A/N Everyone sing: you know the ABBA song…
Thanks for sticking with me. We are closing in on the end. Let me hear from you a few times before we part company.
Don't own Chuck.
CHAPTER 52 Knowing Me, Knowing You
An electric goat's head
Turns and smiles
Turns and smiles
Thomas Merton, Cables to the Ace 30
Kathleen was sitting at her breakfast counter with Alex. She took a moment and thought about yesterday before telling Alex about it.
Casey had taken the day off and they had spent it together.
The time they spent in bed had been wonderful—completely new and present in memory too. Kathleen had been so overcome by it that she had wept in John's arms when it was over. When it was over the first time. She had not wept later.
But it had been awkward between them when they got out of bed. There was still a divide between them, a gulf opened and fixed in place by John's betrayal. And as wonderful as it was to be with him, to be close to him again, it would take time for forgiveness and forgetfulness to do their work and close that gulf. She had to forgive him. He had to forgive himself. Their orientation needed to be on the future, not the past.
Alex listened as her mom started the edited-for-TV version of the story. She was largely unsurprised. She was overjoyed for her mom, but Alex had known what was going to happen when her mom showed up at the party wearing that dress.
She was concerned only that her mom allow her mind to catch up with her heart. Her heart had been yoked to John forever. Alex now understood better the glum, rainy Saturdays she and her mom had sometimes spent together at home over the years, her mom sitting by the door and staring out at the front yard as if she were waiting for someone—or wished she were.
Speaking of waiting, it was Morgan's day off. He was supposed to stop by and have an early lunch with Alex and her mom. After that, she and Morgan were going back to the martial arts studio. If Morgan was going to insist on watching all those Bruce Lee films, he ought to at least learn how to actually do some of what he was seeing. They two of them were supposed to have dinner with Morgan's mom. It would be Alex's first time meeting her. She was a little nervous but mostly excited. She expected it to go well.
Clunk.
Not clank or click. Clunk.
Chuck guessed the difference must be the supermaximum-ness of Jill's new jail. There were no bars, just heavy, thick metal doors, almost like the doors of a bank vault.
Sarah walked ahead of him. She was dressed in black, all black. Black top, black jeans, tall black boots, black military-style watch. She looked like she was going to a funeral. Or an ass-kicking. Both.
The burly guard—a woman—led them deeper into the prison. She finally halted in front of one of the heavy doors. Cell 007. Chuck failed to suppress laughter. The guard stared him into silence. Score one for Bryce.
The guard made a call on the mic she kept otherwise clipped to the epaulet on her shoulder.
The door clicked open. The irony of going to visit Jill behind a door like the one he'd been behind in the warehouse struck Chuck. He was glad for the cell number and the irony. The thought of Jill living out her life in a place like this made him sad, despite his justifiable anger at her.
He had once thought he would spend his life with her or hoped he would. He had been duped. But that didn't change the fact that he had once felt that way. Chuck tried to keep the sadness from showing. But as the guard pulled the door open, he saw Sarah see it. She was not angry with him. She smiled at him, a small brief smile that she kept only for him and only let him see. Her secret My Chuck smile. They went in.
Jill was seated on a low cot. There was little else in the cell except for the expected open lavatory. Chuck had blackened one of her eyes when he hit her before, and the bruising was now a mottled purple-yellow. Jill had a book in her hands—a big book. The Anatomy of Melancholy. Chuck glanced at it when she closed it and then glanced at her.
"A gift from General Beckman. It was in the cell when I got here. I have no idea if it was a kind or an unkind gesture. I really can't make much of it. I guess melancholy is better than nothing. The book is supposed to lift melancholy by reflecting on melancholy." She was quiet for a minute, looking around her cell like she had just noticed it for the first time.
"So…Chuck." Jill met his gaze. Jill turned and visually assayed Sarah, taking in the black garb. "Walker."
"Bartowski."
Jill's mouth formed an 'O'. She twisted her head toward Chuck. He just looked at her. "I thought you two just got engaged."
Sarah strode to Chuck and took his hand in hers, smiling into his smile. "It was a short engagement, Jill. I couldn't wait. He's mine now and I am his."
Jill's leaning crest fell. Her shoulders sagged. Eventually, she raised her head.
"I can't imagine you are here to ask for my congratulations, so why are you here?"
It was clear that Jill had gotten angry as she traversed that question. Her body spoke a new language by its end—her shoulders stiffened, her cheeks flushed.
"I have nothing to say to you two. Leave. Or did you come here," she spoke to Sarah, "to gloat?"
"Maybe a little, Jill. After all, the last time we spoke," Sarah inflected that word noticeably, "you spent your time explaining to me that Chuck was yours. I wanted to make sure you understood how empty your boasts were."
Chuck broke in. "Jill, do you think you are safe from Leader, even in here?"
"No, I know I am not. I was probably safer in your holding cell, probably a lot safer there. Leader does not usually allow high-ranking agents to live until trial."
