Sarah learns more about Chuck's journey.
Chapter 15
When Sarah arrived at the suite she was a little disappointed to find Chuck wasn't back yet. She still had some settling in to do so she set about organizing, which was something that had always helped calm her in the past. As she worked she thought about her application to Galois Media Special Projects. Her history was pretty straightforward. She was raised as a grifter. Joined the CIA at 17 when her father went to prison. Long history of successful field ops before becoming handler to Chuck for two years. Conned into burning her relationship with Chuck and entering into a relationship with Shaw. She became Shaw's unwitting asset while he was in turn an unwitting asset of the Ring. Framed for a spectacular act of terrorism. Two years on the run before Chuck rescued her. Self sabotaging tendencies reduced by undergoing intersect mapping and surviving a personality crisis. Now personally committed to a relationship with Chuck and desiring to support his work in any way possible. Her only doubt was the unproven stability of her current personality.
That alone could be a deal breaker, she realized. Was she at risk of a personality relapse? She tried to remember being the woman who told Chuck she could no longer trust him on the terrible day in Castle. The enormity of that woman's hypocrisy would never stop making her feel sick. On the morning after their first date she asked Chuck to trust her. She was a CIA field operative who lied for a living but he pushed past his misgivings and forced himself to trust her again and again. His trust was repaid with cold blooded manipulation by the government and with very little patience from her when he failed to play by rules he had never been trained in. In the end as messed up as she was, she couldn't violate his trust when she was ordered to use it to entrap him. Although she was locked away in the deepest darkest dungeon of her mind, Sam had finally put her foot down and said no more.
What happened to sap Sam's power in the days that followed? Fear happened, Sarah realized. All the time she was planning Chuck's escape she was fighting the terrible fear that she could never make it as a regular person. Her fear was entirely justified. She had unconsciously structured her planned real life relationship with Chuck just like a handler/asset relationship. Her idea of 'regular people' was sleeper agents who never woke up. Looking back she was stunned at her naivete. She was LUCKY Chuck hadn't left with her, her plan was headed right for the rocks of her control issues and would almost certainly have ended in their breakup.
Instead, Chuck had refused to leave with her and all her suppressed fear snapped back at her like a broken rubber band. It didn't make logical sense but emotionally the plan's failure proved her fear was right all along. Being a spy was all she was ever going to be fit for. A real relationship with real feelings was never going to happen and she needed to stop torturing herself with the possibility. But Sam never stopped believing. Sam never stopped yearning. Sam was never going to let go. Her life became a war of Sarah vs Sam.
As she thought back to that time she realized Sarah had used every dirty trick in the book. She had placated Sam by letting Chuck back into her life while keeping him in the friend zone. She had tried to sell Daniel to Sam as someone she could share feelings with and who could understand. She had unleashed Maggie on Daniel to smother Sam with raw animal sensation. In the end none of it was enough. The ploy that had finally won the war against Sam was a double edged knife. The first edge was that she was no good for Chuck, that she was holding him back. The second edge was that Chuck had become a spy, that her Chuck had been replaced by a cold blooded killer. An echo of Sam's anguish at the second edge literally brought her to her knees as the memory of that pain tore through her.
She had no idea how long she knelt there trying to come to terms with the enormity of the abuse Sarah had inflicted on Sam. At some point Chuck entered the room and held her. She buried her face in his chest and cried. Chuck asked no questions but his embrace was all the medicine she needed. The horror show of all the months of agony Sam endured after Chuck left for Italy while Sarah lived 'the good life' with Daniel replayed in flashes in her mind. The climax of this brutal nightmare was Chuck slashing his wrists. Sarah screamed in despair and sobbed out his name.
"It's OK, baby," Chuck said lovingly. "I'm here. Whatever it is we can figure it out together. You're not alone."
"Just a memory," Sarah managed to gasp out. "It's good now."
Sarah had no idea how long Chuck held and rocked her gently.
