A/N: Thanks to all readers new and old for keeping up with my story, and to garnetflint for handling beta duties.
Chapter 28
"Do I look okay?" Chuck nervously asked Sarah for the third time as he glanced at the mirror sitting in Morgan's bathroom. In order to go as Charles Carmichael, Chuck had to have his hair cropped short and was wearing Charlie's too expensive clothing. For some it was no big deal to slip into another identity but to Chuck becoming Charles Carmichael again was creepy, like putting on a Halloween mask albeit without the fake blood. His idea of what Carmichael should be like had been bent and reshaped by other hands, coming back to him as an almost foreign notion. On top of that he had to pretend to be a fully trained spy. One false word and the whole thing would be shot.
"You look good Chuck, " Sarah said as she instinctively raised her hand to smooth his hair down only to find short curls that boringly stayed in place. "Although I am missing the cute animal shapes your hair usually makes. How's my wig?"
"Perfect. If I didn't see you put it on I couldn't tell it wasn't real, " Chuck told her. Sarah had opted for a wig this time, saying it was easier for her to style to match "Claire Fontaine's" style and would take less time too. Chuck thought she just wanted to avoid dying her hair and couldn't blame her for it. His junior year at Stanford he rushed with a fraternity and had to make his hair purple as part of the initiation. The damn stuff got everywhere and he looked like a bottle of grape soda exploded all over him.
"Thanks Chuck, " Sarah said before shifting into spy mode. "I just want to go over our cover one more time before we head out. Our roles for today are different than what we've done in the past when we had to pose as a couple."
"Thank goodness the pretending part was over, " she thought to herself.
Sarah continued. "Carmichael and Fontaine weren't exactly seeing eye to eye these days so we're going to have to approximate that level of discomfort."
"You want me to yell at you?" Chuck asked nervously. "I don't think I can manage being angry at you, even if you took every single Nintendo game I own and smashed them to pieces, fried my computer and insulted Ellie's cooking."
"Hmm...," Sarah to herself. Slighting his sister's well loved cooking was a grave insult, so grave that even Casey would have starred her down for such an offense. "Maybe acting angry is the wrong way to go about it then. How about pretending to be uncomfortable, like you're waiting to see the dentist? Carmichael did mention he was purposely avoiding Fontaine."
"Yeah, that might work. Oh, I know! I'll try to channel the time when I had to wait in the principal's office for my dad when my science project exploded in my locker," Chuck suggested to her. "Boy, I was ready to dig myself a hole to crawl into when that happened."
"Perfect. Make sure you try to avoid eye contact with me whenever possible too. That'll really sell that we have a messy history."
"It'll be tough to keep my eyes off of you but I'll do it. For the mission of course," Chuck added with a grin. "Casey would be so proud. Plus in a way our history has been a bit, shall we say, turbulent so it wouldn't be such a stretch."
Sarah took the words with a shock at how close to home they hit. In a way Chuck was right, the early section of their history together was anything but smooth sailing at first. He was at a time when his immediate future looked bleak and she had become his only lifeline. She was a point at her life when she just didn't know what she wanted anymore, the desire to conform to the only life she knew at warred with the frustration and burnout being a spy brought her. The stress that came with the ghoulish things the job demanded from her plus her feelings of powerlessness to change the course of her life that her father, and later Graham, had put her on was weighing on her at the time. She didn't want to live like a ghost all her life, moving from place to place at someone else's whim, sucking the life out of others to sustain herself and always being apart from the world around her.
Spending time with Chuck gave her glimpses of a life she had never known, where she was more than a tool to be used and tossed aside as necessary, a person in her own right that had more to offer than her skills and her obvious assets. The fact that he was willing to learn more about her despite her vast library of sins was jarring to say the least. Everyone else had been eager to take her aloof persona at face value, even Bryce who claimed that he loved her but always had shut her down whenever things had gotten to personal. The feelings that came with this revelation were overwhelming for her and so they went to the place where the other troublesome emotions went and that was the end of that, so she thought.
Despite herself her love and hatred of the job had now seemed to incorporate Chuck. The need to protect him from everything including herself now clashed with instinct to keep the lovable nerd at arm's length, and often Chuck had paid the price. When he sought intimacy with her Sarah would throw Company policy at him about assets and when he found romance with another her jealousy reared its ugly head causing her to sabotage the relationship in its infancy. Chuck didn't know where they stood as a result no more than she knew where he was whenever he was supposed to be waiting in the car. She had inflicted the same helplessness on him that she felt and the revelation made her stomach churn.
