A/N1 More story. Our final Act begins. Take a deep breath; we're headed into the final sprint.
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Don't own Chuck.
ACT V
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Voices in the Dark
Sarah woke up then doubted it.
It felt like time was out of joint.
She was in utter darkness. No light. None. Not a shaft, not a sliver, not a pool, not a spot, not a pinprick of light. Just dark.
Dark.
This is my life without Chuck.
Dark.
She realized then she was awake. The erupting heartache, intense, and the following panic, all-consuming: "Chuck!" she shouted his name and listened.
Nothing.
Gas.
They'd been gassed. She'd been so lost in her hurt, in dread of leaving Chuck, that she hadn't noticed anything. Except for him.
And for him, her.
He'd looked at her. He knew. He knew she was leaving.
His eyes. Dammit. But even said internally, the word was not a curse. Chuck was her blessing.
She closed hers, plunging from outer to inner darkness, water trailing heated on her cheeks. He knew.
And now he was gone. Maybe dead. And that was the last thing he'd known of her. That she was leaving him.
Dark.
Silence.
Tears.
"Tears, really? I wouldn't have imagined you'd fallen so far…"
The voice was cool, dry, dead. Dessicated, but with a barely detectable note of, what was it?...satisfaction. And dissatisfaction.
"Are you worried that your...Chuck...is dead?" The words were clearly a question but the inflection never rose; it stayed dusty, lifeless. Interrogation by corpse.
"You should be worried. He is dead." The comment was final. Sarah felt more tears seep past her still-closed eyes.
"How many times did Langston Graham tell you about how to handle an asset, Sarah?"
Hearing her name in that voice made Sarah shudder. She was beginning to gather herself at last, trying to understand where she was, what was happening.
She was seated against a wall, brick, on a cold floor, concrete. The voice was hard to locate. In the room, obviously, but where?
Chuck? Oh, God, please...no. Let him be safe. She would not believe the voice, not yield to it.
So many voices over the years, telling her what to do, what not to do, who to be, who not to be. She'd internalized those voices, and their cochophany had drowned out the one voice that mattered but that she could not hear distinctly: hers. Until Chuck. She had no specific memory of this, just a conviction: because of Chuck, the voices stopped, or she could externalize them, resist them, ignore them. For the first time since she was a girl, she could hear herself think. Hear her own voice.
Chuck didn't tell her what to think, he just created quiet or distance; he did not substitute his voice for theirs, his calm words for all their wild and whirling words. No. He believed in her voice, in its reality, and in its...goodness.
And she began to understand that she was good in Burbank, good with Chuck. Good. And, slowly, over the days and the weeks and the years, she had come to realize that she did not want to do what her father and Graham told her to do, did not want to be who they told her to be.
Maybe she wasn't who they thought she was. Maybe she was who she thought she was, the person Chuck had abounding faith in...
She wasn't bound. Why?
Then she realized that although she was awake and directing her own thoughts, her body felt heavy, loggy. The effects of the gas were still present. The voice must have known that.
"Well?" The voice demanded an answer.
Why not give it? Perhaps the voice could be kept talking. Delay. Hope for something, anything.
"Many times, Graham told me over and over. Countless times. Drilled it into my head, like everything he told me. He didn't believe I had heard him unless I could repeat what he said verbatim. The ipssissima verba…" Sarah's mouth was dry, the words came out pasty.
"Latin." The voice cut her off. "But then languages are your...our...thing, aren't they, Sarah. No one can be a human chameleon whose tongue cannot change color. We must speak the language, fluently, eh? To do what we do?"
Having heard the voice for a while, Sarah could detect a trace of an accent. Latin, but not ancient, South American, rather. Columbia? Somewhere.
Sarah answered the question with a question. "And what is it...we...do?"
The voice chuckled, low, barely feminine. Barely human. The chuckle was chilled, laughter on ice. "We kill. We are natural killers. Predators among prey. Why are you trying to deny what you are? You are an assassin. Death is your gift. And mine. As you helped teach me."
What? "What are you talking about?" I was no one's teacher.
"My father told me to study you. He knew I needed a female...role model. He said you were the best. He found a way to copy your CIA file. It became my favorite reading during my teenage years. My young adult nonfiction. My Twilight. I have it memorized…" A pregnant pause in the dark, the voice lost in memory.
"Would you like me to recite a few entries? It is poetry, some of it, all-day, permanent red poetry."
"No, thanks. I'm good."
Strangely enough, the man I love recited it to me earlier today. Once was enough. Even in his voice, his kind voice, soft and full of love for me even as he recited those hard, awful things…
No, once was enough.
More than enough.
"I know you've been having trouble...remembering." There was a slight spike of glee that kept that assertion from absolute flatness.
How did she know that? Who told her?
"Who are you?"
Sarah could feel the darkness tense, although the voice did not respond. The voice wanted to respond. Wanted Sarah to know. This was all personal, somehow, for the voice.
"I am you, or, perhaps better, I am your shadow." Dark and silence.
