A/N: Another chapter of the story.
Spy vs. Spy vs. Spy vs. Spy
Chapter Six: Rethinking
Two Days Later
Sarah had the charm bracelet in her suitcase. The NSA jet was taking them back to DC.
The situation in Miami had become intolerable; the team was fractured, disjoint. Beckman was pissed.
Sarah was disjoint. Pissed at herself. Sick of nursemaiding Bryce and Shaw.
Sarah had never sent the text to Bryce and Shaw that was to signal their entrance to Ellie's.
She had been in no hurry for them to ask questions about why she was so upset, or why Ellie was so angry with her. That decision not to bring them into the apartment rankled Shaw. He had complained about it regularly since that time. Bryce had not seemed to care about it, although Sarah was sure that was because he had not wanted to face Ellie either. Jill and Stanford and all.
When Sarah would not explain the bracelet to Shaw, and when she dithered about reporting it to Beckman, Shaw did.
Beckman had demanded to know the whole story of the bracelet. Even bent and shaded carefully, the story made clear that Chuck had — at one time — deep feelings for Sarah. Deeper than Beckman really ever knew or acknowledged.
And, although she tried to explain her decision to keep the bracelet as just canny spy work, a move to reassure the asset, to keep the asset happy, Beckman and Shaw and Bryce had seen through her. They were not sure exactly what she had felt or still felt for Chuck, but they knew she had feelings for him at one time and perhaps still did.
That made Shaw more suspicious of Sarah's failure to bring him and Bryce to Ellie. And it confirmed Bryce's old suspicions.
Beckman became even less sympathetic to Sarah's worries about Shaw's growing strangeness, taking it to be the result of Sarah's now-revealed, long-standing feelings for Chuck, her preference for Chuck as her partner, teammate, Intersect.
Sarah had not told the entire story about Chuck's reaction to her when he saw her on the beach the first time, and she had not told the whole story of what Chuck said to her when he saw her on the beach the second time, the speargun time.
She had reduced his conversation to the threat against Shaw. When she reported it, Shaw had laughed and laughed. But Beckman had been puzzled: why go to so much trouble to deliver a message that could have been scrawled on a rock and thrown through a window? Beckman believed that Sarah had not been forthright about her conversation with Chuck, and her questions to Sarah about it had added to the suspicion and anger of Shaw and Bryce.
Since there had been no more contact, Beckman ordered them back to DC.
If Chuck was coming for Shaw, he would have to face Shaw on Shaw's home field, so to speak.
Sarah was under orders to report to Beckman in person at NSA headquarters as soon as possible after the landing.
A car was waiting for her.
Sarah got into the car's backseat, belted herself in, and took a deep breath.
She only had herself to blame for the mess, personal and professional, she was in. She was ready to choose Chuck but knew it too late — after he was no longer willing to choose her.
She let herself slump in her seat. The familiar sights of DC went by her window.
She heard Chuck's voice in her head. "So, Sarah, you're not in DC?"
She stiffened. What were the odds that Chuck would use the exact words she had used when playing Conversation with Chuck in Miami?
And then his later, contextless, bizarre question: "Here for a visit?" That had been her question too.
Chuck heard me — in the bathroom! He was quoting me to myself. — What the hell? I missed it.
How she had missed that was beyond her, a testimony, she realized, to the all-consuming emotional upheaval and stress of the last weeks.
How had he heard her? A bug? But they had swept and re-swept their rooms. There were no bugs.
A directional mic.
Chuck, someone, had been outside the hotel, listening through the windows. No one had worried about that. They had kept the blinds down, to keep themselves from view, never thinking about the fact that they were blinding themselves to the outside. They had not thought for a moment that they were the hunted.
Chuck had been following them while they thought they were following him.
The woman at the picnic table. The hat on Bryce. It might have been hiding a mic. She could have been listening to Chuck. But maybe she had not been listening when Sarah played the Conversation with Chuck in the bathroom. If so, then Chuck had been trying to tell Sarah something not in the words he used but by the words he used.
Or maybe someone else was listening but still someone who had not heard Sarah's words.
If so, maybe Chuck had been telling her other things too.
She tried to replay it all in her head. His quotation of her words had been intended to tell her she was under surveillance. He had come back to the words to underline it. "Here for a visit?" The words were just sense enough, given that it was Chuck who said them, for someone else not to think anything of them. Especially when they began and ended the vitriolic things he had said.
The things about choosing nothing over him, the suburbs.
But those things, the hurtful things, those were not some kind of code. — At least, she did not think so. She knew Chuck well enough to know that what she saw in his eyes, while out-of-character, was not fake. He knows fake. He was deeply hurt, deeply unhappy with her; maybe they were broke past all fixing, personally.
But maybe Chuck needed her, professionally. Maybe that was what this was all about somehow. Ellie had made it clear she only needed Sarah professionally, not personally.
Sarah needed to get her head out of her ass and ignore the hurting and figure out what was going on.
She had wallowed enough, made her bed and Chuck was not in it, was not going to be in it. It was hers and hers alone. She had to accept that, believe it, and go on...
"Believe me when I tell you, Sarah." — Wait, that doesn't sound like Chuck; the phrasing is wrong.
She had told Chuck, early on, that he should trust her, not believe her. What was Chuck telling her: he was leveraging their past, the things they had said to each other? Did he mean her to understand what she had wanted him to understand — that although she might tell him false things, she would not play him false, prove untrustworthy?
Even though I did.
Was he telling her not to believe him, not to believe what seemed to be happening, and to trust him?
She was not sure. Damn it!
It was all making her head and her heart hurt again. She slumped in the seat once more. But she was going to do it: trust him, despite appearances, even though he was, she was sure, deeply disenchanted with her.
Personally.
If Chuck sent the bracelet, what did that mean? How did it fit with the elaborate actions he had taken?
She had almost given the bracelet back at the beginning but she could not.
She had almost mailed it back from DC but she could not.
It was the most precious thing she owned, although she could not get herself to wear it, even to put it on. She looked at it, nearly every day, but rarely touched it. It was a memory of a life she never had.
Chuck knew she kept it; he had to know that she would never have discarded it. He had to give her that much credit.
And if he sent it, he knew she kept it in a place of honor. She had bought the jewelry box for the bracelet: the bracelet was in the box and nothing else.
"For a real girlfriend."
"Something real."
Sarah shot Mauser later that day while wearing the bracelet. Mauser had been Fulcrum but Fulcrum turned out to be the outer ring of the Ring.
The bracelet had belonged to Chuck's mom. Was that significant?
Sarah was still at a distance from Beckman's office. Her suitcase was in the backseat with her.
She pulled it into her lap and opened it. She found the plastic box, the bracelet. She took it out and looked at it closely. One charm was new, slightly brighter than the rest. She had not noticed.
What a fool I've been!
It was a charm in the shape of the Eiffel Tower.
The car pulled into NSA headquarters. Sarah got out, her head spinning.
A/N: Hope folks are holding on and holding out in these bizarre days.
It will likely be a few days before this story updates again.