A/N: We end our first arc, Pairing.


The Missionary


Up to my knees now
Do I wade? Do I dive?
The sea has seen my like before, though it's my first and perhaps last time
Let's call me a baptist, call this a drowning of the past
She is there on the shoreline throwing stones at my back

So swim until you can't see land
Swim until you can't see land
Swim until you can't see land
Are you a man? Are you a bag of sand?

— Frightened Rabbit, Swim Until You Can't See Land


Chapter Six: Swim Until You Can't See Land


Chuck turned to look at Sarah, Casey's comments about Bryce Larkin, about Sarah, jumbling Chuck inside.

Sarah's phone buzzed in her hand. Her inflection was leaden: "It's Graham. He texted the link. Thirty minutes until they are ready for the video feed."

Sarah held the phone out to Chuck. He reached for it while surreptitiously glancing at her face. He saw a mist of tears in her eyes, maybe, but she let him take the phone and then immediately bent down to pick up her purse.

"I'm going to the bathroom."

She stood up and averted her face; all Chuck knew for sure was that she was pallid.

Sarah marched from the Home Theater Room, deliberately bumping into Casey as she went out, bumping him hard; and then, she was out the door.

Casey watched her go, rubbing his shoulder, but chuckling.

Chuck couldn't help himself: "You are a pig, Casey. I thought the Marines made men, not swine."

Casey turned around slowly, ominously. "Shut it, dickhead. Men like you don't even get to talk about the Corps; stay-at-home Mommas-boys crocheting 'til the wee hours. — And why the hell defend that CIA skank? Tell me she didn't wiggle, and promise her goodies to you, earlier tonight. Tell me she didn't!"

Chuck's cheeks burned. Casey saw it and grunted with satisfaction.

"See, I told you. — News flash: she wasn't going to bed you, Bartowski, no matter how damp she was, how hard you were; she was going to bury you but not the way you hoped. Well, she wouldn't have buried you, CIA cleaners would have after she executed you. One bullet, center forehead. She's Langston Graham's golden girl, his fixer. Thick as thieves, those two."

He paused, glanced at the door, sneering to himself. "Most feared intelligence agent in the country." Casey's tone was begrudging, unconvinced, scare-quoted; but he kept his eyes warily on the door. "She's here now because Graham ordered her — maybe you didn't notice, 'cause it was subtle, and I don't know if the Intersect does subtle as well as I do — Graham ordered her to keep you with her no matter what.

"Of course, he made it sound like he was talking to us both, but he was only talking to her; I know that." Casey shook his head. "Graham'll try to screw Beckman if he can, but he'll find she don't bend like his Barbie army." Casey bared his teeth; it took Chuck a moment to realize he was smiling.

Chuck was trying to fit together what Casey was telling him with all that he now knew about the man, all that the Intersect had told him — and with what Sarah had just said to him, about Graham, about not trusting him.

He pushed Sarah out of his mind to concentrate on Casey.

Casey's file was full of grim pages. But the pages of his NSA evaluations all came to the same conclusion: Casey gets things done. One evaluation had a handwritten note at the bottom: A sledgehammer, not a surgical tool. But he's our sledgehammer.

The note was signed by General Diane Beckman.

Casey's strange smile disappeared and his eyes narrowed. "Wait a minute. Wait. A. Goddamn. Minute? — Why did I have to tell you about Bryce Larkin? You're the Intersect. How could you believe Larkin was a Connecticut accountant? His file must read like Fifty Shades of Gray, except thicker."

Fifty Shades of Gray? Did The Punisher just mention Fifty Shades of Gray?

Before Chuck could answer, it dawned on him that he had not had any visions of Larkin — nothing from a file, not a picture, not a surveillance feed. How's that possible?

He spoke Bryce's name into himself (it was the only way Chuck knew to describe activating the Intersect when it didn't activate itself) but the name echoed inside him without gearing into anything. Nothing turned.

Nothing happened.

