn't. Rider would be an only child. They were all making their peace with that. Their life had rounded into an otherwise pleasing, comfortable shape.

ooOoo

But a couple of weeks ago, something happened, something happened to Chuck, something that seemed like nothing, or next-to-nothing, at the time.

Sarah had walked down the long driveway to get the mail, coming back with the expected pile of circulars and junk mail, and a letter from her sister, Molly. She put the circulars and junk mail down on the large oak kitchen table, next to Chuck. He always liked to look at it before he threw it away. He often found the ads amusing.

Chuck was seated next to Rider, reading to him from his one of Rider's namesake's novels, She. Chuck and Rider had read the H. Rider Haggard novel together several times, but they both loved it. Sarah had never exactly joined in, but she had overheard them so often she knew the novel almost as well as they did, and though she never admitted it, she loved the novel too.

She opened the letter from Molly and began to read about Molly's most recent teenage turmoil-her sister Sarah was her confidant-as she heard Chuck finish a chapter and shut the book. Rider got up, hugged his dad, and ran outside, hoping to shoot some hoops in the waning daylight. Chuck told him he'd be out in a second. Chuck pushed the novel toward the center of the table and drew the pile of junk mail toward him, automatically picking up on of the circulars. Sarah happened to look up as he did, and she saw him jolt slightly, his eyes go out-of-focus, and then she saw him blink several times in quick succession, shaking his head.

"Chuck? Chuck! My God, Chuck...did you flash?" Sarah had not even thought that word in a long time, much less said it aloud.

Chuck wheeled to her and smiled. "No, sweetheart, no, I couldn't have. I don't have the Intersect anymore. How could I flash? No, it's...it's just...a headache coming on. Must be. Too much reading here without enough light. I guess I may have to give in and buy those reading glasses after all. Too much coding, too many computer screens. If nothing else, I should probably get them for UV protection." He shook his head again gently as if to clear it.

He got up and went to the fridge, reaching into a basket on top of it and taking out a large container of aspirin. He dumped a couple into one hand, put the container down, then used the other to get a glass from the cupboard. He sat the glass on the counter, turned on the water, and then filled it. He tossed the aspirin into his mouth and washed them down. He smiled at her and she smiled back, feeling something in her gut that had tightened slowly loosen. He grabbed the circular, balled it up, dropped it in the trash. He went out to join Rider. She went back to Molly's letter. As she read, she half-listened to the sound of dribbling and playful trash talk from outside.

ooOoo

The next morning, Chuck was gone.

Sarah woke up with cold feet. They were her first indicator that something was wrong. She waited, though. Sometimes Chuck would wake ahead of her, and if he did, he always brought her the steaming, black coffee she coveted in the morning, then snuggled against her, his feet tangled with hers, while she sipped from her cup.

But he never came with coffee. He never came at all. Sarah began to feel the cold from her feet creeping up into her gut. Her spy instincts, while not exactly rusty, were not all they had been in her Enforcer days. But they were starting to tingle in an unpleasant way. She got up and walked through the house, stopping at Rider's room and opening the door. He was asleep, his curls going this way and that on his pillow. He was Chuck all over again, except for his eyes, like Sarah's, much the same blue as the Montana sky at the end of a sunny day. She closed the door and went on to the kitchen. No Chuck. No coffee. No sign of her husband.

She went to the sliding doors off the living room and looked out on the deck. Empty except for the grill and the furniture. Her heart was thumping noticeably. She swallowed hard.

Back in the kitchen, she noticed that Chuck's phone and charger were gone. His black high-top Chuck's, normally on a mat by the door, were gone too The thumping grew violent. Chuck's shoulder bag was not on the rack by the door. She went into his office. His laptop was gone, a blank spot where it normally sat visible immediately to Sarah.

She headed back to the bedroom. Her phone was on the nightstand. She grabbed it and punched Chuck's name. There were a couple of rings and then it rolled to his voicemail. She hung up. She sent him a text.

Where are you, Chuck? Did I forget an appointment?

She kept the phone in her hand and went through the house again, but this time to the garage. Her Porsche was there, as was the Bronco Chuck had inherited from Stephen long ago and somehow managed to keep running all these years.

At this point, the thumping in her chest was thunderous. She was beginning to feel shaky.

Chuck was gone. No response to the text.

The moment with the circular suddenly came back into her mind. Chuck had flashed. He had. But he did not have the Intersect. Beckman and the NSA Intersect team had removed it years ago, not long after that magical kiss on the beach (Oh! That kiss!), when Sarah's memories had welled up from the darkness to meet that kiss and she knew her husband, and herself, again.

But how was a flash possible? She ran to the kitchen and dug through the trash can, not even pausing to register that she was digging in refuse. The balled up circular was still there. She yanked it out of the trash. Looking at it, she could see nothing special, out-of-place, sinister. It was an ad for a national pizza chain.

She called her neighbor, Gina, who lived down the road, and asked her if she could watch Rider for the day. Gina, dotingly fond of Rider, and often alone now that her husband had died a year or so ago, was happy, eager even, to come over. Sarah ran down the hall to her room. She pressed a lock mechanism then pulled the drawer out of her nightstand and turned it over. She carefully lifted away the rectangle of wood that was the apparent bottom; a small pistol was anchored in the false bottom. She grabbed it. She got her purse and dropped the pistol into it, along with the balled-up circular. She quickly got dressed.

By the time she was ready to go, Gina had arrived. Sarah let her in and gave her a hug, but didn't explain what was going on. Although Gina knew nothing about the Bartowski's past, she was an intuitive woman, the widow of a state patrolman, and she had gotten a strong impression over the last couple of years that Chuck and Sarah were...not unacquainted with dangers.

