The morning after the dream. Reality rears its ugly head once more.

Chapter 10

Sarah awoke the next morning with a full bladder and immediately made a dash for the bathroom. As she washed her hands she squinted at her reflection in the mirror. What the hell had happened last night between her and Chuck? Her hopeless sense of loss was still present. Had he really told her he still loved her? How did she feel about that? She knew she desperately wanted a second chance at some kind of relationship with him but was embarrassed to admit that now that he had confessed his love, she couldn't honestly say she loved him back. Her feelings were a jumble of intense emotions and she wasn't sure what they amounted to.

As she returned to her bedroom, Chuck looked up at her from the bed, a half grin on his face. He looked a little sad. Did he know what she was going to tell him? He sat up and patted a space on the bed that was near him but where she could sit without touching him.

"Sit, Sarah. Tell me what's on your mind. It doesn't have to make sense," Chuck assured her.

Sarah slowly walked over and sat on the bed. He was wearing nothing but boxer briefs and she was acutely aware of his well defined physique. He looked much more formidable than the Chuck she remembered and had that alert ease that suggested he was relaxed but ready to explode into action at a moment's notice.

"First of all I wanted to thank you for telling me you never stopped loving me," Sarah swallowed hard. "I appreciate how vulnerable that makes you." She closed her eyes and took a few deep breaths. This was going to be really hard to say.

"If you're struggling to tell me you don't feel the same way about me, don't worry," Chuck said softly. "You may still be my Sarah but I'm definitely not your Chuck."

Sarah's eyes flew open, "But it's not FAIR!"

"Fair is a an ideal we have to work like hell to get to, not a right," Chuck shrugged. "We feel what we feel and it is what it is."

"The thing is, I really do want to get to know you," Sarah insisted. "I just don't know how to do that this close to the pressure of your intense feelings for me."

"Yeah I've been puzzling over that one myself," Chuck admitted. "I had decided to steer clear and let you reach out if and when it became important to you to know where we stood."

They sat in silence for over a minute. Sarah caught herself staring at Chuck and thinking he was sexy as hell. To shake off the thought she tried to remember something that bothered her about him.

"I was wondering. When you left me at the train station in Prague, were you feeling guilty that I was giving up my spy life for you?" she asked.

Chuck thought about it for a while before answering, "It's hard to remember the way I thought back then. I know I didn't want you to throw away your career for me. Honestly, I think it was more selfish, though. I didn't want to be the damsel in distress, the helpless baggage you constantly had to protect. I thought that by training to be a spy, I'd be able to pull SOME of my own weight in keeping us secure even if I could never be in your league."

"So what did you mean when you said you had a chance to really help people?" Sarah probed further.

"I think I meant I had a chance to work by your side and help you do what you did so magnificently. I didn't have a clear idea what that might look like, I just wanted to be a junior partner instead of an asset." Chuck replied thoughtfully.

That made sense to Sarah. Yes he was thinking of his own career but it was never about spy life INSTEAD of her. It was about being more of an equal partner as he worked WITH her. Chuck had never considered rejecting her.

"So what was it like working in Italy with Morgan and Casey?" she asked, not wanting to linger on that painful subject.

"Looking back now I'd say it was pretty messed up," Chuck sighed. "I tried to fill this great big hole inside me with work. Unfortunately, the hole never got less empty, I just didn't have time to look at it if I kept busy every waking moment. The problem is, as I got better at my job, I had to push that much harder to keep myself from thinking and feeling."

"Sounds like you were a manic workaholic," Sarah noted.

"I was. I found out the hard way that when you lean that heavily into the intersect, it fries your brain," Chuck explained grimly. "My career lasted less than six months before I burned out. Literally."

"Well you don't look completely cooked to me," Sarah tried to lighten the mood a little. "So I guess it wasn't permanent."

"The human brain is still light years ahead of any computer design," Chuck smiled beatifically. "Thank the creator and a healthy diet for neuroplasticity."

"So how long did it take for you to recover?" Sarah wondered.

"Well, that depends on what damage you're talking about," Chuck frowned thoughtfully.

"The intersect burnout," Sarah clarified.

"Oh that was done in a week," Chuck replied. "Dad had already created a solution, he just had to adapt it to my intersect."

