A/N1 It is a datum of S3 that Sarah has no real romantic feelings for Shaw. A part of her wishes she did, just so that the pain of what is happening to her and around her could be lessened, or she could escape from it. Ditto, with the necessary changes, Chuck for Hannah. Much of the darkness of S3 comes from this, from watching Sarah and Chuck misunderstand and betray themselves and their deepest hopes, even if we (sort of) understand how and why it happens.

One nice bit of storytelling irony presents itself, though: Chuck ends up with the woman (Hannah) who seems exactly the woman (everyone thinks) he should have, yet it is clear he is settling for her; Sarah ends up with the man who seems exactly the man (everyone thinks) she should have, yet it is clear she is settling for him. (I mentioned this about Sarah and Shaw quite a few chapters back.) That irony does not make watching Sarah and Chuck date Shaw and Hannah easier; it makes it worse. But it is a nice bit of storytelling irony. It throws an interesting light backward onto Lou, Bryce, Jill, and Barker, too.

Sarah's mind is adrift in this chapter, and the reader has no choice but to drift with her. I want to capture her confusions, her obsessions (repetitions), her mental automatisms, her guilt. A complicated, jumpy chapter.

Don't own Chuck.

The (Mis)Education of Sarah Walker

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Back on the Chain Gang (Part Two):

Castaways, Adrift

Leave the road and memorize
This life that pass before my eyes

Nothing is going my way

There's no one left to take the lead
But I tell you and you can see
We're closer now than light years to go

Pick up here and chase the ride
The river empties to the tide
Fall into the ocean

The river to the ocean goes
A fortune for the undertow
None of this is going my way

There is nothing left to throw
Of ginger, lemon, indigo
Coriander stem and rose of hay

Strength and courage overrides
The privileged and weary eyes
Of river poet search naivete
Pick up here and chase the ride
The river empties to the tide

All of this is coming your way

- REM, Find the River

Canto 1: Stream of Consciousness

Sarah stared at the ceiling. Shaw slept.

She was having trouble telling herself the story of how she ended up where she was. Scenes, jumbled. Words, coming back, random. Not making sense. Nothing making sense.

I was required to oversee the destruction of the man I loved. Love.

Sarah's mind drifted, her heart beaten thin and cold, carpaccio in her chest. She might have scorned the image if it were not apt.

Adrift. Castaway.

Pain oscillating with numbness.

Anger oscillating with terror.

My new life in Burbank. After Prague.

ooOoo

Beckman reconstituted the team.

Sarah was given a new assignment. She was no longer Chuck's handler, exactly, she was more his teacher, his trainer. She was to teach him how to control the Intersect.

The miserable irony was not lost on Sarah: she absorbed the full measure of the misery, took the full force of the irony. She was to teach Chuck to distance himself from his emotions, or, better yet from Beckman's point of view, she was to teach him not to feel, or not to feel what he felt. Sarah was going to teach him to be her.

She was going to teach him to stop loving her. It was what he signed up for, what he wanted.

ooOoo

Bo sticks. Training. Unspoken misery on both sides. So much pain, so little talk.

"I don't want to hurt you, Sarah."

"You can't."

Sarah had intended that as her final word. Parthian shot. Words, not stick. She thought they would part, go to their respective corners of Castle. But they did not.

They both stopped and turned. They looked at each other, eyes wary. They had hardly spoken in days except in professional terms, mission terms. They made eye contact and held it the first time since Prague. It seemed that way to Sarah, anyway. She felt herself retreat behind her eyes, her consciousness retreating even as her feet held their ground.

Chuck's brown eyes swamped her. They were full, full of so many things. Brimming. This is why I have avoided them. Chuck was not Sarah. He was not wired like she was. To distance him from his emotions would not be to enlarge a space already there, it would be to rend him in two. He was whole, one. Or he had been before she came and introduced covers and distance into his life: before she broke him, mangled his realometer.

You didn't. Or you didn't mean to.

- No, but I seduced him into all of this, not intentionally, not on purpose, but I did it as surely as if Graham or Beckman had ordered it. My not seducing him made me all the more seductive.

- I did not know what he would become, the new Intersect, the power he would have, but I primed him for them. I made him love me and in doing so, made him want this life. He wanted to be enough for me, enough in the spy world. He was so much more than enough. He was everything.