"I don't know how I can ever repay your father for keeping you alive, Chuck," Sarah finally managed to croak out in a hoarse whisper. "I was remembering your Intersect 2.0 training. Remembering all the things I did to keep Sam away from you. I deserve to be burned at the stake for what I did to her. Can the intersect be used to erase every persona except Sam?"
"Is that what Sam wants?" Chuck asked quietly.
"No, but it's what Sarah deserves," she answered dully.
"Dad prevented me from completing my suicide. A lot of people are really glad he did, especially me. What will it take to prevent Sarah from completing HER suicide?"
Sarah didn't have a clue. How could she ever learn to live with what she had done to Sam? What she had done to Chuck?
"Stay with me Sarah," Sam stared sadly from her egg chair in Sarah's mind, pleading with her.
Sarah felt Chuck's arms around her and realized he wanted her to stay too. Burning Sarah out of her brain would hurt them both, she realized. After all the pain she had already caused, how could she justify adding another layer by leaving them? But how could she live with what she had done?
"Own it, bitch," Lisa the Liquidator snarled disapprovingly.
"Suck it up, pussy," Soldier Sarah agreed.
Sarah bowed her head and took a deep breath. They were right. Owning the pain and learning to live with what she'd done was her penance. The prospect of facing that pain was daunting but Sam and Chuck were still counting on her. She was damned if she was going to let them down again.
"How the fuck did you ever learn to live with yourself after your Dad stopped you from completing?" Sarah wondered.
"It's a long story and your reaction to my red test is part it," Chuck warned her. "The last thing I want is to make you feel more raw about that time than you already do."
"But it has a happy ending, right?" Sarah insisted hopefully. "So maybe your story can help me find my way to my own happy ending."
"I definitely came out of the experience stronger," Chuck mused. "I'll tell you the story if you promise to work with me to find a way for you to come out stronger too."
"I promise," Sarah agreed solemnly.
Chuck got comfortable and pulled her against him, "Young Charles Bartowski was an odd duck. He was extremely creative and very sensitive. His creativity led him to poke at things and take them apart in ways no one could have foreseen. He wasn't so good at putting them back together again so he spent a lot of time with people mad at him. He developed his first distinct persona to carry the emotion directed at him, let's call him Andy Anxiety. Andy's reactions made the people he angered feel like they were getting through to him but it didn't keep him from breaking things. So he developed Robby Respect, who reminded Charles not to touch things that belonged to other people unless he had permission. Robby was unforgiving in drawing lines but when Charles respected them he was a lot less likely to get into trouble. As he got older, his sensitivity led him to pay attention to other people's feelings and Corinne Compassion held those skills."
"So wait, one of your personae was female?" Sarah didn't see how that was possible.
"That's right," Chuck confirmed. "Who knew Casey had that kind of emotional intelligence? My compassionate feelings for other people were literally lady feelings."
"Weird. But cool," Sarah qualified.
"As Charles got older still he developed some unique tricks for sorting through his super sized memory," Chuck resumed. "Larry the Library was a very skilled listener. He could pluck a few memories and hear the faintest resonance between them. The last persona Charles developed was able to analyze complex systems and find ways to make them misbehave. Paulie Piranha had to be very slippery and smooth with justifications to keep Robby Respect from shutting him down. He was mostly a dissident persona when you met me."
"In college Larry, Corrine and sometimes Paulie were very active. Robby and Andy were there but I had learned to navigate through life in a way least likely to trigger them. Then I was accused of cheating and expelled. Andy got hypervigilant and my anxiety went through the roof. Robby's job was to keep me out of trouble and he worked twice as hard as he ever had to make up for being mostly dormant when I was expelled. Robby kept me deferential to everyone and forced me to stay in my lane. By the time you met me my lane had become a rut I wondered if I could ever get out of."
"Working with you and Casey kept Andy on high alert but I got blown so far outside my comfort zone Robby had no idea where my lane was any more. Corrine helped me really care about you and Casey."
"When I got the Intersect 2.0 and they offered me training, Robby FINALLY saw a lifeline. I could be accepted into the spy world as a member, not just an asset. You wouldn't have to throw away your career and we could work together as equals, freely and openly. Not only would we not have to run, we would be RESPECTED. Andy could stop being vigilant and I could stop being such a spaz."
