Nancy, the title's just a play on the spy comedy Mr and Mrs Smith, as Chuck and Sarah are both in the game this time around, nuthin' clever ;)
Usual disclaimer, no rights to any characters portrayed etc.
Chuck hated the stupid cover job and his stupid cover life, because to keep up appearances he'd had to put in the application for the assistant manager's job, and Big Mike, the idiot manager, used that to throw a "test" at him, to get the Nerd Herd to fix the backlog of repairs within two days. He was halfway through explaining that to his team (and Patel) when Morgan came in and after wasting a few minutes crapping on about how he wanted to help but couldn't he got to the point, that Sarah was there (and made a sleazy comment about how good she was looking), which was all it took for Chuck to bolt. He was taken aback when Sarah told him to kiss her, because what Auntie D said about her keeping her distance if she actually had feelings for him came to mind, but when she said that they had to keep up appearances for the cover he breathed a sigh of relief, because that meant that she wasn't playing him, it was just part of the act that they were expected to put on. He was still intimidated by her beauty, so the best he could manage was a peck on the cheek, she seemed a little disappointed about that, then she grabbed his hand and dragged him off to the home theatre room with some comment about going somewhere more private, which had him wondering again until Casey turned up and it became clear that this was actually a briefing.
Sarah showed him some pictures and they asked him what he got from them, but he wasn't getting anything until Jeff came in to check up on them, using the excuse that he'd called dibs on the room for a nap (he really was a great actor), and a picture and reference to an art auction on the paper tucked under his arm provided the trigger to set off the information flash, when he mentioned the art auction and La Ciudad they suddenly looked interested. When Sarah and Casey had their briefing with the General and Graham about Chuck's flash, Auntie D had to hide her smile when she saw how protective Sarah was being of Chuck, saying that it was too dangerous for him to go on the mission, but unfortunately they did need him there to identify La Ciudad, so she had to make the call to say that he would have to go with them.
Over in Ellie and Chuck's apartment, Morgan had taken it upon himself to advise Ellie of Chuck's assistant manager application, so Ellie (and Chuck) had to put on a show about the dead end Buy More job being important, and the more crap Morgan came out with and the more he tried to make it all about himself, the more Ellie just wanted to stick a knife (or fork, or anything) through his eye, and Chuck was becoming inclined to agree with her. It would have been bad enough if it had stayed in the kitchen, with Morgan was making his pathetic attempts to convince Ellie that they should be spending time together mapping out Chuck's future, but as the argument went on and on it just got worse, they moved to the living room and Ellie tried to keep her responses terse in hope that Morgan would wind down and give up, but of course that just gave him a soapbox to keep lecturing from. Chuck just ignored them and sat there reading a magazine, waiting for Ellie to get tired of it and just throw Morgan out until, of course, Ellie's boyfriend decided to weigh in with his opinion of what Chuck had to do.
After all, the guy's role was basically nothing more than a walking sex toy for Ellie, and how the hell he could have managed to get through medical school was very suspicious, one thing was certain, there was no way that Chuck would ever let Devon work on him because "over my dead body" seemed as though it may well be a prophecy if that happened. As far as Chuck was concerned, he was happy that Ellie had someone who seemed to make her happy most of the time, but Devon was basically just a bigger, better looking version of Morgan, stupid, self centred, and coming out with a constant stream of sexual innuendo (when they were that subtle), so when he decreed that Chuck had to come with him for a weekend of white water rafting because he needed a near death experience to be a man, Chuck just stood up and went to bed. Of course, Ellie didn't miss the look he'd sent her way as he left and that made her feel guilty about bringing Devon into their lives, Chuck had to put up with Morgan for his cover life, because of their well known friendship history, but Ellie mainly kept Devon around because he was good in bed and she was still trying to make up for all the fun she'd missed out on while she spent her youth basically being a mother to Chuck. Yeah, Auntie D and Uncle Bry had done what they could to help them, but when it came down to it, it was Ellie who'd raised Chuck from the time he was six, pretty much by herself, and she was using Devon to make up for what she'd missed out on now.
