A/N: Here we go!
Spy vs. Spy vs. Spy vs. Spy
Chapter Eleven: Uncovered
Sarah opened her cabinet and took out two wine glasses.
She grabbed a corked half-bottle of red from the counter and poured a generous amount in each. For a second, it felt like the old days in Burbank, when she and Ellie were friends — pretend friends.
Ellie had been Sarah's friend. Real friend. Sarah had wanted to be Ellie's friend. Real friend. But Ellie's side of the friendship had been built on truths, Sarah's side on lies. No genuine friendship could be so constructed, despite Sarah's genuine affection for Ellie.
A false relationship was not a kind of relationship. She had told Chuck they were a different kind of a couple but the truth was that they were no more a different kind of couple than a wax apple was a different kind of apple.
Sarah and Ellie's false friendship was not a kind of friendship. It was the shadow of a friendship, cast by nothing.
Fake. All the lies that are my life. Alive and well and on a friendless voyage.
She took a deep breath. Ellie was seated on one end of the couch. "I've poured us some wine. I have cold, left-over pizza, veggie, no olives, if you want some."
"The wine I'll take. I'll pass on the pizza."
Sarah carried the glasses in. Ellie held out her hand and Sarah handed Ellie her glass. Again, it felt like the old days until she saw the flint in Ellie's eyes. Sarah sat down on the opposite end of the couch. She had stationed the panda on the end table. She put her wine down and reached for the panda and put it in her lap.
The panda had a back that buttoned closed, and its back was bulgy. She unbuttoned it carefully, gently, feeling Ellie's hard gaze as she did it. Inside the panda was a tracker, broken. A CIA tracker.
The one Shaw had put on Sarah's car. It wasn't there anymore. Chuck. Sarah had been so upset, her head so jumbled, she had temporarily forgotten about it. Sarah held it in her hand as she deliberately rebuttoned the bear.
"Is there a gift in the gift, like Chinese boxes, cause, you know, China and pandas…?"
Sarah glanced up. The question made Sarah think of her Conversations with Chuck game; it sounded like a Chuck question. For whatever reason, Ellie's eyes had softened. "What is it, Ellie?"
"Nothing. I guess, given who and what you are, I never imagined that something so...inconsequential...could...touch you. That you could be...tender...to a stuffed panda."
"Not everything in Burbank was false, Ellie. I am a person, after all."
Ellie's eyes became less soft. "Are you, a person, I mean?"
Sarah looked into Ellie's eyes. "I deserve...a lot, but that, Ellie?" Sarah cradled the bear on her lap.
A quick shadow of remorse slipped across Ellie's face. "Maybe not. Everyone's got a story, I suppose, even Sarah — or whatever your name is."
"Sam, Ellie. My birthname's Sam, Samantha. No one's called me that in a very long time. I don't call myself that, you know, not even in my head. I think of myself as Sarah." She shrugged. "I must seem fake to my very core. Fake to myself."
Ellie gave her a frank look. "Yeah, Sarah, sorry, but you do. — I've been wondering about you since I...threw you out of the apartment. Trying to find my feet with you, our past, yours and mine and Chuck's. But I've had a hard time because every time I believe I've found something real, I find something else that contradicts it…"
Ellie stopped talking and Sarah looked down at the panda.
Silence. Sarah picked up her wine.
"Except for one thing." Ellie held up her index finger. "There were times over the past two years when I know you didn't know I was watching you, times when you couldn't have known, and the times I have in mind are times when you were looking, no, gazing, at my brother.
"The gaze was always the same, a swirling mixture of the soft tenderness you just showed that panda, Chuck's gift, and of deep desire, and cold fear, for him but also for yourself. — I could never sort that gaze of yours.
"Taken as a whole, more than the sum of its parts, it was the look of a woman in love who would not allow herself to be in love. — At least, that's how I've come to understand it. But here's the thing, I don't understand it — I don't know why you gazed at him that way and...kept yourself from him, because the...tenderness and the desire always seemed spontaneous, natural, an upsurge of the woman, the real woman," Ellie paused significantly, "the person, in you, and the fear always seemed... manufactured, artificial, ...sort of...Does that make any sense?"
Sarah had tears on her face and her throat had closed. She could only nod.
Ellie took a sharp, deep breath then exhaled it in a long, slow sigh. "So, you were born Samantha. You said you'd tell me everything.
