Trouble and Strife

A/N: As I promised, here is the next chapter, and only a week(ish) between the two! I'd like, once again to thank the ever knowledgeable Virgil, formerly known as BillAtWork for all his help. He is the maestro and I am merely his apprentice. Thanks for the awesome reviews for the last chapter guys, now onto the story!

I don't own Chuck, btw.

"Chuck?" Sarah called, inhaling a breath of the fresh Texan air a welcome comfort from the dusty tomb of the house.

Sarah shielded her eyes from the sun, its rays blinding her in its early morning splendour, painting the world with an inviting orange hue, of warmth and contentment.

But she couldn't revel in any of that, Chuck had left, like a mirage in the morning heat, out of the house without a word. Maybe she wasn't as good as Chuck at reading between the lines, but Sarah wasn't completely inept. Being a spy hadn't let her, and being around Chuck for so long meant some of his qualities were bound to rub off.

Sarah scoured the landscape for the familiar, lanky, gangly shape of her nerd, but failed. The world was empty, too early for the morning commuters, too early, even, for the paper boy, and so the world stood in silence. Stood to mock her for her actions, for revealing something real to someone who had meant nothing… Nothing to her at least, when she'd held back so much from the person that meant everything.

How did she expect him to react to that news? Should she have just let Chuck believe it was Mark's birthday, and let it lie? Would that have really been easier?

'No.' Sarah stated to herself, the force behind her thought shocking even herself. She'd lived behind a veil of lies for the majority of her life, every word subversive, and every action with its purpose. If she wanted something real, something healthy and productive with Chuck then she couldn't ignore the evils of the past. As much as she wished she could.

"Chuck?" Sarah called again into the ether, a glimpse of curly brown hair catching her eye from the darkened windows of the Mustang.

Striding purposefully - faltering now would only delay the inevitable - from the house's front step, Sarah made her way to the Mustang, her pace steady despite the hiccups of her heart.

Suddenly, Sarah found herself at the car, her feet focussed when her mind had wandered. She reached her hand towards the door handle, a small tremor pulsating its way through her body. She drew in a breath. In the last week she'd never felt so at liberty, so free in her expression, yet so restricted. Before she never had to care about what she was saying, even if she was professing her love, or expressing her endearment to somebody, it was empty. Always. But now? Now that she actually cared about the person, cared about the outcome?

Sarah was never nervous. In the middle of the gun fight, Sarah was the one that was in the middle of it all, the one that the others looked to for support, the one that could always be counted on to get the job done, and then some.

Sarah pulled the handle, a rush of warm air hitting her from the enclosed atmosphere of the Mustang, and stepped into the car, a miniature prison for her pain, for her mistakes, judge, jury and prosecutor all present in the form of one person.

Sarah gulped, Chuck seemed despondent, untalkative, which was definitely not like him. It unnerved her, but it wasn't unexpected. What she'd done had hurt him, again. What more did she expect? For all her sins to be forgiven at the drop of a hat? Only God did that, apparently, and, for all he was, Chuck was still only human.

"I needed…", Sarah began, cutting herself off before she had finished, the words not enough.

"I wanted… No, I… I'm sorry Chuck. I won't say that if I could do things again, that I wouldn't give Mark my birthday, because I would. It was what the mission needed what Mark needed to build that trust, so that he knew… so that he thought I was in the relationship, that I felt the same way…"

"You never thought that it might be nice for me to know that you felt the same way?" Chuck shouted, his face pulled in anguish, his hands clenched in his lap.

"You never thought that I needed that, Sarah? All those times I asked you for something, anything real and you spouted about how it was too dangerous, or just plain ignored me?"

Chuck fidgeted in his seat, his hands clenching open and closed as he pulled at his bottom lip with his teeth. He was fuming, angry, in a way that Sarah had never seen before, and his questions weren't rhetorical.

She had a reason, of course, but, at this point, just having a reason wasn't enough. She'd had enough reasons to not give Mark that information, there were probably more reasons not to give Mark her personal details than there were for. She'd made mistakes, God knows that.

"It meant nothing, Chuck, I promise, nothing I ever told Mark meant anything to me." Sarah replied, her voice the antithesis of Chucks , small and timid, the mouse to Chuck's elephant.

"But it would have meant something to me, Sarah." Chuck replied in kind, moving himself to face Sarah, his leg coming to rest underneath himself on the seat.