Having to put up with morons like this telling either of them what to do drove both Ellie and Chuck around the bend, yes, Auntie D and Uncle Bry had pulled strings to make sure that they both got into the academic tracks for the careers that they wanted, but they'd EARNED the scholarships that paid their way through, and while they were doing that, Charles Carmichael and Eleanor Van Der Graaf (the cover identities that Chuck and Ellie had with the DCS) were working for the DIA, providing information analysis and strategic planning and what they provided was rated so important that they were constantly monitored with protective details watching over them from close by, and they'd had the NSA's best agent on call for additional protection for most of that time as well. The DCS unit that they were in was basically a think tank made up of the two of them (and sometimes their father) until Chuck added Jeff and Anna to the cyber-intelligence/security side that he handled. Ellie had been sixteen and Chuck had been thirteen when they were pulled into working for the DCS and decisions made from what they provided sometimes effected the nation. So, with all that, why were they expected to put up with being pushed around by idiots just to maintain the cover lives that some other idiots came up with?
For that matter, Mr Extreme Sports wouldn't have lasted through the training that both Chuck and Ellie had gone through when they were in their teens, very few women had completed the special ops training before Ellie went through it, and Uncle Bry had called in enough favours to get Chuck put through SEAL training on top of the same special ops training that Ellie did (Uncle Bry was worried that the only place that Chuck was comfortable and confident was when he was sitting at a keyboard, and he thought that it could help get Chuck out of his shell if he was accepted into and successfully completed training that few men could manage, as well as making him more able to look after himself and Ellie. He knew that Chuck would be able to handle it, because he'd seen what his mother was capable of in the years that they worked together, and could see that Chuck had gotten that from her. He also wanted Chuck to see what an incredible young man he was, to see what he, Diane and Ellie saw). Their godparents wanted to make sure that they were as safe as they could be, and as they'd both been agents (Uncle Bry still was), they'd thought that that level of training would be a good starting point for them to get the skill sets they needed to keep them safe. They knew that neither Ellie or Chuck would ever want to kill anyone or do most of the things that they were trained to do, and they didn't want them to be in that position, but they did want them to be able to do what they had to if and when the time came. Anyway, Mr Extreme Sports thought he was a man because he'd gone scuba diving, white water rafting and sky diving and looked down on wimpy Chuck, who had successfully completed the SEALs underwater demolitions courses, did numerous high speed extractions into a Chinook in exercises, and had more HALO and wingsuit jumps in his logbook than Devon had tame civilian ones, seeing Devon look down at Chuck angered Ellie more than it did Chuck, but it pissed him off too.
Casey was having a good time winding Chuck up about the mission and what he had to do, he knew that Chuck was a good man, he'd pulled into this as a kid (shit, he was still a kid when Casey was attached to his team a few years after he'd started) and he'd seen him do incredible things, but he was a brainiac and Casey just didn't understand him or his sense of humour, so when he had a chance to make him uncomfortable, well that was his way of having fun. The way Chuck panicked when he told him with a straight face that he'd have to be able to do the tango made his day. After his session with Casey, Chuck had to sit down with Sarah to organise his cover (though any excuse to sit down with Sarah and look at her worked for him), when Sarah asked him for a suggestion about a cover name, he instinctively told her the name that they'd used for his DCS identity, and then had to cover up with a story about how Carmichael was who he'd expected to be by now when he was at Stanford when she called him on it (all the while trying to remember just how well the name Charles Carmichael may be known in intelligence circles, but as far as he remembered, Auntie D nearly always identified him and Ellie as Agents Smith and Jones when she forwarded their reports to other areas, so they should be safe, that didn't stop him kicking himself, though). They actually had a good conversation about what had happened, one of the more comfortable talks that they'd managed to have to date. When he got home, he asked Ellie if she knew how to tango, and she was having fun ribbing him about it, but unfortunately Devon heard them talking and came out (in a towel, of course) and insisted on teaching him, which Ellie found hilarious, knowing that Auntie D would also be pissing herself laughing when she watched the video of course bothered him more than it did Ellie.
