A/N: A little more of our tale.
Spy vs. Spy vs. Spy vs. Spy
Chapter Nine: Pandamonium
The Next Day
Sarah dressed for the Zoo, weapons in place, knives around her ankle, holster across her shoulders. She looked in the mirror at herself and had a change of heart.
She went back to her suitcase in the closet and took out a summer dress. The late spring day in DC was warm and getting warmer, and she decided to fly a flag of truce.
She took out a white linen dress and a pair of white sandals. She had packed them for Miami, but they would work here. She unstrapped her holster and her knives and dropped them on the floor. She took off the blue blouse and jeans and slipped into the dress. She buckled the delicate white leather straps of the sandals around her ankles.
She took her hair out of the ponytail and brushed it, letting it hang long and loose, natural. She would meet the person she was going to meet, the pizza delivery lady, whoever she was, dressed as a woman, not a spy. It was a long time coming, too long, too late, but the gesture felt right. She wanted to talk to Chuck, woman to man. Maybe he would only have use for her as a spy, not a woman, but she would offer herself to him as the latter first. She picked up the weapons and tossed the holster and the knives onto her bed. She had never turned it down, never really slept. It was mussed but made.
She took her Company phone from her purse and replaced it with her personal one, unplugging it from her charger. She called up her pictures of herself and Chuck and thumbed through them slowly. How did I miss it, deny it? In all of them, mostly selfies of them on cover dates, her love for Chuck was right there, on her face, available to be seen for anyone but someone committed to the idea that spies do not fall in love. Fool!
The phone rang in her hand. The caller was not ID-ed, but Sarah knew the number.
Carina.
"Hey, Red."
"Sarah," Carina's voice came over the line, chipper, for lack of a better term, a chipper whisper, "how are you?"
"Um...fine...why are you whispering?"
"Don't want to wake...um...the guy here."
"You don't know his name?"
"I know the name of all his relevant parts. Where have you been? I tried your apartment in DC a couple of days ago, but, surprise, you weren't there. Are you still in Snoresville? Um...Burbank?"
"No, I'm back in DC, at least for a while."
"Huh. So you didn't do it?"
"Do what?"
"Give in. Lap that Chuck up, the way I know you wanted to, the way I know he wanted to lap you up."
"No. I mean yes, I didn't do it."
Carina was silent. "Wow. I don't think I ever…"
"Ever what?"
"Ever knew you to...run...before. So, you aren't still with Chuck and Casey?"
"No, well, it's complicated."
"Jesus, Sarah, you and that word. That's the same thing you said when Bryce disappeared. What happened?"
"Too long to go into now, Carina. I've got to go. I have a meet at noon."
"You're still hung up on the guy, aren't you?"
"Carina, look, I...He's done with me."
Another silence, longer.
"Carina, I have to go."
"You know, Sarah. He's not one of us. When he falls, when a Chuck falls, it's for real. He fell. I know."
"How could you know?"
"Because he turned me down in Burbank when I gave him the full treatment. Full."
"You did what?"
"I put on my red lingerie. Same lingerie that's on the floor beside the bed here, come to think of it. And it lasted all of three or four seconds last night...with what's-his-name. Chuck not only left it on me, but he also wouldn't even look at me in it."
Sarah thought about the lilac lingerie she wore to Chuck's for their cover-sleep-over. He had looked at her in it. Absolutely he had looked at her in it. Sarah knew Carina's...gifts...if that was the right word. She had never known Carina to get a man into the sights of her lingerie and miss. And that turn-down was back at the beginning, Sarah's early days in Burbank. Chuck had been committed enough to her to turn down Carina when she was red-ripe for the taking? Had Sarah mattered that much to him all along, even when she dallied with Bryce, leaving with Bryce, soon afterward?
But that kiss. The incident. She had done so much to block her response to it from her mind that she had not carefully considered Chuck's. She had wanted so much to deny her part in it that she had denied his.
True, he had dallied with Lou, more than dallied with Jill. But Sarah had pushed him toward Lou, even as she told him it was a bad idea for him to date her. And Graham and Beckman had insisted he get mixed up with Jill, when all Chuck had wanted was closure. He had gotten more than that from Jill — but he had not asked to end up with a mission that involved Jill or to be seduced by a Fulcrum agent, which is what had happened to him, a seduction that Sarah's iciness and the mission's demands and Jill herself tempted Chuck to succumb to, his belief that maybe what he had with Jill could be reborn, his clutching for some normalcy.