"I thought not. Look, we think we can stop Leader, actually capture him. If we do, that'd make you safe, safer anyway. It's a long story, and one I am not going to tell, but do you remember ever wearing a red dress with a matching red hat?"
Jill's face was puzzled. "Sure. I often wear that outfit when I travel; it is a favorite of mine. Why?"
Sarah: "Did Leader ever see you in it, with his own eyes?"
"No, I have never seen Leader with my own eyes or he me with his."
"But he would have seen a video of you in it."
"Yes, many times. Vincent Smith, the bastard, used to call me Carmen Sandiego. He got a lot of the men doing it."
Sarah shot Chuck a quick, almost unnoticeable glance. He nodded.
"Do you know where Leader is, Jill?"
"Rumors are that he is in California—but I don't have any idea where. For all I know, that weird cell he is rumored to be in could be on a submarine or a space station—you know, like in that Bond film…what was it?"
"Moonraker," Chuck offered.
"Yes, that one. With the toothy guy, Jaws. Say, wasn't he in another of those movies?"
Sarah answered. "The Spy Who Loved Me."
Chuck and Jill both looked at her. While they both looked at her in surprise, their looks were otherwise totally opposed, Jill annoyed and Chuck touched. When Jill looked away, Sarah gave Chuck the same small smile she gave him when they entered the cell.
"In your interactions with Leader, Jill," Chuck asked, "do you recall ever talking about specific locations, locations that might have been Leader's location?'
Jill appeared honestly to consider the question and honestly to answer it. "No."
Chuck had been afraid of this, afraid that whatever Mary took Jill to know was so distant from Jill that it could not be recalled.
"Is there any place you often went to get orders from Leader? Was there even a particular town?"
"No. Usually, Leader contacted me on a laptop I had been given."
And then Chuck had a thought, a good one: "Is there any place you often went between missions, a place you spent time?" Chuck believed he knew the answer.
"Yes, my house I the beach. I told you about it, Chuck."
"You did. I just remembered. How did you come to get that place, Jill?"
"I mentioned once to Leader, after money for a mission was transferred into my account, that I would soon have enough for my dream home. He asked about it. A few weeks later, I got a call from a realtor about it. I remember that Leader asked me later, after I bought it, if I liked it. It is up on a cliff, above the water."
"Tell us the address, Jill." She did.
Chuck noted the address in his head, as did Sarah. He turned to Jill again, his sadness evident. "I'm sorry you are in here, Jill. I wish you had made different choices."
Jill's eyes filled with tears. "I do too, Chuck. But I have been thinking. I'm not saying this to hurt your feelings or to get to gloat myself, but the truth is, Chuck, despite what I told myself from time to time and my fantasies about us being together: I wanted you, I wanted you to be mine…" Jill glanced quickly toward Sarah, "but I never wanted to be yours. I wish I had. Maybe things would have turned out very differently for us, for me."
Sarah squeezed Chuck's hand. He was stuck, unable to respond or move.
"Maybe they would have, Jill," Sarah spoke with no rancor and no taunt: echoing the fact itself was enough.
They left Jill behind them.
Clunk.
Back on the road, Sarah glanced nervously at Chuck. She could feel his sadness, his melancholy. She felt some of her own, she had to admit. "Are you ok, Chuck?"
"I will be. What a waste, Sarah…Jill wasted herself. I wasted all that time on her and then on the memory of her. How did I fail to see her for who she was, who she admitted she is?"
Sarah gazed at him kindly. In Jill's cell, it had struck Sarah just how close her life had been in ways to Jill's and how near Sarah had come to missing out on Chuck and what he had given her.
"Chuck, you are the most generous-minded person I have met. Part of that generous-mindedness, a part that I don't think can go away, is that you think other people are generous-minded too."
She stopped for a moment.
"You read your guilelessness into their characters. That can be a good thing for some people; it makes you gentle and patient with them, allows you to shelter them so that they can grow and allows you to endure their growing pains…"
Sarah's voice quivered.
"You habitually see things from other people's perspectives. You never forget that other people are people, with minds and feelings of their own, right or wrong. But sometimes you have a hard time imagining how ungenerous other people can be, how little concerned that other people are people.
"When we went on our first cover dates, I sometimes feared you were being…mean to me. You kept attributing your way of looking at other people to me. I thought you knew that I was not like you, not generous-minded. I thought that you were being ironic, satirizing me, my coldness and suspicion."
Sarah drove on in silence for a little while. Chuck was silent too. She knew he knew she had not finished.
"I figured out pretty fast that you were not doing that. You really believed that I saw the world the way you did. Your belief that I did made me believe I could—and I began to try.
"Sometimes you were so gentle you almost broke me. I never told you this.
"It was like you knew how wrong I was about everything and were determined to make me see how wrong I was about everything. That wasn't what you were doing, though. You were just being gentle with me, sweet to me…loving me. But sometimes, I experienced that love as torment…. "
Her voice and her hands on the steering wheel were tremulous. She took a deep breath and felt steadier.