She could see the love in his eyes, a gunshot to her chest. I can't bear it. I can't return it. He rejected me. He chose this life. Spies don't fall in love, Chuck.

"Well," she almost barked the word at him, "is there something you need to say?"

She saw his gaze grow more complicated; she saw him struggling with his feelings for her. She had been telling him - to control his emotions. Telling him hat he needed to learn to feel nothing or to ignore what he felt. She had actually said it to him a few days before, not just thought it, God help her: "Spies don't fall in love."

She was her dad teaching her. She should have just called Chuck 'Darlin''; the effect would have been complete.

She was Graham manipulating her, making sure she took no time to allow her emotions to register, to steer her. "Feel nothing." That was her message to Chuck. "Move on."

And she was trying to embody it, show him how to do it, changed though she was, miserably in love though she was. I am not in love with you. I have no feelings. I feel nothing I feel. I love you.

"Sarah, I...we...we need to talk. We've always needed to talk. Please talk to me. I have to explain. My explanation in... Prague...That went all wrong."

"Don't trouble yourself, Chuck. I made a mistake. I won't make that mistake again. Ever. We don't need to talk. We never need to talk. There is nothing to talk about." Except that I love you and I miss you every moment, especially when we are together. That's when I am most alone. I can't take refuge in memory or dreams; the reality is too awful.

The agony on his face.

Forgive me, I can't stop. I am hurting so much. Beckman has you now. This is what you want. I don't have you. I never had you, not really. I was too late.

"Sarah, it's just that I feel…"

"Stop! No feelings, Chuck. Stop feeling things! Casey is right: you are a lemon, a waste of perfectly good Intersect download."

Sarah stormed away. She went to a dark part of Castle and cried. He could hurt her. It did not matter what she claimed. He could. He did. All the time. She had made sure he knew she could hurt him.

The anger drained out of her after that.

ooOoo

She still had to train him, though. Ruin him. She had feared Beckman would do it before. That was why she wanted them to run. But they had not run. Now, she got to do it, ruin him, for Beckman. And she was going to have to do it without the help of anger.

She felt cold, reptilian. A creeping thing. Cold-blooded.

ooOoo

Carina came to town. The team helped her with her mission. Carina tried to help Sarah. She tried various stratagems to open Sarah up. At Sarah's she zeroed in on the charm bracelet, hidden by Sarah from casual sight, and Carina lingered over it, deliberately insulted it - trying to force a response from Sarah.

Sarah had no real hope to fool Carina. But she had some hopes to fool herself, to blunt the edge of her own unhappiness by denying it. Deny. Deny. Self-denial, my one indulgence.

At the end of the mission, Carina gave Sarah a thumb drive. On it was a video of Chuck as he tried to explain to Sarah. He had been in a vault, succumbing to gas. But he gave her the answer to the question that terrified her: Why? His answer, short version, was that he did it out of love for her.

Chuck choose the spy life because he felt like he had to help, that the power the Intersect gave him created an obligation. Sarah knew Chuck: she knew that was true. But she also knew something else. That from the beginning, he had harbored the suspicion that he was not enough for her, that she needed...more...than he could give her. When she told him at the wedding she was going to leave with Bryce, she saw him lose again in his own mind, saw him embrace himself as a loser.

Had he chosen to become a spy hoping to be enough for her? Had that been part of what motivated him? Had he done the thing that destroyed them partly out of hope to create them?

Whatever Sarah's view of the spy life, she was supremely good at it. She was supremely competent and knew it. Chuck never knew how she really felt about that life.

Over time, he had some of his assumptions about her life taken from him. He knew that her childhood had been...difficult. That high school had been too. He knew that she was not good at relationships. And although she had never admitted it to him, she thought he knew that Bryce was the one relationship of her past. But he also knew how highly Casey thought of her. He knew a little about her work for Graham.

The new Intersect gave Chuck a chance to prove himself - to her, before anyone else. He obviously feared that even if she chose him, she would be settling. That had been a subtext of that awful fountain conversation. She did not believe that. Never had. Not for a minute. No matter what Carina or Bryce thought. If anything, she thought he would be the one settling - settling for a pollutant, for someone who had no rightful place in his life.

