A/N1 More context. But things to come start to take shape; the story moves ahead.

Thanks for the reviews and PMs! Please keep them coming.

Extra A/N at the end of the chapter.

Don't own Chuck.

Sarah vs. Omaha

CHAPTER TWO

The Anatomy of Melancholy

"[T]hou canst not think worse of me than I do of myself."

― Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy

Chuck was worried, nervous. Frazzled. He'd spent his shift at the Buy More looking out the front, waiting for Sarah to show up for work. She never did. He had thought about calling Casey, but it was likely that Casey would just make fun of him or make him even more frazzled.

Omaha. She had not gone. She wouldn't go. Bryce. She had not chosen him. She wouldn't choose him.

Omaha and Bryce.

He had been unable to think of anything else. Those two words repeated themselves in his head until they were brute sounds against his mind's ear, meaningless except for their capacity to make ice form in the pit of his stomach.

When he got off, he went straight back to the apartment and straight back to his room. He dialed Sarah's number. Rings but no answer. He did not want to leave another voice message. He had already humiliated himself enough in the previous six. Ok, thirteen. Ok, fifteen.

He pulled his curtains shut and got in bed. He needed some dark and quiet. He needed to pull himself together. He closed his eyes only to see her. The memory of her face somehow quieted him and made him miserable all at once.

Omaha and Bryce.

He was not sure he could live through another Jill again. God, no.

Chuck and Jill went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water
Chuck fell down and broke his crown...

...And Jill and Bryce left Chuck there to bleed out

Stop. Fracturing nursery rhymes is not helping. It had been bad with Jill. He had not been with Sarah long. Actually, he had never really been with Sarah. Cover. Cover. Not real. But short and fake, he knew: if she was gone, it was going to be worse than it was with Jill. Lifetime plan but no font bad.

But Sarah had not gone. She would not go.

Omaha and Bryce.

Chuck had been tense all day, wound round and round like the rubber-band engine of a toy plane. And so, in the cool dark of his room, it all caught up with him; he suddenly unwound. Mercifully, he slipped into sleep.

ooOoo

They got to the room, Sarah still pulling her bag. Bryce had chatted at her in the car, but she had not responded much. He was not talking about the mission, so she let the words pass by her without really attending. She pretended to be looking out at the city. But she was trying to understand why he hands were still atremble. They would not stop. So she had balled them into fists again.

Sarah was familiar with numbness. It was a constant in her life. She could normally find her way to it, create it in herself. Retreat into unfeeling. She had started trying to create that each time Chuck had called her. But even though she let the phone ring, unanswered, the numbness would not come. Each ring was like the blare of an alarm clock, loud and insistent. Each ring hurt. She knew there were messages from him on the phone. And she knew she should have discarded the phone before she got on the plane. But she when she stopped by a trash can in the airport and pulled the phone out, she could not do it. She just stood there, phone in hand, the trash can waiting. And then her hands started to tremble. Or, then, she first noticed they were trembling. Now she wasn't sure which. But she needed to get the tremble under control. Bryce would notice, eventually, if he had not already noticed. And a spy with trembling hands was a liability.

She closed her eyes and tried to take a deep breath. But her chest was constricted, tight. She beckoned numbness, called it to her. It didn't answer.

ooOoo

Crash!

Chuck shot upright at the sound, the sound of something heavy tumbling to the floor. He whipped his head around, taking in his room, trying to locate the source.

"Goddamnit!"

Chuck located the source. Casey was sprawled on the floor of Chuck's room, face down. One leg was still in the Morgan Door, and Chuck could see that Casey's shoelace had caught on an uneven piece of the window frame. Chuck and Morgan...and Sarah all knew about it, knew to avoid it.

Chuck shook his head, started to grin. Wait! Casey used the Morgan Door? What was going on? Chuck watched Casey move his leg, freeing the lace. Chuck knew better than to help. After a minute, Casey stood. He looked at Chuck, daring him to react. Chuck thought about that experiment in science in junior high, the one where the class was able to get a boiled egg to squeeze through the neck of a coke bottle: that was Chuck's image of Casey coming through the Morgan door. He wished he had seen it. He fought back a smile.

