A/N1 Another chapter. Early.

I warn you that these earlier-than-anticipated updates are about to end. After mulling it over, I have added a layer of complication to the plot, and so I have more writing to do than I expected to finish the story. I will be slowing the pace of updates until I finish the last chapters. In fact, I probably won't post again until the whole thing is finished. But the story won't be a lot longer than I anticipated, 18 (probably) rather than 15 chapters. The point? Expect a brief hiatus.

Thanks for your indulgence. This story is stylistically peculiar, sort of Norbert Davis meets W. M. Spackman. It has been dark, angsty. Big goings-on in tight prose spaces. Fiddling with tenses. Ludlum motifs. Etc. I appreciate folks sticking with me.

Thanks for the reviews. It means a lot to hear from folks. It's great to know folks are reading the story (it really is) but it is hard to know what they are making of it unless they leave a review.

Don't own Chuck.


ACT III

CHAPTER NINE

Heart Attack


Sarah was half-awake, Chuck beside her in the bed. For a long moment, she felt completely at peace, at ease, whole.

She started to roll over into him, to put her cold feet against his.

What am I doing?

She closed her eyes with the force of the realization: she had shared this man's bed before. She had.

Shared it to wonderful effect, wonderfully: that was her waking body's report.

She couldn't recall it, picture it, re-live it; still, she knew it, in her heart. And elsewhere.

Oh, God, I was cheating on my husband.

Chuck was still asleep, and he rolled over into her, cuddling her. She stayed stock-still, frozen between the peace of his embrace and the shame she felt redden her cheeks. She was still trying to decide what to do, how to extricate herself from the fix she was in, when her stomach decided the issue.

Nausea asserted absolute rights over her suddenly, and she sprang from the bed and sprinted to the bathroom. She was violently sick. In the middle of it, though, she felt a cool washcloth eased softly against the back of her neck, and a warm hand gentle on her shoulder. "It's ok, baby, it's ok."

Baby?

Oh. Oh, no. Damn. He loves me. He's in love with me!

Her heart sank. Her heart soared.

There was a long moment during which, she knew, Chuck finally recalled his own words, realized he'd called her 'baby'. Would he try to walk it back?

No.

He instead spoke diagnostically.

"Sorry. It was that godawful concoction I made you drink last night, Sarah, the concoction to neutralize the tracking stuff you'd been given. The concoction wasn't dangerous, but, especially since we had dinner out of the vending machine, I'm not surprised it's affecting you. It'll pass."

He ran more cold water on the washcloth, squeezed it, then re-applied it to her neck. His touch was again so careful, so attentive, that it unsettled her. She could not look at him. Sick as she was, she knew that she wanted him, and that she had, even if she'd only been intermittently aware of it, since she had first heard his name.

No, I wanted Chuck when I saw the desk clerk back at the hotel. The clerk reminded me of Chuck.

She reached up and across herself with one hand, resting her hand on his hand on her shoulder. Hers on his. His on hers. But she could not look at him, couldn't face him.

She was not allowed to have Chuck. She had no business wanting him. Maybe this was why he frightened her? Because she knew he was a temptation to her.

Had she ever been tempted like this before? Of course, she couldn't remember for sure. But this felt unique: powerful, all-consuming, irresistible. Once in a lifetime, life-changing. She wanted him so much. But she could not have him.

And then a name filled her mind, unbidden, unsought. She was immediately ensnarled in emotions that overwhelmed her.

Still not looking up at Chuck, she whispered the name as she stared blankly at the wall.

"Daniel Shaw. Daniel Shaw is my husband." She could feel Chuck tense behind her.

She finally looked up at him, saw surprised agony on his face. She was right. But she had to ask. "Is my husband someone named 'Daniel Shaw'?"

And she finally had a connected memory. (It had her, she didn't have it.) A moving mental picture. She was in a room, near a window. Chuck was there, standing before her, hurt in his eyes (he was trying not to be in love with her) and beside him was another man, dark hair, dark eyes (he was trying to be in love with her). They were both looking at her.

She remembered feeling miserable, confused, jumbled, wrong. She knew at that moment in the past too that she desperately wanted Chuck, but could not have him.

She was bound to the other man. To Daniel Shaw. She had told that man her name. Shaw knew her as...Sam.

Sam.

I am Sam. That is the I in me.

I chose the wrong man.

I am the wife of Daniel Shaw. But I am in love, desperately in love, with another man, Chuck.

