A/N For the benefit of those who don't know, there's a Facebook group for Chuck Fanfiction, and we'd love to have some new members.

I know it's been a long time, so feel free to review if you want. I'll wait. This story has gotten very granular on me, with bits and chucks from lots of episodes all mixed together.

"I'm getting back on the plane right now."

"Give it up to the man."

"Give me the key, Vivian."

"She'll be back."

An airport in Europe...

Sarah walked off the plane, moving as a left-handed person would move, alert for thieves. In the middle of a mission was neither the time nor the place to get her wallet stolen, not that she was so concerned with that particular object. She did see someone, looking at her, but he stopped when she made it obvious she'd noticed him the way he was noticing her. It probably wasn't for the usual reason, since she'd done some work during the flight to make herself look less like Sarah Walker.

Her hand went up to the locket hanging around her neck, but that was just for show. The locket on the chain wasn't the locket she'd been charged to deliver with a dying woman's last breath, although it looked similar. She had no intention of leaving the real one out where any sneak thief could reach out and grab for it. Like everything else about her, the locket she wore was a cover, in case anyone was looking for a woman wearing a locket.

But her chest had been aching for a while now, and she rubbed again at the spot, just above her heart.

In Castle...

Chuck rubbed again at the spot, just above his heart, while Casey got out a cold pack and crushed the inner bag, mixing the chemicals. Once the mix had gotten cold enough for his liking, he walked over to Chuck and slapped it against his chest.

"Ow." Chuck reached up to hold the bag in place as Casey let go.

"Man up, Bartowski," snapped Casey, walking away. "We've got two enemy agents on the loose, with or without a dangerous weapon."

"Go, team," gasped Chuck.

"That's more like it," said Casey. "Too bad your better half's not here, so I could let you go home and sleep it off while we did our jobs."

"You'd really do that?" asked Chuck.

"No. I was just wondering what it felt like to say stuff like that." Casey shifted uncomfortably.

Chuck grinned. "So how'd it feel?"

Casey's lip curled. "I didn't like it." Still, he pushed a keyboard closer so Chuck wouldn't have to lean forward to do it himself. "You get on the horn to Orion, then start checking cameras for the shooter and the car. I'll check with the team they sent to the docks and join you. You know I can't trust those guys further than I can throw them."

At the airport...

The ache in her chest went away, finally, and with it an urge to call Chuck. None of her current gear had any obvious connections to that life. Sarah turned her thoughts fully toward the next phase of her mission. She needed camouflage, more complete than what she could do in an airplane bathroom. Something to confuse whatever they used for facial rec over here.

Something to confuse the facial rec behind her own eyes. She was different, without Chuck, and she didn't like it. No way could she do this in her own face, the face he would be looking at when this was over. No way she could look in a mirror, be what she had to be, do what she had to do.

She'd had to kill those men, back in that barn, but she wasn't Agent Walker and never would be again. She'd said so in front of Casey and that made it practically a blood oath. She'd killed, but she hadn't killed them for cold, calculated, professional reasons, a first, baby-step for the Ice Queen. She'd killed them in anger, for vengeance, and now she was paying for that with remorse, with pain. She treasured that pain, let it come, let it chip away at the wall she'd built around her heart all those years ago.

On a secure conference call...

"Did we acquire Dr. Wheelwright?" asked A.

"We did," said C, "But I don't know what value he'll be to us. We drove past a Chuck E. Cheese and he totally lost it. Couldn't tell if it was a man or a rat."

"That giant rat's head is pretty scary," said B.

"It's a mouse," said A.

"It doesn't look like a mouse," snapped E, and for once C agreed with him.

"Moving on. What about the lab?" asked A, his voice indicating that he was putting Wheelwright firmly in the 'no' category. He put most assets there. Eventually.

"Crawling with agents," said C. "Someone must have given up its location, and we doubt it was Volkoff. Fortunately Wheelwright had a delivery device already loaded, maybe he expected to have to give a demonstration. Anyway, it wasn't in the lab. We have that."

"One dose of the toxin and no way to make more," summarized A. "We'll have to use that quickly, before they can develop an antidote."

"That may be a while," said C, in the smug tone of someone who'd already thought of that. "Comrade Grenade Launcher nobly sacrificed himself for the cause."

"Bravo," said E, looking forward to the evening's news coverage, such as it was. They always played it up the best.

"You realize the Soviet Union collapsed, don't you?" asked B.

"You recognize that I don't care, don't you?" said C. "Volkoff has the most obvious interest in keeping us from getting our hands on the formula. Wheelwright was his client, and the thing would be worth billions."

"Not anymore," said A, unconcerned. Let Volkoff blind himself with money, just like Fulcrum had blinded themselves with their own brand of patriotism.

"Lamentable," agreed B. "But if nothing else, the Manoosh debacle taught us not to overreach ourselves." Their attempt to use Manoosh's Intersect glasses to destabilize an entire region of the world had failed rather badly, leaving them with no glasses and the inventor working for the enemy.

They knew they were lucky, at that. Powerful weapons were brutally suppressed, if not before then certainly after, but some weapons were too powerful to ever allow to even be created. Mere possession invited destruction. Just the threat of them was enough, if it was believable. A lesson Wheelwright never learned, too bad for him. At least his quivering hulk would make the threat believable.

