A/N: More of our new arc, Sealing the Deal


The Missionary


So, stand in the place where you live
Now face north
Think about direction, wonder why you haven't before
Now stand in the place where you work
Now face west, think about the place where you live
Wonder why you haven't before

Your feet are going to be on the ground
Your head is there to move you around
If wishes were trees the trees would be falling
Listen to reason
Season is calling

Stand in the place where you live
Now face north
Think about direction, wonder why you haven't before

— REM, Stand


Chapter 34: Home?


Graham's eyes bored into Sarah like twin rifle barrels. He still had her in his sights; he was still coming to a verdict on her. She had a bizarre, almost inexplicable flashback to her childhood, to her grandmother reading to her from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: The Queen of Hearts bellowing: "Off with his head!"

Graham made a strange Queen of Hearts — but he was after Chuck's head, and Sarah suddenly felt that Langley, heavy and umbrageous and malevolent around her, was an evil Wonderland. She needed to escape. But she needed to raise no suspicion.

Exercising self-control only years of pressurized pretending could make possible, Sarah plucked at a string fraying from her sleeve, tugging it loose and moving her fingers, letting it fall. She watched it float toward the floor, then turned her attention dispassionately toward Graham.

"I haven't made a final decision. One of two very important deep cover assignments, both out of the country, both likely long-term."

"Very good. But about Bartowski. His sister will be a problem, sir. Smart, delicate sense of justice bolted to an iron will."

Graham relaxed and leaned back. He had reached a verdict without knowing it; the one Sarah wanted. Now, she just needed to make a clean exit.

And call Casey.

"God, I hate people like that. Self-righteous. They have no idea what it takes to keep them living their lives and keep them believing their dainty hands are immaculate. But it's a Bartowski trait." Graham seemed to regret that remark, looked to see if Sarah had marked it (she acted as if she had not), and hurried on. "I mean that's much the way the brother strikes me."

Sarah shrugged. "Bartowski's a good guy. White hat on his overstuffed head. But what will you do about the sister? — and she just got engaged, Devon Woodcomb, another doctor."

"Right, the other roommate. I hadn't heard that news yet."

Sarah frowned. "I wasn't sure it was pertinent to…anything. I'd have mentioned it eventually, I'm sure, once wedding planning began and Appocalypse was affected."

"I plan to have Bartowski call his sister, briefly, and explain that the two of you will have to stay in DC for an extra couple of weeks. Toward the end of the two weeks, you'll both die in a very unfortunate rental car accident."

"Both of us?"

"I'm afraid Sarah Walker is about to enjoy her final days. We'll choose a new name for you before you begin your next deep cover assignment. I hope you're not too attached to the name. You've kept it longer than was probably advisable, but, since you came to us trailing so many, I thought it might be good for you to have that one for a time."

"I've been Sarah Walker longer than I've ever been anyone. It will be strange to start over." I already have started over, Graham, with the man you're intent on destroying. My new mission is the one I gave myself, not the one you plan to give me.

"I suppose, but it has to be done. You've been in Burbank as Sarah Walker for too long, associated with Chuck Bartowski. Sarah Walker has to go."

"So, you'll kill us off and ship unidentifiable remains back to Burbank, to the family." Sarah kept her voice distant, mechanical as if she were reading off a checklist.

"Burned beyond recognition but dentally identified by a coroner here, just in case the sister climbs aboard her high horse in her grief." Graham smiled.

Sarah moved during Graham's moment of self-satisfaction. She picked up her purse. "If that's all for now, I'd like to get back to my apartment. I've got dead plants to bury. It's been a long time since I was there." Time to get the hell out of Wonderland.

Graham nodded. "I will be in contact within 48 hours. Get your apartment in order but don't buy any new plants, unless you like burying them. You're not likely to be back in the States for months."

"Yes, sir."

Sarah reached the door when Graham spoke again. "I meant it when I said welcome home, Agent." She noticed that he had already dropped 'Walker'. "This has always been your true home. There's a car at the front entrance waiting to take you wherever you need to go. I had your Porsche moved out of storage and back in your apartment's garage. Welcome home."

No, I had a home with my grandmother, although I didn't know it, and I have found a home in Burbank if I can find a way to have it.

"Yes, sir. Thank you, sir."

