A/N: A/N: A little Chuck anniversay treat. A few short chapters, not everything will be quite as the show had it.
A Comet Appears
Close your eyes to corral a virtue
Is this fooling anyone else?
Never worked so long and hard
To cement a failure
We can blow on our thumbs and posture
But the lonely are such delicate things
The wind from a wasp could blow them
Into the sea
With stones on their feet
Lost to the light and the loving we need
Still to come
The worst part and you know it
There is a numbness
In your heart and it's growing
— A Comet Appears, The Shins
Chapter One: Comet
She could smell the fading scent aviation fuel, it seemed to mix with the more pungent scent of the mildewed canvas, the canvas of the duffel bag in which she was hiding.
A sarcophagus of canvas.
She was airborne, hence the fading scent of fuel.
She could hear voices.
Sarah Walker had found the huge old duffel bag in the bowels of Lost Baggage.
She had carefully attached the dummy airline bag tag she had ready in her shoulder sling after she dumped the duffle's contents of jeans and T-shirts and tube socks — none apparently clean when they had been packed, and all now aged from untold months in the dusty, cool tomb beneath Los Angeles International Airport.
Sarah checked around her; no one was nearby — other than Sarah's CIA partner, Lola Bowen, who was staring at the pile of dirty clothes with a sickened look.
Lola was dressed as a baggage handler and standing beside a partially loaded baggage cart.
"Ok, this will work," Sarah said quickly. "They won't check the luggage after this point. All you need to do is get me onto the plane, hidden in the duffel."
Lola shook her head and turned dark, disbelieving eyes on Sarah. "You're actually going to inhabit that bag? Jesus, some of those tube socks were stiff, and not just from eternal mummification."
Sarah shook her head, frowning. "Baggers can't be choosers."
Lola's mouth dropped, and her eyes narrowed. "Was that a joke, Walker? You're not funny."
The tall blonde shrugged."Sometimes I try, but no luck, I guess." Sarah's frown seemed to freeze on her face. "Not a lot of comedians in the CIA, after all."
"No," Lola agreed, "not exactly SNL — but you are the unfunniest. Probably because you're also the scariest. Existential terror and belly laughs aren't typical bedfellows."
Sarah's frown unfroze only to deepen further. "I don't know about bedfellows," she muttered as she hoisted the empty duffle on the back of the cart and climbed up beside it.
After another quick look around, she stepped into the open duffle, kneeled, then sat, scooting to position herself more midway in the bag.
She looked at Lola. "Ok, after you zip me closed, no more talking. Just get me on the plane, inside the cabin with the other luggage."
Sarah lowered herself into the bag, rolling onto her side, into a tucked, almost fetal position.
Lola grabbed the zipper and carefully pulled it along the top of the bag, attentive not to catch Sarah's hair in the rusty metal teeth. She finished the zipping, leaving only a very small opening.
"No, you don't know about bedfellows," Lola whispered, her face suddenly soft, her voice kind, her expression sad. She patted the bag but too softly for Sarah to have felt it. "Good luck, lonely girl."
Lola spoke the last words soundlessly, then mounted the cart and headed through the maze of underground paths toward the tarmac, the section dedicated to the private jets of privilege.
By the time Lola loaded the baggage into the rear of the private jet's cabin, darkness had fallen.
No one had interfered with her. She knew how to play a role, and the uniform, her brown eyes, and brown skin helped. No one gave her even a first look, much less a second look.
Dragging the duffel off the cart and onto the plane had not been easy, but after a couple of sweaty minutes, it was done.
Lola pressed a hand to the bag. "Good luck, Blondie."
She did not expect a response and she got none. Walker was in the zone, mission-focused, and likely pissed that Lola had spoken at all.
A moment later Lola was steering the cart back into the mazeways.
Time to ditch the cart and the uniform.
Sarah listened carefully.
She recognized one of the voices, the voice of the man who owned the plane, Maxwell Brenner. Benner was superfluously handsome and fraudulently wealthy. His looks were the result of extensive plastic surgery; his money was the result of extensive black market arms sales.
He conducted business under the cover of a tech security firm he owned, Phish and Chips.
Sarah had been in deep cover for weeks at Phish and Chips, working her way closer to the boss. It had not been a seduction assignment, and that was a relief. Brenner was handsome — but a LA plastic surgeon's knife, not nature herself, had chiseled his face. Brenner struck Sarah as a pretty, California Frankenstein.