She heard her own voice, from the past, a different moment, the words choking her as she said them. The auditory memory came without explanatory context, disembodied: "Chuck, I've made a commitment, and not just to Shaw." She wasn't sure about what the other commitments were, but she had made one to Shaw.

And then the pain of remembering became too much. She slumped into Chuck's arms.

ooOoo

The night before, they switched cars as soon as they could. Stole one. The Intersect turned out to make that easy, but Chuck found it hard anyway. He kept wanting to leave a note, but Sarah finally talked him out of it. She couldn't believe they had that conversation.

Chuck had mixed the concoction of items from the drugstore and the hardware store while they were parked in the lot of a defunct movie theater. Sarah had choked it down. Chuck made a face for her, and told her it would take an hour or so it to do its job. They got back in the car and drove aimlessly. Neither wanted to start a serious conversation-although they were supposed to be having one. Soon, anyway.

But Sarah's confusion kept her from being able to settle on a safe starting question. And Chuck's worry that she might run if he told her the truth, and his realization that his mere presence seemed to be hurting her, made him reluctant to engage her. He told her jokes and hummed to himself. She listened to both but was mostly lost in her own head. The hour passed and they found a motel that looked sad enough to be of little interest to anyone, but clean enough to bear for the night.

Once inside, the difficulty of talking remained. Intensified. Chuck finally broke the spell of silence, telling Sarah about Ellie, his sister. Sarah was shocked as she listened, shocked at her growing conviction that Chuck's sister had become her friend. Her close friend. But not a spy. What did she know about Chuck, about Sarah? About them...together?

It was clear Chuck was editing the stories as he was telling them. What was he keeping from her? She was not being told everything, but she could detect no falsity in Chuck himself. He was trying to protect her, not mislead her, confuse her.

The discussion of Beckman was similar. Beckman had changed over her time with Team Bartowski. Softened. She and Sarah seemed to have reached an understanding, an understanding about something of the first importance to Sarah. About her husband? That felt...right. But Sarah was wary of her feelings. Beckman was evidently working to help Sarah, along with Ellie.

Sarah found herself believing all that Chuck said. His omissions did not falsify what he did say. She believed him; she didn't know how to feel about that quite, or about Ellie or Beckman. Sarah kept trying to understand what was happening to her.

Listening to Chuck talk was not like hearing about complete strangers, but it was not like hearing about friends, either. It was a little like hearing stories about familiar fictional characters, but then being told that the characters were not fictional but real. She had a place prepared in her psychological life for Ellie, for Beckman. But she had not known that until Chuck put them in those places. It was a little like noticing something that you had previously taken for granted, passed over, a house on a hill you knew was there but never looked at directly. It was a little like saying 'Hello' and 'I miss you' at the same time. It was bizarre. It was welcome. It was hard.

Hearing about Ellie and Beckman had caused Sarah pain, but nothing like the pain trying to remember Chuck caused and was still causing. After the discussion of Ellie and Beckman had wound down, they talked a little about Carina. Sarah's guilt about what had happened, especially what had happened at the motel, swamped her for a little while. But Chuck told her more about her friendship with Carina, and she came to realize that it had always been a bumps-and-bruises friendship, full contact, no punches pulled. He did warn her to watch out for payback.

But then had come time for showers, for bed. Chuck volunteered to shower second, and so she showered first. When she came out of the bathroom, Chuck was on a small pallet on the floor, made out of a couple of extra blankets from the closet. The bedroom light was out, although the light from the bathroom was adequate. Chuck rolled over onto his side, facing away from her, as she came out of the bathroom. He was determined to keep her comfortable, to try to minimize the pain he knew he was causing her. She smiled to herself.

She turned off the bathroom light and got in the bed. He rose from the pallet in the dark and made his way to the bathroom; she saw the light go on beneath the door. She lay there in the near-dark, listening to the water and to Chuck's soft on-again, off-again singing. Although she wasn't exactly sleepy, she felt more complete than she could ever remember feeling. She realized that when she was near Chuck these feelings of being centered, and being complete, saturated her.

But he was the other man. He was not 'C', not Mr. Fantastic. But how could anyone else be more fantastic than Chuck? The pain started up again, so she got up and disassembled Chuck's pallet. She rolled up one of the blankets lengthwise and placed down the middle of the bed. She returned the pillow Chuck had taken from the bed to its place.