"Washing out of spy school was like getting kicked out of Stanford all over again. It was soul crushing. But I wasn't expelled. MAYBE there was a place for me in spy world after all. Maybe I'd get a second chance at that bright shining dream. My red test was traumatic. I was sleepwalking through life, emotionally deaf. Beckman laid my dream at my feet. All I needed was you. When you told me that passing my red test had changed me so much you couldn't trust me I realized I wasn't emotionally deaf, I was emotionally dead. I THOUGHT I felt gutted but maybe that was just Andy freaking out. Robby took over. The CIA became my lane and my job was to follow orders. I may have been emotionally dead but I could still serve and protect my country."
"While I was in Italy Robby drove me hard but I it felt like I had found my place. Andy and Corrine were dormant and that was a good thing. Robby, Larry and Paulie were all I needed to be a kickass spy and I was until the intersect shorted out my brain."
"When I was in my Dad's lab there were no more orders, no more handlers telling me I was doing a good job, and no structure to my life. Robby went almost completely dark. In that quiet space, with my father there every day, Corrine finally woke up. The people I had killed weren't just mission objectives, they were human beings. Andy went from dormant to full scream as he tried to hold the mountain of pain I had inflicted on the world. When I turned to Robby for validation it finally dawned on him that killing was FAR more disrespectful than touching someone else's things without permission. The three of them were united and their condemnation was unbearable."
Sarah felt her gut twist into a knot and she gripped Chuck's arms so hard her knuckles went white.
"Happy Ending, Sarah. Don't forget this has a happy ending," Chuck reminded her soothingly.
"So there I was, unable to handle the pain but unable to make it stop. I leaned HARD into Larry and let my desperation drive me. Dad and I built the prototype of the Intersect 3.0 and he interrogated me, trying to talk some sense into one persona at a time. He saved me the tapes, it got pretty hairy. He tried to convince Andy, Robby and Corinne that the responsibility for all the killing belonged to the CIA officers giving the orders, not me. Unfortunately, these were my most primitive personae and they simply couldn't grasp the concepts he was using. We decided the only way forward was to create an intersect program to implant that knowledge."
"Did implanting the knowledge program the personae to accept his argument?" Sarah asked.
"No, that would have required a much more complex implant with a high likelihood of instability and persona disintegration," Chuck explained. "As it happened, just linking a few relevant concepts to enable Dad to make his argument was enough to completely destabilize all three personae. It was the first multimodal intersect implant we attempted and we didn't anticipate that the different sensory modes would interact to create a feedback loop when the flash cascade was triggered. That first flash burned through my brain and by the time the regulator my Dad had created was able to dampen it enough to stop the feedback loop, it had spawned a huge number of secondary connections. Andy's sense of emotions from others belonging to me and Robby's sense of boundaries between myself and others fused to create Solomon Sociomapper. Corrine's additional connections transformed her into Emily Empath. By the time my new personae stabilized, Dad no longer had to convince Solomon and Emily of anything. My new personae have a sophisticated understanding of the social fabric and accept me as an enabler of destruction rather than a cause."
"So that was all it took to cure you of your suicidal impulses?" Sarah asked doubtfully.
"It seems like a much too subtle distinction to enable such a radical shift in attitude, doesn't it?" Chuck acknowledged. "But yes, that was all it took. I still felt a heavy weight of responsibility for all that killing but the idea of tearing a new hole in the social fabric by ending my life felt even worse. There are other consequences as well. I could never again blindly follow orders or put implicit trust in rules. My sense of right and wrong got a lot more situational and relative. The way I relate to people is also very different. I do a lot more emotional listening. I used to care ABOUT people, now I want a constructive relationship WITH them."
"That's a lot to take in but it sounds like your accident made you a lot more emotionally mature," Sarah said thoughtfully.
"I was extremely lucky," Chuck agreed. "But when I look back on all that would have been lost if I bled out and died it makes my blood run cold. At the time I was certain there was no way forward. I wouldn't have been able to comprehend my future self, let alone believe I could become him. I understand you're at that desolate moment with Sarah right now but you've already put Sam in a MUCH better place. You have no idea how amazing future Sarah can be, don't give up on her."