Chuck shrugged at Casey, perplexed. "It's weird. The Intersect knows which pharmacy supplies your Viagra, but it draws a blank on Bryce Larkin. He's nowhere.."

Casey eyed Chuck, poked at his chest with a large, square finger. "You mention that Viagra factoid to anyone, anyone, but particularly Walker, and I'll take you by your tongue and swing you 'round the room, clear, swing you until centrifugal force rips it out? — And it's only an occasional problem. It's a hard job."

Chuck swallowed, avoided making the pun, and nodded. Casey glared for a second longer, sealing his threat, then his heavy forehead furrowed. Casey was considering what Chuck said.

Chuck didn't believe Casey was lying about Larkin, at least not about being an agent.

Bryce Larkin was CIA. It made sense. Otherwise, it would be hard to understand how Bryce could have had the Intersect to send, known how to send it. Bryce must be — must have been — a spy.

Sarah's quick, misty exit didn't necessarily prove that she and Larkin were involved as Casey said, but it was corroboration.

Jealousy tugged at Chuck, irrationally. Backwash from Jill Roberts, no doubt. The thought of Bryce always came trailing the thought of Jill. Chuck looked at the door.

Casey started musing aloud. "Why would Larkin not be in the Intersect? Does he show up in Walker's file?" Casey asked the first question rhetorically but the second he asked Chuck.

"No, not once," Chuck answered.

"Are you sure? Check her missions, starting two years ago." Casey used his forehead to point to the door

Chuck consulted the relevant section of Sarah's file, unsure how he did it; he just did. "No, but there are long gaps between some missions, weeks, months."

"Figures. Someone redacted the pretty boy. Believe me, there are no long gaps in Walker's file, no real ones. All she does is work: she's the Energizer Bunny with a bikini and a sniper's rifle — you know, instead of them clacking things."

"Cymbals?"

"Not, not symbols. Metal things."

Chuck let it go. "Well, we don't have time to worry about this right now. I need to make sure we're ready for the video feed. It won't be too much longer."

Casey leaned into Chuck again, closer, and Chuck got a whiff of vomit, cigar, and sweat again. It made him dizzy.

"Keep this stuff about Bryce between us, you and me. I won't tell. The quicker you learn that everything in your life is now need-to-know, the longer you will live."

Without thinking, Chuck agreed: "Okay."

Sarah came back into the room, her purse on her shoulder.

Her color had returned. And now her lips were the same hard line they had been when she had her gun to Chuck's forehead. Her eyes fell on Casey and they iced over.

Chuck saw Casey flinch slightly, although Casey tried to smother his reaction.

Chuck did not make eye contact with her at all. A bikini and a sniper's rifle. Symbols. He double-checked the computer, the TV, and the speakers.

Everything was ready for Graham to initiate the video feed.

A rumbling filled the room, followed by a kind of gastronomic screech. Casey frowned, swallowed, then put his hand gingerly on his stomach.

"Feels like that cigar got lit before it made the return trip. Burned all the way back up. My stomach feels like an ashtray that needs dumping. I'll be right back."

He left the room.


Sarah watched Casey go, fighting the urge to grab one of the knives around her ankle and impale it into his receding back.

She had left the room earlier and found herself among the large appliances, the refrigerators. Her throat was tight and her eyes moist. She did not know what had affected her but she'd reached a breaking point. Casey is a bastard.

All that she had heard of him seemed true, the way understatements were true.

She had never met him in person before tonight, and she was glad of that.

She wiped her misty eyes and sighed silently. Her hands were shaking.

News about Bryce had not moved her to tears before, in Graham's office. She had no feelings for Bryce, certainly no retentive feelings. It would have been too much to say she had been indifferent to the news when Graham shared it, but she had received the news with composure. — Of course, she never showed any reaction to anything around Graham. Never. He was more intolerant of human feeling, human weakness, than her father had been.

Between the two men, they'd squeezed the feeling out of her, a tube of toothpaste, until she was twisted and flat.

She hadn't loved Bryce. Her grandmother was the last person Sarah could say she had loved, whole-heartedly. Her death was the final thing Sarah could remember feeling.

