A/N: A Christmas one-shot, the result of too much Wilco and a stray thought or two about the Chuck pilot.
Assassin Down the Avenue
She had told him there was no place he could hide.
Not from them. And by them, she'd primarily meant her.
Sarah Walker.
But she was wrong.
He had run that day, after talking to her on the beach, after she asked him to trust her.
He hadn't.
Could she blame him? No. She didn't trust herself, and she surely didn't trust them: Langston Graham, the CIA, Diane Beckman, the NSA. The whole damn government.
So he had run, Intersect in his head. Bryce had chosen better than any of them suspected. Far better.
Chuck Bartowski was a lightning-quick study. Far quicker than his extended Buy More employment suggested.
He had run — and he had escaped. From them. From her.
Sarah Walker.
The CIA's best. She was the CIA's best. But she had been chasing a college-dropout civilian for over a year now, getting close but never getting to him. It seemed like every day he got better at evading her.
This was the second Christmas she had spent trying to capture Chuck Bartowski.
The first Christmas, last Christmas, he began to tease her. He also began to torment Graham and Beckman and even Casey, though Casey had been reassigned. None of them could trust a computer, a credit card, or a cellphone. For a week at one point, every time Sarah tried to make a call, she was patched through to an employment service for people who wanted a change of career.
Graham's calls all went to the IRS.
Chuck seemed to be everywhere (and nowhere), to have fingers in everything, the man who they could not capture, the man who could not hide from them, from her. Sarah began to worry he was watching her from every security camera on the planet.
He hid from them with a deftness and a panache that was maddening. — And, though Sarah never admitted it to anyone else, amusing.
Sarah had chased him from Burbank north, across the Plains states, and then up into Canada. She thought she was going to capture him in Toronto, but he managed to slip into the shadows and fade away, turning her own specialty against her.
He did it over and over.
It began to feel like a baffling form first of flirtation and then of foreplay.
Except Sarah never got to finish.
And then Sarah realized that, in some strange way, she was being courted by Chuck Bartowski.
He'd begun leaving her gifts.
It had started with a CD of the LA band that was playing the night of their 'date', the 'date' prematurely ended by Casey and his men. The song that they had danced to was underlined in red on the CD insert.
The CD showed up on her pillow at a hotel in Dublin, near Trinity College. No note.
Chuck had used the information in the Intersect to empty several accounts, Langston Graham's black-op slush funds, and Chuck was using the money, a fortune, to fund his flight. And, presumably, to buy the CD, although she had no idea how he could have found it in Dublin.
Every so often, Chuck emailed an itemized expense report to Graham, detailing how the money had been spent, but with the crucial place names and dates redacted, forms filled with big, black squares. It made Graham furious.
After the CD, on the first Christmas, Chuck had left a dozen roses on Sarah's hotel bed while she was out.
A few weeks later, a box of expensive chocolates from the best chocolate-maker in France was on her Parisian hotel bed. She almost captured him that time, near the Eiffel Tower. She had seen him. He had taken her picture and then waved.
But again he eluded her grasp, melted into the crowd, and was gone.
A few weeks after that, an 8x10 glossy photograph, the picture Chuck had taken of her, showed up in her mailbox in DC. The photograph had made her catch her breath. Chuck had photographed her in a moment when she was not thinking about the chase, a moment when she was, as she remembered, watching a small boy and his mother playing together near the Tower. The picture showed her to herself as if she were a stranger. The small, wistful smile on her face, the expression in her posture, all told her something about herself that she had tried not to know.
She had never gotten over that baby she saved in her final mission before Burbank, the baby she'd secreted with her mother.
Molly.
Sarah had seen Molly since then — a few times.
Each time had been when the chase led near her mother's, and each time Sarah detoured for long enough to watch the little girl through binoculars but afraid to make any contact. After each of those times, Sarah had thought seriously about giving up the chase, and about giving up the CIA.
About home, a home, a home of her own.
The memory of the baby's warmth in her arms haunted her.
Chuck had started to give her child-themed gifts: a baby blanket, a teddy bear. Some weeks after that, in Miami, he had taped a photograph of Molly to Sarah's rental car steering wheel.
For the first time, there was a note, handwritten on the backside of the photograph
You have a beautiful daughter, Sarah Walker. I know she's not yours but she looks like you, and she belongs to you by right of sacrifice, and she needs her mother.