A few minutes later, Chuck emerged, careful to turn off the light before he opened the bathroom door. She spoke in a whisper: "Chuck, get in the bed. I...I put a blanket between us, the Walls of Jericho, if that makes you feel better." Sarah knew she had put it there to keep herself on her side of the bed, not Chuck on Chuck's side. She felt him get into the bed.

"Anyway, the floor is gross. I can't let you sleep down there." She heard Chuck sigh, a long, sad sigh. She had a momentary sense that she understood the subtext of that sigh, but then the sense was gone, and all she knew was that the subtext was sad. Maybe she had somehow made him think of his wife. She hadn't meant to do that. But she didn't know exactly how to stop. Maybe if she knew something more about her...

"Chuck," she began, her voice filling the darkened room, although she was still whispering, "tell me about your wife...if you don't mind. She must have been...special."

Chuck was silent. And then silent some more.

Sarah thought she had made a mistake in asking, but then Chuck answered her.

"She...was...special. I've never met anyone like her. No one even remotely close. She...was...funny, really funny, and she was particularly good at getting me. Somehow, no matter how many times I would warn myself about it, she'd lure me into a Gotcha! moment. She...was...incredibly warm, especially in private moments, but sometimes even in public too. She...was...always more comfortable with PDA than me. And smart, God, she...was...smart. She made me...me."

Sarah was paralyzed by the distance between Chuck's wife and the person she took herself to be, an assassin, nothing, nothing but a spy.

Chuck's struggle with the past tense wet Sarah's vision. Tears ran down in the dark. She could hear how hard he was struggling to speak in that tense, and not in the present tense. His comment about feeling like he could reach out and touch his wife...well, he obviously really felt that way. It must be a torment to long for a person so much and not to be able to touch her...

Chuck added nothing more. He was not asleep, but he seemed to be exhausted by his words. There was a long, still quiet in the room. Sarah cried soundlessly. As she finally fell asleep, she unconsciously pushed the blanket from between them and rolled snugly against Chuck. So fell the Walls of Jericho, not with a trumpet blast, but a sleepy shove.

ooOoo

When Sarah regained consciousness after passing out in the bathroom, she was on the bed. Chuck was standing beside her, bent over her, looking at her with deep concern.

"Chuck," she demanded, reaching up to grab him by his t-shirt, "am I married to Daniel Shaw?"

Chuck kept his gaze steady but Sarah could see the superhuman effort it took. "No, Sarah, you are not married to Daniel Shaw. At one point, you had decided to leave Burbank and go to DC with him, but you...didn't go."

Sarah's mind focused. Daniel. 'D', not 'C'. Not Mr. Fantastic. So not Mr. Fantastic.

"But Chuck, I remember that I told him...my name. My real name. Why would I do that, why would I be thinking about leaving with him, what about my husband, my husband-to-be? Wasn't he around when all...the Shaw...stuff...all that was going on?"

She saw a look on Chuck's face. Resignation. He looked at her searchingly for a long, long time, then he sat down on the edge of the bed beside her.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small bottle of Tylenol.

"I don't know how much this will help, but I guess it won't hurt. I don't see how to do this except by...ripping the band-aid away." She could see that he regretted the phrase. But he kept quiet. He shook a few Tylenol out into his hand. He held them out to Sarah.

She looked at him. She had thought he intended to take them. He put them in her hand, she had sat up, reached out automatically, and he then gave her a glass of water from the nightstand. She took the pills and then took a drink all while looking at him, feeling the pain that accompanied looking at him directly. She gave him back the glass and reclined again.

He blew a breath out through his nose and then set his shoulders. "Your husband-to-be was right there, Sarah, for all of it. That's because your husband...is me."

Sarah arched in pain on the bed. She felt a shaft of blinding heat in her head. For a moment, she could not see. When her vision returned, she jumped up from the bed and rushed toward the door.

No.

I am not her. Not the woman he described.

I am a spy. I am no one.

I do not have a real name.

I am nameless, less even than Sam.

I am not Sarah.

My name is not Bartowski!

But then she knew it was. Knew. No mental pictures, rather utter visceral certainty. And she knew she was Chuck's heart. She had known it but refused it since Carina said his name.

It was too much for her, too much to accept.

How could she have been, become the woman he described? How could a man like him love her, love her so devotedly, so painstakingly, so...perfectly? She sank to her knees before she got to the door. She wept. The pain in her head trailed her tears, squeezing out drop by drop, decreasing. Her head ached, throbbed, but it was the after-effect of whatever had happened, no longer active torment. The shaft of blinding heat was gone.