But she had not felt nothing for Bryce. He and she had stood in the vestibule of something, something larger, maybe, something that, for their individual reasons, neither would enter.

The larger structure was too complex, too daylit, and overwhelming. The vestibule was all they could bear — and then Bryce left her standing there alone.

That was, in a way, her entire life. Life alone in doorways, vestibules, a subsistence on the margins of life, not in, not out, stranded hopelessly between dark and light.

Purgatory.

The tears she had almost cried weren't really for Bryce, though she was sorry he was dead.

Her almost-tears were the result of the sadness that settled on her earlier. Casey's remarks had stirred yeast into the sadness, made it bubble.

She needed to control herself, needed to feel less, to feel nothing.

She would face Graham soon — and Graham would not be caught surprised again.

Graham would be ready. Is Chuck ready?

She stared at her hands, willing them to stop shaking. They did not.

She blew out a frustrated breath, but then, of their own accord, their shaking diminished, slowly, slowly. She witnessed it without affecting it.

Vanished.

She went back inside the room.


Chuck's computer beeped. He looked at the screen; it went blank for a moment, flashed, then glowed with the official CIA seal. Chuck shifted the video to the TV, and shifted his eyes there. Casey slipped back into the room, this time tucking his shirt in his pants.

A moment later, a tall, elegant black man in a bespoke suit, three-piece, a sartorial Trinity, was on the screen. Graham.

Standing beside him, but not much taller than he was seated, was a short, square, with a vigor and uprightness of posture that gave her importance, added inches, maybe feet, to her height. She was uniformed. Beckman.

Seeing them both flooded Chuck's mind with visions, two distinct, conscious streams, visions of Graham and visions of Beckman. Very different lives, different motives, but they had converged in this instant.

Chuck made no effort to dam the streams, he let them rush past him. He could recover it all later, he knew.

The visions stopped, but the Intersect kept working. Chuck could feel it…percolating silently, inaudible background music. He realized then that it was always working (but not always noticed), casting ahead, figuring the future. It had anticipated Sarah's attack dimly, even before he and it were fully…paired (the word appeared in Chuck's consciousness). The songs, Patient Zero, The Killing Moon, they'd been through-a-glass-darkly warnings, the program's anticipations of what was to come. Even the joke about Heidegger, Being on Time, had been an anticipation — an anticipation of the plot against Standfield.

It all staggered him, the pattern, the patterns.

But that's what the Intersect was — a pattern-recognizing pattern. That's what I am now.

Pattern, shape, form.

He blinked, focused. He needed to be in the present, in the present, needed his head to be over his feet, needed to be in the Home Theater Room. He cleared his mind

But before Graham spoke, one phrase, with accompanying images, crystallized in Chuck's mind. The images were of cinder block, artificial lights, a narrow bed, a foldout table, bars and locks, and guards. Bunker — plan with the highest probability.

Chuck knew the words to be true as they crystallized in him. They were his and the Intersects all at once.

He blew out a slow breath. In the corner of his eye, he saw Sarah step beside him, Casey stepped beside her, finishing the line, still tucking his shirt.

"Good evening, Mr. Bartowski, Agents. Mr. Bartowski, this is General Beckman; she was kind enough to join me."

"Mr. Bartowski, nice to meet you. Agents." The woman pulled at the bottom of her jacket, although it was already perfectly straight. "I've seen the video from The Ritz-Carlton. Director Graham has shared Agent Walker's report on what happened there. We've talked. You are the Intersect?"

"Yes, I am. Although unintentionally. I had no clue what Bryce Larkin was sending me."

Both Graham and Beckman nodded.

Graham spoke next. "Do you have any idea why he sent it to you, Mr. Bartowski? We know you and Agent Larkin were at Stanford together, and fraternity brothers, but, so far as we know, you and Larkin have had no contact since then."

Agent Larkin. They're assuming I know about him, the Intersect does, that Bryce's file is in there.

Chuck squelched an impulse to peek at Casey.