Oh, and tag, you're still It.
Chuck Bartowski
Sarah had put the picture of Molly in the inner pocket of her suitcase and took it out often to look at it and to re-read the note.
She was now back in Paris. Chuck had led her here again, as she followed the clues he left her. He seemed to have a thing for France.
Sarah strolled the Avenue Anatole France, feeling far less like an assassin, a CIA agent, than a woman about to meet the man she loved.
She'd started feeling that way not long after the chase began.
Another thing she had never gotten over — that first 'date' with Chuck. All the flirtation and foreplay since then had intensified a yearning in her, born on the 'date', that had nothing to do with a CIA agent's desire to capture an escapee, a yearning that had everything to do with a woman's desire to see the man she loved.
As she reached the Champs de Mars, the Eiffel Tower loomed ahead of her, sun shining through the wrought-iron lattice. She walked along, enjoying the sunny cold of December Paris, the Christmas decorations, the sound of the moving crowd.
And then she heard her name. "Sarah!"
She looked up and, just off the sidewalk, at a small table, sat Chuck. Sarah's mother, Emma, was seated beside him and Molly was seated beside Emma. A box of crayons and a coloring book were on the table.
Sarah stopped cold. It was like gears inside her began to turn against each other, seized.
Emma smiled and stood. She walked to Sarah.
"Merry Christmas, Sarah," Emma said, and the next thing Sarah knew, she was in her mother's arms.
Sarah freed herself from the hug and pushed her mother back gently. "How are you here, Mom?"
Emma tilted her head toward the table, where Sarah could see that Chuck was coloring with Molly in the coloring book. She saw Chuck look up and smile at her, then return to coloring. "Chuck brought us. We've gotten to know him recently. He helped me get Molly into preschool, worked some computer magic to create all the documents I needed. She now has a Social Security Number! He also paid off our house."
"He did what?"
"He paid off the mortgage. I was having a hard time keeping up with it and with child care and everything."
"Do you understand who he is?"
Emma nodded and frowned. "Better than you do, I suspect, Sarah. We've spent a lot of time with him since he showed up on Thanksgiving with a turkey — and a tale." Emma tapped her head and gave Sarah a meaningful look.
Sarah checked the table. Chuck had not disappeared. If anything, he seemed more completely involved in his coloring than Molly did in hers.
Emma was studying Sarah's face when Sarah turned back to her. Emma was smiling. "Chuck tells me that you two have been dating, sort of a long-distance relationship."
Sarah shook her head. "What? No. No, we haven't. — Well, maybe we have." Sarah could feel the impulse in herself — a crazy desire to run to Chuck and slam into his arms, to pull Molly into the hug.
"Will you talk to him? He wants to talk to you. But if you don't want to talk to him, he'll leave. 'And the chase can begin again.' Those are his words. Talk to him, Sarah. It's Christmas, and he's gone to so much trouble. He's so kind."
Sarah nodded wordlessly. Emma left. When Emma returned to the table, she touched Chuck's shoulder. He looked up at Sarah with the first hint of nervousness she had seen in him since Burbank. He stood and walked toward her slowly.
"Hi, Agent Walker. Good to see you."
She stared at him for a moment. She'd chased him for so long and now he was just standing in front of her, within easy reach, looking into her eyes.
"Chuck, what is all this?"
"Your Christmas present. Your Mom told me that you've had some bad Christmases. I have too. And I wanted to spend Christmas in Paris, see the Tower again. Ellie's here too, and Devon. But I left them in the hotel."
"You brought your family — and mine — to Paris — for Christmas — for me? For me for Christmas?"
He gave her that grin she saw for the first time in the Buy More. That grin she now knew had captured her there; she had never escaped it.
"So, what happens now?" she asked.
"We enjoy our holiday. You decide about the future. You know that I'm aces at hiding. I can hide us all, and Graham can foot the bill."
Sarah felt dizzy and calm, as full of sunlight as the latticed Tower.
She reached out and gripped Chuck's arm, tightly. He looked down at her hand. Then she slid it down his arm and softly interlaced her fingers with his. His face came up, split by a smile as wide as the horizon.
"You've got me? I'm It?"
She nodded.
He asked her the question again, the question from the Burbank beach: "And there's no place I can hide?"
She smiled at him, a smile as wide as his.
"Not from me."
A/N: Merry Christmas!