"Or perhaps better still, I am the woman you were supposed to become. But you failed her, left me to rescue her by becoming her, making her real after you abandoned her."
Darker, somehow. More silence. Ruminative. "But I suppose my father may have seen that coming and expected me to see it too," the voice became speculative, "so that you would be both role mode and cautionary tale. My father made sure I was trained...more perfectly...than you were. I am incapable of love; no one can ruin me as your Chuck has ruined you."
The voice simply reported, no emotional reaction.
If she says 'your Chuck' like that once more, mixing contempt and venom, I will find her and I will strangle her.
Sarah was beginning to feel her feet, her hands, slowly, just a little. Dancing needles in the soles of her feet, the palms of her hands.
"Where is my husband?" Sarah's tone was cold now too.
"Husband! Really, Sarah. That word reeks of weakness, servility, submission. How could you have married?"
You don't know my husband.
"You should have become freelance, killed Graham; you should have become what you were meant to be. But no. No. You betrayed destiny. For a boy-man with a pocket protector and a ring. A Nerd Herder."
And memories clicked into place, almost violently. Memories.
Herder. Husband. Pocket protector. Rings.
Chuck. Her 'C'. Her Chuck. Her heart. A brief flash, a memory, the counter of a jewelry store: of seeing the engravings inside the rings, of having chosen them together, her hand in his as Chuck explained what they wanted to the jeweler.
His ring, inside: Your heart is my heart. -S.
They'd traded hearts.
If she left, she'd abandon her heart and abduct his.
Another flash of memory, pulling her mind along, a child pulling a parent at an amusement park, flushed, eager, unchecked: Chuck was standing at a counter, a call bell on it. He was looking at her, his gaze the most unguarded she had experienced since she was a child.
For a few seconds, for a minute, for...a while, her guard fell. It fell; she did not drop it. It never fell. It had been up since she was a girl, never relaxed, always vigilant and more vigilant. But it fell.
She fell.
And although that scene—in a Buy More—was all the connected memory she got, it told her something: she'd never had a chance.
She'd been lost, had lost, from the beginning, even if she hadn't acknowledged it. He had terrified and confused and excited her all in equal measures. He moved her, moved things inside her. Things she did not know could move, not anymore. He stirred her. Brought her back to life.
She had fought against it, fought against him, as she could, when she could remember to do it, or when Graham's voice filled her head, demanding that she do it.
But her heart had never been in the fight, not, at least, in that way. She had wanted to lose, even while she fought tooth and nail. She wouldn't throw the fight, she'd been who she'd been for so long; she had to be bested.
And even though she didn't know all the details, she knew she had been bested, outlasted. Chuck had bested her, and she was profoundly glad he had. She had her victory prize, the rings, to prove it.
But she didn't. They were in a pawn shop in San Diego.
Your heart is my heart. -C.
How could she leave? She loved him.
How could she not leave? She loved him.
"I can...kill. I have killed. I am...not a natural killer." Sarah stopped, drew out the silence.
"I was not destined to be you, or whoever you think I was destined to be." Sarah had an intuition, followed it. "You were not destined to be you, either. Someone, your father, I'm guessing, made you this way. Left alone, maybe if left with your mother, you could have become someone else, would have become someone else.."
She heard a sharp intake of breath in the darkness. She could feel the radiating heat of rage. Her aim had been true. The voice shifted attack.
"Leave my mother out of this." A threat, monotonic. "You will leave him. No matter how much you may think you...love him." Contempt, venom. "You will leave him. Because it is what you...what we...do. What we must do. Even if we...wanted someone, we could not have him. The earth itself will not bear us for long. We have to make the most of the brief time it deigns to support our deadly weight."
The voice had...moistened. It sounded slightly more human. This conversation mattered.
"Who are you?"
No answer. No answer. Then: "I am Archeus."
Sarah knew the name, of course. But Team Bartowski had never run afoul of Archeus, and she had only really come into prominence since Sarah had been in Burbank.
Still, the name was terrible news; Sarah's stomach flipped. Archeus had never been known to accept a mission and fail. And if she had been sent against Sarah or Chuck, someone was totally committed to them being dead.
"Archeus? Huh." My pupil? "But the rumor is that you were trained in...Russia." Sarah waited for the answer, not so much for its own sake but because it would make things clearer.
"Yes."
Oh, no. If she was willing to confirm that it was because she was sure Sarah would be dead soon.
Maybe Archeus wasn't lying about Chuck. Maybe he was dead. No, no, no. He couldn't leave her, even if she had to leave him.
ooOoo
Carina was going stir crazy. Or just crazy.
Everyone else had something to do. Morgan was working on the computer for Beckman, and Alex was sitting close to him, her hand on his shoulder, watching him work and whispering things to him now and then. Encouraging him, keeping him steady. He was terrified for Chuck and Sarah; they all were.
That terror was the background of the entire scene, present in everyone.
