A/N: Next-to-last chapter.

Nothing Like A Train

Chapter Twenty-Six: Here I Am

Beckman clears her throat as she tries to poker-face calmly in response to my words, but she blinks. A tell. Nerves. "Yes, Chuck we do. First, I…" Her tone commands; she leans forward onto elbows, her elbows on her desk.

I disobey. "No," I say, imitating Sarah's quiet firmness when talking to my mom, "First, I need to tell you that neither Sarah nor I will be returning to...work. This is our notice, so to speak. We plan to finish here, finish with Volkoff, and then to give you whatever remaining help we can, — and then we are out. No on vacation, not rogue. Out. O-U-T. Retired."

Beckman does better with the poker face this time. "Ok, Chuck, I assume Casey told you I am willing for you to make that decision. But…"

"But, that's that. Now, we have figured out where Volkoff is. He's vulnerable. We will go and try to capture him as soon as you and I finish talking, and…"

"The man matters, yes, Chuck, but it's his network that matters more…"

"And it matters more than you know, General." I wrest the conversational initiative from her, frowning as I do.

My early days in Burbank with the Intersect come back to me, the fear and disorientation, how much Graham and Beckman intimidated me, Graham's contempt, Beckman's dissatisfaction. How small I felt, how unequal to everything and everyone around me. I had felt like that to a degree since Stanford, small, shrinking, but I almost disappeared in those first few weeks. If not for Sarah, I would have disappeared.

Beckman sits back in her chair, taking her elbows off the desk in front of her and putting her hands on the edge. She gives me a surprised and speculative look.

"I will tell you about that when we bring Volkoff back. But now I need a guarantee from you that we will be out when we choose, on our terms."

She gives me a General's smile, ripe with assurance and condescension. "Of course, Chuck, you will have my iron-clad guarantee, but…"

"But, nothing." I hold up my hand, palm toward her. "I know what you are going to say: I'm still a teeming repository of state secrets. And that's true. But the secrets daily grow older. Without updates, I will know little soon that could be news to you. The other things I know you are just going to have to live with me knowing; they are one of the costs of your having done business, so to speak, with me. — I won't be sharing the secrets, and I believe that if we take Volkoff off the board, interest in me, outside the US government, will wane. But I will also promise that if there's a way to remove the Intersect from my head, a way that my dad can find, maybe with my sister's help, a way to get rid of the information, I will happily submit to it. — I have done a lot for my country while my country treated me as its property, while I was given no choice. The country can trust me when it grants that I am a human being. Because I am, and you, General, along with Graham, were only too willing to refuse me that status," I pause and face her squarely, "to take that status from me, permanently. And what you let happen to me in Prague…"

I collect myself, the Intersect surges in me, and I stare into her face with all that I now am. She tries to meet my gaze, to back me down as she has in the past. But I am not who she thinks I am. She has never known who I am. I am too much for her.

She surrenders. For the first time, she makes no effort to hide how she feels. I see intimidation flash across her features, a brief wave of a white flag.

She grimaces and looks down, no acting now.

"I didn't know what was happening under my nose, Chuck, and for that, I am profoundly sorry. I sent Casey after you, not teams of agents, to try to make that clear.

"And I am not proud of my...past with you, pre-Prague. I was wrong, sometimes disastrously wrong," she glances at Casey who grunts softly, "and I not only allowed my team in Prague to be infiltrated, I did not let you teach me how to teach you; I did not listen to you, Chuck. I saw failure where I should have seen difference. You are not a spy by my estimation. But...Sarah...and Casey...each in his or her way, had tried to get me to see that you did not need to be a spy by my estimation to succeed.

"And you did succeed, Team Bartowski succeeded, over and over." She includes Sarah and Casey in the scope of her nod, then focuses on me. "So, let me say now, and for the record, that I am sorry, Chuck. Mistakes were made."

It is a very military apology.

The glance down was all the outward contrition I was going to get. But it wasn't contrition I wanted. I wanted the white flag that preceded it. I want my life back, or, anyway, a life that is not moth-eaten by lies. Since Prague, since finding Mom, I finally know who I am, who my family is, what happened to me as a boy. For the first time, I comprehend myself.

"Did you know that Frost was my mom, General?" The conversation is mine to control now.

She shakes her head. "No, Graham told me nothing about all of that, if he even knew. Frost was a legend, rogue or dead, and I never knew her real name. Well, not until your father showed up, revealed himself as Orion, and then I suspected but did not know. — You were born to this life, Chuck, for what that's worth…"

I don't speak for a moment. Sarah takes my hand.