She had infiltrated Phish and Chips as a PR specialist, charged with helping the company expand and polish its image.
Brenner was engaged to a woman even more wealthy than he, and, although Sarah knew he found her attractive when he hired her, he kept within bounds. But she was able, by the use of her own wits, and by carefully capitalizing on information provided to her by CIA analysts, to impress Brenner: she presented him with a PR campaign that he believed would accomplish all he wanted and more.
As a result, Sarah had spent time with him, and had gained access to him. This morning, she had discovered that he was making an unannounced flight that evening, and she also discovered that chatter put one of Brenner's big money weapons clients, Amir Abadi, in LA that evening too.
Sarah was sure it could not be a coincidence. Her gut insisted that Brenner was using his jet to fly Abadi into LA, and then using it as an airborne office in which to conduct business with Abadi.
She quickly formulated a plan. Lola was Sarah's partner, her backup during the infiltration of Brenner's company.
They had known one another since Sarah's days at the Farm, although this was their first time working together. Sarah had, for almost all her CIA career, been the loneliest of lone wolves.
She never hunted as a pair and so never in a pack. But various logistical difficulties made a backup necessary on this mission, and Sarah had been excited when she realized Lola was in the LA field office, and available. They saw each other rarely, and usually only in passing while visiting Langley. Lola called now and then, but Sarah was rarely available to talk, and if she was, she was lousy at friendly conversation.
Friendship was a strange land to Sarah; she was a stranger in it.
But the past weeks had given Sarah a chance to reacquaint herself with Lola and with friendship. They could not spend much time together, but the little they did quickly came to mean something to Sarah. It was a new experience, that meaning, that friendship.
She began to wonder a little about her choices, to wonder if the lone wolf howled, not at the moon, but because she was so alone, so lost to the loving she needed.
Now Sarah was on the plane, Brenner's plane, stowed away, — and she was certain that the other voice had a to-her-recognizable accent, Lebanese.
Abadi.
Her gut had been right. She focused. Inhale, exhale.
Sarah put the tip of her finger through the small opening Lola left and began to unzip the bag, one tooth at a time, a minced unzipping, trying to make no sound.
Her legs and back were beginning to cramp from her strange posture, a numbness growing, and she was desperate to be free of the cloying, mildewed scent. It seemed like it was growing stronger. Lola's comments about mummies and about stiff socks had floated to the surface of Sarah's mind; she felt seedy and claustrophobic.
She gagged but silenced it, hand over her own mouth.
The zipper was now almost all the way open. Luckily, Sarah was, as Lola obviously planned, flanked on each side by a suitcase. The suitcases were not perfect cover but they were helpful.
Sarah rolled slowly onto her back and lifted one booted foot through the opening, keeping it low. She put her foot on the floor alongside the duffel. Part of that side of the duffel compressed beneath Sarah's thigh, and Sarah could at least breathe the cool, filtered air of the cabin — and not body-heat-activated mildew of the duffle.
And she could, at last, hear the voices, unmuffled.
She took a long, silent breath, then rolled slowly back over, now onto the compressed side of the bag, staying low but positioning herself on her hands and knees, staying as compact as possible. Her body was hidden by the suitcase between herself and the two men. She kept listening. Brenner would, she was sure, reveal the location of the cache of weapons he had, a particularly deadly stash that the US absolutely did not want in terrorist hands.
Her tranq pistol was in a shoulder holster, harnessed close to her black bodysuit.
Using one hand, she took the pistol out of the holster. She intended to tranq the two men and the pilot, then fly the jet to a deserted airstrip a couple of hours from LA, where a CIA team would be waiting to take Brenner and Abadi off the plane and deep into supermax detention.
She was about to stand, to spring her trap, when she heard Brenner shout "No!" followed by the whisper of a silenced shot.
She jumped up to see Abadi — she recognized him from photographs — standing over Brenner, a smoking gun in his hand. He looked up at her as if she were a materializing spirit.
Abadi jerked, his finger closing on the trigger. But he never aimed the gun; the bullet shattered one of the small windows in the cabin.
The cabin was filled with a roar, part the sound of the engines, part the rush of air. Papers whipped up and into the air. Abadi fired again but Sarah had time to duck. The bullet struck the suitcase. Sarah rose and fired, and Abadi clutched at his abdomen, her tranq dart lodged deeply. He crumpled, but as he did, he fired several times. Another window shattered, the roar became louder.