She could not remember Chuck as her husband; still, she knew he was. She had wanted him the day before yesterday, yesterday, last night, this morning. Wanting before she knew what she wanted or what she had. She had had him all along. She could have reached out to touch him. Her husband.

Chuck knelt beside her, his long arms curling around her tentatively. When she did not pull away, she felt their strength. He pulled her against him, to him, and held her. He was crying too. He softly brushed his hand over her hair, saying her name, again and again, a cry, a prayer.

Sarah.

That was her name. Sarah Bartowski. When she was able to control her weeping, she put her arms around him too. She held onto him with all she had.

ooOoo

She extricated herself from his embrace slowly, making sure he knew it was no rejection. She stood and walked into the bathroom, wiped her face, brushed her teeth. She looked hollow, tired, needy in the mirror. She knew she still had bruises, scrapes; she was still sore. But she knew what she wanted, what she needed. She came out of the bathroom. Chuck was seated in the floor, where she'd left him, his knees drawn up and his arms around them. She walked to him. He looked up at her.

She found her voice again after a while. "Chuck, I am going to ask you to do something, and I want you to do it, no questions asked, ok?" She gazed down into his tearful, reddened eyes. He nodded, a half-smile on his face.

"Make love to me, Chuck. I want to create a memory of being your wife. Everything else can wait."

ooOoo

He stood and held out his hand. She took it and stepped to him. He picked her up and placed her on the bed. She reached out to touch him.

Her husband.

Her heart.

"Are you sure? I don't want to hurt you."

"It's ok, Chuck; I need this. I want this." Chuck delayed a moment, then looked deep into her eyes. Even reddened from crying, he could see they were Sarah Bartowski blue.

ooOoo

For a time, the Intersects were forgotten, the spy world, the whole world, was forgotten. The bed in the motel room held all that existed. Beyond it there was nothing. Sarah knew Chuck again for the first time. She discovered what she had already found.

She loved him.

She always had.

ooOoo

Carina arrived in Castle in a mood. She'd harrumphed her way in and then glared at Beckman and Casey and Ellie and Morgan when she saw them. She was hot and tired. Hitchhiking was not, she now knew, her favorite mode of travel.

"Don't say a word. Don't add embarrassment to failure. Any word?"

Beckman answered. "No, none. We don't know where they are."

Carina fell into a chair with a tired sigh. "Damn it."

"Do you think Sarah will hurt Chuck?" Ellie asked the question quietly but intently; she'd clearly been waiting to ask it of Carina.

Carina thought for a moment, then shook her head. "No, Ellie, I don't. She didn't kill me when she could have, and the more I have thought about what was happening in the car, I am sure that Chuckles is still capable of stirring Blondie's pot."

Ellie's brows drew close and so Carina went on. "It was clear in the car that even looking at Chuck was causing her pain. But she couldn't stop herself. If I hadn't been sure she was in love with him before, I would have been after our little joyride.

"She doesn't remember herself, but in some form, she remembers him. He's closer to her heart, I think, than she is herself." Everyone, Morgan included, looked at Carina with a bit of shock. She frowned. "What? Can't I talk romantically? I can, you know. I have many talents." Morgan dropped his head, embarrassed. The others smiled at her and each other.

"Well," Casey interjected, "enough of the emotional crap. What do we do about all this? Are we just going to sit here?" In answer, they all moved together to the large central table and sat down.

Beckman looked at them and then began. "I think that someone wants the Intersect gone. Completely gone. Erased. Whoever that is, he or she does not yet know that Chuck now has the pristine Intersect," Ellie's eyes narrowed and she looked angry, but not surprised, "and that gives Chuck and Sarah an advantage, and us too. My guess is that right now Sarah is the target, taken to be the final carrier of the Intersect. Assuming she and Chuck are ok," Beckman gave Ellie an encouraging smile, "and we know those two, so the assumption doesn't seem gratuitous, our enemy's attention will be focused on them. We need to figure out, if we can, how to help Chuck and Sarah, and how to take the fight to the enemy."

Ellie raised her hand. Beckman shook her head. "Dr. Woodcomb?"

"Can we talk for a minute more about Sarah's Intersect and what Carina saw?" Beckman nodded.

"Carina, when you found Sarah the second time, if I understand, she was...hunting herself, right?"

"Yes, she'd gone to a dive bar looking for help tracking herself. At least, that's the assumption that led us there and she was where the assumption said she would be."

"And you say that looking at Chuck caused her pain?" Carina confirmed it.

