A/N: The last chapter was a signal of mood. This one sets the table, so to speak, for the action in that mood.
Spy vs. Spy vs. Spy vs. Spy
Chapter Two: Residuals
Two Months Later
Chuck was gone. Not to be found in Burbank. Gone.
Now, Sarah was on a plane to Burbank, Daniel Shaw beside her, Bryce across the aisle. Desperate not to disclose how close to despair she was, Sarah stared unseeingly out the window, her thoughts turbid, muddy.
Sarah had been stumbling around as if tranqed since the news reached her. A day ago — that was when the news reached her.
No one was quite sure exactly when Chuck had disappeared, not even Ellie, his sister, who had been away on an extended vacation with her husband when it happened.
Or that was what Sarah had been told in the briefing by Beckman.
Sarah had not asked about the specific arrangements made to protect Chuck as she left for the Intersect Project. She had tried to make the break clean, thinking that would be best for both of them, when, she now knew, she had really been making it best for her.
She was increasingly sure that she could not be trusted where what was in her best interests was concerned. She had made it worse for her.
Chuck did so many things to her, but one of the most important was that he fired her imagination. She had left her imagination behind as a child, a difficult, unnatural abandonment for a very bright and very lonely little girl, but she found that her imagination tormented her too often, presenting taunting possibilities: toys, friends, freedom, a home.
And as she got older, her imagination, when it sprang to life, turned moral — she imagined the feelings of the people she and her father conned, their feelings of betrayal and loss. And then, once in the CIA, there were marks and assets and targets whose inner lives she could imagine. — All of it was unbearable, and so, slowly, from the time she was a little girl, she had begun to purge herself of her imagination, to disallow it to function.
Until Budapest.
When her imagination sparked moral again, and she saved the baby.
Until Burbank.
When it flamed to life in the Buy More that first day, flickering, then growing, then conflagrating. A wildfire of imagination she could only partly contain.
Until Chuck.
He had fired her imagination, long in a cold lifeless stupor, and he had fed it. Her Conversation with Chuck game was a product of his effect on her, as were long, frustrated, frustrating nights alone in her bed, squirming and turning, when images of what she and Chuck might have had and been together filled her head and agitated her...body.
One of the many huge differences between her time with Chuck and her time with Bryce — before Burbank, the Andersons — was that her imagination remained practically dead with Bryce. She imagined nothing more, and nothing more for them than they had. And that had been how she had lived as an agent: imagining nothing more, and nothing more for herself than she had.
Until Chuck.
And now she could not douse her imagination again, shut it down, put it back in its decade-long coma, ashen. It was tormenting her, filling her mind with images, including images of what might have happened to Chuck, and it was causing her to curse herself violently for leaving him unprotected, leaving him in Burbank, without her.
Abandoning him to save herself.
Not long after she and Bryce got to DC, she had learned that Chuck had a new protective detail — or partly new — assigned to him. It had not occurred to Sarah at first, but even with the Intersect gone, it turned out that Chuck, supernaturally retentive as he was, still remembered reams and reams of classified data, the residuals of previous flashes.
Casey had remained behind but Sarah's place had been taken by Amy Smythe, Sarah's friend — more or less — and one-time CATs member. Amy was not posing as Chuck's girlfriend — that would have made Sarah crazy, crazier — and was not with him constantly.
Amy was working out of an LA CIA substation. She checked on Chuck every few days. Sarah had never called her; she had never called Sarah. Amy worried Sarah, though.
Chuck was charming. Not in some dripping machismo way, but subtly, quietly, insistently, charming because of the prowess of his goodness, not some fascinating and short-lived magnetism, but through the depth of his commitments to the people he cared about.
Casey maintained his old apartment and the various security measures at the complex there, and he continued his cover job at the Buy More. Sarah had begun to believe that somewhere, deep, deep down, Casey actually enjoyed that cover job. The little Sarah had heard from Beckman — Sarah never asked for fear of betraying herself — suggested that Casey and Chuck had become friends. Better friends. They had been friends from early on, Sarah acknowledged, just as she and Chuck had been a couple from early on too.
Casey reported Chuck missing. Chuck had failed to show up for a Buy More shift and Casey went to the apartment. Chuck was not there but his phone was, as well as signs of a struggle. The Morgan Door was shattered.