The door to the cockpit opened. A man stood there, the pilot. He was not the man Sarah expected to see. The pilot looked remarkably like Abadi, and when the pilot saw Abadi, the blowing papers, he reached into his jacket and yanked a grenade free.
His eyes burned with a zealot's intensity, a blinded martyr's death wish. He thought Abadi was dead.
Abadi had somehow replaced the pilot with one of his men, and they must have planned to kill Brenner all along. Why? Sarah did not know. But in the instant she had no time for reflection; the man's other hand reached for the grenade's pin.
In the periphery of her vision, she saw a parachute hanging by the door. She fired another dart, this time into the pilot. It hit him in the arm, the arm of the hand reaching for the pin. He stood for a second, his motion frozen, staring at the dart sticking from his arm.
Sarah used the moment to leap to the door. She yanked the handle, opening it, and, as it opened and more air roared into the cabin, she grabbed the parachute, swinging it onto her shoulders as she prepared to jump.
She expected an explosion immediately, and expected to die. She felt at peace with that: she had been expecting to die since she joined the CIA.
But the explosion did not occur.
She leaped from the plane and into the unwelcoming embrace of the endless night sky, inky and cold.
Time stopped. Her body stretched out, air whipping past her as palpable as water. She reached for the parachute cord. The lights on the ground, near the horizon, looked like stars.
She could not see the actual stars above her.
Then: the explosion, a ripple of force, a split-second after her leap into the dark.
She had not yet pulled her cord when debris, some of it aflame, hurled past her, around her, pieces striking her like molten hail, burning.
And then, just as she pulled, a piece struck her head violently, and she lost consciousness.
She became the inky black — but starless, lightless, the night sky now inside and not just outside her.
Chuck Bartowski was seated on the beach, despondent.
He had snuck out of the birthday party his sister Ellie had insisted on giving him. It had been awful, a string of women sent to him one at a time by his sister, in hopes that he would manage a connection with one. He hadn't. Each encounter had seemed more demoralizing than the last, and so he had finally asked his friend Morgan to run interference, to draw attention away from Chuck, so that Chuck could go to his room and slip out the window. Out — out into the welcoming night.
He had gotten away while Morgan pretended to be about to vomit, and he slipped behind the wheel of the Nerd Herder that he drove home from the Buy More that evening.
He rolled down the window and enjoyed the cool air as he drove to the beach, to what he thought of as his spot. He needed to clear his head.
He needed to make a change. He'd been lonely and depressed for too long, buried voluntarily in a dead-end job for too long. Something had to give.
He took off his shoes before he got out of the car, but decided to carry them with him. The sand of the beach had cooled from the day. He trudged out a distance, each step heavy as if there were stones on his feet. No one else was around. A couple walked along, but they were headed away from him, and already out of earshot.
He sat on the sand cross-legged. Ellie would be raging when he got home, but he had been unable to take it. The birthday had made him despair of his future, not look forward to it. He blew on his hands, shifted postures.
I had potential. Once.
He gazed up at the night sky. A sudden flash made him blink — a comet? — and then the sky was black again.
He stared up for a while longer, trying to decide what he had seen, or if he had just imagined the flash.
Eventually, he shrugged to himself and dropped his head. To amuse himself for a while, he was not sure how long, he tried to capture sand in his fist and felt all of it run out as he squeezed it.
A metaphor for his life. I can't hold onto anything worth having.
He heard a faint splash and looked up. He thought he saw a figure, black, lift from the water. He blinked.
No one would be scuba diving on that beach, not at night. But then he heard more splashing. louder. Steps. There was a figure, dark black against dark gray.
It was headed right for him. He stared at the apparition, unable to move. And then a flash of light — passing headlights? — framed it.
It was not an it.
It was a she. A goddess risen from the waves. Her hair was wet but obviously blonde. She was dressed in black.
"Venus? Venus?" Chuck whispered reverently, standing, the name out of his mouth twice before he realized what he was saying.
The woman stopped at the sound, peered ahead as if unable to see him, and reached up to touch her forehead. Then Chuck saw the blood.
"Where am I?"
The woman stumbled, dropped to her knees before him, then collapsed face-first into the sand.
A/N: If you have been following The Missionary, two new chapters went up a few days back, during all the glitching by the site.