Sarah walked out of the front entrance. A car was waiting, as Graham said. She gave the man the address and sat down in the back seat.

She would not call Casey until she was back in her apartment, and had checked the place for bugs.


Chuck woke slowly, the darkness draining out of his consciousness like filthy dishwater from a sink. He was moving.

He raised his head.

He was not moving. He was in something that was moving. A van. No, an ambulance. He was on a stretcher, belted to it as he discovered when he tried to move.

"Be still, Mr. Bartowski." He turned. Dr. Astley was seated beside him. "It won't be a long journey, but you will miss it altogether if you fight against your restraints." She gestured toward a syringe on the narrow metal counter behind her.

Chuck dropped his head. "Fine. I suppose this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship?"

Astley smiled humorlessly. "Do not try to charm me, Mr. Bartowski, I am invulnerable to charm."

Chuck believed her. "Where are we going?"

"Your new home. That is all you need to know." She reached into her lab coat pocket and took out a phone. "Well, there is a bit more you need to know. Director Graham has had a meeting with Sarah Walker. He recorded it and wanted you to hear it." She pushed a button.


A moment later, over the sound of engine and wheels, Chuck heard Graham's voice:

"As of a few moments ago, you are no longer Bartowski's protector."

"Oh, "that's unexpected. But I understand. What is my new assignment?"

Sarah did not sound like Sarah. She sounded like Agent Walker, the woman he knew not in the flesh but in an Intersect file, the way she sounded on recordings and video in the Internet. Abstracted, cool, deadly efficient.

"I haven't made a final decision. One of two very important deep cover assignments, both out of the country, both likely long-term."

"Very good. But about Bartowski. His sister will be a problem, sir. Smart, delicate sense of justice bolted to an iron will."

No, Sarah. She couldn't talk about Ellie like that. They were friends.

"God, I hate people like that. Self-righteous. They have no idea what it takes to keep them living their lives and keep them believing their dainty hands are immaculate."

"Bartowski's a good guy. White hat on his overstuffed head. But what will you do about the sister? — and she just got engaged, Devon Woodcomb, another doctor."

"Right, the other roommate. I hadn't heard that news yet."

Sarah frowned. "I wasn't sure it was pertinent to…anything. I'd have mentioned it eventually, I'm sure, once wedding planning began and Appocalypse was affected."

"I plan to have Bartowski call his sister, briefly, and explain that the two of you will have to stay in DC for an extra couple of weeks. Toward the end of the two weeks, you'll both die in a very unfortunate rental car accident."

"Both of us?"

"I'm afraid Sarah Walker is about to enjoy her final days. We'll choose a new name for you before you begin your next deep cover assignment. I hope you're not too attached to the name. You've kept it longer than was probably advisable, but, since you came to us trailing so many, I thought it might be good for you to have that one for a time."

Chuck felt his flesh crawl.

"I've been Sarah Walker longer than I've ever been anyone. It will be strange to start over."

"I suppose, but it has to be done. You've been in Burbank as Sarah Walker for too long, associated with Chuck Bartowski. Sarah Walker has to go."

"So, you'll kill us off and ship unidentifiable remains back to Burbank, to the family."

Sarah sounded detached, describing the fake death as if it were nothing.

"Burned beyond recognition but dentally identified by a coroner here, just in case the sister climbs aboard her high horse in her grief."

"If that's all for now, I'd like to get back to my apartment. I've got dead plants to bury. It's been a long time since I was there."

"I will be in contact within 48 hours. Get your apartment in order but don't buy any new plants, unless you like burying them. You're not likely to be back in the States for months."

"Yes, sir."


Astley shut her phone off and put it back in her lab coat. She cocked her head slightly, a bird-like movement, and spoke, each word distinct.

"The Director wants you to understand your situation exactly, Mr. Bartowski, and not to cherish any foolish hope. You are alone now. In extremis. No one who knows what has happened to you cares about your personal fate. All those who care about your personal fate will soon believe you are dead. So, you see, alone. The sooner you resign yourself to your fate, your destiny, the easier this will be for all of us, but especially for you."

Chuck did not look at her. Tears formed in his eyes and ran down the sides of his face, gravity dictating their path.

Sarah!

He could not imagine Ellie's horror and grief when she got that phone call or when she met the remains at the airport. She and Devon were so happy, so looking forward to the holidays, to planning a spring wedding.