Chuck was still a free agent, he made his own choices, but Sarah and Graham and Beckman had diminished the menu of choices, taking anything real with Sarah off it in particular. Sarah had seen to that, with her lie under the truth-serum, and her subsequent actions. She had made sure he remained just Chuck — in her mind and his, his maybe most importantly. And she had done it while also telling Chuck he was a hero, could have anything he wanted. She had caused him more headaches than the Intersect.
Heartaches.
She had her reasons but they looked...stupid in retrospect. She had hidden from the only person she ever wanted to know and be known by. She had hidden behind the job, behind her expressionless face, and left Chuck to twist in the wind while she avoided facing herself.
"Chuck turned you down, all lingerie-ed up?"
"Flat. With me cooing in his ear."
"I have to go, Carina. I'll call you later when I have time to talk."
"Okay, Sarah. So, it's too late, huh? You're sure? He told you that face-to-face?"
Sarah thought about her conversation with Chuck on the beach.
Was that what he told her? What did all that about the suburbs mean, if not that he was done with her?
"I don't know...I have to go, Carina."
"Alright," Carina whispered, then she giggled breathily. "Looks like I have things...popping up here to...attend to myself...Good luck, Sarah."
Sarah walked into the Zoo, part of the large crowd enjoying the sunshine and warmth of the day. She had often envied normal people, people whose lives were lived in daylight and not in shadow. She let herself move along with them, pulled by the strange magnetism of a happy crowd until she found herself at the pandas.
The rail for viewing was deep with mothers and children. Sarah looked at them, and for a moment, maybe for the first time in her life, she imagined herself as one of the mothers. What would it be like to give and nurture life instead of taking it?
"Sarah?"
A voice spoke from behind her. A woman's voice. Sarah felt the barrel of a gun in her back and could feel the woman close to her.
Sarah did not turn. In the distance, above the heads of crouching mothers and enthralled toddlers, she could see the pandas, black and white.
"Don't turn. Keep your voice down. Are you alone?"
"Yes. And unarmed."
"That seems...idiotic, given the circumstance, Sarah."
"I came alone. Really alone. A show of...good faith."
"In this business, all faith is bad. I keep telling Chuck that."
Sarah tried to place the voice. It was a woman's voice but not a young woman's voice. It wasn't an old woman's voice either, but it did not seem young enough to be Red Nails' voice, the woman from the car, the beach.
"Who am I talking to?"
"It doesn't matter. I'm here...on Chuck's behalf. He...couldn't come himself."
"What do you need to tell me, what does Chuck need to tell me? I'm on his side."
She heard the woman breathe out a skeptical laugh. "Right, just like from day one back in Burbank, huh? 'Trust me, Chuck.'" The woman's tone was bitter, mocking. "I give you credit. You played my...You played Chuck like a violin. You used to play, didn't you, years ago? Back when you were Daddy's Girl?"
Sarah started to turn.
"Don't. This is no place for a scene. All these...kids. Little kids. Let's not turn this into...an incident."
Sarah gasped at the word. "Who are you?"
"Someone of a sort you can only dimly imagine, someone who has Chuck's best interests at heart." The woman stopped talking for a minute, then Sarah felt the gun barrel bite into her back. "You lying bitch, you aren't alone!" A harsh whisper, near her ear.
Sarah was shoved forward, hard, and her feet cut out from behind her at the same time. She plunged forward, into a mother and toddler, into the stroller the toddler was seated in. She was able to twist, miss the stroller and the mother. She landed hard on her bare knees on the pavement.
The mother rushed to her. "Are you okay, lady?"
The toddler started crying. People closed in around them. Sarah let the woman help her up, but it took a moment to get herself untangled, on her feet. She looked around. There were women everywhere, many moving away from the pandas, many toward them. She could single no one out.
And then she saw him. Shaw. He was stalking toward her, his eyes glowing dully, his head on a swivel. He got to her. "Running missions by ourselves now, are we? Lucky, I put that tracker on your Porsche. You can't be here to see the pandas. What are you doing, Walker?"
Shaw put out his hand to lead her from the crowd. She looked down. Her knees were scraped and bloody. Shaw looked at her legs, the blood, let his eyes snake up her, the white dress. "Kind of fancy for the Zoo, huh?"
His eyes glowed, heated. Sarah shoved him away from her.
"Get away from me, you son-of-a-bitch, I can go where I want on my own time."
His face contorted into a sneer. "Don't lie to me. Something's going on. It's time you and Beckman and I had a man-to-man-to-man talk."
He grabbed Sarah's hand, his grip iron. He pulled her from the milling, whispering crowd. She took one last look around. For a split second, on the far side of the pandas, she thought she saw Chuck.
Then Shaw jerked her forward.
A/N: We're heading into the meat of our story. Thoughts?
Hope this finds everyone still doing okay. Patience is our watchword.