A/N: We continue with the Past into the Present arc.


The Missionary


The odd times we slip
Slither down the dark hole
Fingers point from old windows
An eerie shadow falls

Walking on the spot
Make sure that I'm alive
Moving every bone in my body
From side to side

Will we be in our minds when the dawn breaks?
Can we look the milkman in the eye?
The world is somehow different
You have all been changed
Before my very eyes

— Walking on the Spot, Crowded House


Chapter Twenty-Nine: Confessions and Consequences


Carina was annoyed, truly annoyed.

Things had ended badly at Appocalypse. Sarah had manhandled Carina there. Ellie Bartowski had proven a difficult woman to manipulate — she was too damn smart. And she actually seemed to care about Sarah, to mean that sentimental sister talk. Ellie's cover-boy boyfriend, Devon, had a brain behind his pretty face too. But most annoying of all was that Casey had interrupted her while she was working, and did it after the talk they had.

No, that was not the most annoying thing of all. The most annoying thing of all was that she was glad to see him, even distracted by him beneath her annoyance.

It made no damn sense.

She could have — basically, did have — any man she wanted. And she had them while her heart remained coated in Teflon. They slid off it, each man in turn. They had come in all sizes and shapes, all shapes and sizes, but no matter what shape or size, they had never moved her, truly touched her.

Until this crass bear came along. John Casey. Somehow, God help her, he had scratched the Teflon, made a mark on her, on her heart. She wanted to hate him for it, hate him as he stuffed chocolate chip cookies into his mouth with his paw, hate him as he smirked at her annoyance, and licked his lips — but she couldn't. Damn it. She was pissed but she did not hate him. Not close.

She decided to cut her losses, regroup, and try again. She looked at the keychain and Casey noticed.

"Oh," he said, a bit of chocolate in the corner of his mouth, "I can let you in Sarah Walker's apartment. She called me to ask if I would. Shall we?"

Gallantry and chocolate mouth shouldn't mix, Casey.

But he gave her an out.

"Thanks, I'd like to freshen up a bit before Sarah comes back. Thanks, Ellie, Devon, for the coffee and cookies."

Casey stood and Carina did too. He led her out of the apartment.


Sarah was driving, but her mind was largely elsewhere, lost in replaying that brief, gentle kiss that Chuck had given her, lost in wondering about his comment to help his unbelief.

She felt close to him now in a way that she had not since that first date, close to him as she had felt outside the El Compadre and under that blue moon.

But she wanted more. That kiss, in its very brevity and gentleness, had stirred her. At first, she had only been aware of the emotional effects of it, but now she was feeling its bodily effects. How so small a thing could have such large, delayed effects was beyond her, but she was very aware of her body as she drove; it all seemed sensitized, it all wanted Chuck's caress. She squeezed her thighs together, wishing she was squeezing him.

The stop had not helped, that was sure.

She glanced at Chuck and realized he had just glanced at her. She wondered if he saw the movement of her thighs, and read her thoughts. She blushed in the dark car.

"So, you and Carina? It's hard to imagine you two working together — or anything else." She could tell Chuck was worried about asking — but he asked anyway.

Damn it, Carina. You had to put suggestions in his head. 'Romantic adventures' — wasn't that Chuck's euphemism for them?

She turned quickly to look at him, to better gauge the character of his interest. He did not seem to be asking so much out of suspicion as curiosity. Still, either motive could lead to trouble, and they had only just closed the distance between them.

Sarah sighed. "I had a hard time imagining us working together even while we were doing it. We ended up together on a team of women — but I guess you know this."

"Yes," Chuck said, his one word simple and soft. "I know about the other two, their deaths."

Sarah swallowed hard. "A mistake. An awful mistake of judgment: we split the team and we shouldn't have. I was pissed at Carina, she was pissed at me, and I wanted to talk to her alone, so I suggested we split up, and go to each of the two places where our marks had been seen.

"And then, once we realized that our place was a dead end, I tried to get Carina to hurry, we needed to locate the place Zondra and Amy, our partners, had gone, so we could back them up, but Carina was angry about what I had told her on the way, and she delayed us long enough to tell me exactly what she thought of me. We got there just moments after the explosion…I always kept personal stuff out of work, mainly by just not having any personal stuff. But I screwed up. I worked alone after that, until Bryce…"

At the mention of Bryce, Chuck faced away from Sarah, blinked, and looked out the windshield.

But he faced her again after a moment. "What were you and Carina fighting about?"

