A/N I homaged a bit from Chuck vs the New Day, WG said I could. You should know it when you see it. For those of you who enjoy making fun of Daniel Shaw, enjoy. His definition of 'masculine' and Sasha's don't exactly jibe.


"You're a spy too?" Morgan remembered to whisper. "That's so cool."

"She says she's a spy, Morgan," said Ellie softly. "That's easy to say, harder to prove. I doubt she carries an ID, and she probably has a good reason why she doesn't."

"I have one, but it's in a vault in DC," said Sarah.

"Come on, Ellie," said Morgan. He pointed at Sarah. "She said 'thwart', she has to be a spy."

"Do you have a large cutting board?" asked Sarah. "Bigger than Morgan's head?"

"Sure I do," said Ellie. "A few, actually. He has a small head."

"Morgan, can you go and get one, please?" said Sarah. "The larger the better."

Morgan ran into the kitchen and came out before the door stopped swinging, with a rectangle of wood in his hands.

"Stand by the door, please, and hold up the cutting board behind your head." He did as instructed. "Now don't move."

Sarah turned her head, only her head, to look into Ellie's eyes. "Look at me, Ellie. Do you see this knife?" She held up a short pointed sliver of ceramic so Ellie could see it without moving her gaze.

"Wait a minute," said Morgan, sounding nervous. "Is this dangerous?"

"No," said Sarah, taking a quick glance at him. "Not at all. Don't move."

"Oh. Okay, then." He stood completely still and waited.

Sarah turned back. "Do you see this knife, Ellie?"

"I do," said Ellie. Before the sound of the words faded they were overwhelmed by a thunk! as the knife vanished. Sarah's eyes did not move, staring into Ellie's. Only her hand and arm moved.

Then there was another knife. "Do you see this knife?"

"I do." Thunk!

"Do you see this knife?"

"I do." Thunk!

"What do you think?" asked Sarah, turning to look at Morgan. Ellie looked too, they all did, to see three knives embedded in the cutting board, one by each ear and the other above his head. None of them was more than an inch away from his skin.

"Awesome," said Devon.

Morgan lifted the board from behind his head and looked at the knives. "That is so cool."

"Not as cool as you trusting me," said Sarah. "Thank you. Bring the board over here, please." When Morgan brought it over she wrenched her knives out of the wood, and slipped them up a sleeve, where they vanished.

"I am having so many problems with this you cannot begin to imagine," said Ellie. "You could have hurt him."

"Not likely. Morgan did exactly what I said, and I joined the CIA knowing how to throw." Sarah held up her hand, fingers clenched, and began to imagine, or in her case, remember. "One," she said, raising one finger, "I don't have a gun at the moment. My knives are ceramic so I can take them on a plane, but most guns would set off the metal detectors, and most places I would use them in keep them more strictly controlled. Two, and this is probably the big one, I brought them into your home."

Sarah put her hands down and looked at Ellie sadly. "I bring them everywhere, including the bathroom. Not to mention that the knife is only as dangerous as the thrower, and I could probably do a good bit of damage with spoons." She grimaced, and looked down. "Which probably doesn't make you feel any better, but it is what it is. I'm as dangerous as any other well-trained fighter. These-" she touched her sleeve "-are just some of my pointier bits. They are for my protection, and as long as I'm your guest, for your protection as well."

"Why would we need protection?" said Devon.

"Three, that guy out in the parking lot isn't watching me, he's watching you. Specifically Chuck."

"Me?" said Chuck. "What would he be watching me for?"

"No idea," said Sarah. "An entire day in your presence and all I've seen is a kind, sweet, generous-" she took a breath "-caring, charming, considerate, loyal-"

"So you weren't faking?" said Ellie, smirking into her wine.

"Oh, no."

"Faking what?" said Chuck.

"This," said Sarah, and she kissed him, holding his head in her hands.

"Hm-hmm! Hm-hmm-hm," said Chuck his arms working spasmodically, desperately seeking his freedom and reluctant to push her away at the same time. "Hmm-hmmmm," he hummed, as his hands discovered her face. His fingers stroked her cheeks, her neck, back behind her head. "Hmm-hmmm-hmmmmm-hm-hmmmmm."

"Break it up," said Ellie. "You're making Devon jealous."

"They are?" asked Devon.

"They'd better be."

"Uh, yeah. Awesome, dudes, but totally not awesome at the same time, if you know what I mean."