And Sarah. Had she been playing him this whole time, finding a way to come back from their first night, their first date, but only so as to establish control over him, to eventually put him at Graham's disposal? No one who knows what has happened to you cares about your personal fate. The Sarah he heard on the recording was a professional — not interested in his personal fate.

His arm was burning still from whatever Astley had injected him with. But that was just the background to the pain of betrayal.


Sarah looked back over her shoulder at Langley as it diminished in the distance.

After first entering it years ago, she had never left that building imagining that she would not return, but now she not only imagined it. She knew it. Or, she knew she would not return except as the enemy, except to strike at Wonderland, to try to bring it down.

The Agency had all but owned her for all these years, Graham had all but owned her. And she had allowed it because she did not know how to own herself, because, by the time she had come to the age to lay claim to herself, she found herself corrupt, guilty — a con man's daughter, her original sin, cheating before she understood cheating — and she did not want to own herself, to lay claim to what she was. So she let her father define her first, and then later let Graham do it, let them own her, and so own her corruption, her guilt.

But she was not that Sarah anymore. Graham was strangely right about that but in the wrong way. She had become a different Sarah, her own Sarah, in Burbank.

"Here we are," the driver said.

He stopped at the curb.

Her apartment building squatted outside the passenger window. Sarah's heart sank, bottomed out, and shook by a depth charge of unwanted recognition.

She had long hated the apartment but she had never complained or asked for another. The building seemed like an extension of Langley, of Graham's long, spooky arm, an outward and visible sign that she was Graham's no matter where she was.

The apartment was her cell, her penance. Between missions, she bided there in extreme asceticism.

The car drove away and she found the key in her purse. She went inside the building, through the bare lobby, almost always empty, and she boarded the elevator. She punched the button for the sixth floor without thinking, her mind already on her apartment, on sweeping it for bugs. Graham had gone to the trouble to send Carina to spy on her and Chuck, it was not impossible he would have used her long absence to bug her apartment.

Sarah thought about calling Carina as well as Casey, but she was still not entirely sure where Carina's ultimate loyalties lay (other than with herself?), and she wanted to know what Casey thought about that plan. It had been obvious during Carina's visit and afterward that Casey was even more lost in Carina than Sarah had estimated. Carina's silence after her visit had disappointed Casey, though he knew what he risked in taking part in Sarah's prank. Sarah would talk to Casey in person about that. She needed to see his face to know what he really wanted, really thought.

She keyed her door and opened it, greeted, as usual, by the contradictory scent of disuse and disinfectant. She hit the light switch — the blinds, as always, were down tight — and scanned the apartment. The gray that dominated the apartment, the walls, and the furniture, was not a loud gray. As if there was such a thing. It was muted, almost not a color at all. Dust blended with it imperceptibly. Her plants were, as she predicted, dead; they had long ago given up the ghost. Their little plant souls had departed their viney, leafy bodies and gone on to that great botanical garden in the sky. Sarah felt a twinge of guilt, especially at the thought of the plants not just dying, but dying of hunger and thirst, hoping in dumb, plant-like slow motion for an end to their suffering.

She made herself focus. Her fear for Chuck was ubiquitous, filling her and her environment, bending her perceptions, not that her apartment was ever the scene of pleasantries between Sarah and herself.

She shut the door and locked it, then quickly crossed the living room to the bedroom. Inside the room, she walked to the one living plant in the apartment, a small cactus that she had bought long ago on a whim, standing in the checkout line of a grocery store, a housewarming gift to herself. It had not been all that warming.

She put her fingers carefully on the cactus, and without exerting much pressure, used the plan to pull the dirt from the pot. There, in the bottom of the pot, was a small, high-grade bug detector, one she had pocketed during a mission and later reported missing, her small, dishonest effort to use the CIA to keep the often dishonest CIA at bay.

She took the detector out and turned it on. It glowed green. She walked slowly through the apartment but the glow never reddened, as it would if there was a bug. Finally satisfied, she dropped the detector in her purse and replaced the cactus in the pot. All these years, my only faithful bedtime companion has been a cactus.

She dug her phone from her purse, not her CIA phone, but the burner Casey had given her. She turned it on. There was a text from Casey. He was in DC, at the hotel they had planned for him to use, not far from the one at which Sarah and Chuck were going to stay. She would meet him there. He acknowledged her text and told her his room number.