When they were in the limo, Chuck found Sarah's wording when she gave him a GPS locator watch (not knowing that he was implanted with DCS tracking and recording devices) interesting, hearing the way she said "you can't run away from me" felt nice. He didn't appreciate it at all though when he found out that Casey's cracks about needing to tango were all just a joke, but at least he saw that Sarah hadn't been in on the joke, that was the only upside to it. As he was entering the auction with Sarah, he managed to drop something on his shirt which meant that he had to go to the men's room to try and wash it off, embarrassing that, but while he was in there he had a flash on a man who came in and from the images that came up in the flash he presumed that he was La Ciadad. When he went to Sarah to tell her about it, she sent him to the bar (where Casey was) and went to engage the man. Chuck had no idea what was going on, so watching her as she worked the man hit Chuck in the guts, because being jealous about how close she was getting to another man made him forget what Auntie D had said, this was the way an agent would behave if she was working a mark, if he'd thought about that he would have realised that it just showed that Sarah WASN'T working him. Casey didn't have the time or inclination to worry about Chuck's insecurities when he saw Walker being taken away at gunpoint, so he just told him to stay and bolted after them. That left Chuck not knowing what the hell was going on (he hadn't looked at Sarah after he saw her playing up to the man so he didn't see the gun in her side when they led her away), so as he was just left alone feeling sorry for himself, he went for a wander.
As he was wandering around the auction, he saw the painting that La Caidad was interested in and had another flash, which included images of a container of plutonium hidden in the frame. As he was looking at the painting, a beautiful woman called Malena started talking to him, CHUCK stumbled when he tried to talk to a beautiful woman, so he decided to put on the suave Charles Carmichael to talk to her, and when she asked him to dance the tango with her, he just thought "Why the hell not?" and went with it. Aside from a bobble when he had to admit that he only knew the girl's part the dance seemed to go well, until the end when he'd flashed on a scar on her neck and realised that SHE was La Ciadad. At that point, Charles Carmichael disappeared and he was back to Chuck Bartowski, who was way out of his depth with either the beautiful woman or the arms dealer. Of course, at that point Morgan managed to stick his foot in things again because he'd called the function to get CHUCK BARTOWSKI on the phone and kept screaming that it was Chuck Bartowski while he was trying to tell the woman with the phone that he was Charles Carmichael. An idiot on the phone screaming that his name was Chuck Bartowski obviously ended any chance of Chuck managing to talk his way out of things and Malena had her henchmen drag him up to her room to find out exactly who he was. After a few threats of torture (throwing a knife between his legs and waving that knife under his face while she had a tray of other knives out) and threatening to throw him off the balcony, Chuck came clean on his name and told her that the frame had been changed on the painting, knowing that she was planning to kill him anyway because he'd seen her face. Chuck had to hold out and stick to the cover identity as long as he could before he acted himself, because if Sarah saw him in action it would blow everything.
By that stage Casey had caught up with the ones who took Sarah and after a standoff at gunpoint, they'd identified themselves as MI6. When Sarah and Casey ran back to the function, Chuck was gone. They tracked him with the locator watch (the other devices were better but they couldn't tell Sarah about them just yet) to Malena's room, where they took out the guard outside the door then had a shootout through the door with Malena's men, but Malena managed to get away. If Chuck hadn't been acting sorry for himself (because he had to play the pathetic weakling) at that point he may have seen how worried about him that Sarah really was, but he was locked into playing the role and missed it. When he got home, Ellie wanted to talk about how things were going, but had to be careful about what she said because they didn't know who might be listening, and of course any chance to talk finished when Devon decided to come out and just join in the discussion, so Chuck made it obvious he couldn't speak in front of HIM and was about to go to bed before Ellie told him that Morgan had been calling all night and he was apparently locked in the storage cage? This was the way their lives were now, they were surrounded by "civilians" and because of that, they had to stick to the scripts that someone in the cover bureau had created, it was bad enough that they had to do this at work, but having to do it at home because someone who didn't know them at all decided that they needed to fit into a given image drove them crazy.