"I had heard it took you months," Sarah blurted. After a moment she added, "I take it the intersect wasn't the only damage you had to recover from?"

"Not by a long shot," Chuck confirmed quietly. "Being back in California brought back memories. I discovered that your Chuck wasn't quite as dead as I'd assumed. He woke up with the memories of a lot of killing and had a REALLY hard time with it."

"I imagine you needed some pretty intensive therapy," Sarah said, not quite able to get her head around where Chuck had been.

"No, my solution was much quicker," Chuck's face went still at the memory. "I just needed to die to stop the screaming in my head."

"You tried to kill yourself?" Sarah was aghast.

"Slashed my wrists," Chuck said, peering at the wrists in question. "I got a laser surgeon to remove as much of the scar tissue as possible. He did a great job. It would have worked nicely if Dad hadn't had a live stream of my vitals going. He intervened and saved my life. I wasn't happy about it," he remembered.

"What happened then?" Sarah asked intently.

"Dad locked me up," Chuck shrugged. "Life got very boring. The only thing I had to amuse myself was his research on the intersect project. I devoured it and got him to give me voice command access to some general research databases."

"So I take it that's when you started getting into neuroscience?" Sarah asked.

"Big time," Chuck confirmed. "I was hoping to find a way to surgically remove my memories of Italy."

"You're SUCH a nerd. Leave it to you to turn emotional trauma into an engineering problem," Sarah said with wonder.

She was rewarded with an encore of her Chuck's goofy grin. "Yeah, Dad arranged to have a CIA therapist visit me but he wasn't able to decide whether I was suffering a regular psychotic break or some intersect related damage. He never seemed to be able to get his head around the distance between California Chuck and Italy Chuck and his attempt at talk therapy fell flat."

"So how did you get well enough for your Dad to let you go?" Sarah was genuinely curious.

"My interest in traumatic memory led me to the interaction between emotion and memory," Chuck explained. "When the CIA adapted my Dad's design to create the 2.0, they didn't realize they were coding it in such a way that it could only be reliably accessed when the subject was emotionally flat. Dad was happy I was thinking about something other than dying and we spent a lot of time kicking around ideas. We discovered a much better technique that leveraged emotional context to create a multidimensional intersect that was much more powerful than the 2.0. Dad had been pretty angry that I'd downloaded the 2.0 after he worked so hard to remove the 1.0 but as things stood, we thought we had a decent shot at structuring the 3.0 in a way that could help me to cope with what I'd done. We had a some long talks about what it would do to my personality but with the help of my therapist's findings I was able to convince him that I would always be a suicide risk if I stayed the way I was."

"So the intersect 3.0 changed your personality?" Sarah's brow furrowed as she tried to imagine the implications.

"All the old elements were still there, I just gained the ability to realign them," Chuck replied. "The effect WAS a pretty radical change when viewed from the outside. I got a lot less neurotic and a lot tougher to read. I also discovered that my natural problem solving skills were a LOT more effective when I didn't get locked into assumptions or blocked by my fears. I always assumed Dad was awkwardly trying to encourage me when he repeated the ridiculous statement that I was smarter than him. It turned out he was seeing something real and I was the one being ridiculous."

"So you no longer saw yourself as some loser who worked at the Buy More?" Sarah smiled, remembering her frustration at Chuck's low opinion of himself.

"I got a LOT more grandiose than that," Chuck laughed. "I was no longer content to be Charles Galois, billionaire playboy. I reinvented myself as Charles Galois, billionaire patron of the arts and savvy cultural influencer."

"So how did you come to terms with all the killing you had done in Italy?" Sarah asked.

"It wasn't easy," Chuck admitted. "In the end, the only way I was able to make peace with it was to take responsibility for all the possible achievements of every person I killed. Whenever I did an act of charity or helped launch a career, I did it in the name of one of my victims. I've still got a long way to go to balance the books but I feel a lot better about my balance sheet than I did two years ago. I'm still hoping to be a net positive influence on the world before I die."

Sarah was stunned. She'd known a lot of assassins who felt enough remorse to try to make up for the damage they had done here and there but she'd never dreamed one of them could attempt to take on the enormity of the burden Chuck was attempting to shoulder. She did her best to always focus on the next mission and forget about her past.