Beckman sees it and watches us as Sarah and I share a glance of mutual understanding.

My life flashes before me again, recontextualized, reclaimed, mine.

What Beckman said is true.

My life has been a somber quilt of secrets, a grave quilt of guilts of which I was ignorant but that have marked me, my life, from the beginning. I was swaddled in secrets, swallowed them in my spy-laced mother's milk.

I was born to a spy and the mark she loved (her love of him real but complex, flawed), born into the spy life. My life has never been normal, despite my belief that it was. I have no more lived a normal life than Sarah: she was conscripted by spying as a girl, really, her father's doing; I was Intersected as a boy, my father's doing.

It's almost time for her and me to lay down our arms, to see if we can find, create, a normal life, together, a life in one another's arms, no longer the bearers of burdens we each took up unawares. We've labored under other's mistakes.

I ponder the comic book line — I know it from comic books — I've often brooded on the past two years: with great power comes great responsibility.

That's true — but the responsibility does not have to be endless, and I do not have to choose the power. I can let it go. I refuse to let my good, Sarah's good, be gulped into nothingness by an amorphous abstraction that no one understands, the Greater Good. We have slaved away for that blank, devouring demon for almost our whole lives, been almost swallowed whole by it. I will not channel that Void. Forgiving my mom does not require repeating her mistakes.

"I was, and I am not willing to live it any longer. Here's what I want, General. Your iron-clad guarantee, but underwritten by the President's. I want to talk to you here again in one hour, and I want his guarantee of your guarantee."

She reddens. "Chuck, my guarantee…"

"...is not enough. I'm sorry, General. But I can't trust you, all due respect. And I want the President's guarantee in writing."

Beckman starts to protest and then she looks at me hard. I stand before her in measured, lanky indignation, staring back at her. Here I am, General. Here I am: not the hapless man-boy of early Burbank, not a later Prague spy of your making, but something else, made early by my dad and my mom, but especially by Ellie, and later by Sarah, most of all by Sarah. You have no categories for me, General; US intelligence has no categories for me.

"Give me my promises, and I will give you Volkoff and...more...and then you will let us go when we leave."

She hunches her shoulders, leans forward. "I can't get the President briefed, get a document prepared, in an hour, Chuck."

"I said I didn't trust you, General. I didn't say I underestimate you. You can do it, General. It can't be the first time the President has heard my name."

Beckman's mouth opens and she raises an eyebrow a millimeter or two. She is silent, then she crosses her arms, leans back further in her chair "No, it won't be. Okay. What do you need there?"

"We need the helicopter again, assuming you can make that happen."

She frowns. "I called in a lot of markers getting Sarah and Casey what they needed to rescue you, in Moscow of all places, Chuck. I can make that happen, and I can get you all out if you succeed. If you fail, I will walk away from...the remains. I won't have any choice."

"I understand. We're going to get ready. One hour, General, if you please."

I look at Casey and he ends the connection; the screen blackens.

Casey gives me a look both impressed and disappointed. "You went easy on her, kid. You had her. Had her. Professionally — and personally. Despite her attempt to apologize and save face at the same time."

"I know, Casey, but I don't want anything from her, except freedom from her. I thought I wanted to be a spy, needed to be a spy, but what I needed to be was me, Intersect and all."

I am not a failure; I thought so because I was serving a false self, one fashioned from my misunderstandings of my childhood, my parents, Jill, Bryce, my expulsion from Stanford, fashioned from all the things in my childhood I forgot, fashioned from the intentions and expectations of others.

I'm done with that fashioned false self. Sartor Resartus. I'm remaking myself, consciously this time: my life as poioumena. A word my poetry professor used. She was talking about poems that narrate their own creation, like novels that do the same. Carlyle's Sartor Resartus. John Fowles' Daniel Martin; she had read Fowles' novel's remarkable opening, "The Harvest", a prose poem. The opening line leaps into my mind, memory, flash, both: Whole sight; or all the rest is desolation.

Whole sight. Here I am.

At last, I am translating my sense of who I am and who I wish to be into action. The self I have quietly hated all these years is that false self, an impersonation, a caricature of The Young Man as Failure-to-Launch. I did not consciously register the falsehood, although Ellie certainly did, and Morgan, and, again, especially Sarah. She tried, again and again, to get me to see the me I am and could be, the one she saw but to which I was, almost completely, blind.