But all her reversals, her vacillations, her doubts, her automatisms, all her attempts to hide what she felt from him and from cameras, bugs and eyes, all that had predictably made him feel like she did not rate him highly enough for there to be a future between them, or to feel like she chose him, if she chose him, by...default or pity or something. Her doubt that he could play a part, pretend, if she told him how she really felt almost certainly seemed to Chuck as general doubt about him. Chuck wanted to be a spy because he wanted to help, and because he had the power to help - but also because he wanted to be with her, with her the way he thought Bryce was or Barker would have been: on equal footing. Side-by-side, not walking a few steps behind her. Equal.

She had tried to make it clear to him over and over, to praise him. He was a hero. A genuine hero. Whether it made him a spy or not, being the Intersect was the job he was born to do - a job he never asked for but performed beautifully. Still, she knew those moments of praise were isolated moments in months of ambiguous silence, hard to bank on, undermined by the suspicion that she might have praised him in order to handle him.

It was all so absurd. If it were not her life, she would have laughed. Bitterly. But she was too deep in the absurdity now to laugh, bitterly or no. The first time he downloaded the Intersect, he had been (like Sarah) a conscriptee. But this time, he downloaded the Intersect voluntarily. He chose to become a spy and had put himself in the spy life. And although she was miserable, she could not leave. She could not leave him. If becoming a spy was what he wanted, she loved him too much to say no.

They might have made it through it all somehow, all the paradoxes, pain and Prague, but Shaw showed up. There had eventually been...moments...suggestions that there might still be some way forward. And then Shaw.

Sarah needed to think more about Shaw and about her, about their relationship. About the fact that she was in his bed.

What am I doing here?

But at the moment...At the moment, she was thinking about Shaw and Chuck, and their relationship. Shaw displaced Sarah as Chuck's teacher. Part of her was glad about that. Part of her was not. Because Shaw was there to make Chuck a cookie-cutter spy, like Shaw himself. A good spy, but Shaw was not going to give Chuck room to find his own way. Worse, Chuck was star-struck. Had he not had the history with Bryce that he did, Chuck might have reacted to Bryce like that. (Maybe he did, a little.) He had reacted to Barker like that. Shaw was the poster boy for what Chuck believed he needed to become, what Beckman wanted, what Casey (damn him) reinforced. A real spy. Why could Chuck not hear - a real spy is an unreal human being? Shaw was a golem. A fundamentally inanimate thing made animate by magic. Locomotive mud. She could see it. How could Chuck miss it? Hell, Casey could see it.

But Chuck could not. He responded to Shaw. Shaw knew how to push Chuck's buttons, maybe his old frat boy buttons. Shaw knew how to egg him on, how to play on his desire to be more, to be equal to Shaw. Slowly, Shaw began to create compromises, to find situations in which Chuck had to do something that the Chuck she spent two years protecting, two years loving, would not have done. Shaw undermined her influence with Chuck, suggesting that her worries were really her doubts about his abilities.

Chuck became someone she hardly knew, step by alienating step. He became darker. He burned an asset. He began to drink - serious, self-medicating drinking, alone. And when Hannah came into his life (I will think about that in a minute, don't want to think about that here, now, in Shaw's bed), he began to treat her as he accused Sarah sometimes of having treated him. He started handling Hannah, despite the fact that he was in a relationship with her. He lied to her face. He twisted the truth. He misrepresented himself. He seemed to view that mistreatment as a matter of course, as Shaw did. Hannah was a civilian. Duping her was permitted. Chuck was willing to be with her falsely, undercover, keeping her in ignorance. Shaw allowed it, did not suggest that Chuck should stop seeing Hannah or doing whatever it was Chuck was doing. For two years, Chuck fought for real with Sarah. Now, he was happy with lies with Hannah.

It nearly killed Sarah. Hannah.

And she had transitioned to Hannah, to thinking of Hannah, she realized. Hannah was the start of Shaw for Sarah, or as close to the start as she could pinpoint. Sarah had softened toward Shaw when she found out about his wife. She knew something about being driven forward as a spy by guilt, by pain, by remorse. But that change had not led her to his bed. Hannah had done that.