Casey wasn't smiling. But it took Chuck a second to realize that it wasn't just Casey wounded dignity that powered the frown on his face. It was something else. Entirely.

And the chill returned to the pit of Chuck's stomach, full Antarctica. He knew. She was gone.

ooOoo

They'd gotten to the room. The hotel was low high-end, nicely appointed, new-ish, more than respectable. A restaurant and a couple of shops on the first floor were on the first floor, along with the expected lobby. Bryce led her to the elevator and they were lifted to the 11th floor. Bryce got out and, after a couple of turns in the hallway, he pulled a keycard from his wallet and swiped it in the lock. The little light turned from red to green. Bryce looked up at her as if to ask if she noticed that change. He opened the door and stepped aside so that Sarah could enter the room first.

The room was a suite. There was an outer room with a large tv, a couch and a couple of chairs and a minibar. Through that was the bedroom. Bryce had left the curtains in the bedroom open, and the low-angled sunlight of the afternoon filled it. It glowed the same dull gold as the wedding ring on her finger. Her chest tightened more. Bryce walked to the bed without speaking and sat down on the end of it. He crossed his legs and began to unlace one of the Chuck's. Sarah realized she was staring again, not a Bryce, but at those shoes.

Sarah but her bag almost on the head of the bed, the other end from Bryce. She started to unzip it. Her hands did not seem to want to work quite right, but eventually, she got the bag open. She grabbed her toiletries bag and went into the bathroom. She closed the door. And then, as silently as she could, she locked it. Predictably, the seat was up on the toilet. She lowered it and the lid and then sat down. She was staring at her hands, the ring on one of them, when water began to drip on them. It took Sarah a moment to notice, and then a moment more to notice the drops were tears.

She felt like she could not breathe. Each successive breath was more shallow than the preceding one. Her mind was racing, her heart thumping, her hands still trembling, and all the while she was slowly suffocating.

She pulled her phone out of her pocket and pulled up a picture, a contact photo. She looked at it. As she did, the panic slowly receded. Even the trembling eventually stopped. Looking at the...picture...his picture...Say the name, Sarah, just say it...Looking at Chuck's picture, helped. But it hurt too, caused an ache so real and deep that it seemed like the world itself ached too. Still, she could breathe again. She put the phone away.

There was a quiet knock on the door. "Hey, Sarah, are you ok? Can I get you something?"

She had forgotten Bryce. "Um, yeah, I don't want the coffee we can make in the room. Any chance you could get me one. I saw a coffee shop across the street, didn't I?"

"Yeah, you did. Remind me again, how do you take your coffee? What do you want? They'll deliver to our room."

"An Americano, black. Nothing else."

"Ok. I'll call now." Sarah got up, quietly unlocked the door, and walked back to her suitcase. She zipped it closed and began to roll it to the closet. As she went past the end of the bed, she saw Bryce's unlaced Chuck Taylors on the floor, one sitting upright, the other on its side. Sarah slowed as she passed and kicked them both beneath the bed. She could not bear to look at them.

ooOoo

Graham put the file down on his massive desk. Yes, she would do. She would do. He looked at the photo, not because he did not know what she looked like, but as preparation. He had to be ready. She would be in his office soon. No meeting with her was easy. She was a handful, a handful of razor blades.

She also hated Sarah Walker passionately. She judged that she ought to have had the position at Graham's side, so to speak, that Sarah had all these years. Certainly, she was deadly enough to have had it. Skilled enough. But she was...well, it was hard to say, really. She was...off. Walker could scare Graham, although he thought he had never let the fear show. But when she had scared him, on the rare occasions when she fought him about a mission or disagreed with him about the value of an outcome, he understood her, understood why she scared him, scared him then, there. Walker did not scare him all the time. But this woman...Juniper Thorne, June Thorn, she scared Graham all the time. Just sitting in his office, apparently chatting amicably: she scared him. Or maybe 'scared' really wasn't the best word. Or maybe it was. Maybe 'appalled'? Did she appall him? Maybe. Anyway, she would do. Bartowski was about to be handled.