"That's one hell of a project," Sarah said in awe. "But I guess a genius who could create a multibillion dollar media empire in two years while launching a wildly successful educational institution and a spy faction capable of taking on the CIA can do the impossible."

"I bet you never imagined all that when you told me I could do anything I set my mind to back in Burbank, did you?" Chuck grinned impishly. "To be honest, most of the credit for the media empire and the spy faction belongs to my Dad. Galois Media's income is powered by Dad's technology. He's developed some amazing things since the stolen innovations that built Roark Industries but THIS time he's getting as much of the profit as he wants. The spy faction was founded on the intersect. I DID have a hand in both but I'm nowhere near as amazing as my reputation."

"Speaking of your spy faction, how are the interrogations going?" Sarah asked, trying and failing to sound casual.

Chuck stared directly into her eyes without saying a word until she got uncomfortable and looked away.

"I want you to know that above everything I love you and I want the best for you," Chuck said with conviction. "I've seen you in action and have talked to my people here and your skills are just as extraordinary as I remembered."

Sarah finally looked up and held Chuck's gaze for a moment. She nodded to let him know she heard him.

"But I have serious reservations about your judgement," Chuck said without rancor. "I've already been justifiably called on the carpet by Antonia for trusting you with too much information. I'm not going to discuss any Galois Media operations that you're not directly involved in."

"Is this because I didn't consult you before I talked to Steven?" Sarah's cheeks burned with embarrassment. "Can you really blame me for not wanting to be any more of a burden to you than I already was?"

"This has nothing to do with being a burden and we both know it," Chuck replied with mild reproach. "You simply weren't ready to talk to me. You're one of the most wanted terrorists in the USA, Sarah. You didn't have the luxury of leaving me out of it. Trying to clear your name by having one of Zondra's friends reach out and hit the hot button that is 'Sarah Walker' in US intelligence circles was bound to end badly for you."

"So you just let me walk right into a trap. Thanks so much for loving me," Sarah's voice dripped with angry sarcasm.

"I kept an eye on you after you kicked the hornet's nest and I broke you out before the interrogation got TOO serious," Chuck replied calmly. "No, my love isn't so pure that I refused to let them touch a single hair on your head or passed up the opportunity to turn the situation to my advantage. My point is that you put yourself and your friend in jeopardy to avoid dealing with a situation you found emotionally difficult."

"So based on this one lapse in judgement you don't think you can trust me?" Sarah challenged him.

"No," Chuck said quietly. "This latest example was a minor stumble compared to the epic blunder of trusting Shaw."

"Jealous much?" she snarled.

Chuck sighed, saying, "One of the first things Shaw said to me was 'I don't like guns, either.' It was a facile lie and when I found out who he was I was immediately suspicious of him. A man who can't get a schnook to trust him is sorry excuse for a spy. You, on the other hand trusted him enough to give up your real name. You continued to trust him after he manipulated you into destroying me. A novice spy watching this could have seen that he was cold bloodedly using you. You, on the other hand, maintained a close relationship with him for months and when he finally burned you for good you never saw it coming."

Chuck's description of her relationship with Shaw was laid out with clinical indifference. He wasn't biting or sarcastic, the only emotion she could detect was disappointment. The worst of it was that it was devastatingly accurate. She would have judged any spy candidate who had been that blind as hopeless, a complete washout. Had Chuck complimented her just so it would sting this much when he took her down? If so it was working.

"I get it, I was a complete idiot. I'll turn in my spy pin and promise never to try my hand at anything remotely resembling a field operation ever again," she said feeling utterly defeated.

"That just it, Sarah, you're NOT an idiot. Aside from that one blind spot you're an amazing operative and I'd be eager to recruit you to my team," Chuck insisted. "You only do dumb things when you're hiding from your emotions and pretending they don't exist instead of dealing with them."

Sarah frowned. Could that be true? Her father and her CIA trainers had all taught her that emotions were a liability. Her feelings were pretty raw at the moment so how WAS she dealing with them? As she forced herself to think about it she realized that her hostility toward Chuck and her abject admission of incompetence were ploys to end the conversation and avoid that question entirely. Taking a step back she realized that the prospect of sorting out her jumbled feelings was a lot more terrifying than having to tell Chuck she wasn't in love with him.