"Chuck, Jill is Jill. Even you can't reach everyone.
Pause.
"Or, anyway, not all at once." Sarah laughed softly at herself.
Pause.
"You were never cold and suspicious, Sarah."
She rolled her eyes at Chuck but she kept laughing. "Ice Queen, remember."
"You were never the Ice Queen, Sarah. You just believed that you were and fooled everyone else into believing it too. I never believed it."
Sarah sighed, a sigh long and affectionate and warm. "QED, sweetie, QED."
"I know this address helps us, how does this address help us, exactly? Are we supposed to go there and find something that will allow us to figure out where Leader is?"
"No, Chuck. That is where Leader is."
"What?"
"Jill was just talking but her comment about Leader being in a submarine or a space station was right in a way, I think. Leader is afraid of the light of day, of natural light, of color. It allows your mom to fight him. Leader arranged for Jill to buy that place.
"Leader is bunkered somewhere inside the cliff the house sits on. Jill is only there, when she is, between missions, when Leader knows she will be there. The rest of the time the house sits empty.
"My guess is that the house commands a healthy slice of private beach. Leader gets supplied by water, and likely arrived by water. I also guess there is not a huge number of guards. Enough. Enough to take care of Leader and to make him feel safe. Lots of traps, likely.
"When your mom told Stephen that Carmen knew and didn't know, she didn't mean she had forgotten, she meant that Jill knew the place under one description, Home, but not under Leader's description, Head Quarters."
Chuck laughed, one chuckle. "Head Quarters. That would be funny if it weren't Mom."
Sarah reached over and held his hand.
Beckman was in Castle. She had spent the night there, trying to catch up on DC paperwork and other obligations.
She got off the phone with Chuck. She had the address and Chuck had explained Sarah's hunch. Beckman called and ordered a satellite into position. That was going to take a while. Beckman ordered surveillance drones to go over the house once darkness fell. They should know whether Sarah was right by tomorrow or the next day.
Beckman had just sat down when her phone rang, scaring her slightly. It was still in her hand.
"Roan?"
"Not tonight? Well, I am going to be in town at least a few more days. Soon? Ok, I will hope to see you then."
She ended the call and sighed. She should never have mentioned the future. Roan bolted like a colt any time she did that. She had hoped it wasn't what happened this time, but given his flimsy excuse for leaving and his hemming and hawing about when he might be back, it seemed that he had. She knew him. Damn.
The man was not a colt—he was long in the tooth, as the saying went—as was she. There was precious little future to put off or run from. Maybe, if he came back to town, she could finally get him to acknowledge that.
She knew she was in a bad spot. To get Roan to do what she hoped, she would have to convince him that he was not as young as he wanted to believe.
Disillusioning someone you love, even for love's sake, was no pleasant task. She closed her eyes and sank into the chair, feeling her own years.
Stephen was resting on a cot in one of the holding cells of Castle. He had finished up the preliminary program for Bryce, implementing several of Ellie's suggestions. They would try it on him tomorrow.
Stephen was reflecting on Mary.
When they met, she had been so beautiful that he could hardly look at her. She had been his handler and then she was his lover. It had not happened overnight; it took time. Her being his handler blended imperceptibly into her being his lover.
But did she really ever love him? They had fought about this occasionally during their marriage. Stephen would be fine for weeks, months. And then she would do something that reminded him that she was Frost.
Frost had been his handler. Mary was his wife. Anytime he was reminded of Frost, he went into a tailspin, spiraled. He could not convince himself that if Mary loved him, then Frost loved him.
He knew that had to seem as evident as: if Clark Kent loved Lois Lane, then Superman loved Lois Lane. Taken one way, there was no denying it. Superman and Clark Kent were the same person. So too Frost and Mary.
But were Frost and Mary the same person? Mary loved Stephen. Did Frost? Why couldn't he accept the obvious answer?
Was Agent Walker the same person as Sarah Bartowski? Sarah loved Chuck. Did Agent Walker? Stephen wanted to believe it for his son's sake. He was trying to believe. Maybe he did believe it.
Maybe he did.
Leader was concentrating. In the dark, Frost continued to stir. She seemed determined. He could tell—faintly, ever so faintly—that she was anticipating something or hoping for something. Frost had stopped anticipating and hoping a long time ago. Leader thought she had. Now those feelings were back and they seemed to crawl along the inwards of Leader's chest like hot-coal spiders.
Leader knew Frost. Something new was happening. Something had changed—or was about to change. At least Frost thought so. She was wrong.
Let her anticipate. Let her hope. When Leader made ash of it all and salted the earth, her anticipation and hope would make the pain sear ever deeper. She would never recover. Tomorrow. It would begin tomorrow.
Thinking about it, Leader turned and smiled. Turned and smiled.