"That's right. You might say that Bryce and I did not part amicably."

"That makes what Agent Larkin did even more puzzling. Why would he send it to you?"

Chuck recalled the Intersect's word, his word. "I'm guessing he thought the Intersect and I were compatible. Like a weird Tinder for brains and programs."

Chuck chuckled but no one else did. He stopped.

"Do you have any idea why he would have thought that?"

Before Chuck could respond, Casey broke in. "Maybe he sent it to Bartowski by accident. You know, like putting the wrong email address on an email intended for someone else."

"Thank you, Agent Casey," Beckman said sternly, "but we will let you know when we want to hear from you."

Casey grunted his acknowledgment, and then Chuck realized Casey interjected to prevent Chuck from answering, to force Chuck to think.

Need-to-know.

"I suppose it might have been an accident. The other night, I meant to call my sister and called The Family Wok instead. Um, anyway, now that Agent Casey mentions it, it might have been a mistake or an accident. We were friends in college, but I can't think of any reason why he'd single me out…for this fate. He'd already taken everything from me, kicked me to the curb."

He saw Sarah glance at him, just a shift of her eyes.

Inside him, the Intersect was percolating again.

"So, you have no real idea why he would have sent it to you?" Beckman asked.

Chuck shrugged. "Computers are kinda my thing. Bryce knew that. It was true at Stanford. Maybe he thought I would find it interesting?"

Graham and Beckman looked at each other, then back at Chuck. Graham took over. "As I told you earlier, having the Intersect makes you extremely valuable. We need to understand what has happened better — we need to examine you to make sure that having the Intersect is not affecting your health, physical or psychological. We need to study what you can do in controlled conditions. So, we'd like to invite you to come to DC.

"The government will pay for the trip, the accommodations, the checkup. Agents Walker and Casey will accompany you back to DC." Graham smiled and Beckman too. "What do you say to a few days in the capital? Maybe we could make time for you to see some sights with Agent Walker?"

"Excuse me, sir," Sarah said carefully, politely, "but you don't have my full report. I'm not sure that Mr. Bartowski would care for me as a tour guide."

Graham knew he had blundered (Chuck wondered if he had misunderstood the kiss outside General Stanfield's suite) but he smiled as if all was well. Beckman was staring at Sarah thoughtfully.

"Sorry, Mr. Bartowski. We can find you another tour guide, even let you choose one once you are here. I don't believe you've ever been?"

"No. But I'm not coming to DC. I'm staying here, working from home. I'll help you, work for you, but I won't be your prisoner or your slave. You wanted a superspy. I'm not what you planned on, but I'm what you've got."

Chuck saw Graham's jaw clench for a second. "Working from home, Mr. Bartowski?"

Chuck nodded. "It's 2022. I'm, like, half-computer anyway, right? Honestly, I was looking for a new job. A new place to live. I'd even signed up with an Internet job service. No one knows I'm the Intersect except the two of you and these two agents. Their missions were top-secret. Wouldn't the best strategy be not to draw attention to me? Hide me in the open? — Look, set me up with whatever computer equipment your experts think I need, rent me an office or something, and, bingo!, I'm a CIA satellite office." He saw Beckman frown. "I mean a CIA/NSA satellite office, of course."

Graham's smile died. "Mr. Bartowski, I mean to have you come to DC…"

"You mean to put me in a bunker, Director," Chuck said, imitating the contour of Graham's intonation. "And I won't submit. I'll fight you, these two (he gestured at Sarah and Casey) will tell you I can fight. I'll refuse to help you, feed you bogus information if you try to make me. After all, anything I tell you only counts as a probability. Even the Intersect can't guarantee certitude; you'd never know for sure when I was lying and when the Intersect just got it wrong. — You have to understand, Director: I know you, your past decisions, your patterns. Because of the Intersect, I have what football coaches would call your tendencies. You can't really outthink me except by doing what you wouldn't do — and that's kind of a paradox. — Say, have you ever seen that episode of Seinfeld, the one where George tries to do the opposite?"