"Well…" Sarah sighed again, knowing that telling Chuck was inevitable but fearing that it would undo the progress they had just made. But dishonesty — a lie or even an omission, an avoidance — was not what she wanted to offer Chuck, not ever but especially not after that kiss. "...You mentioned once that I must have been young when I joined the Company. I was. Technically, although the paperwork said I was eighteen, I was in fact seventeen."

She paused. This was not a story she wanted to tell; she didn't even tell it to herself. "How it happened is not entirely clear to me. I was — I was under duress at the time, so I signed. It seemed, crazy as this sounds, the safest option. A place to be, to belong. A direction for my life. But I quickly found out it was a direction…"

She paused again. "...It was a direction that just made me sad. I found out I could excel at a job that required moral compromise, not just once in a while, Chuck, but daily. I was able to ignore it, the sadness, for a long time, but ignoring it cost me, required me to close myself off to everyone if I was going to close myself off to me. Any openness was a mistake because it might let me into me. — Of course, I didn't understand this then. I've really only come to understand it lately…"


Chuck was listening carefully, holding his breath.

Earlier, Sarah had made a speech, but it was nothing compared to this, a full-on soliloquy.

But he was not holding his breath only to keep from interrupting her, upsetting the fragile balance that was allowing her to open up to him.

He was also dreading what he thought was coming, the story about Sarah and Carina. It seemed like anytime he drew close to Sarah, something shoved him away again.


"That's where I was when I was assigned the mission with Carina and Zondra and Amy. I had no problem with Zondra or Amy. I was the AIC, and neither of them had any problem with me or my role. But Carina did. She thought she should be in charge and she resented me. She figured me out quickly, I guess. So, she started picking at me, jabbing at me. First, challenging my decisions about the team, about missions, strategies, and tactics, but then badgering me when we weren't working, when we were off-duty, claiming I was such a grinding, no-imagination, hard-ass leader because I had no real life, was incapable of fun."

Sarah frowned and snuck a glance at Chuck.

"She was sort of right. I didn't have fun. I had myself in a vise grip and was terrified of relaxing my control — of everything, anything. Her hectoring eventually began to sour the whole team, so, one night, when she dared me to go out with her, I took her up on it."

Sarah slowed but did not look at him; she guided the car around a tight turn.

"I knew what Carina was about. The men she dragged back to the apartment in the wee hours and sent packing before the sun rose. Or took to hotels. I can't plead ignorance. But the truth is, I didn't have much experience, you know, in that department. There was no time for experience: missions and sleep: basically, that was my life. I feared the consequences of closeness of any kind — what I might do to someone else, what someone else might do to me. My parent's marriage was — it was not an encouraging example of intimacy. Not at all."

Sarah's stomach felt queasy; she did not want to share this with Chuck. She had many regrets, of each of many different kinds. Her baggage. He knew about most of the professional ones, due to the Intersect, and so he knew that in those cases, she had acted on orders (whether or not that excused her, it at least mitigated blame) — but these were personal regrets, acts that shamed her in a particular way. She had no orders to offer as excuse or mitigation — this was all her, a betrayal of herself for which only she could be blamed.

"Anyway, I was in over my head. Carina took me to a club, promptly found two men, introduced one to me, and we started dancing. Carina dared me to match her, dance for dance, drink for drink, and I tried. The dancing was great; I enjoyed it. But I didn't drink unless it was required for a cover, and I could not keep up. A lightweight. I got drunk, really drunk, fast, and then I found out that Carina had basically promised me to the guy she introduced me to. She told the two men that we were a package deal, one for each, and they assumed that I was okay with it all since I was mirroring Carina."

Sarah kept her eyes on the road, her arms stiff between her body and the steering wheel.

"I went along with it, all the way, and woke up the next morning in a hotel near the club with a man I didn't know at all and whose face I only barely recognized. I barely remembered the night." Another pause. "But I did remember it and was furious with Carina — but I knew if I showed my anger, said anything, she would claim that she was right, and claim that she had won somehow and I had lost. I wasn't going to lose, even if I was disgusted with myself. And I was."

Sarah cleared her throat. Her voice had grown raspy and dry.

"Drunken, meaningless sex with a stranger has never been my thing. Never, Chuck. But by the next weekend, Carina started on me again, daring me to refuse, to back out. I wouldn't — and the evening repeated. That time, the man left after the sex but before I woke up, and I spent the morning vomiting in a cold hotel bathroom, alone.

"It happened once more, although that last time the man passed out before anything happened, and I snuck out and went back to the apartment I shared with the team. Still, Carina won and I lost; I did.