Walker had convinced Graham that her non-seductive friendship approach with Bartowski was best, would produce the best results. And Graham would admit, the results had been good. That did not mean they could not be better. Bartowski was, at the end of the day, government property. It was time to push him, to see just how much they could get out of the Intersect, to find out what the Intersect's limits really were. And if that broke Bartowski, fine, it broke Bartowski. He was more trouble than he was worth. Graham secretly wished that Bartowski had run from Walker at the beginning so that she could have ended him. Oh, well, c'est la vie.

Graham had spent the morning on the phone, fighting back Beckman's immediate efforts to claim the Intersect wholly for the NSA. He had managed to get the status quo restored. He explained that Walker had been required for an urgent deep cover assignment, and that the CIA was in no way yielding their share in the Intersect. But Graham knew he needed to move quickly. Beckman would not stop pressing her advantage. He needed an agent on scene asap. Thorne would do.

Her orders would be simple: Do whatever it takes to get everything out of the Intersect. Graham would leave the parameters of 'whatever' and 'everything' open to Thorne's interpretation. Of course, he wouldn't say that explicitly. He just would supply no interpretation of the parameters to her. And if her interpretation caused...unfortunate results, Graham could blame her for misinterpreting him. After all, he was the Director of the CIA. She was a Special Agent with a...spotty record.

ooOoo

Casey finally said it. "She'd gone. Gone with Larkin." Bartowski's face had fallen before the words were spoken. He had figured it out. Casey swallowed the twinge of sympathy he felt. It would not do either of them any good to show it.

Chuck's gaze sank to the floor. They held those poses for a long time. Casey standing, arms crossed, watching Bartowski. Bartowski staring a hole in the floor. Casey waited him out. When he looked back up, his eyes were questions.

"Did she leave a note, tell you to say anything?"

"No, no note." Casey considered lying about whether she had said anything. She had not said anything, of course, but maybe he could give the kid something. But then Casey realized he had no idea what Walker might have said. It almost certainly would not have been "Happy Trails!", which was the first thing that leaped into Casey's mind. So he went on. "And, no, she didn't say anything. For what it's worth, I found out about it from Beckman. The skirt," Bartowski's eyes narrowed, "Walker...she just went. She talked to Beckman and Graham. She's going deep with Larkin." Shit! What the hell did I just say? Sometimes I think the only language I speak is Asshole. Bartowski's face collapsed in on itself. Casey could see him turning the phrase over in his head.

"Look numbnuts...I mean, look, kid, she's gone." Casey tried to soften his tone, with mixed results. "Neither of us can do anything about it. We just have to move on. I just heard that the CIA is sending a new handler. He or she arrives in a couple of days. I don't know how that will work. Until then, we need to get back to work. We have a new mission. Let's go over to my place. The briefing is in ten minutes."

Bartowski nodded as his head fell to his chest. Casey stood there for a bit before asking, "Are Ellie and Devon here?" Chuck shook his head. "No, they've gone out of town for a few days. Some kind of...romantic getaway." Those final two words seem to suck all the air out of Bartowski and his room, and Casey was relieved to leave it and leave the apartment. He got outside to the fountain before he realized Bartowski was not behind him. He did not go back for him. He would give the moron a minute to pull himself together.

ooOoo

Sarah had taken some aspirin. When the coffee arrived, she and Bryce sat down in the front room and he began to outline the mission. Sarah listened carefully. A New Orleans crime family, the Garlands, had ties to Fulcrum. The matriarch of the family, Gretta Garland, was likely a high-ranking member of Fulcrum. The family laundered money for Fulcrum and performed...other services.

The goal was to infiltrate the family and become close to Gretta Garland. She'd run the family with efficiently and remorselessly since her husband disappeared a decade ago.

Sarah studied her photograph. She was 50, but still a very handsome woman.

"She prides herself on her looks and on her prowess. Not just in business, but in bed. She is rumored to have a taste for younger men…" Bryce flashed the Farmer Montgomery, making clear much of the rest of the plan by just that expression.

"But won't it cause problems if you're married?"

Bryce shook his head. "No, it will help. Especially since I am married to you. Gretta likes to win, to prove that she more desirable than younger women."

"So, we infiltrate and then you run a seduction on her?"