"Jesus Christ," Casey grumbled under his breath.

Chuck shut up and waited. Beckman leaned over a little and whispered something to Graham. It took her a minute. When she finished, she stood. Graham made eye contact with her and nodded once.

"Let me make a slight counterproposal, Mr. Bartowski. We will do as you say. Find you a place to work, a place to live, and set you up with the necessary equipment. But you will have to accept Agents Walker and Casey as your undercover security detail. We won't have our satellite office unprotected."

Sarah and Casey both interjected at once: "No!"

Graham ignored them. "What do you say, Mr. Bartowski? I will also need you to agree to a thorough examination. We will send Dr. Zarnow, the Head of the Intersect Lab, to LA to examine you. He's a PhD in artificial intelligence as well as an MD."

Chuck saw the tactic, its multiplicity. Graham hoped that whatever the issue was between Chuck and Sarah, it would cause Chuck to back down rather than be stuck with Sarah. Beckman suggested this. If Chuck refused, they were back at the bunker. But if he accepted, he would have two deadly agents more-or-less attached to him. And at any moment, given orders, they could turn on him. Hell, one or the other will kill me if anything goes wrong. But he wanted to die with his boots on, in Burbank, not in a bunker. Somehow, he'd avoided Reboot Hill. Maybe he could continue to avoid a bunker and a termination bullet.

He was not ready to leave his sister. Her apartment, yes, her, no.

It was an unstable arrangement, one that Graham undoubtedly expected to be temporary or terminal. But it was good enough for now.

Chuck could feel his continued integration with the Intersect. Surprises were coming.

"Okay, deal. Plus, I draw a salary." Chuck looked at Sarah and Casey. "One dollar a year more than Agent Walker, since she's the highest-paid of these two."

"Shit," Casey muttered, envy in his sidelong glance at Sarah.

Sarah stepped forward, unaware of Casey's reaction.

"Sir, please. I'm sure that there are other agents who could do the job better. Since Mr. Bartowski said yes with me doing it, I'm sure he'd say yes again without me doing it."

Graham shook his head. "No. Do as you are told. You are staying." Sarah dropped her head.

Casey stepped forward but before he could speak, Beckman shot him a glance.

"Both of you are staying. This is our arrangement. We will put our teams here on the project. You should have new orders late in the day tomorrow. If you have requests for personal items from DC, let us know and we will ship them to you. We will talk to you again soon.

"Agent Casey, you can expect a phone call from me in the morning." Beckman glanced at Graham but kept going. "Agent Walker, you will hear from the Director in the morning. Mr. Bartowski, be safe. You are on the payroll. We'll call today your start date."

The video ended; the CIA seal replaced the Director and the General. Sarah and Casey both turned to Chuck, gaping. The three of them stood in astonished silence.

Sarah caught Chuck's eyes. "Do you think you won?"

"No, no I don't. But I didn't lose. This is what not-losing looks like."

"But we're both going to be here. You know who we are, what we are," Casey hissed. "You agreed to be caged with the lions!"

A line came to Chuck. "The lion shall lie down with the lamb."

Casey shook his head in disbelief. "What the hell does that mean?"

Chuck shrugged, defensively and aggressively all at once. "I don't know. — And, believe me, I chose you two only so I could choose Burbank and my sister, — plus some modicum of freedom, however muzzled. I'll endure the two of you," Chuck said to them both while focusing on Sarah in particular, "so I can be home, be with my family. You're the tax I'll pay for normality."


Fists clenched, Sarah wheeled back to the TV but now even the CIA seal was gone.

She had been ordered to stay in Burbank. To stay with Chuck Bartowski, a living reminder of how dead she was.

Purgatory.


A/N: Come back next time when we begin a new arc, Three's Company. My thanks again to Smatterchoo and WvonB for pre-reading.

(Don't know if you remember my titular Frightened Rabbit song from the show (S03E10) but it's one of several amazing placements of FR songs in Chuck. There's a thematic connection between that episode and this chapter. — RIP Scott Hutchinson.)