"I would have meant everything to me, Sarah. I just wanted something; it didn't have to be big, just something real."

Chuck's expression turned from anger to pain, the kind that lingered in your soul and tormented you for life, the kind that laughed at those who said that words could never hurt you. Because they could. They may not hurt you physically, might cause a wound that people could see, that could be fixed and treated, would heal over time. No, words were much more sinister, and the wounds they created couldn't always be healed.

"That's just it, Chuck. Before you, it was always the mission. I could say anything to anyone, and it didn't matter, because it was all about the mission, being the ultimate spy, and getting the result."

Sarah lowered her eyes and picked at her cuticles. She'd already confessed her feelings for Chuck once before, why should this be any more difficult?

"But then you came into my life, Chuck, and from the moment I met you… You were like a breath of fresh air and it was beautiful, you were beautiful, Chuck. The way you were with people, with Morgan, Ellie, even with Jeff and Lester, there was such a love of the people around you, and it was nothing I'd ever seen before. Not even my Dad was like that with me; there was always some motive to what he said, but not with you."

Sarah began to raise her eyes to meet Chuck's, but failed at the last moment, instead bringing her sapphire orbs to rest on the landscape through the window of the Mustang, just behind Chuck's head.

"You already know that you broke down every defence that the spy world had told me to cultivate, and nurture, the psychological barrier that would keep me sane if under torture. But it didn't work Chuck, because being with you, for the shortest amount of time and they'd gone."

"So," Chuck interjected, his body language declaring to Sarah that he had yet to ease up, that her explanation had a long way to go yet before Chuck was comfortable with the whole idea of what she'd done.

"Being with me is like torture to you?"

Sarah's eyes bored into Chucks, the pain behind them yet again echoing the pain in his own, though it was perhaps greater. There was no-one in the world that Sarah would rather spend time with, whether in silence, in the pain she was currently experiencing or in her memories, she'd always choose to spend it with Chuck.

"Sorry…" Chuck whispered, "that was out of line."

"It's okay…" Sarah shrugged, she guessed that was what she got after what she'd pulled. Not only the birthday, but the 'intimacy' – the sex. In fact, she'd envisioned his reaction to be much worse than that, but perhaps this was only the beginning. Only time would tell on that one.

"I know you think that I gave Mark everything that you'd ever wanted, but it's not like that Chuck. You know how long I've lived the spy life, know the training that I've done, right? Well that's just the thing, Chuck, it's all training. They tell you to do whatever it takes to complete a mission, hell, you've met Roan Montgomery, he's basically a CIA sanctioned gigolo. Sex and spying has always been entwined, as sickening and seemingly illegal that may be. Seduction is just another word for sex in the spy game, even Casey would tell you that."

Chuck cringed slightly at the thought of Casey seducing, well, anyone. Some things were just wrong, on so many levels.

"Sex has been empty for me for a long time, Chuck, but that's not the point. The point is that Mark wanted to know my birthday for a reason. He wasn't just interested in learning stuff about me, although that may have been an added bonus, but he seemed to have

"Okay", Chuck drawled, the tension in his shoulders softening slightly. Holding her hand out towards Chuck, open palmed awaiting the warmth of his skin on hers, Sarah held her breath as the punch line neared.

'At least', Sarah mused to herself, 'he hasn't left the car. That must be a good thing.'

"I think I get it. I might not like it, but I can deal with it. I mean, it's not like you told him your life story, is it? Or got married to him."

"No", Sarah breathed, thankful at last that she could assuage Chuck's fears, and tell the truth. Which was a novel, and refreshing feeling.

"Definitely not."

"Well okay then," Chuck continued, taking Sarah's soft, cool hand in his, intertwining their fingers.

"Okay," Sarah repeated, a smile coming to her face, the only person she wanted to marry, for the rest of her life, was sitting right in front of her, holding her hand, and smiling, despite all the shit she had put him through. If she was alpha, then he was her omega – her be all and end all.

"Just tell me one thing. Why did you give him your actual birthday? I mean, you said yourself that you made a living out of lying, so why not lie about that? It would have been easy enough, right?" Chuck asked, the curiosity wide in his eyes, all hints of accusation, of hurt wiped away. For the time being at least.

"Oh." Sarah coughed, surprised by his question, pulling her out of her thoughts of a white picket future.