Bryce nodded this time. "Right. Of course, I just need to get close to her, see if I can find a way to get information on Fulcrum, particularly on the Fulcrum brass, so to speak. Close. Close but no cigar." Bryce grinned at himself, at her. Her expression did not change; his expression sobered. "Close. Nothing more."

Bryce reached out. Sarah thought he wanted the photo. She held it out, but he took her hand in one of his, and took the photo and dropped it on the coffee table with the other.

"Close, Sarah, but nothing more. I want a new start, a new start with you." He was staring into her eyes the way he used to, back at the beginning of their relationship. She remembered the gravitational force of that stare.

She remembered it but she no longer felt it. Her only thought was that she wished she could turn his blue eyes brown.

She turned from Bryce and from that thought. She got up. Paced so as to loosen the words. "Look, Bryce. You are going to have to give me some time. A lot happened. I believed you went rogue. I believed you were dead. I grieved for you. I can't just re-set myself to months and months ago and act like all that never happened." All of that is true, but it is not the whole truth. Something else happened too.

Bryce pursed his lips. "Ok. I know we need to talk. But I just want you to understand. To understand what I am hoping for."

Nodding, Sarah made no other reply. She recalled Bryce and the woman at baggage claim. Had she misread that moment? Or did Bryce simply think that a new start would include his old habits? Or maybe her suspicions about those habits were wrong? She had not felt the old gravitational force, but maybe she would again, in time? After all, she'd just been in the bathroom, looking at...that picture. Maybe she ought to delete the all the photos from the phone, or to throw the phone away altogether? You know you should, Sarah. New Orleans was not Burbank. Burbank was gone. Or she was gone from Burbank.

Same difference. But everything was different now.

Bryce went back to the mission, evidently willing to let what had been said suffice for now. Sarah sat back down. She realized she heard a trumpet player, playing sad and low out on the street, blue notes.

ooOoo

Sarah was back in the bathroom. She had put on her least flattering pajamas and made sure all the buttons were buttoned. The last few buttons had been tricky, because the trembling in her hands had returned, as had the tightness in her chest.

"Trust me, Chuck."

She had said those words to him. At the moment she said them, she had not deliberated over them, although she said them sincerely, as sincerely as any words she had ever spoken. It had taken a few days for it to dawn on her that she had never asked anyone to trust her sincerely. She'd said the words to marks or assets, but never meant them. But she had meant them that night, and she still wanted to mean them. But she had left, left him. Things had gotten too...complicated.

"Trust me, Chuck."

Trust me to screw up your life then abandon you. Trust me to be a coward. Trust me never to have any business with a man like you. Trust me to destroy your trust. Trust me to destroy anything I...Just, trust me.

All spies are liars.

A scrap of song sprang unbidden to her mind, maybe a lingering effect of the trumpet she heard earlier. She must have heard in the song in Burbank. She could only recall the chorus. It had stung her when she heard it, and so stayed with her.

I got the password
I got persuasion
A proposition for invasion of your privacy
Give yourself away and find the fake in me

Sarah looked at the woman in the mirror, the blue-eyed, empty spy in the mirror. Chuck must hate her. Sarah hated her more.

A/N2 [Clears throat...] Tune in next time for Chapter 3, "Behooved and Behicked and Behulked". Nighttime reflections. Missions start in New Orleans and Burbank. June Thorne arrives.

A/N3 I posted my first words of fanfiction a year ago today. And here we are about 750K words later. (I guess it's fitting that I celebrate my anniversary with a melancholy chapter.) As many of you know, I have been writing for a long time and published a lot, but all of that has been philosophy or literary criticism or poetry. I hadn't tried fiction since high school, and back then I had written only short stories. (I guess they were ok: they got me hired by the local arts council to teach a fiction writing class. Boy, that class was weird. I was 17, writing stories for a collection of dark, existential tales I called "Diary of the October Man", but I was teaching mainly retired women who were hoping to publish romance short stories in magazines or to publish children's stories. Ahem!) Anyway, I put down my fiction-writing pen shortly thereafter and did not pick it up until the tail end of last summer.

I thank those of you who have stayed with me through so many words. I deeply appreciate those of you who have reviewed and especially those of you who have reviewed steadfastly. Many of you have become friends-you know who you are.

Thank you, again!

Zettel