"So," Ellie said, thinking aloud, "I don't think the faulty Intersect itself can explain the sudden extent of Sarah's memory loss. We all figured Quinn took her for a reason. She was not a hostage, really. He wanted her to accomplish something for him.

"But she wouldn't have cooperated. Quinn knew that. He also knew she had the faulty Intersect. I have been thinking...I'm willing to bet that he tried to use the Intersect against Sarah, to use it to erase memories. Since her pain in remembering seems more intense with Chuck than anyone else, I'll bet that the memories Quinn went after were her memories of Chuck…."

Morgan jumped in. "But her memories of Chuck and her memories of Burbank, they are all wrapped up together, a package, so wouldn't Quinn have in effect been trying to make her forget all that happened since she got here five years ago?"

"Yes, Morgan, that's right. But why? Given what we know, the DARPA lab was likely the target. He wanted Sarah to steal the pristine Intersect. I don't know exactly how he planned for her to do that, but I suspect that was what he wanted. Maybe she was supposed to use Chuck in some way? Anyway, my point is that Chuck is the focal issue. If Sarah remembers him, really remembers him, maybe all of Quinn's machinations will come to nothing. I believe that the two of them can work this out, if they stay together."

"What do you mean, 'really remember'?" It was Beckman who asked.

"I'm not sure...But my best guess is that Quinn did this to her in stages, and it may be that her recovery will go through stages too. That her reactions to Chuck are as Carina says is a very good sign.

"She may not remember him in the sense that she can replay scenes in her head, recall visual details of past events, but her embodied reaction to him is, well, what it has always been. Chuck could 'stir Blondie's pot'," Ellie made a face and looked at Carina, who shrugged one shoulder, "right from the beginning. Remember, we all knew it long...looong...before she was prepared to admit it." Ellie looked around. Everyone in the room, Beckman, Casey, Carina, and Morgan simultaneously and positively shook his or her head.

"When she finally told me they were together," Beckman offered, caught up in a sudden memory, "I told them, off the record, it was about damn time…"

"And you spoke for us all." Ellie smiled and went on.

ooOoo

Sarah had liquified. Her body hummed to itself, something low, slow, languorous and satisfied. Her heart was full of Chuck, of their love-making. She could not remember making love to him before, but all that had happened had been at once brand new and tantalizingly familiar, a favorite word she did not know on the tip of her tongue.

She opened her eyes to meet Chuck's. He was looking at her, happy and worried. She smiled at him and reached out to touch his hair, run her fingers through it.

"I am your wife," Sarah whispered to him, wonderment in her voice. "How did that happen, Chuck? My head is full of things that should have kept that from happening. Even with my memory...messed up...the manual is in my head. Falling in love, really getting married, those are two things I am sure the manual forbids."

Chuck's eyes were warm but his gaze became complicated. "Yeah, I get that. I mean I really, really get that. I spent three years...No, that's not right, not fair...we spent three years fighting with that...manual. Three years of going through a super-slow-motion version of the last couple of days. I loved you from the beginning. You later told me you fell for me at the beginning too. But we faced so many obstacles, internal and external...I was sure you cared for me and I was sure you didn't. Like the last couple of days, it seemed like you wanted to look at me and like looking at me hurt you.

"Back then, I couldn't get a read on you. My heart said you loved me, my head said you didn't…I don't think I ever really understood how tormenting the position you were in was, at least not until I started trying to become a spy, and thought that doing so meant that I couldn't love you.

"I tried not to love you…" he slowed, his voice dropping with each word, "...but I failed completely. So I got my own taste of wanting to look at someone…" he paused and looked at her, "...and having it hurt to do it…Of wanting someone I thought I could not have...because of my own choices."

Sarah felt a deep, old sadness well up in her as he talked. She knew Chuck was referring to the time of the memory she had earlier, the one of Chuck and Shaw standing before her.

And she then felt a cleansing relief: she had not chosen the wrong man. She had chosen the right one.

Chuck was silent, looking at her again. It was very strange: when she let herself start thinking, Chuck seemed like a stranger to her, she could recall so little. But when she didn't think, when she let herself be, he felt like...no, he was...home.

She knew they needed to check out of the room in a few hours. She knew they had friends they needed to talk to, enemies they needed to fight. She had memories to uncover, a life to recover.

But Sarah stopped thinking. She reached out and drew Chuck to her.


A/N2 Tune in next time for Chapter 10, "Afterglow?". Please leave a review before you go.