"He was very persistent, always asking me about my birthday. Not, what's your real name? Where did you grow up? Not the questions that someone who was simply interested would ask. Not the questions that you'd asked."

Sarah looked down towards their locked hands, the fit was perfect, his strong, muscular fingers giving her a sense of security, of being safe and loved so that she couldn't help but smile.

"That's what first told me something was up. He kept asking, and I kept telling him it was too dangerous, or it was against protocol, the same reasons that I'd given you."

Chuck nodded slightly during Sarah's monologue, urging her to continue, whilst indicating his support.

"I thought maybe he was going to use it as a password to this thing he was working on on the computers at the base, and I needed a number I could remember so that I could hack into his account and find out just what exactly he was up to. I thought it would get me out of there quicker, Chuck. I couldn't do it anymore."

"So did you find out what he was doing?" Chuck asked quickly, his enthusiasm for anything technological coming to the fore.

"He building skynet, wasn't he? I knew it."

Sarah gave a pained laugh that felt like ash to her lungs. No, she hadn't found out what Mark was working on. He'd died a week after she'd told him her birthday, and he'd been glued to the monitor for the majority of that time.

"I don't know, I never found out." Sarah replied, "He died not long after that."

The silence in the car was, yet again, uneasy. The tension mounting backwards and forwards like a tennis ball between Venus and Serena. But Sarah knew she had no-one to blame but herself for the way things panned out with Chuck. And with Mark, for that matter.

"But that's all in the past." Sarah finished a sense of finality in her words bringing a sense of calm back into the Mustang.

"I love you Chuck. Every time I close my eyes all I can see is you, a future with you, and that's something that I've never experienced before, and to be absolutely honest with you, Chuck, I love it. I love you."

"I love you too, Sarah." Chuck replied, the words slipping off his tongue as easily as oil over water. It was natural, easy, and felt good. Much better than that anger that he had been experiencing earlier, so much better.

Sarah couldn't help but light up at hearing those words. He still loved her, even after this latest set-back in their relationship that she'd caused.

"Marry me." Sarah blurted, a victim to a bout of Chuck-esque mind-mouth filtering.

"Say what?" Chuck replied, eyes the personification of Tatooine's moons.

"I said marry me, Chuck Bartowski." Sarah paused. "I want you to marry me."

"Okay. Who are you, and what have you done with Sarah Walker?"

"Nobody's done anything to Sarah Walker; she's just come to her senses, that's all. She finally knows what she wants from life, and she wants to spend it with you."

"Well, Chuck" Sarah asked into the silence, "what d'ya say?"

"You, you want to marry me now? Like right here, right now?"

"Right here. Right now, Chuck. Marry me."

You wouldn't get anywhere in life by being lazy. So Daniel Shaw lived by the ethos of live or let die. Or rather, live and let others die – and so far, he liked the way things had worked out. He had a swanky office at the top of the CIA headquarters at Langley, a sweet ride and he was a magnet for the ladies. By anyone's standards, he was a lucky guy.

But that's not how Shaw saw things. He'd had enough of being mediocre, sure he had made a name for himself in the CIA, hence the office and the car, but he wanted more, and the codex was the best way to get it, the key to everything.

Shaw cracked his knuckles. He'd never really had much time for tech guys and pencil pushers and the likes and he'd just about reached his annual charm quota. They were too predictable, once you got them strung up, put a bit of duct tape over their mouths, they wet their pants. You really didn't have to do much to make them spill their beans. It was the same with this one, although, to his merit, the pants wetting had come much later than Shaw had predicted… But it still came.

"I know you have it, Mark." Shaw stated, clicking his neck to the side theatrically, the kind of move to show his prey just how serious he was.

"Give me the Codex, and I'll let you go. Quid pro quo as they say."

Apart from being strung up, Mark looked pretty much as though he'd just left the house. Sure, his hair was a bit ruffled, and his shirt was more than a bit wrinkled, but who wasn't to say he was just an untidy man? Besides, it pretty much suited the setting. Old warehouse by the docks, the smell of old fish from the crates littering the building, your stereotypical south east Asian fish market aroma, as well as your stereotypical hostage/torture venue. An oldie, but a goldie.

"I told you", Mark repeated, a tone of exasperation entering his voice. A mistake, he later surmised, on his part.

"I don't have it, hence, I can't give it to you."