She went to her closet and took out a small chest. It contained guns, ammunition, stun grenades and an assortment of knives, and other supplies. She unzipped it and peeked inside, just to be sure of the contents. All was in order. She blew out a long breath.

"Believe, Chuck. Believe. I am on my way. Nothing will keep us apart." She thought of the lingerie she brought to DC. She might not wear it there, but she would wear it, and soon.

For my boyfriend.

She lugged the chest to the elevator and down to the parking garage. True to his word, Graham had her Porsche, washed and waxed, in her usual parking spot. Sarah put the chest in the rear seat, using the passenger door. She walked around the front of the car and opened the driver's door, climbing inside. She took the detector from her purse and checked the car. A green glow.

She started the car and headed to Casey's hotel as fast as she could without being pulled over.


Chuck could raise his head but that tired him and made his forehead throb if he did it for long. He was prone on the stretcher. When the ambulance finally stopped, after a seriously bumpy section of road, the doors opened and Chuck was overwhelmed by the strong scent of pine and the faint scent of wood smoke. A soldier gripped the stretcher and pulled it out of the rear of the ambulance. Another soldier took hold of the other end. Both avoided making eye contact with him. He stared up at the stars in the midnight blue sky, the moon was rising above the trees.

"Careful," Astley barked. A moment later, the soldiers carried him inside. Inside something, a building, brick. And then they put the stretcher on a gurney and wheeled him further inside. The brick became metal and suddenly, after a lurch and a metallic, grinding sound, the stretcher, the gurney, and the elevator began to sink.

When it stopped, after a disturbingly long time, Astley spoke again. "Down the hall, to the room next to the laboratory."

They wheeled Chuck under bricks, the ceiling punctuated by pale fluorescent lights. And then they were in a room, the ceiling white, the lights brighter, sterile.

A moment later Dr. Astley stood over him. "I will undo your bonds momentarily. But the room will be locked. There is no way out. You are underneath a mountain, Mr. Bartowski. Food is in the refrigerator, and in the cupboards. Dishes, plates. A stove, microwave. A television and a large library of DVDs are here too. This is now where you live. Welcome home."

She undid the restraints and a moment later, she was gone, a heavy metal sound marking her departure, a sound like a metal tomb, sealing. He raised his head; he was locked in the steel equivalent of a Tupperware container.

Chuck sat up slowly. He was in a very large white room. A bed stood in one corner of one end, beside it, a leather armchair and reading lamp, and a leather couch. A TV covered much of the wall in front of the chair and couch. On each side of it was a large bookcase, one full of DVDs, the other full of books. On the other end of the room, stood a large wooden desk and behind it a large, inviting leather desk chair. On one side of the desk was an empty tray that said IN, and on the other side was one that said OUT.

Two massive metal doors stood near the desk, looking more like the doors that compartmentalized submarines than normal doors. He turned on the stretcher and put his feet down carefully, one at a time. The floor was concrete but glossy.

He started laughing to keep himself from crying. This was not how his night was supposed to go. This was not how his life was supposed to go.

He stood, on his feet. He had no idea where he was, no idea about the points of the compass, north, south, east, or west.

But then he knew, knew something else. Deep down, existentially, in the bowels of his heart. He was sure. The drugs had cleared his system; his mind was his again, his own. He could reason.

It was a trick. Sarah had tricked Graham, made him think she was still his soldier, his to command.

But she was not. She was not Agent Walker anymore. She was Mrs. Fantastic — or one day she would be (the Missus part, he hoped; she was already fantastic). He had carried Sarah across the threshold of Appocalypse. Sarah would find a way to dig him out from under the mountain.

I believe, Sarah, help my unbelief.

He would act as if he did not believe, as if he were alone. He would not alert Astley or Graham. But he wasn't alone.

And then he spoke softly, so softly only he could hear himself. The thought, the recognition of the feeling, was his for the first time. "I love you, Sarah Walker."


A/N: Love to hear from you, especially if you're out there, reading but not reviewing. You make this writing work much lonelier than it needs to be by refusing to drop me a line.

By the way, I'm three chapters into my 2022 Christmas tale, The Vanishing Woman. Chapter Three was posted yesterday.