A/N: Thanks for the comments and for sticking around.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Vigilante
"How far ahead of us is Chuck, Ellie?" Sarah asked.
Ellie did not answer immediately.
Instead, she stood and smacked Clarke's face hard with her open hand, rolling his head on his shoulders with the blow, and then doing it again with her other hand.
"Ellie, what are you doing?"
Ellie glared at Sarah. "Trying to wake him faster. And don't look at me like that — if Chuck hadn't stopped you, you'd have put a bullet in Clarke's brain."
Sarah sat back involuntarily. She had known that Ellie knew about Reno, must know a lot about her CIA life, but having Ellie say that, so bluntly, so matter-of-factly, shocked Sarah — partly for her own sake, partly for Ellie's. Had Ellie changed this much?
Ellie yelled for Morgan. "Morgan, make some coffee!" Ellie then looked back at Sarah and answered Sarah's earlier question. "Hours ahead. Chuck is hours ahead. By the time I get Clarke awake, and ready to talk, Chuck may be dead."
"Dead?"
Ellie had smacked Clarke twice more. She stopped, panting a bit, and watched as Morgan entered the room. He was holding up the pink sock like a trophy. Ellie nodded at him and he tossed it and the blue one to her. She caught them and put them into her doctor's bag.
She rummaged in it for a minute and produced a tranq gun. She handed it to Sarah.
"You know the drill. If he wakes, and he makes an aggressive move, even a microaggression, shoot him."
Ellie faced Sarah squarely at that point, turning her back on Clarke, who was now twitching in the chair, moving his head.
"Sarah, don't you understand that letter, all of this," Ellie gestured around the cabin at everything and nothing. "Chuck's on a suicide mission. A final mission. He's been planning it all along. He conned Jack, or he tried to; he conned us, Morgan and me. I knew he was...struggling. He's been struggling since you left, since Dad died. But I didn't know he'd reached the crisis. But I should have known. That's why he wanted to see you so bad. You were his last, best wish, freeing you was the thing he most wanted to do."
With that, Ellie sat back down, turning her chair in a semicircle from Clarke to Sarah. Ellie sighed. "When Dad died, Chuck joined the CIA. But he didn't really join. It was a cover. He'd decided that he would become a vigilante in the spy world, that he would work for no one but himself. Make his own missions. Do what he thought was right.
"After he established himself with the CIA, he presented himself to Fulcrum as a double-agent. He recruited me, and Morgan, and even Devon — although Devon and I usually take turns helping — to be his team. He taught us. The Intersect made him better at that than all the Farm instructors put together — a lot better. He's a walking espionage encyclopedia. We weren't the most promising recruits, I guess, and our training was hit and miss, now and then, but we gradually became a functioning team, maybe as good as your team in Burbank.
"Morgan did most of the leg work; he's been Chuck's sometimes field partner and backup. I, well I mostly have done the research, help with Chuck's mastery of the Intersect, developed drugs, tranqs," Ellie looked at the tranq gun in Sarah's hand, "and various gadgets. He calls me Q sometimes. But mostly, I've patched him up, kept him going, physically and psychologically, talked him through the darkest times.
"He found ways to short-circuit missions he didn't approve of, CIA and Fulcrum, ways to play the agencies against each other, to deepen the stalemate between them. Like those arms in Reno. He delivered them to Fulcrum, but later Fulcrum found out that a small piece of each rifle was missing, rendering them useless. Chuck made it look like they'd been useless all along, like Chentle had intended to cheat Fulcrum."
Ellie smiled at a memory. "It was kind of funny. And then, later, the rifles disappeared, poof! — But doing all this has forced Chuck into making choices, hard, hard choices, forced him into means-end reasoning that is unnatural to him. Being a vigilante was more complicated than being CIA or Fulcrum. He's made choices...choices he loathes. And each one has made him loathe himself more.
"That Dante line, Sarah," Ellie stood up and turned to Clarke, "that was Chuck's way of saying that he's going to sacrifice himself to end Fulcrum. One last mission, a mission of atonement. You were part of that mission all along but I didn't understand what seeing you meant. — Morgan, where's the damn coffee?"
Morgan had been working furiously in the kitchen. He turned almost on cue with a steaming cup in his hand. He handed it to Ellie, and she tipped back Clarke's head and began to pour coffee slowly into his open mouth.
He swallowed some. Some ran down his face, onto his neck, and browned his light shirt.
Morgan and Sarah watched for a moment, and then Morgan spoke. "We knew Chuck wanted to see you, to give you this chance to quit, to work through some things with you. His anger, mostly, I'm guessing. But, Sarah, he couldn't have been so angry if he hadn't loved you so much."
Clarke's head rolled again, moved by him. Sarah stiffened and took aim, but he made no other movement.
Sarah shifted her focus back to Ellie and Morgan.
"So, Chuck and Jack come up with this plan. They'll stop me from terminating Clarke, keeping Clarke alive so that Chuck can extract vital information from him. But Chuck stops me by tranquilizing me and then faking my death. He brings me here, to the place where he's set up a meeting with Clarke, and I'm supposed to be a kind of living prop at that meeting.
"But the point is to offer me a chance to walk away from the CIA. And then, things go sideways, from the point of view of the plan — Chuck and I go sideways. I not only don't resist him, which is what he expects, plans for; instead, I attack him only to make love to him. I end up telling him I'm done, that I'm on his side. He believes me, eventually, and decides that he can't take the chance I'll insist on sharing his suicide mission, so he tranquilizes me again, — so that he can escape from me, hoping that I will begin my new life. — Was that the plan?"
Ellie looked at Morgan and he looked at Ellie. He answered. "That's the TLDR version of the plan, I guess. — But keep in mind, Sarah, Ellie and I are getting the whole story right now. In what you said. Some of what you said is news to us.
"The plan as we understood it — and Ellie and I never liked it, too many steps, too cute, too Jack — was for Chuck to stop the termination, take you, make you the offer, use you to meet with Clarke, get the information, and then rendezvous with us and Jack, so that we three could help Chuck move against Fulcrum.
"We were supposed to call you from the road to tell you Jack was free. The pretended threat against him was to make you...pliable and to keep you in the cabin after Chuck left."
Morgan shook his head and allowed himself a quick grin. "Chuck didn't bargain on you feeling the same way he felt, especially after his pretended threat. You must've surprised the hell out of him."
Sarah recalled tackling Chuck onto the bed, and she smiled for a moment. She pushed the memory from her mind.
She understood — understood enough. She felt her old steel reforming but on a new pattern. She stood, her lips compressed into a hard line. She put the smile away.
"Here, Ellie, take the tranq gun. Give me the coffee. I'll pour for Clarke. We can't lose any more time. My guy and my dad are out there, and they need me."
A/N: Two or three chapters to go.