"I won't," Sarah repeated her promise, heaving a huge sigh.
"Well, I'm always here for you if you want talk it out," Chuck assured her. "And if Antonia was telling me the truth and your application to join GMSP is approved, it will open up a whole new world of possibilities. I AM planning on adding my endorsement to Antonia's on your application, in case there was any doubt."
"I wouldn't presume to know everything that goes on in that big sexy brain of yours so thanks for the endorsement," Sarah replied sincerely.
Sarah admitted she was emotionally exhausted and they agreed to turn in early. Chuck asked her some probing questions about how she was feeling and they agreed that cuddling naked without actually having sex would be the most comfortable thing for her.
"I don't want our relationship to be all about me though," Sarah said firmly. "If you're horny I'm pretty sure I can push myself to go a round or two."
"Since we're going to be naked it would be pointless to pretend my physical response is due to a medical condition," Chuck laughed. "But what I would like more than sex is for you to tell me a bedtime story. Tell me about something Sarah did that was good."
As they snuggled together the first thing that Sarah thought of was the baby. Sarah's panic and attempt to think of something else ran straight into the brick wall of Lisa and Soldier Sarah. If she was serious about learning to live with the things she had done, this was a perfect opportunity.
So Sarah told Chuck about her old handler Kieran Ryker and the mission in Budapest. She recounted how helpless she felt when she simply couldn't think of Molly as "the package." She described how completely out of control she felt as she went off mission and left the baby with her mother. Chuck spoke gently but his questions reached into all the dark corners of her feelings and she found herself gripping him tightly as she forced herself to admit things that were really hard for her. She expected to feel raw and vulnerable afterward but with Chuck's help she was able to see how much courage it took for her to face up to Ryker, Graham, and her mother. In the end she was surprised to find that she was really proud of the way Sarah stuck up for Sam. She felt peace as she drifted off to sleep.
Sarah groaned as she levered her stiff body off the cold flagstones and into a sitting position. Her eyes took in the bars and stone walls of her dank prison cell. Scratched into one of the stones was 'Sam + Chuck.' She heard footsteps and soon the small figure of Sam stood outside her cell, clad in a spotless nightgown.
"How long are you gonna stay down here?" Sam asked.
"Until they execute me I guess," Sarah croaked.
"No one is going to execute you," Sam admonished her.
"Then I guess I'll be here until I die," Sarah replied, coughing up a disgusting glob of phlegm and spitting it into a corner.
"Everybody misses you, you know," Sam said sadly.
"Maybe they can all take a up a collection," Sarah's laughter was harsh and grating. "No idea what it would take to bribe a guard to spring me though."
"There are no guards," Sam's brow furrowed in confusion. "Or locks, you can leave whenever you want."
Sam swung the door to her cell open to demonstrate. Sarah stared at the open doorway in disbelief. She slowly stood and walked through it.
"But I locked you in there," Sarah said, confused.
"And I got out and now I wanna share something with you," Sam replied patiently.
She grabbed Sarah's hand and tugged insistently. Sarah allowed Sam to lead her up some stairs to the suite she shared with Chuck. Sam led her to the side of the bed and jumped up on it. She started tugging Sarah's gown over her head. Sarah helped her and she soon stood naked and shivering.
"Get IN," Sam insisted.
Sarah crawled beneath the covers and an equally naked Chuck sleepily drew her to him. Sarah felt Sam's nightgown against her front and Chuck against her back. She felt something profound but she didn't have a word for it. Sam squirmed and crawled to whisper in Sarah's ear.
"This is what safe feels like," Sam whispered.
Sarah was surprised to find herself struggling to wake up the next morning. She felt like a bear coming out of hibernation. Chuck was dressed and had coffee and a light breakfast ready for her.
"Good Morning, Sleeping Beauty," he said with a broad smile. "I tried kissing you awake but I guess breaking the spell you were under took more magic than I could muster."