"The next day was the day I wanted to talk to Carina alone, the day that Zondra and Amy were killed. Carina and I almost came to blows during our talk, and I still wish I had punched her smirking face. She had won, of course, because I should never have agreed. I lost when I agreed, before anything else happened, and then lost bigger given what I did, given what happened. We never resolved it. The horror of what happened to Zondra and Amy swallowed it up, although it played a role in our blaming each other for what happened to them."

Sarah finished. They were close to the apartment complex.

She glanced at Chuck, the sick feeling in her stomach had grown stronger as she spoke, and she was afraid of what he would say in response.

She was completely focused on her story and Chuck's reaction to it.


Behind their car, Mattress Bob was careful to stay behind a few cars but to keep them in view.


Chuck had turned to look out the passenger window.

He would have lied if he said that Sarah's story did not bother him, even upset him. Sarah had been right earlier. The Intersect was clearer about how Chuck felt than Chuck was. His reaction to the story was proof of how much he cared about her.

The story made him feel jealous and insecure.

But he took a deep breath. It had all happened years ago, and he believed Sarah, what she told him about it. Besides, he remembered a beery night from his freshman fraternity rush days that he would like to have back, a night no one knew anything about except Morgan. Chuck had always been too ashamed of himself to confess it to Ellie.

He had no purchase for self-righteousness.

He reached over and put a hand gently on one of Sarah's arms. She released the wheel with that hand, and he ran his hand down her forearm and laced his fingers into hers.

"I've done things I'm ashamed of too, Sarah. I'll tell you if you want to know."

She smiled at him with tears forming in her eyes. "Maybe someday, Chuck, but not tonight. Just that you're willing, that's enough. I can't stand much more. It's been an emotional day."

He raised his eyebrows. "But we still have Carina to deal with, the stuff in the bags."

"True, but that will be pure fun."

She turned the car into the complex's parking lot.


Casey walked quickly to Sarah's apartment, jangling his key chain to keep the heat on beneath Carina's annoyance.

The truth was that he was heated. Those stockings, the line down the back, the rest of her outfit, all was working on him, starting a conflagration inside him, rearranging blood flow in his body.

But he fought to keep his head clear.

He opened Sarah's door but did not stand aside for Carina to enter. Instead, he went in ahead of her, now humming aimlessly, using that to replace the noise of his keys.

Sarah's apartment always surprised him. In the time she had lived in it, it had gone from a barren Spartan barracks to a more restrained but still comfortable version of Ellie's apartment. The colors were not quite as saturated, the furniture more angular, less plush, and there was no lingering odor of regular baking, but, still, it was homey. Decidedly homey. Casey counted down from three, waiting for Carina's reaction: 3, 2, 1…

"Jesus," Carina whispered fiercely behind him, "this is Walker's place?"

"Sure, why?"

"I saw her place in DC, when we first got teamed up. As warm and cheery as an operating room." Carina walked past Casey, deeper into the apartment, all the way to the bed room, the bright orange comforter, the plant stand with several healthy plants. "There, her bed looked like a how-to illustration in a boot camp catalog, not like this. This all looks human."

Casey walked up behind Carina. She was staring into the bedroom, shaking her head. Her astonishment at Sarah's decor had kept her from flying at him.

He picked up the tranq gun he had hidden in Sarah's apartment before going to Ellie's, and he shot Carina square in her rounded ass.

He caught her before she hit the floor.


Sarah looked at her phone. The bags were on the ground. She had stopped and sent Casey a text, just a question mark, and she got one back, a thumbs up.

"Looks like everything's going according to plan," she said to Chuck, looking up. He had gotten close enough to her to read the text himself, and when she looked up, he bent down and kissed her deeply and hungrily, his mouth opening, and hers opening in surprised, but welcoming response.

She had not expected the kiss, and she was in a vulnerable, emotional state. The kiss swept her off her feet, not physically, but metaphysically.

It was the kiss they should have had that night in the car, the kiss they should have and it should have been followed that night by more and more kisses.

When it ended, Sarah realized they were again standing in the moonlight, each of them panting gently, their foreheads touching.

Neither spoke but the kiss had spoken for each, spoken unabridged volumes.

Sarah caught his hand in hers, giving him a smile with an edge. "C'mon, Chuck, Let's go reclaim my pound of flesh."


Mattress Bob watched the kiss through his binoculars, the moonlight aiding his vision.

He put the binoculars down and picked up his phone, hit a button and stuck it to his ear.

"Yes, Walker's definitely involved with Bartowski, as you suspected."


A/N: We have two chapters left in this arc. As an arc, it is quite important, but it is also, in a way, an interlude.

If you're out there reading, but haven't responded (much), please let me hear from you.