And then, the next day, Amy did not report to the substation. She had gone to look for Chuck and Casey had waited for a call as he searched too. He got none. The next morning he went to Amy's apartment to find the door unlocked, the scene of a struggle, a puddle of blood (Amy's, tests showed) on the floor, Amy's gun in it, unfired.
Beckman had called the Intersect Project together and told them what happened, sent Sarah and Shaw and Bryce to Burbank to find Chuck and Amy. Beckman also mentioned that there had been increased Ring-related 'chatter' detected in LA, so the possibility that the Ring had taken them seemed none-too-distant.
And so, Chuck was gone. Sarah was ashamed to admit that a part of her had liked the thought of Chuck in Burbank, pining away. Not a sadistic part of her, but a part of her that cherished the possibility that one day she would grow up, claim her own life, too long passive and Farmed-out to the CIA, and actively pursue what she wanted, what she needed. That part of her wanted to believe Chuck would be there when she knocked on the apartment door and ran past him as he opened it, pulling him behind her in the jet condensation trail she would leave into his bedroom.
But now he was gone. He might never be there again. She might never get the chance to claim the life she wanted. He might be...
"Dead," Shaw said beside her, shaking his phone. "I must have forgotten to charge it. Guess I'll do it now."
Sarah looked at him. He had turned out to be almost perfect for the Intersect, at least as Beckman understood 'perfect'. Shaw was a good spy. But he was a peculiar man. In the past, Sarah might not have made that distinction, but Chuck had taught her it had to be made. And that it mattered. From the time they began to prep Shaw to be Intersected, he had bothered Sarah. At moments when he thought no one was looking, he stared off into space, his lips flattening into a cruel line. Beckman had not given them much information about his personal or mission history; the file they used was heavily redacted. But Beckman assured them, once Sarah and Bryce agreed that, given what they knew, he was the best of the candidates they had seen, that he was the right man for the job.
It was not just this graveyard stare that unsettled Sarah, it was also the way it disappeared, traceless, and his early, and constant attempts to create something between them. One moment he would be looking hard into space, the next attempting to charm her — and not the Chuck way. Before Chuck, or even perhaps after, if she had truly given up on the possibility of claiming the life she wanted, she might have been responsive to Shaw. At one time, she would have seen only the spy and not the man. But Chuck had taught her what it was to be looked at not just by a spy, or by a guy, but by a man, a man in full. Shaw was a long way away from a man in full.
That had become even clearer when they first went into the field together. The Intersect changed Shaw, empowering the darker side of him and weakening the lighter. He was unnecessarily cruel to assets, to marks, even to targets. And his attempts to charm Sarah increased, but so too did the subtle undertone of demand, of entitlement. In his eyes, she saw a hidden but real assurance that one day, she would capitulate to him, that it was...inevitable.
She hated to admit it but she was a bit afraid of him. Intersected Shaw seemed demonic; Intersected Chuck, angelic. And she had chosen, indirectly but ineluctably, to pair herself with the demon, not the angel. Sarah had a positive genius for the wrong choice.
Even worse still, Bryce saw Shaw's attempts to charm Sarah, and that had made Bryce's relationship to Shaw, and to Sarah, even more tense, troubled. Two men she did not want were with her constantly and the one she did had vanished.
"Yes, you'll want it charged when we get to Burbank." Sarah finally said. "Beckman wants us to go to Ch...to Bartowski's apartment, first thing. Casey and Bartowski's sister, Ellie Woodcomb, will be there when we get there."
As if Chuck being gone and Shaw being...Shaw...were not enough, Sarah was going to have to face Ellie.
Ellie. Sarah had not even said goodbye to the woman who had become her best friend, better even than Carina. No, Sarah had ducked that as she had ducked any real goodbye with Chuck. After Ellie's wedding, Sarah had found a moment to slip up the beach, unseen, to meet with Bryce and to leave, vanishing like Lawrence of Arabia into the sand, but to no heroic purpose.
She really was a coward.
Shaw had plugged his phone in when she suggested it. It had enough charge now for him to be playing a first-person shooter. She watched for a moment. His hands moved faster than she could see. His score was perfect. He had a predatory smile on his face.
A/N: I'm playing somewhat fast and loose with canon history (S1 and S2). To borrow a popular Chuck Fanfic suffix, I've —ished canon history, and will continue to. The gross features remain but I will toy with details as the spirit moves me. Whee!
Hope everyone's feeling okay and is happily hunkered down.
Thoughts?