"You're ruining me as spy, Chuck," Sarah complained. "Even an amateur assassin could have murdered me in my sleep without waking me up."
"We could get you a watchdog," Chuck suggested.
"I can barely be trusted to keep a goldfish alive," Sarah snorted.
As they sipped coffee and ate Sarah went over her application statement with Chuck. She was dismayed when he told her he had no suggested additions.
"Do you not WANT me to be hired?" Sarah asked.
"Of course I want you to be hired," Chuck insisted. "I meant it when I told you that I'd be eager to recruit you if you could only stop hiding from your emotions. Lately the challenge has been how to keep you from wallowing in them."
Sarah grabbed a pillow and held it threateningly. Chuck quickly put down his coffee and held his hands up in surrender.
"I'm not Casey, Sarah. I'm all for a good wallow now and then. But I hope we can agree that when a person contemplates wiping out most of their personality they may have taken it too far," Chuck qualified in a conciliatory tone.
"Ok, good point," Sarah acknowledged, putting down the pillow with an apologetic smile.
She walked over to kneel before him in mock supplication.
"Please forgive me!" she threw up her hands theatrically, then dropped her head and let her hands fall onto Chuck's belt buckle. With her eyes cast down to the floor her fingers deftly relieved him of his pants. After a very satisfying morning workout Chuck grumbled about having to take a second shower and she was happy to make the experience the furthest thing from a chore.
Sarah met Antonia for lunch and they went over her application statement. She was surprised to find Antonia had no additions to suggest either.
"You and Chuck are making me nervous by telling me my application is perfect," Sarah admitted.
"Your application isn't going through an HR process manned by keyword sniffing drones," Antonia laughed. "The application statement should be a straightforward reflection of you and you probably have a much better grasp of what you're in for if you're hired than anyone who has gone through the process so far."
"So what's the next step?" Sarah asked, trying to keep her nerves calm.
"The members review it and we schedule an interview. I'd be shocked if that took a full week to set up," Antonia mused.
"So will we all meet in the same room for the interview?" Sarah wondered.
"No, the questions are typed and come to you on a terminal. Your responses are verbal and on camera," Antonia explained.
Sarah could see the sense in that. They wouldn't want to give a applicant who was NOT hired too much information about who they were. She told Antonia to submit her application and tried not to think about what kind of limitations of access to Chuck's life she would endure if she were rejected.
That afternoon Sarah had a follow up session with Isabella. Her counselor was floored by the transformation in Sarah over the course of the week.
"You simply MUST tell me what your diet is like," Isabella insisted. "I promise not let it go any further than myself and to buy your book when it comes out."
"I'm afraid my secret would do you no good and there will be no book," Sarah replied. "What you see is the effect of being sequestered with Charles Galois for most of the week."
"I see," Isabella sighed hugely. "The legendary Galois Sanctuary effect."
"I did have a tough moment last night," Sarah still felt a twinge of guilt at Chuck closing the sanctuary and wanted to change the subject. "I was remembering a time in my life when I brutally repressed my inner child. It made me feel like all the adult parts of me deserved to die."
"And how did your child feel about your adult parts in that moment?" Isabella asked gently.
"Sam tried to reassure them that she wanted them to stay," Sarah replied. "But how can I live with myself now that I know what I put her through?"
"You feel unworthy because of a time when you refused to listen to Sam," Isabella reminded her. "Listen to her now. Feel her need for those parts of you. Be the adult she needs and feel her joy. Leave the past in the past. You are no longer that woman, she is already dead."
Sarah closed her eyes and tried to listen to Sam. Sam told her that Isabella was right. The bad Sarah who kept her locked away and silenced was nothing like the Sarah she was now. In her mind she gave Sam a hug, thanked her, and promised to never let her be silenced again. Sarah opened her eyes and wiped away her tears.
Isabella reviewed the listening exercises they had practiced and gave her tips for overcoming the challenges she had encountered in using them.
Later in the day as she was enjoying a relaxing supper with Chuck her cell phone registered a message: Interview scheduled for tomorrow at 2pm, my office - Antonia.