Ellie and Devon were busy...Intersecting. Ellie thought she had a way to get the Intersect out of Sarah's head, and she was explaining it again to Devon, to see what he thought. Beckman was on the phone with someone, talking quietly, too quietly for Carina to make anything of it. She couldn't tell if Beckman's call was professional or personal.
Carina turned again to watch Morgan and Alex.
Alex seemed to have...mostly...gotten past Carina and Morgan's past, and Carina deliberated kept calling him 'Martin' just to reassure Alex that Morgan meant nothing to her. The truth was, he did mean something to her. No, he was not and would never become a grand passion or something, but she did really like him and she had really enjoyed their...time together. It had been...different...and she remembered it clearly, and more often than she would have admitted.
She envied Alex. To be with someone who wanted you, as Morgan clearly wanted her, but who did not only wanted you but wanted you. Morgan was not anything like as shallow as he tried to be.
Carina was beginning to be suspicious that she wasn't either.
She wasn't sure what she wanted, but the life she had been living, the personal part of that life, wasn't making her happy anymore. She could go on living it, of course, the habits were all in place. She wasn't miserable, exactly. No. It was rather like someone had pushed her horizons back, back, into the distance, and everything near Carina that had seemed so engrossing, so all-important, was revealed to just be...well, not so engrossing, not so all-important. She had a sense of being bigger than she had known herself to be, but also, at the same time, emptier, less fulfilled.
Alex leaned in and whispered to Morgan and he turned and gave her a quick kiss, warm and affectionate and promising passion, but not itself passionate. Carina would like to be kissed like that, a couple's kiss. A committed kiss. She had scoffed at such kisses in the past. Why kiss if the kiss were not passionate? She was beginning to think that question was not the obvious rhetorical question she had treated it as for years. Maybe there was not only an answer but a good one.
She wanted to try to talk to Sarah about all of this, to try to figure it out. Sarah understood commitment.
ooOoo
Chuck's fear in the dark was not for himself, at least not about bodily injury or death. His fear was knowledge. The knowledge that his wife was planning to leave him. He knew why. The problem had been lurking for years between them, stalking them from the shadows. Sarah's past. Her inability to get past it.
Chuck had been hurt by his recitation of her termination missions. But he was hurt for her, not for himself. Her reluctance to do what she had been more-or-less forced to do, her regret, her pain. She had sublimated all of it onto Chuck, had imagined her horror at her past to be his. He could tell that it was hurting her again to look at him, but not only because of what Quinn had done but because Chuck now knew what she had done. She saw herself through Chuck's eyes, as she imagined her saw her. But he did not see what she imagined he saw. He saw a woman who had managed to preserve her heart in the fury of assault after assault by her father and Graham, and during the long, lonely, hungry, thirsty siege of the spy life, and in the midst of her own bloody handiwork.
She was a miracle, not a monster.
She had conned out of a desperate desire to be loved by her father, she had killed under orders. Perhaps those cons and orders were corrupt, but then the guilt for what was done fell on the corruptors, on her father and Graham, not on Sarah. But Chuck knew that the fact an action was not blameworthy did not make it easy, did not keep it from preying on the person who performed it, perhaps wrecking that person. Even if an execution is justified, who would want to be the executioner?
He sighed.
Chuck heard cool laughter in the dark, a breeze across dead leaves, a ripple in a glacial lake. "Considering the sins of your wife, Chuck? Your wife is an artist, or she was, before you took her red paintbrush from her. I'm going to go talk to her now. I am going to tell her you are dead. Think on that.
"I will be back for you soon, and I will kill you. But not in the dark. In the light, with Sarah watching." The voice closed on him.
Chuck felt something slip around his neck. A wire? A shoelace. It was pulled taut. His gas-numbed limbs refused to respond. He gasped for air, gasped again. He started to slip into an interior darkness deeper than his exterior one.
The lace slackened and he gulped in a huge lungful of oxygen.
"Did you know your wife terminated two different targets with a lace from her boots, two different missions? I have learned so much from studying her. She is a woman of infinite resource. I am sorry to have to kill her almost. Almost. But you were her fatal mistake, her ruination. She betrayed our calling for...you." The voice stopped, but before it had, it contained the barest hints of pride and rage and...something else. Envy. "Enjoy your final breaths."
The voice was gone. Chuck's neck was throbbing, the abrasion around it from the lace was burning.
He knew about the bootlace. Sarah knew too. It had been in the file, in the Intersect.
Chuck felt his heart rate continue to increase. The numbness he felt began to decrease. The Intersect. It was aiding his body, speeding his recovery from the gas. How? He didn't know, but he was profoundly grateful. With an effort of will, he flexed his hand. He had feeling there.
Feeling was spreading quickly.
Sarah had another resource, another weapon Archeus had not recognized: him.
A/N2 Ah, the Intersect, Chuck's blessing, and curse.
Are we having fun, yet? I can't hear you.
Thanks, everyone. Tune in next time for more in Chapter 16, "Hole, Hold, Whole".