"Has Groucho been telling you about what we've discussed in our sessions?" Sarah asked suspiciously.

"No, Sarah, all he told me is that he's had sessions with you and that in his opinion they have been productive," Chuck replied, sounding tired. "I took it as a very hopeful sign until the LaBarge fiasco."

"Damn," Sarah came to a sudden realization. "I just made a wild accusation to divert attention from my inability to deal with my emotions."

"Insightful," Chuck noted approvingly. "You're a highly intelligent woman, Sarah. I know you can learn to completely crush emotional intelligence."

"I guess I'm stuck here with nothing better to do aren't I?" Sarah half smiled in resignation. "With the Ring using the CIA to hunt me I've got nowhere to run to."

"For now, yes," Chuck agreed. "I wouldn't assume the Ring's stranglehold on the CIA is permanent though. You may yet get the chance to be vindicated and have your record expunged."

Something about Chuck's reassurance really bothered her. As she automatically sifted through the ways hope could be used as leverage against her something clicked. He had broken her down to the point that she would have accepted any direction he gave her. Giving her hope was the LAST thing he would want if he were manipulating her. Was she really so damaged that she automatically assumed manipulation and control was goal of any man in her life? Was that really her 'normal'?

She brought that question to Groucho later that afternoon. They painstakingly reviewed every relationship with a male she could remember. Her father, Graham, and other superiors at the CIA had all valued her for what she could accomplish for them. She could remember a few instances of doing things to the benefit of others on her own initiative and in every case the response was a reprimand for losing her focus on the mission she had been given. In her relationships with male peers she gauged how much she was valued based on the effort those men put into the lines and ploys they used to get into her pants. She, in turn, let the men in her life know she cared by mission focus or letting herself fall for their ploys. The only exceptions to this pattern were Casey and Chuck. Casey explicitly ruled out any interest in getting into her pants but didn't try to give her orders. Chuck longed to get into her pants but was never going to try to manipulate her into bed.

With Chuck the pattern was similar but the roles were reversed. SHE used ploys to manipulate HIM and he responded by falling for them. As Groucho had her dig into her feelings she realized that what hurt the most about Prague was Chuck's refusal to trust her to make choices for him. He wasn't rejecting her as a person or a lover, he was rejecting her as his handler. Groucho guided her back to that point in her life and she realized that the reason she refused to talk to Chuck after that wasn't because she stopped loving him, it was because if she wasn't his handler she had no idea how to relate to him.

When Shaw came along and took over as Chuck's handler, she felt her relationship with Chuck slipping away and her life spinning out of control. Chuck was right to point out how crazy it was that she gave up her birth name to Shaw. With Groucho's help, she realized that it was a sign of absolute desperation. Deep down she knew Shaw was a manipulative predator all along and she was screaming, "Victim Available, No Grooming Required." She NEEDED Shaw to take control of her life. It was the only way to restore any kind of order and keep her panic from overwhelming her. Once she accepted that Shaw set the mission parameters of their relationship, Sarah could focus all her creativity on solvable problems, crush her objectives and feel good about herself.

In hindsight, this decision had been utterly disastrous. Not only had she set herself up to be burned, she completely abandoned Chuck. Groucho had to guide her through a mediation session, then carefully talk her down a step at a time as she grappled with the enormity of these consequences. She had already worked through most of them in pieces before but the stark simplicity of the line between that decision and those consequences was brutal. The dark tsunami of panic was still there, waiting for her, even two and a half years later. As she fought hard against the urge to avoid facing it she remembered that Chuck believed in her. He thought she could crush this. Chuck was rogue, HE decided how to deal with the world and refused to pass off responsibility for his actions to his superiors. He was crushing it and he was confident she could too.

The knowledge steeled her and she imagined herself on a surfboard, levitating over the dark water and picking her spot, then letting herself drop and riding the hundred foot wave. As the wave began to crumble she kicked her board into a spiral spin to keep it on course and did a double somersault, sticking the landing in the sand while her board buried its nose beside her. She could do this. She could face the world without anyone else defining her mission objectives. An exhausted Groucho asked if they could end the session and she realized with surprise they had been at it for six hours. She readily agreed and thanked him profusely.