"So tell me about Samantha, Sarah, and about how Samantha became Sarah."
Sarah took a sip of her wine. She leaned forward and put the broken bug on the coffee table, an emblem. And then, cuddling, clutching the panda as her preserver again, Sarah told Ellie a story she had never told herself, even if she had lived it.
Half-lived it. Half a life.
"I was born…"
Ellie wiped her eyes and stared at Sarah.
Sarah knew she was a mess. Tears still on her face, her face red, her eyes puffy. Her hands were shaking almost uncontrollably. But she had done it. Told it, confessed it. Not every detail, of course, because many details could be dangerous and because many were irrelevant, but she had not spun any of it in her favor or hidden the nastiness, the blackness.
The confidence games with her father. The Farm. The countless missions in a decade of missions, one blending imperceptibly with another, almost no breaks. The CATs, Bryce Larkin, the Andersons. The lies, the covers, the infiltrations, the seductions, the terminations.
Budapest.
And Chuck. She told Ellie about Chuck. The way he had immediately disarmed and befuddled her, outstripped her expectations, even her understanding. How he had warmed her from the first moments, and about how hard she had tried to re-freeze herself and to freeze him.
But mostly, as she finished, she talked about his goodness and his irrepressible faith in her, in her goodness. She finished by talking about her terror of destroying that faith in her — the damage it would have done to Chuck and her.
Ellie had said nothing during the entire recitation. She waited when Sarah stalled or dithered or fought for words.
But now she spoke: "So, you left Chuck, Burbank, not because of the job, the handler/asset shit, unresolved feelings for...Larkin, you left because...you were in love with a man who loved you but wouldn't love you, if he knew you. If I understand some of the other things you told me," Ellie bit her lip, reflecting, "you took yourself to have fallen for a mark who did not know he was your mark?"
Sarah faced Ellie. "What? No, nothing like…"
"No, wait, Sarah. You think you've been undercover with Chuck this whole time, a cover that he created by...commission...and you created by...omission. You think he invented a version of you and that you never contradicted it, and the version he created and you never contradicted was what he loved...your cover, not you?"
Sarah's mouth opened, but the movement was futile. No words came.
Ellie's eyes were bright; she was in the grip of her idea. "But, Sarah, what if you've reversed the...polarity of it all?"
Sarah managed to strangle out a one-word response. "Polarity?"
"I had to jump Devon's car the other day. You know, batteries, the positive and negative poles of a battery, a car one or a nine-volt."
Sarah shook her head in ununderstanding.
"Here's what I mean. What if all that...shit...you've done, sorry, Sarah, but, Jesus!," — Ellie shuddered unrepentantly — "what if all that shit you cling to so silently and so desperately, in self-condemnation, what if all that is the cover, and the woman Chuck loves is the real woman? What if...you are your own mark? What if Chuck is the one who knows the reality and you are the one trapped in appearances, covers, a cover of yourself?"
Sarah sat and blinked, the words echoing in the apartment, or her head, or her heart, or all three.
What if?
Sarah's Company phone rang in the bedroom. It took her a second to process it. She got up and hurried to the bedroom where she left it.
"Walker, secure."
"Larkin, secure," Bryce sounded breathless but not with laughter. "Sarah, we've got a problem, a big problem. Orion uploaded a new upgrade into Shaw a few minutes ago. When it was over, Shaw...Well, he screamed in rage — "Eve!" — I was in the room — and then he threw himself through the window. And the lab is on the third fucking floor.
"By the time Orion and I got to the shattered window, Shaw was gone. He's snapped, Sarah. He's out there, Intersected, dangerous as hell, and he's...hulking out."
"Hulking out?"
"Insane, Sarah, super-insane. Comic book crazy. You have to come to the Project. We have to figure out what to do, what he might do."
Sarah turned. She had been facing her window.
Ellie had followed her to the room and was listening, staring at the gun and the knives on Sarah's mussed bed.
"No, I can't come there. I have Ellie Woodcomb with me. I need to get her away from me, someplace safe.
"Come up with a new place for a meet, Bryce, one Shaw won't find. I know what he's planning."
"You do? What?"
"He's going to kill Chuck and he's going to kill me, but probably not in that order."
A/N: Thoughts? If you're enjoying this, please tell me so.