Sarah let go, staring at Chuck's flabbergasted face with a silly grin. "I've been wanting to do that all damn day."

"Why didn't you?" asked Ellie, "Aside from my brother's notorious aversion to PDA."

"With everybody watching?" said Sarah. "I won't put on a show for my own side, much less anyone else's. Two teams, too, but I think the second one might be friendlies, on overwatch. They're just following you around, but not really doing anything."

"What is there to do?" asked Devon.

"I couldn't answer that until I know why the other guys are here," said Sarah. "What have you done lately that would call for a response of this magnitude. It must be pretty hot. They don't waste these on just anybody." She took the crushed remains of the bug Chuck had stepped on from her pocket and put it on the table.

"Is that a bug?" asked Morgan.

"A listening device, yes," said Sarah. "Attached to that do-, um, action figure, which was misplaced. They probably went through your comic books too, and have definitely been on your computer."

"Ha!" shouted Morgan. "Not his computer, no way. I don't care how many cyber-guys you put on it. No one beats Chuck Bartowski."

Sarah turned to look at Chuck. "Interesting."

"Yeah," said Chuck. "Thanks, Morgan."

"Hey," said Devon, doing his best to take some of the heat off his almost-bro-in-law. "That bug. Would they put one of them in the bathroom?"

"I guess so," said Sarah, who wasn't on those teams and didn't know where they might put things. "Why?"

"When I was coming home earlier, there was a truck that flushed a toilet."

"A florist van?"

"Yeah. It took off."

"That was them. They've been with us since the airport, and a bunch of other cars as well." She took Chuck's hand. "They're going to a lot of effort over you, Chuck. I need to know why, so I can keep you safe."

"Yes, Chuck," said Ellie, "What have you done. Lately."

"Nothing, sis, I swear. I just fix phones at the Buy More."

Sarah watched the two of them, her face quite blank. "Speaking of which, Chuck, let me tell you about what you can do for my mission." She leaned down to retrieve her bag, and pulled out a phone. "I need you to unlock this for me."

Chuck took the phone like it was made of something explosive, or just plain icky. "What's on it?"

"The technical readouts of the Death Star?" asked Morgan.

"No," said Sarah, confused. "I took it from an agent who was trying to kidnap a baby to gain access to her fortune. Whoever he worked for, wherever they are, whatever they need that fortune for, is on that phone."

They all sat for a bit, staring at the object in Chuck's hands. Finally he looked up and said, "But no pressure."


"Masculine aesthetic, my ass," said Decker, looking around the boss' penthouse.

"We're lucky this is LA," said Sasha. "The stores have all kinds of weird stuff to girly the place up for me, not mention the prop warehouses." Two guys came in with a stuffed and mounted Kodiak bear. "Put that in the corner, make sure to hide that weaving loom. You guys, take those Norman Rockwell dishes and bury them someplace. We'll need that cabinet for all the sports trophies."

"Don't really bury them, either," said Decker, knowing his team's weaknesses. "Shaw's gonna want all this stuff back where it was when we're done. Gruber, how's the TV?"

"It will do. I'll glitch the OS. Only the best of the best would know how to unglitch it, and it should take them a few hours."

"Plenty of time," said Decker. "She'll have him crawling by then." He scanned Shaw's collection of vids. "But not with this junk. Those nature documentaries have to go, and the art history."

"Of course. We'll need room for the gaming rig." He indicated all the gear Delgado and another guy were setting up.

"Games?" said Sasha.

"He took her to the arcade at the Pier, didn't he?" said Delgado. "If that's his schtick, we'll work with it, right, Thing?"

"We'll set you up with a lot of FPSs," said Thing.

"What the hell are those?" said Sasha, who apparently didn't find a comrade called 'Thing' at all remarkable.

"First-person shooter," said Delgado. "You play them to kill stuff."

That caught Sasha's interest. "People?"

"Monsters," said Gruber. "Zombies mostly."

"Oh," said Sasha, disappointed. "Well, that might still be fun."


They set the table in silence, as Chuck sat in his chair, apparently deep in thought. Every so often he would turn the phone over in his hands, but mostly he just stared at it.

"CIA, huh?" said Devon as they prepared the table. "They teach knives like that? I thought they were all about guns."

"Actually, they aren't about either, although they do like my knives," said Sarah, carefully arranging the flowers. "Most of our missions are either covert or clandestine, so things that go boom aren't very popular. If I were an assassin, or a bodyguard or something overt like that, it would be different, of course, but that's not a big thing in an intelligence-gathering service. Most of us aren't 'licensed to kill', whatever that's supposed to mean. We start killing them, then they start killing us, and eventually all your spies are dead and no one wants that."