Hannah was Lou - but on steroids. Steroidally normal. Steroidally perfect for Chuck. Brunette. Techie. Smart. Verbal. Small, petite, lovely. But it was not just the fact of Hannah, the fact that Chuck slept with her. That was awful, a knife to a heart not long healed from Jill. But if Sarah had thought Chuck was going to be happy with Hannah, that they would have the sort of relationship Sarah had longed to give Chuck but never could, Sarah would have sucked it up and went on. Nursed her broken heart but wished Chuck and Hannah the best. I would still have hated her, a little, more than a little, forever.

But that was not what was happening. No, Chuck was handling Hannah, not dating her. He could not seem to tell the difference. He was lying, constantly, to Hannah. The man who broke up with Sarah because their cover story was a lie was lying to Hannah. She was his asset, not his girlfriend. To lose Chuck to Hannah was one thing. To watch him sleep with his asset - that was indescribably painful.

Be fair to Chuck. It was true that Chuck did not understand his relationship with Hannah in those terms, but as he had often told Sarah, understanding a relationship in certain terms did not mean those terms accurately described the relationship. Functionally, in terms of what was really going on, Chuck slept with an asset - that should have become clearer to him when Hannah ended up swept into a mission.

Be fair to Chuck.

- I am trying, Jill, but…

But, by his own lights, Chuck was not being fair to Hannah or to himself. Maybe the handler/asset charge is too strong but how would it have looked to Chuck if it had been someone else doing what he did?

Here's what hurts the most.

Yes, Chuck slept with Hannah. That hurt. It still hurts. But he slept with her when he was in love with me - and when he knew he was not in love with her. Somehow, that hurts the most. Jill, at least, confused him, made him revisit old feelings. And I don't mean Chuck did not like Hannah - he did - but he did not love her, he did not really ever believe they would be real. That they had a future. I know, because I know what he looks like when he wants something to be real. He settled for a fake. Slept with her under his cover.

Sarah gave up at that point. Shaw had been pushing, making it obvious that he wanted her, wanted something with her. She began to yield.

And that brings me to Shaw. I am doing what Chuck did. It would kill Chuck to know it. Why am I here? In the bed of a man I know I do not love and never expect to love - all the while in love with someone else? I am doing what Chuck did.

Sleeping with someone when I am in love with someone else.

Why the hell am I here?

The shorter answer is because this is all, this is what, I deserve. This is my relationship with Bryce again, worse, since I know what to expect.

Worse, because we have a corpse along for the ride. Shaw's wife. Three's company.

But there's a longer answer and it starts with my real name.

And it starts with my settling for fake, too.

Canto 2: Brackish Backwaters

Chuck was with Hannah, apparently satisfied with that, with a relationship of lies. The kind he would not have with me.

Shaw kept pushing on Sarah, attempting to woo her. Locomotive mud. But attractive. She did not like him. Not at the beginning. But, after a little while, she came to feel for him, for his grief. It matched her grief for Chuck. Shaw had lost the person he loved. Sarah was losing the person she loved.

She had wanted to run with Chuck. He had run from her. She was running from him. She never ran to Shaw; she only ran from Chuck. Given the straits of her life, that meant she ran into Shaw.

But from the first, it was not what she wanted. Despite her attempts to tell herself it was. Hannah had what Sarah wanted, or the hollow version of that Chuck was willing to settle for. Sarah had what she always had. Nothing. Less than nothing. Less than zero.

Shaw kept pushing. It was hard, being at less than zero. Eventually, she started to yield. But as they went along, no change for the better occurred. Shaw wanted to sleep with her, she knew, and she realized that would likely happen if she allowed this to go on, but she also knew it would just be a change in their relationship, not progress, not an achievement of intimacy, bare, but not a baring. Sarah had no sense of what Shaw might have been like with his wife, but grief and the job had made him incapable of intimacy. Knowing that, she let things go on, because she was hurting so much, because she was willing to do almost anything to make it stop. She knew, deep down, although, as usual, she tried not to know it, that Shaw was not her romantic choice. She pretended that he was. He was instead a coping mechanism. But she tried to make him more, tried one time. A desperate measure.

She had kept virtually everything about herself from Chuck for so long, and yet he managed to know her. She realized that the reason they had both managed for so long with the awful cover dating was that the cover never kept them from becoming intimate with one another. They had not become physically intimate. (One day, Morgan Grimes, a reckoning…) But still intimate, deeply intimate despite the cover. Neither of them had realized it fully, but they were friends and lovers, lovers in almost every sense.