"Rider's still asleep." Sarah looked at her watch. "Probably will be for another hour or so, since it's Saturday. Breakfast stuff is in the fridge. I should be back by lunch...not long after, anyway."

Gina nodded and went into the kitchen. She started making coffee. She spoke up, offered to make enough for Sarah, but Sarah, entering the kitchen, shook her head, tight-lipped. Gina turned, touched Sarah's arm. "Are you ok?"

Sarah shook her head. "I don't know what's happening, Gina. Chuck's not here, but he should be. I'm going to look for him. Don't let on to Rider. But do me a favor, once he goes outside to play, put some things in a backpack for him-clothes for a few days. We may have to leave."

Sarah finished talking to Gina and then went through the front door. Gina's brown Ford pickup was in front of the house. Sarah could see it's tire tracks leading to where it was sitting. But there was another set of tire tracks visible in pebbly, sandy soil. Sarah could not tell make out details of the tire tread or anything, but she did see something that made her stop breathing. On the edge of the half-circle driveway, in a spot with no pebbles and only dirt, was the clear imprint of a Chuck, the tread of one of Chuck's shoes. He'd gotten into a car.

Sarah was covered in a cold sweat. She ran around to the garage and got into her Porsche. She backed out and then went tearing down the road, obscured by her own trailing cloud of dust. She was going to find her husband.

ooOoo

When she got the Porsche off the backroads and on the highway to Bozeman, she punched the button on the dash to make a call. Carina.

Carina had moved up the food chain at the DEA. She was now running covert ops for the Agency, and not often, almost never, in fact, in the field herself. That was good, because Carina's life had done a complete one-eighty about five years ago.

She met a man, the man, Bryan. He had been married before, but his wife had died while their son was still a baby. Bryan was a banker and had been an asset of Carina's on a drug-money laundering op in Miami. He was no part of the criminal activity, under no suspicion; he just had access to people and to programs that the DEA needed in the investigation.

Somehow, Carina had allowed herself to not only start sleeping with Bryan (not a surprise) but, during downtime in the op, to agree to meet his little boy, Simon. The father and son struck a deep chord in Carina, one Carina had no idea that she had. Carina demanded a promotion and got it, got out of the field, and a few months later, she was married, a wife and mother. Bryan's work allowed him to travel, so he and Simon were often in DC during the school year, for holidays and breaks. Carina flew to Miami regularly, and she practically spent her summers there. The three of them were doing well, even with the scattered living arrangements. Sarah still had a hard time believing it. Carina-married, a mom! And it wasn't that she was both, but she was good at it. Bryan and Simon adored her and she was wholeheartedly devoted to them.

"Blondie!" Carina picked up the phone. "Knew I'd hear from you sooner or later when you tired of running with the Nerd Herd up there on the savanna. You're a predator, not prey." Even panicky as she was, Sarah snorted. Carina would never be completely domesticated, completely housebroken.

"Hey, Carina. Look, I have a problem. At least, I think I do...a big one."

"Shoot." All the levity was gone from Carina's tone.

"Chuck's missing."

"He...he left you, Blondie? That can't be. If ever there were two people who mated for life...Hell, you two are worse than a pair of Greylag geese…"

"No, Carina, no. Chuck left. But not me. Let me explain. There's not much to go on." She told Carina about the possible flash, about Chuck taking his computer and apparently getting picked up in front of the house sometime in the night or very early morning.

Carina was quiet but Sarah knew she was still on the line. Finally, she spoke: "I thought Beckman got you two clear, that the files, the records, of you two-three, counting Casey-had been buried. You were out of the life. You were out, right?"

"Yes, Carina. Well out. We haven't even done anything cybersecurity-related in a couple of years. And I don't think we did anything as Carmichael Industries likely to put Chuck in danger…"

"So you think he is in danger?"

Sarah huffed, frustration and ache mixed together. "Greylag geese, remember. Chuck wouldn't just leave me with no word, not even to do something really important. No. There's something going on, Carina. And it is connected with that circular."

"Then get it to Beckman. And, Sarah, I can be free at a moment's notice. I love Chuckles too...in a more vertical way than you, but I am at your disposal."

"Ok. I just needed to say all that out loud to someone, before I call Beckman. I hate to bother her, given things with Roan…"

"Yeah, I saw them the other day. But the cancer's in remission. They both were hopeful. Beckman was even talking about finally retiring…As she said, 'How many stars are enough?' Well, keep me updated, Blondie."

"Bye, Carina."

Sarah was nearing Bozeman. She pulled off on a dirt road and headed back into the country. There was an NSA safe house there. Beckman had insisted that there be one near them, just in case. In the basement, hidden away, was a room of cutting-edge computer equipment, weapons and various other implements of the spy trade. Sarah had hoped never to visit. But now she was. She pulled out her phone and dialed Chuck again, but as she feared, it rolled to voicemail. She let the silly message play, just to hear his voice.

"You've reached Chuck Bartowski, and likely by mistake. No doubt, you are actually trying to reach my utterly amazing wife or our brilliant, completely adorable son. I am at your service, happy to convey a message to either. If on the off-chance that you do want to talk to me, leave a message and I will get back to you. Promise. Buh-bye. Ugh! I mean...ahem...bye! Bye. Buh-bye. Oh, dammit…"

Her eyes got teary. She wiped them just as the safe house came into view.

A/N2 This will likely be around 10-12 chapters. Some adventure-related tension ahead, but no angst on tap. Some humor, although not much in this chapter.

Lemme know whatya think...