When Chuck had let Morgan out he decided to stay and finish the rest of the repairs, so he didn't go home that night. As was quickly becoming the way things were for Chuck, it wasn't long before Malena's men turned up in the store looking for him, so he tried to hide, but first he had Tang pointing him out to the ones looking him, then Morgan, death by Buy Moron wasn't the way he'd ever wanted to go, but it was looking more and more likely. Casey took out the one he saw in the store while Chuck tried to trap the other one when he followed him out to the cage (once again, he had to play the role in case he was seen), and Sarah went after Malena when she recognised her from Chuck's description. It was close but Casey managed to get the two inside before they got Chuck and Sarah got La Ciadad (Casey's were bigger, but La Ciadad was much more dangerous, so they were even).
That night, Chuck and Ellie had a chance to talk a little before Sarah arrived for dinner (still being careful because of the listeners), and she managed to boost his confidence a little (which had dropped right down when he watched Sarah working the MI6 guy) so he was OK when he went to answer the door. When he opened the door to find both Sarah and MORGAN there, though, he was surprised, and then a little angry when Morgan started into a pile of crap about "I thought we had plans" and "What's she doing here?" He shared a look with Sarah and she was giving him the indication that she didn't mind, so he let him come have dinner with them. (Though if he'd seen the way that Ellie was gripping the knife in her hand or the expression on her face when she heard Morgan's voice he may have given a different answer.) After dinner, as he was walking Sarah out, she tried to compliment him on what they'd achieved, and after a bit of haggling he accepted her compliment, managing to get up the confidence to make the quip that if they were really dating he'd have to kiss her at that point, they had a bit of semi serious banter about that and she looked like she was about to kiss him, but the lines of the job were holding her back, along with the fact that she could see Morgan hovering just off to the side getting ready to interrupt them again, so she left. They had a long way to go and a lot of obstacles to overcome before they'd be able to sort out things between them.
The next week, things got a little strained (once again, due to Morgan) during a game of Know Ya! at Casa Bartowski when Morgan insisted on correcting everything that Sarah said and made a big thing about going on and on about what Bryce had done to Chuck. Given that that had been purposely left out of the information that Sarah had been given about Chuck, this was news to her, and it left her off balance, as that it was the last person that she'd had any sort of relationship with who had done this to Chuck, she just didn't know how to handle this. On top of that, she was sure that they were being watched, and that was making Agent Walker kick in. As Chuck was walking her out, they tried to talk over a few things, including Bryce, but she didn't know how to tell Chuck that she'd been in a relationship with Bryce when she was still trying to work out what she was feeling for Chuck, so she evaded Chuck's question with what he would regard as a lie, and of course their talk got cut of AGAIN by Morgan barging in with some some stupid flimsy shit about "Oh, you meant walk Sarah to her car, makes sense, I don't have a car", which finished any chance they had of trying to talk about anything.
Watching this from her home in DC, Aunty D had to wipe a tear away, would they ever get a chance? She was also seriously reconsidering her refusal of Ellie's request that she arrange for that little troll to be made to disappear, perhaps permanently (after all it couldn't be considered killing a person because THAT was something certainly a long way short of a human being). Previously she'd just seen him as irritating, but as Chuck had never been close to being interested in anyone since that bitch in Stanford dumped him for Bryce fucking Larkin (right after Larkin framed him to get him kicked out), she hadn't seen the depths that this poor excuse for a human being would go to to sabotage any chance for her godson to be happy before. Yes, Sarah Walker was damaged goods, but she was an exceptional woman, one of the rare few who could possibly be worthy of Chuck, and she obviously cared for him, watching the surveillance videos (which she did every night) , there wasn't a day that went by that Sarah didn't give some clear indication of her affection and concern for him, so if it took getting rid of one disgusting little troll to give them a chance, well that was something she was starting to seriously consider.