"Too bad you couldn't use your knives at the Pier," said Devon, who disliked words like 'killing' in almost any context.

"She'd have gotten four unicorns," said Morgan, gathering silverware and examining the knives more closely. Blunt, wouldn't cut butter very well. He wondered what she could do with something like this. He tossed one at a corkboard note holder. It hit broadside and bounced off, falling noisily to the floor. "What about silencers?

"Not very silent." Sarah stroked a petal on one of the irises. "That guy in Hungary, he had a silencer on his gun, but it didn't help much, not at all by the time I took down the last guy. So you see, I can use a gun if I have to. Someone heard it and called the cops, so all I could do was put his gun back in his hand, take his phone, and leave the scene."

"You didn't kill him," said Devon. Sort of a question.

"Strategy, not mercy," said Sarah, unwilling to lie to her hosts for any reason. Maybe it was the air in the apartment. "If I hadn't left them a shooter on scene they'd have gone looking for one. The way I did it they focused on him so I could get away."

"You got away from the whole country," said Devon, putting out the plates and whatnot.

"Had to," said Sarah, setting the vase on the doily in the center of the table. "Whatever I had stumbled onto, it meant I couldn't really trust any of my own people, especially there. And I needed a tech to open the phone."

"Chuck's your guy for that," said Morgan, setting out the flatware. "Phones are only the tip of his iceberg."

"Morgan, shut up," said Ellie from all the way in the kitchen.

Morgan tossed a glance in the direction of the kitchen, drew a finger across his lips, and shrugged apologetically at Sarah. He put out the flatware and walked away. "So, uh, Chuck, that looks like it's gonna be a big job for you, we can hear you thinking about it."

"What?" Chuck looked up in surprise. "Oh the...thing. No I wasn't really thinking about that at all. I've got much bigger fish to fry than hacking a phone to get information that might save the free world." He sank back against the chair.

"Like what?" asked Sarah, for whom the matter was pretty important.

"Coming up with a playlist to have on while I'm hacking the phone to save the free world," said Chuck. "This stuff doesn't just happen, you know. It's gotta have ambiance. Do you realize, for all the songs about phone calls, there really aren't many about the phones, and somehow I don't think 'Telephone Man' sets the right tone."

Sarah came over and loomed. "Do I need to kiss you again?"

"No! I mean, yes! But not now." Chuck swallowed heavily. "What am I thinking? Telephone Man sets a great tone. No problem with tones here, none at all."

"So no more delays?"

Chuck nodded, then changed his mind and shook his head instead. "Nope, not a one. No more delays. I'll grab a bottle of chardonnay on the way into the Buy More tomorrow and get cracking."

Sarah unloomed, having gotten the asset's compliance. Asset management 101, although these weren't quite the circumstances they had in mind when they wrote the book. "The Buy More?"

Chuck shook his head, then changed his mind and nodded. "That's where my tools are, and I doubt they've bugged it."

"Hmm," mused Sarah. "Those are some very good points. Plus I can think of many better ways to spend an evening with you and I plan to implement at least some of them."

Chuck clutched the neck of his shirt, eyes wide. "The night?"

"You don't think I'm letting either you or that phone out of my sight, do you?"

"...no."

"Good boy."

"Okay," said Ellie, coming out of the kitchen to check the preparations done without her direct supervision. "Looks like we're all ready."

"Yep," said Morgan. "The table's laid, the plans are all laid, and then after dinner..."

"You go home," said Ellie firmly.

"Exactly what I was going to say. I go home." Morgan leaned in close. "We all go home, eh, Chuck?"

Chuck sighed. "Morgan, if I wanted innuendo layered on that thick, I'd call Lester."


And if that isn't a reason to pivot to the Buy More I don't know what is...

The phone rang at the Nerd Herd desk. Lester let it ring a few times, just to make sure the person on the other end of the line really wanted to speak with him. Then he reached out slowly and picked up the receiver. "Hello, Buy More Nerd Herd. This is Lester. How may I help you this fine evening?"

A woman answered, her voice harsh and demanding. "I am needing your best man, and I am needing him now."


A/N2 You know what they say about the best plans for getting laid. Feel free to blame, I mean thank, MyNameIsJeffImLost for the playlist idea.

LOLs and comments welcome as always