Chuck noticed how her face fell when he uttered that lousy joke and was mortified. "Ah frak, I'm sorry Sarah. That was rotten of me. I should've..." he said before Sarah's embrace cut him off.
She held him for a moment before she managed to find the right words. "Chuck... I'm the one that should be saying sorry. For treating you so terribly then. I... admit that I've acted selfishly at times at your expense, playing with your heart when it was already so fragile and dashing your hopes by running back to the familiar when I didn't know how to handle things. God, I don't know how you can stand me sometimes."
Chuck planted a kiss on her head and smoothed her hair. He was surprised at the outburst but he supposed it was a good thing no matter what training dictated. Like his psychiatrist and Pumbaa before him said, 'better out than in'. "I'm not completely innocent either here. I didn't always listen to you about the important stuff and I didn't trust you when I should have."
"Well, your home was under surveillance 24/7 and I didn't exactly do much to put you at ease, " Sarah pointed out.
"But you always looked out for me and my family, and you went to bat for me with Graham and Beckman when it would have been sooooo much easier to let me just toss me in a deep, dank hole somewhere. I let my faith in you waver at times, and that's pretty rotten too don't you think?" Chuck told her. Sarah couldn't bring herself to answer but her tightened grip on him said it all. "In the end though, I don't want to be mad at you and you don't want to be mad at me so here's what I suggest. I suggest that we forgive each other, keep the jerk-esque moments to a minimum from now on and forgive each other when they do come up."
"Just like that?"
"Why not? It's not like there's a exact guideline for being in a relationship and I can tell you firsthand that carrying a grudge is one of the most grueling things you can ever do. So what do you say?"
Sarah mulled it over in her mind. It sounded so simple when Chuck said it but in her experience things weren't always so simple when it came to people. Her mind, so honed to looking for ulterior motives, reeled at the possibility that for once someone was asking for something that was mutually beneficial to both parties. No strings attached as they say. "You don't have to over think everything sweetie," a voice so much like her mother's spoke in her mind. "Sometimes a cloud looks like a duck because it wants to." It was something her mother told her one day while watching the clouds and Sarah had puzzled over the meaning behind a cloud's mysterious appearance.
Sarah chuckled at the unexpected memory and found herself in better spirits. "I say it's one of your best ideas yet, " she said as she nuzzled his mini-curls. "Thank you for sticking with an over paranoid spy like me. You don't know how much it means to me."
"Thank you for wanting to be with a biggest nerd on this side of the Pacific."
"Hey, you know I don't things half measure. Nothing for the best for this girl," Sarah joked before detangling herself from Chuck. "Now, we better get going before Casey gets antsy."
As if on cue the bathroom door resounded with Casey's strong knocks ("more like punches," Chuck joked) and he bellowed, "You ladies done in there? There's work to be done!"
"Just finished putting on my mascara. Sorry, Sarah took forever trying to find the right shade of rouge that suits me, " Chuck called out.
"What?! Your cover doesn't involve makeup!" Casey shouted before yanking the door open.
A flustered Casey poked his head in to see Chuck, sans makeup, all ready to go.
"Sometimes you make just too easy," Chuck chuckled.
Sarah laughed and added, " You got to admit, he got you going for a moment, "
Casey let out grunt #68 (not very amused) and said, "Okay wiseguy, how's this for a joke? Knock, knock."
"Who' s there?" Chuck replied.
"The guy that's going to make you ride on the roof if you don't quit playing grab ass. Now hurry up so we can get to the staging area!" he said before returning to the kitchen. "Damn that's good coffee!" he shouted happily, and Chuck and Sarah couldn't help but take in the rare " happy and not firing 1,000 rounds a second" Casey.
"Whoa, that is some magical coffee beans Morgan discovered, " Chuck said in amusement. "I wonder where he picked them up."
"Uh... he traded a cow for them?" Sarah joked. She wasn't versed in pop culture as well as his friends but damn it, she wanted to be topical too, even if it was fairy tales she referenced.
"Knowing Morgan I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case," Chuck bantered back. "After you m'lady."
A/N: Yeah, I don't know where the Lion King reference came from. Dang thing just popped in my head. Also, I felt like making this a short chapter since this felt better on its own. I have an idea about the following chapter already and I think it's best if this stood on its own instead of being squeezed alongside the action.