When Sarah go back to her hotel room, she found out who'd been watching them when she was attacked by an intruder in black while she was getting ready for a shower. After they'd trashed the room and almost murdered her fish, she pulled off the intruder's ski mask to confirm that it was who she thought it was. Sure enough, it was Carina (as they confirmed the names they were currently using), and after their usual banter whenever they caught up with each other, she let Sarah know that they were going to be working together again. Sarah was happy to see her oldest friend again (they'd known each other since they were teenagers at The Farm), but she didn't stop to think about what effect Carina could have on another aspect of her life, possibly because she was trying not to think about the effect he was having on her at the moment.
The next morning, Chuck got hit with a flash when he walked out into the courtyard and saw the redhead standing there, so he rushed over to Casey's to find out why there was a DEA agent there. Casey and Sarah were getting a briefing when he barged in, and after they put away the pistols they drew as he came in the door they turned back to the screen. When he saw the screen out of the corner of his eye, he could see Auntie D looking nervous, probably worried that he'd slip up and let the cat out of the bag (not an unfair assumption, while he'd been an analyst for the DCS since he was thirteen and had extensive field training, as they'd found out on the previous mission, he wasn't an agent, and hardly knew how he was supposed to act in the field), so he pretended not to see the screen until Graham spoke and then asked "Who are they?" When she saw that he was on the ball, Auntie D looked a little less nervous and went into their instructions to help Carina steal a diamond from a drug transporter, Peyman Alahi. After Sarah and then Casey tried to argue against Chuck being exposed to Carina and the dangers of the field, the team had its orders and they went out to talk to Carina. They'd just made introductions when Morgan barged in AGAIN, trying to be suave but just coming off like the idiot that he was, and with that they headed off to "work".
At the Wienerlicious, Carina was trying to get information out of Sarah (about Chuck in particular, as she'd caught the vibe from them that something was going on) and brought up Bryce. Sarah looked upset when Carina brought him up, but it wasn't for the reasons that Carina was probably thinking, it was because she suddenly realised that she hadn't really thought about him other than the funeral or when someone mentioned him since she got here and felt a little guilty, if he'd really meant anything to her, wouldn't she be thinking about him a lot more than that? And for that matter, it worried her that she was more concerned with deflecting any interest that Carina had in Chuck, Chuck wasn't stupid enough to give out any information that he shouldn't, so why was she worried about keeping Carina away from him? When Sarah wouldn't tell her anything about Chuck, Carina said that she'd have to ask him then and took off, and the stupid little turd who was the supervisor there stopped Sarah from going after her.
Over at the Buy More, Morgan presumed that Carina had come over to see him, and even when she blew him off, he was yammering at Chuck that he HAD to fix him up with her, he came out with all sorts of stupid crap, but the line that almost sealed his fate when Chuck's godmother heard it was "If you can get Sarah, man that means that just about anything's possible." When Auntie D heard that, she just about picked up the phone to order Casey to end the little rodent then and there. After everything that Chuck did for that little bastard, he had the gall to say THAT to him? It was almost enough to make Jeff drop his act, too, when he heard that, but luckily the vacant stunned look was sort of his "normal" cover face, so when it came up naturally it didn't stand out that much. Unfortunately Sarah was concentrating on keeping Carina away from Chuck, rather than Morgan, so when Chuck came to her with Morgan's ridiculous request, practically begging her to say "no", she only saw it as a way of occupying Carina and told Carina that she had to do it as a condition of the team's support, given that Carina had been forced to do far more disgusting things than Morgan in her career, even him carrying on like a retarded five year old right in front of her wasn't enough to stop that happening.
At Chuck's that night, Chuck could tell that Carina was winding up Sarah about some dating issues, but couldn't work out what she was getting at (when it came to relationships, Chuck had very little experience, he'd played around very little in highschool and college before he started going out with Jill because leading a double life working for the government the way he was made those sort of things difficult, and he hadn't done anything since Jill dumped him for Bryce). When the pizza arrived, he had to put up with Morgans' stupidity about how "into him" Carina was, and then his tantrums when Chuck was less than 100% in agreement with that idea. By the time they put the movie on he was totally over this shit, so when Morgan kept asking Carina questions about where she'd been, he answered for her and told him to shut up, not noticing the looks he was getting from Carina and Sarah after that because he was refusing to look away from the screen. After they'd all gone home (supposedly), Morgan kept calling him over and over and over again to ask whether she'd called yet and wanting to rabbit on about it, no matter how many times Chuck hung up on him, until Chuck got another call that was supposedly a Nerd Herd support call.