Mark gulped as Shaw pulled a nasty looking needle from a pile of crates just to his right. Grabbing a small vial from his pocket, Shaw sighed.

"Mark, Mark…" Shaw scolded, striding rhythmically towards the trussed up man.

"I told you, it's wrong to tell lies. Now. Lets' start again, shall we?"

Shaw injected the needle into the vial and took a healthy draw of the yellow coloured liquid it contained before holding it to the light. Oh, how he enjoyed these moments. So what if all he'd put into the syringe was Mountain Dew? Mark certainly didn't know that, and Shaw thought the colour added a certain pizazz to proceedings. People always thought that coloured liquid was much worse than its clear brethren.

Oh, how wrong they were.

"Give me the Codex."

"I promise", Mark answered, this time, his voice high pitched and panicked, sweat marks beginning to appear around his armpits.

"I don't have it."

"Well, Mark, I must say, I am disappointed in you." Shaw smiled sadistically, inching ever towards his cornered, cowering prey.

"I gave you everything you could have asked for. I gave you money, gave you resources, gave you Walker as your plaything. All I asked for in return was the Codex."

Shaw, now nose to nose with Austin, flicked the syringe before burying it deep into the flesh of Mark's not so fleshy ribs.

"Well, since you don't seem to want to tell me where the Codex is, I guess we'll have to do this the old fashioned way." Shaw whispered above Mark's scream of agony.

"No, no, I know where it is, I know where it is, Sarah has it. Agent Walker has it."

Shaw slapped Mark across the mouth.

"What do you not understand about lying being wrong? I know that Walker hasn't got it. We're not stupid, Mr Austin, and I'm not going to ask again. WHERE IS THE CODEX?" Shaw shouted, the remnants of his lunch earlier pattering Mark across the face.

"She has it," Mark repeated, licking the blood off his lip.

"She just doesn't know that she has it."

Stilling his hand just centimetres from Austin's swelling face; Shaw looked his victim in the eyes. The truth could always be found in those, even in the most talented of agents… Just with them it was difficult to get close enough to look into his eyes.

"Just like she doesn't know that you're still alive, right?" Shaw snarled. Despite his utter contempt for this waste of space, Shaw had to give Austin credit for the way he'd duped Walker.

"Sir" A familiar voice echoed through the building, its matching silhouette standing by the entrance to the warehouse.

"What do you want?" Shaw shouted angrily, his nostrils flaring at the untimely interruption. Just as he was getting into the flow of things.

"We've got a hit on Walker, sir. Her name on a wedding certificate, seems like she's just married the nerd."

Shaw's brain was working overtime. This was perfect; he couldn't have set it up any better. Shaw laughed sadistically, the sound echoing menacingly around the warehouse, incomparable and inescapable. Here he had Mark Austin, Walker's previous… well, you know what… And this was the kicker, she thought was dead. And then there was the Intersect, her new catch.

Shaw quirked his lip in amusement. He couldn't understand how a spy of Walker's calibre could put up with that bumbling idiot for more than 10 minutes, but who was he to comment? Besides, it really did give him the perfect plan, and the perfect excuse to implement it. Not that he really needed an excuse, he was Daniel Shaw after all, but having one was always nice.

"Good." Shaw replied with relish, leaving Mark to hang in the middle of the warehouse as he made his way to the silhouette.

"Because she has the Codex. Release the prisoner. He's coming with me."

Sarah knew that getting married now probably wasn't the most logical or practical thing to do at this point in time. Your stereotypical beady eyed bad guy was chasing after them; they were trying to find the Codex, or what Chuck had described earlier, and very ominously, as 'the key to everything'. So getting married, on a normal person's list, probably wasn't at the top. But then again, she wasn't a normal person. And Chuck wasn't a normal guy, not that Sarah really knew what normal was in the first place, because, let's be honest here, no-one really does, do they?

She'd never followed her heart, always thinking it was a path that only lead to destruction and pain. But, Sarah had recently decided, that came from all angles. In fact, not following your heart probably hurt more. There was a reason people always quoted Tennyson in times like this. Because, and this is truly a fact, 'tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all.'

