Casey sat leaning forward in his seat, unable to pull his face out of the grimace of regret it had fallen into. He watched the screen receiving the feeds from the cameras in Chuck's room intently. Chuck had finished angrily playing a one man shooter video game and had now taken to pacing back and forth, occasionally running his hands through his hair in exasperation.

Casey tried to convince himself that he did not regret the decision he made regarding Chuck, but to no avail. He hated regrets; he didn't believe in dwelling on something that would never change, no matter how much he wanted it to. Besides, he knew that he absolutely could not become involved with Chuck. It was simply too dangerous and Casey outright refused to be the one to put Chuck in danger, or subject him to the possibility of getting hurt.

(And, Casey had to remind himself, he wasn't the kid's handler anymore. Casey had grown to like the idea of protecting Chuck. He had liked knowing that Chuck had to rely on him and trust him completely.)

But Chuck was hurting now, wasn't he? Didn't that mean that Casey should go over to "save" him? He wasn't clear on the rules about helping a teammate when he was the one responsible for hurting them (emotionally, that is).

Casey growled in frustration and dropped his head into his hands, unable to remember a time he had felt so helpless. He glanced up at the screen from between his fingers and noticed Chuck sitting in an identical position at the edge of his bed. He wanted to smile at the irony, but his face wouldn't seem to respond. As he watched Chuck stand up and begin to prepare for bed, his eyes became unfocused, and soon he was lost in thought, grasping blindly for a solution, but finding nothing.

He couldn't be with Chuck- he had already ruled that out- but he also couldn't pretend that nothing had happened. Well, that wasn't entirely true. Casey would be able to pretend that nothing had happened. Hell, he made his living off of pretending. But Chuck probably wouldn't be able to hide the fact that something had changed. He was stuck. There was no foreseeable way out.

"What was I thinking?" Casey thought.

He growled in frustration again, swiping his hand out aggressively, sending his remote flying across the room and plowing into a wall. It broke on impact, bits of plastic shattering in all directions and the batteries dropping to the floor.

"Fantastic," he grumbled as he stood and walked over to clean up the pieces of the now useless remote.

He threw away the shards and made his way back to the couch. He sat down and looked up at the screen as his butt hit the couch, only to shoot up onto his feet again.

Chuck was gone.

Casey repressed the panic growing in his chest, trying not to assume the worst. He cursed himself as he realized that he had just obliterated the only remote he had to the spy-cam receiver, so he couldn't switch to view the other bugged rooms to look for Chuck. Casey picked up the GPS tracking device corresponding to Chuck's watch. It showed his position as being tucked safely in his room. He must have taken the watch off while preparing for bed.

"Damn it!" Casey hissed under his breath as he tucked his knife and gun into their respective holsters. He ran silently to his door and swung it open, pulling out his car keys as he went, realizing with a cold terror in his heart that he now had no way of knowing where Chuck had gone.

There you go! Tell me what you think! More to come, and I promise, it's gonna get juicy.

(Ok, so I just realized how unrealistic it is that the spy-cam receiver thing only changes feeds by remote and doesn't have a button on it, but whatever. This is my story and it goes how I want it to! lol)

DISCLAIMER:

I do not own Chuck, nor do I profit from using its characters.