She grabbed a salad to go from the kitchen and trudged back to the cottage.

"There she is!" Zondra greeted her enthusiastically. "Damn girl, you look beat. I guess Chuck spent the day putting you through the master class."

"Master class in what?" Sarah asked, forcing herself to get out of her head and attend to what her friend was saying.

"Sex, dummy," Zondra said with playful annoyance.

"I didn't have sex with Chuck," Sarah replied.

"So when I met a half naked Charles coming out of your bedroom earlier today he had been, what, posing as a model while you spent the night sketching?" Zondra asked in disbelief.

"No. I went to bed drunk and told him I really wanted to wake up next to him. We cuddled, that's all," Sarah explained.

"You two are SO weird," Zondra was gobsmacked.

"Zondra, be honest, how would you say I deal with my emotions?" Sarah asked very seriously.

Zondra took a while to think it over before answering slowly, "I guess I'd say you beat them to a bloody pulp or freeze them in a block of ice and shatter them into a million pieces."

"That's what I thought," Sarah nodded, her voice heavy with resignation. "Chuck told me he never stopped loving me but my refusal to deal with my emotions is making me do some really stupid things."

"Sounds like some pretty tough love," Zondra said. "So he's refusing to go all with way with you until you figure it out?"

"Not exactly, after he told me he loved me I couldn't tell him I loved him back," Sarah explained awkwardly.

"Ouch," Zondra winced. "How did he take it?"

"It didn't really seem to bother him. I didn't have to tell him how I felt, he named the problem while I was searching for the right words," Sarah shrugged.

"Wow," Zondra replied. "I knew the man was pretty chill but I would expect some kind of disappointment. I wonder what the hell he thought he was doing coming over here and confessing his love for you anyway?"

Sarah gazed at the floor and in a small voice said, "I asked him if he could ever love me again, that's when he told me."

After a very uncomfortable silence Zondra said quietly, "So you asked him if he could ever love you again. He said he never stopped. Then you admitted you didn't love him back. Did I get that right?"

"Well I didn't admit I didn't love him back until the next morning," Sarah clarified.

"Because that makes it better?" Zondra was incredulous. "I guess I have to give you credit for not sleeping with the guy."

Sarah realized she had absolutely wanted to sleep with the guy. The only thing that stopped her was that she was too drunk to initiate. Was she really the most sadistic bitch on the planet? She didn't feel like it but how much consideration had she given to Chuck's feelings in all this? None at all really. She remembered he had offered to give up his sanctuary and let her live there. That wasn't just love, that was complete devotion. She didn't have the strength to share that tidbit with Zondra.

"It's just totally fucking complicated," Sarah said. "If I try to think about it any more my head will explode. I'll talk to you in the morning."

As she laid in bed that night, her emotions swirled. She had unconsciously accepted that Chuck could still want her even after she had turned her back on him. She had seen Carina treat men like dirt and still have them fighting for scraps of her attention. But that wasn't Chuck. What WAS he feeling? Their reunion caused him enough pain that it shocked him and he didn't seem like a man who was easily shocked. But why stay away if really wanted her? He claimed he never stopped loving her but he completely walked away from a golden opportunity to completely own her. How did he expect to mold her into someone who could meet his needs if he was this standoffish? Was it some kind of game? Did he expect her to guess?

She racked her brain for clues of Chuck's expectations but the only thing she came up with was his wish that she would stop ignoring HER emotions. What did he have to gain by that? If he refused to guide her journey of self-discovery and left it all up to her he would have no one to blame but himself if she became someone who was difficult for him. No one knew what forces were locked deep within her or where they would lead her. He'd get the Sam version of her. Was that what he wanted?

The pieces of the puzzle clicked together and she knew. That was EXACTLY what he wanted. He wanted the truest and deepest version of herself possible. Would he like her? The question triggered the most intense bolt of terror she had ever experienced. She had no idea how long her silent scream lasted. When it was finally over she was spent. The question of what would happen if Chuck didn't like Sam would have to wait for another day. It wasn't until she was deep in REM sleep that a far more disturbing possibility surfaced. Her entire personality was built on the fact that this was impossible but if anyone could do the impossible, it would be Chuck so what if? What if Chuck LOVED Sam?