Intimate.

For Chuck, knowing about her dislike of olives or her love of pickles was not just two items on an information checklist, it was a secret he shared with her. They had shared secrets together, kisses, touches, little comments. Like a reverse magician, Chuck had managed to make Sarah appear - when her whole life she had disappeared. She had appeared and, without knowing it, had grown intimate with Chuck. That intimacy became symbolized by the charm bracelet, affirmed by it. For all its sufferings and frustrations and sadnesses, her cover/real relationship with Chuck had been suffused with warmth and closeness. She loved it, loved the time they spent together. The charm bracelet was suffused with that warmth and closeness.

Sarah missed that so much. She had never had it before. She now knew she would never have it again. Whatever became of this thing with Shaw (Sarah knew there was no long-term future in it, Shaw was all about the past), the spy life would kill intimacy, hunt it down and terminate it. What she had with Chuck was a miracle, a fire that burned despite being starved of oxygen. There was no fire with Shaw. No intimacy.

So Sarah tried to create intimacy, to work the sort of magic for herself that Chuck had worked for her. The charm bracelet gave her the idea, sadly. Chuck gave her something intensely personal, something absolutely real, something she could not falsify (even if she hid it from herself now in the back of her jewelry case, unable to touch it, but unable to bear the thought of parting with it). She had thought maybe she could fake it until she made it. But that was not working. She needed a stronger magic. Time with Shaw distracted her thoughts to an extent, but her heart was never there, found nothing in him. So she made a decision. She would create intimacy between them, give her heart something.

She told Shaw her name. Sam. The oldest charm on the almost-bare bracelet of Sarah's life, a charm known only to her father and her mother.

Since Sarah had come to Burbank, she had been learning the logic of gifts. Chuck understood that logic as intuitively as Sarah understood the spy life. She had been learning from him. So she gave Shaw a gift, a kind of charm, meant to charm them into something more than it seemed they could have. Alchemy via a secret word, power in a name. Shaw's acceptance of the gift was not ungracious, but it was not like Sarah's acceptance of the charm bracelet.

It was like he had been given socks he needed for Christmas. He was thankful but the moment was not deeply special for him. Had she told him her high school locker combination, he might have reacted in much the same way. What had been intended to enspell them, to create intimacy between them, turned into a reminder of the lack of intimacy they shared. There was no enchanting what they had. It would always be...different from what she had with Chuck. She accepted it. Rearranged her compartments. Terminated her expectations.

And because the universe hated her, Chuck overheard the entire conversation. She created no intimacy with Shaw; she hurt Chuck instead. My life. He had asked for her middle name and she had not really given it to him. Shaw had not asked and she gave him her name. What had been a desperate ploy to conjure intimacy with Shaw turned into a betrayal of her intimacy with Chuck. Another implicit rejection of him.

There was no way to make it right. It just went on the baggage pile of wrong that Sarah pulled behind her daily. Chuck was with Hannah. She was with Shaw.

The shitshow was the shitshow.

Still, there had been a moment...

It was during Chuck's testing, on a stakeout, when she thought they might escape from the shit-show and find each other again. Sarah felt a heartbeat of hope...

But then the everything turned Red.

Sarah wanted to blame the whole shit-show on Chuck. On his desire to be a spy. But she blamed herself for that desire.

She had polluted him, pulled him toward the spy life in her attempts to stay near him.

Shaw made her give Chuck the news that he was not yet an agent, made her oversee the Red Test. Why the hell did I not walk away? Chuck thought they were going out, a date to Traxx, to celebrate his having become an agent, to maybe finally put the past behind them and work toward a future.

Why did I go? Why did I dress up, like we were going to really do what he thought?

She put him in an impossible position. He was so happy, so full of hope; he had emerged from the dark. He thought he was an agent. He thought the handler/asset, teacher/student structures were gone. He did not know that a worse one had taken their place, fully and finally: corruptor/corrupted.

The structure of our destiny. We have reached it at last.

I snake the gun across the table, apple in the Garden. Everything now Red. I calmly explain the situation to Chuck.

See, Chuck? A real spy feels nothing or does not feel what she feels. If you do this, it will rend you.

Why did I dress up? What am I celebrating?

Seductress, against my intentions. Snake.