Sarah glanced across to the seat beside her. Chuck was grinning like the Cheshire cat, a grin that she was sure, was identical to her own. The reflection of the desert sun glinted at Sarah from the hand in her lap; the ring that tied her life to Chuck's caressing her finger. Sarah smiled again, although she wasn't sure whether she'd actually stopped, in the time that they'd gotten to the Justice of the Peace, gotten a pair of matching rings from a nearby jeweller and actually gotten married, to the time that Sarah had actually let Chuck drive the Mustang (as a wedding present), she hadn't stopped smiling. So that was pretty much a 2 or 3 hour work out for the facial muscles. Sarah didn't think that they'd ever been given such a gruelling regime, the muscles in the rest of her body, definitely, but facial muscles, the ones specifically used for smiling… Sarah wasn't so sure.

The fact that the act of smiling made her smile more was slightly peculiar and novel to Sarah, but who was she to judge? In turning over her new leaf, beginning her new life with Chuck, she had decided, amongst many, many other things, that she was going to spend less time worrying, and more time living. It may be a struggle at first, letting go, but she'd always have Chuck to help her through the hard times. And the good ones, and that was what Sarah was really looking forward to the most.

Sarah looked back to the minute she'd breathed "I do". Surprisingly enough, she hadn't been nervous at all. Maybe things had happened so fast that she hadn't had time to develop cold feet, but there wasn't a single bone in Sarah's body that wasn't ready for this. It wasn't like she was treating this was a mission either, because Sarah always got nervous before a mission, it was healthy, she'd been told by a self-proclaimed expert, to experience anxiety in the face of one's own death. Besides, treating this as anything other than what it was, joining herself for life to the person that she loved most in the whole universe, proclaiming her love publically and eternally, would be the worst kind of betrayal to Chuck.

No, Sarah hadn't been more sure of anything in her life, even when she vowed herself to Chuck 'til death do us part.' Things like that would usually have sent Sarah Walker running for the hills - historically, she'd been a living in the moment sort of gal, but now..? All Sarah knew was that her mind and her body were telling her something. That if there was ever something she should do, and do right by, then it was this, always and unequivocally, this.

A buzzing sound caught Sarah's attention, the thoughts of happy times, outdoors, on long summer walks with her husband and kids took a backseat temporarily in Sarah's mind. The sound continued, its pitch ebbing and flowing, a melody being formed behind it, one that Sarah thought she recognised.

Sarah looked to her left and the source of the strange noise. It was Chuck. He seemed to be humming a song of some sort, one that Sarah didn't recognise, not that that surprised her, because she hadn't really had that much time for music recently.

"Whatcha doing, Chuck?" Sarah asked, her voice floating ethereally from her throat, soft and comfortable with the slightest of hints of playfulness.

"Hmm..?" Chuck replied, the noise ending abruptly as a result.

"What was that you were humming? It sounded like a song."

"Oh, it's nothing, really. Just a song that always reminded me of you when you were gone. I'd use to listen to that every night, hoping that you'd come back, but you never did. That is, of course, until you did."

"What song is it, Chuck?"

"It's Ain't No Sunshine. The Lighthouse Family version, to be specific. Why do you know it?"

"Actually…" Sarah paused, marvelling in the fact that she actually knew a song that Chuck was talking about for once.

"I do."

Okay, so Sarah didn't know this Lighthouse Family version, but she did recognise the melody, it was probably, as with the rest of her musical knowledge, something her dad had played on the tape deck in his old Buick. Sarah didn't know if this was strange or not for a con-man, but her dad was rather fond of Bill Withers.

"Bill Withers." Sarah whispered, turning her head to watch the clouds passing swiftly past her passenger side window.

"Mmhmm" Chuck murmered delicately, a smile once again gracing his lips whilst he continued to hum; Sarah's eyes gently closing, the sun creating a kaleidoscope of patterns across her closed eyelids.

It was a good song, a good strong rhythm, oddly juxtaposing the overriding feeling the lyrics created. Lyrics that Sarah actually, mostly, knew, ones that broke her heart a little to know that these words were the ones Chuck had chosen to comfort himself in her absence.

"Ain't no sunshine when she's gone." Sarah began her voice small and sweet, perfectly in tune, a birdsong in the dawns light.

"It's not warm when she's away."

A/N 2: Thanks for reading, and you know the drill - keep it easy and don't work too hard! Any reviews are more than welcome, getting feedback on where people think this story is going, or what people did or didn't like, I find, is one of the most rewarding things as a writer. Thanks again for reading, you guys are awesome!