B sent a note to a minion. They had to get some footage before Wheelwright quivered himself to death.

"Plenty of people have reach," said A. "What matters is vision." On which they did not have a monopoly, but that was where planning and execution came in. Such a nice word, 'execution'.

"I love manipulating the foolish and the ignorant as much as the next spy," said C, who'd heard all this before, especially the vision part. "But there are times when you really just want it to be your hands holding the grenade launcher." Let that ambition soar. They couldn't, most of the time, that was their main defense. People on the lookout for soaring ambition, like, say, Alexei Volkoff's, weren't looking down. No one expected people capable enough to have soaring ambition to make it creep. That was for peons, or for people smart enough to piggyback their plans on someone else's ego.

"What about the gun?" asked E, reminding everyone of the other weapon C had gone out of his way to use.

"Along with some prosthetics," said C, catching the implied criticism. "If they got anything for facial rec to work with, the output will simply skew toward eastern Europe, nothing more definite than that. As will the bullet."

"Did you at least check to make sure Bartowski was wearing a vest before you shot him?" asked B. "We still need him against Volkoff."

C snorted dismissively. "If he wasn't smart enough to wear a vest to a meet in a public place, then we don't."

In Castle...

Chuck filled Orion in on the mess at the 'piece of cake' meet. Orion filled Chuck in on Sarah's progress, and future intentions, passing along a message recorded before she went dark. They had nothing definite enough to call a plan, which was why she was taking a train to give herself time. Casey still hadn't come back.

Chuck had just started searching the memories of the traffic cams by the cafe when the emergency alarm blared, the screen automatically switching over to specify the location of the beacon. Somewhere in the Port of Los Angeles area, where his mother had told them Wheelwright's portable lab was located. He switched the screen from grid to satellite view.

He saw a cloud of smoke. "Casey!"

Port authorities got there first. The NSA wasn't keen on sharing details of their operations with locals, but big smoky explosions were hard to hide, so Casey made an exception and warned them what they might be up against. It took longer for the fire department to suit up in their haz-mat gear than it did to put the fire out, so paramedics could get inside. With the exception of the one woman sent to DC in connection with Sarah's trip to England, the brave men and women of the LA field office were no more. One, standing outside the box, had survived the initial blast long enough to set off his screamer, only to succumb to his wounds, and the fumes of whatever chemicals had been stored inside.

Local authorities were mainly upset that the contents of the container didn't match the manifest, and were preparing to take legal action against the owner. Casey, knowing the LA field office, was prepared to treat it as either an accident or a booby-trap, until one of his sweeper team stumbled upon a Russian-made grenade launcher.

On a train somewhere in Europe...

Sarah moved into the dining car, her new clothing stiff and uncomfortable, throwing her a little off balance as the car rocked. She sat down as the train rolled along, ordering tea and a light breakfast from a server in a polite but cool tone, discouraging conversation. Her face was pale, her nails filed to sharp points. Her lips were colored a harsh red, in lines so sharp it seemed she would cut herself if she smiled. No one wanted to share her table as she sat, drinking tea and thinking dark thoughts behind dark glasses.

She'd had a bad first night, the train rocking and shifting and clacking along with a rhythm that reminded her of all the good things about being in bed with Chuck. She both did and didn't wish he was here, and for pretty much the same reason. The odds were good that they would spend most of the time in the sleeping car and not enough time doing anything else, like think, plan, or execute.

A door opened at the far end of the car, letting in not only the sound of the train rolling, but a high-pitched giggle, as a woman entered, followed by a man, both of them bubbling over with good humor and very little sense, broadcast to everyone else in the car in accents almost too thick to understand. "We've been on this train three days and this is the first we've ever seen this car," she exclaimed, as she cheerfully introduced herself to the server, their unfortunate table-mates, and the people at the table across the aisle.

How typically American, thought Sarah, well into her character.

The loud woman reached out to shake hands with one of the men across from her.

The man she was talking to put one hand into his coat, nodding his head and speaking to her in a thick accent of his own.

Sarah ignored the loud woman completely, her attention on the man, what little she could see of the man sitting across from him with his back to her, and the man next to him. He looked familiar, his eyes wary, his posture far from relaxed. He turned his head further to speak with his seatmate, and Sarah caught his full profile. Only the depth of her role enabled her to conceal her shock.

What was Juan Diego Arnaldo doing on this train?

A/N2 Sarah baby-stepping away from Agent Walker is a bot of a reference to the story Chuck vs Gravity, where she baby-steps toward honesty. Love that story.

I was stuck for a very long time on this chapter, trying to figure out what all these people were doing, and what elements from canon I could use to show them doing it. It never occurred to me to think of the Honeymooners episode until tonight.

Another reason I took so long to get this chapter done was because I was writing a fanfiction in the Avengers fandom, a little story called Irony, about Captain America and how he returned the Infinity gems. I don't know how many of you like those movies, but I hope some of you will give that story a try. I have a few stories in other fandoms, but not many.

Please leave a comment, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this thing. It helps the story talk to me if you do too.