He should have turned around and walked away when the door opened and Carina was standing in front of him in a robe, but for all his brilliance, Chuck was still a trusting soul and came in, asking her where the computer was. She hit him with the fact that she knew that he was more in the game than they'd said because he'd need a high level of clearance to know that she'd been in Argentina and tried to get him to loosen up and tell her things. When her outright attempt at seduction didn't work, she thought she'd see whether she could separate him from Sarah (who was obviously the reason that she didn't have a chance to seduce him) by bringing up her boyfriend (well supposedly dead ex-boyfriend, but she didn't feel the need to add that in). From Chuck's reaction when she said "Bryce Larkin, her boyfriend", she knew that she was on the right track, she may not have used Bryce if she knew Chuck's history with him and just how much damage that would cause (hopefully it would have made a difference if she'd known), but she was ignorant of the background between them. The problem with that was, while she may have turned Chuck off Sarah a little, it didn't do her any good because he just shut down and left after that. When Chuck got home, he was sorely tempted to hack into Sarah's files and find out the truth about what Carina said, but he couldn't bring himself to breach her privacy like that, so he just went to bed and stewed over the matter for the rest of the night.
The next day when Sarah was trying to brief Chuck about the mission, he was distant and distracted, but he wouldn't tell her what was going on and it worried her, because he'd never been like this with her. When she told him that she needed him to stay by her side when they were on the mission because Carina couldn't be trusted he was relieved because he thought that that meant that what Carina had said the night before about Sarah and Bryce was a lie, and he started opening up to her about getting the service call from Carina and going to her room, along with the fact that she'd said some things about Sarah when he was there, but when her face fell when he repeated what Carina had said the doubts came back and when she basically confirmed that it was true, he shut her out and left. When they got to Alahi's mansion for the mission, it was obvious that Carina's plan to drive a wedge between Chuck and Sarah had worked all to well because Chuck wouldn't talk to Sarah, and Carina made sure that she planted a few more barbs to set him up to react just the way she wanted, so that when they were done and were escaping with the diamond, the doubts that Carina had planted in Chuck's mind made him give up the diamond to her over Sarah and she bolted with it, leaving them to face the music. When they got out of there and went back to work, things were quite cool between Chuck and Sarah because she was as angry with him as he was with her, so after work she sent him home when she went to see what happened to Casey, who'd disappeared when he went after Carina.
Of course, nothing ever went easy for them, when Sarah found Casey, Alahi and his men took them because they'd come looking for Carina to get the diamond. Chuck found the diamond where Carina had planted it in Morgan's bag when she saw Casey and called Sarah, only to be told that she'd been taken and she needed him to find Carina and get her to bring the diamond. Just as he was about to head out to trade the diamond for Sarah, he was faced with a black clad figure and took them down (passing it off as a lucky shot), only to find that it was Carina. They argued about going after Sarah, and Carina couldn't work out how he managed to guilt her into changing her mind and coming along to save Sarah, but he did. When they got to the hotel, Chuck had to go back to pretending to be defenceless because he couldn't show any skills in front of Sarah (he would have done whatever necessary to save her, but this way he could keep up the cover), but Sarah and Carina were quite capable of taking down Alahi's men without him, and he did manage to get the diamond couriered off to their bosses in DC with a bit of quick thinking that was pure Chuck.
In the clean-up afterwards, he shot Carina down again when she tried one last time to get him to come back to her room, but her parting gift floored him when she confirmed what Auntie D and Ellie had been telling him, that Sarah had feelings for him (well, what Carina told him was that he was what Sarah wanted). That night he went to Sarah's with a pizza (vegetarian, no olives) to talk about what happened, and they talked a little, but much as Sarah wanted to talk to him, she mainly confirmed what Carina had been saying the previous night, that field agents can't share details about themselves.