He takes the gun. Knowledge of good and evil. He understands now. If he does not kill the mole, he is finished as a spy, and we will never be together, not as he wants - as equals. We are equals, Chuck, please don't want this more than you want me. No, forget me. Don't want this more than you want you. Don't want this more than I want you. Choose yourself, Chuck. I am your ruination. Serpent. Snake. Temptress. Why did I dress up?

Chuck holds the gun the way that perhaps Eve held the apple. The Red Test is power, knowledge. Be like God. Good and Evil. Life and Death.

The past had been on my mind. Sam. My past. My Red Test. The woman I killed...executed...whose name I still do not know. The beginning of my days as Enforcer.

I have no future to consider. Shaw is a movement back in time. The future I want is trying to decide if he will kill...execute...the mole. Kill himself. Kill me. I dressed up for my funeral. For Chuck's funeral. Funerals, his and hers. For the funeral of the woman I executed.

If he does kill the mole, we will not be together. I could not live with my handiwork. I could not bear to see it. I make sure his choice is as awful as possible. I make sure he knows he is going to lose me if he executes the mole, and I know he believes he will lose me if he doesn't - we will never be together as he wants. Never be equals. I damn him both ways. Because I have always been his damnation.

I made him want me. I made him want this.

Damn me.

- Too late.

- Shut up, Jill.

I thought Jill was the serpent at the bosom, but my feeling of kinship with her in Castle was right: serpents both.

You do not have to do this, Chuck. For once, be like me in just this one respect: Don't want what you want. Forget being a spy. Be Chuck. That is all I ever wanted you to be. There is nothing for you to prove to me. But I did this. I want you to be Chuck and I want you to be with me and I can't have both and now you are living my paradox.

I see it in his eyes. This is now about him proving something to himself too. He wants to succeed. He has felt like a loser for so long, and I made that feeling so much worse.

He takes the apple. The gun. I leave him to my fate.

ooOoo

I get to the scene after the gunshot. I look to see the mole, dead. Chuck stands, gun in hand. I realize that I have switched places with him. I am where he was when I shot Mauser. He is where I was. I had no idea when I killed Mauser it would lead us here. The gunshot then echoed the gunshot now, the one still echoing in the trainyard. Or maybe it was the other way around. Or maybe they were both echoes of the gunshot in Paris, my Red Test.

Chuck stands over the mole's corpse.

Smoke from the gunshot wreaths him, a garland of loss.

Chuck is a spy.

Chuck is me.

I am Corruption.

We are cast out of the Garden

Sarah noticed that the sun had risen. The dawn was pale, gray. The pale grayness had filled the penthouse bedroom as her mind drifted.

She wiped her eyes and got up. She went to the bathroom and washed up, brushed her teeth. Back in the living room, she took clothes from her suitcase and dressed standing there.

She pulled an armchair close to a window and sat staring out, vaguely in the direction of Langley, far away, invisible, yet omnipresent.

She heard Shaw get up, heard the shower start. She went to the kitchen and made coffee. If she was going to live there, she needed to know where things were.

She was drinking hers when Shaw came out, dressed. He had his suitcase, pulling it behind him. She gave him a cup of coffee and they shared a quick kiss.

"Morning, Sam." Her heart sank. She wished she had never told him that. But she could not take it back and he would undoubtedly go on using it in private, not knowing that each time he did, he was cursing her.

She made herself smile. "Morning, Shaw."

He smiled. He liked her use of his last name. Professional. The Andersons. I am in Nod, East of Eden.

He sipped his coffee then put the cup down. He saw her suitcase standing in the living room where she put it when they arrived. "Ready for Burbank? Ready to end one chapter and start a new one?"

Sarah's heart closed her throat, so she only nodded.

A/N2 Does all that Sarah thinks make sense? Is she being fair to Chuck, to herself? No, but give our heroine a break. It's been a shitty few months. My interest is in her attempts to make sense, her attempts to be fair, in what they show about her, not in their ultimate success. She will see through some of them soon with a little help from the man she loves. Things are about to turn. She's reached the bottom of the Valley of the Shadow of Death and is about to climb out.

Tune in next time for Chapter 37, "Back on the Chain Gang (Part Three): Appearance and Reality". This has been dark. Sunny dawn is coming.