Casey considers my words. "Ok, Bartowski. Now, let's figure out how to board that train."

During the next hour, we plot, plan, scheme. The basic specs of The Wanderer are buried in the Russian Railways computer system but I find them. A locomotive and two other cars. Four passengers, one of them Volkoff. Hartley.

The train sits at a depot east of Moscow, off the main lines. Other Russian Railways rolling stock is there: it's a kind of rail yard, a place for repair, refittings. A massive criss-cross of tracks. That seems like the place for this to happen, a representation of the Intersect itself, its converging and diverging lines, its rolling stock of information.

We equip ourselves as well as we can. Casey and Sarah are armed. Pistols, knives, and flashbangs, explosives. I have a tranq gun and the broomstick from Volkoff's. Casey sees me grab the broom and shakes his head. Sarah grins at me, and I know she's thinking about her choice-of-weapons line from the woods.

Ready, but still a few minutes ahead of Beckman's scheduled video return, Sarah and I make our way to Mom's room.

She is sleeping, her face relaxed. The nurse comes in as we stand there and gives us an encouraging report, good news: Mom's stabilizing. The bad news is that she can't possibly travel for two or three days, perhaps longer. If Sarah and Casey and I take Volkoff, go home, we will have to do it without her. She will stay behind.

I walk to the head of her bed and reach out, touching Mom's face, the lines etched there. Sarah watches me, standing by my side. When I look up, Sarah reaches out and takes my hand, holding it in hers. "How are you doing?"

"Better than I would have expected, if I could have expected this, expected her." I look down at Mom. "Why would she do it, do you think, make the choices she made? I know she loved Dad, Ellie, and me. But…"

Sarah frowns a vulnerable frown. "It's easy to lose yourself in this life, Chuck. Maybe, ultimately, it's required. Especially in deep cover. — Your mom glossed over the details of what she did to attract Volkoff's attention, but I'm willing to bet she lost bits of herself slowly, over time.

"You tell yourself that each time you step over the new limit you've drawn for yourself, it's the last time. And then you draw a new limit, and you step over it. And each time you make yourself a promise, you mean it, but promises to yourself are the hardest to keep: how can you be held accountable when the person who would hold you accountable and the person who wants to break the promise are the same?

"By the time she got to Volkoff, and looked behind her, at the path she traveled, she was separated from you and Ellie and your Dad by all those lines, all those steps. — And you realize that you've been moving steadily, steeply downhill somehow too and that returning is almost straight up all the way. It's easy to sink into despair. To think that there's no way back, that all you can do is live out your decline." She pauses then adds quietly, "Even embrace it."

We stand for a moment. I turn to face Sarah. "We both know a version of that story, don't we?"

She nods. "My story, seventeen-year-old recruit to Enforcer."

"And mine, Stanford honor student to five-year Nerd Herder."

I kiss her and she kisses me, reassuring each other. Casey knocks very softly, opens the door a little, looks in.

"Beckman's due in three minutes."

I don't recall ever seeing Beckman look a little disheveled, much less frazzled. But when she comes on the screen, she is.

Her uniform's starchy crispness has wilted damply. Her makeup is gone. She ignores all formalities. The sound of a fax machine in the room with us accompanies her appearance on-screen.

"It's done, Chuck. The President has guaranteed your freedom. But he wants Volkoff and whatever else you can give us. And he wants you to recognize that he is taking a massive risk in letting you walk away, but that the size of the risk only equals the size of the debt we owe you. — He made sure I memorized those words exactly and made me promise to repeat them. So I have."

She blows out a breath. Casey coughs quietly into his hand.

I answer her. "Thank him for me, General, and thank you."

"Good hunting, you three." The screen goes black again and I hear the sound of the chopper outside.

A moment later, we are airborne, flying fast, staying as low as darkness and the weather will safely allow. Snow is falling again, gently; it was blown up and around us, the tarmac slippery under our feet, as we climbed in. Sarah sits against me. None of us speak, we all have too much to think about.

Before I expect it, the pilot's voice breaks the silence, coming through my headphones. "Ok, this is the spot where I drop you. I'll wait for two hours. The rail yard is about a half a mile east, just over that low ridge."

He points and I nod. Casey and Sarah are already out, moving. I get out too. The snowy silence is eerie after the chopper's blades stop rotating, its engine shut down.

We find the train tracks in the dark and start marching eastward along them, following them.