Endings and Beginnings

Devon was sitting at the fountain with a beer when Chuck arrived. His forearms were resting on his knees and he seemed to be staring through the outside wall of his own apartment. Two empties sat at his feet, which caught Chuck's attention immediately—Devon wasn't that much of a drinker. Either he didn't notice Chuck's approach or he was ignoring it.

"Hey Devon," Chuck called out. It took a second or two, but Devon's eyes snapped back into focus at the greeting.

"Hey, bro…" he replied, his forehead crinkling. "Didn't expect to see you today."

Chuck wobbled his head in agreement "Me either. I got time off for good behavior." He grinned. "Is Ellie home?"

Devon glanced at him briefly, then took a swig from his beer.

"That bad, huh?" Chuck joked.

"Not. Awesome."

Chuck made a sympathetic face. "Mind if I try to talk to her?"

Devon tilted his bottle towards the door. "By all means." Chuck smiled genially and turned, but Devon caught him before he took a step. "Uh, Chuck…"

"Yeah?" Chuck stared blankly as Devon struggled to finish his sentence. After several false starts, his expression fell.

"Grab another couple of brews out of the fridge, you know… on your way back out."

"Hah, sure thing."

He went inside.

Ellie was sitting on the sofa, a half empty bottle of Cabernet on the table in front of her. On her lap lay a weathered photo album that Chuck recognized from their childhood. Her head lay completely over the backrest, eyes closed. Chuck thought maybe she'd fallen asleep. He closed the door quietly and crept into the living room.

"I figured you'd be with Sarah today," Ellie said abruptly, her eyes still shut. Chuck hid the small jump he'd made at the sound of her voice.

"I was," he admitted, "until about a half hour ago. She got called into the office unexpectedly."

"Ah, the demands of life as a spy. Must be rough." Ellie's words were sympathetic, but her tone was anything but. "Still, I guess I owe the government a thank you. Without their intervention I might never have seen my own brother again." She fixed him with a piercing glare. "How's that for irony?"

Chuck frowned and sat on the edge of the couch next to her. "Ellie, I know you're mad, but…"

"Two weeks!" Ellie interjected, her voice strident. "It's been two weeks since the funeral, Chuck! Two weeks without a word from you! Couldn't you have spared a couple of hours from… whatever it is that you're doing now to see if I was okay?"

"No, that's not…"

"You never answered one of my voice mails! Did you even care if I was okay? Or how I was coping with all of this? With everything that's happened, I really needed someone to talk to. Someone," she cast a dismissive glance towards the front door, "who actually knew what went on."

She dropped her chin to her chest and sighed loudly. The pause afterward was like the eye of the storm and Chuck was so thankful for the respite he couldn't bring himself to break it.

"What happened to us, little brother? We used to talk all the time and now it feels like I'm the person you trust the least."

Chuck dipped his head and closed his eyes. When he opened them again he spoke from his heart. "Ellie, I know I should have come and told you everything right after Dad died. But I just couldn't do it. You'd been hit with so much, so fast… I couldn't bring myself to hit you with even more. I figured if I gave you some time, time to get a handle on things, time to grieve Dad…" Chuck dropped his gaze. "I thought there'd be time to tell you the other stuff later."

"You don't get to make that decision on your own, Chuck," Ellie said. "He was our father, not just yours. I had to sit through his service knowing almost nothing about why he was killed right in front of us, Chuck. I still don't know. You should have been there for me, whatever it took."

Chuck sagged. "I know, you're right. I should have. It's just, you were so angry after the funeral—" Ellie's eyes lit with fire and Chuck sped up his delivery, "—and you had every right to be after so much had been kept from you. But I thought that anything I told you then would have just made things worse. Gotten you even angrier."

"You should have at least called."

"Honestly, El, I thought I was doing the right thing," Chuck replied. "But I guess I'm just an idiot. And I was wrong. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry." Chuck put his elbows on his knees and clasped his fingers behind his head, wondering if he'd finally screwed up so badly it was essentially unfixable.

Time passed as Ellie simmered.

"You're not an idiot," she said, finally. Chuck looked up with a hope for redemption that was quickly squelched. "But you were wrong." She reached out to take another sip from her wine glass, and folded her legs underneath her on the couch.

They sat together without talking, Ellie sipping her wine and Chuck fidgeting under the weight of her appraising stares. He wanted to say something, anything, to break the extended silence between them, but the feeling of repentance held him back.

After a particularly lengthy stare she finally spoke. "Do you remember the Father's Days after Dad left?"

"Uh, yeah, I think so."

"I wouldn't let anything take me away from the house and…"

"…you jumped at every sound," Chuck finished. "You thought Dad might pick that particular Father's Day to come back to us and you were afraid you'd miss him. Yeah, I remember, why?"

Ellie averted her eyes. "Chuck, I…" She bit her lip. "I know it's crazy, but I'm still getting that same feeling. Like, he's still out there, somewhere, and one day he's going to just walk in the door…"

Chuck shook his head. "No, Ellie…"

"…like nothing's wrong and start apologizing for letting us believe he was dead and…"

"No." he said, firmly enough that Ellie stopped mid-sentence.

Chuck's brow knotted as he saw the small sliver of hope in Ellie's eyes. It wasn't fair that he had to do this to her now. Not after she'd already suffered so much. But he couldn't bear the thought of her holding on to a vain hope every Father's Day to come.

"Ellie… you were there. I was there. He's gone. He's not coming back."

She leaned forward, eyes narrowed. "We don't know that for certain, Chuck. The CIA didn't—"

"I held him in my arms, Ellie. I felt him go."

Staring into her eyes, Chuck saw the exact moment Ellie accepted the truth. Her face fell, and he moved closer to touch her shoulder. At his contact, she dropped her head to his chest and sobbed.

"So what have you been doing for the last two weeks, anyway?" Ellie asked, still shoulder to shoulder with Chuck on the couch.

Chuck hesitated, his eyebrows rising and his mouth open in a look she immediately recognized. Pushing away, she turned a furious glare on him.

"You haven't gone back to the spy business again, have you? Chuck, you promised!"

"El…" he raised his right hand in a pledge, "I swear to you I have not, nor do I plan to, rejoin the CIA as a spy." The earnest expression he tacked on at the end seemed to sell it. Internally, he breathed a huge sigh of relief. If she had homed in on his potential non-CIA spy activities he probably couldn't have been as convincing.

"So, what then?"

"Oh, you know," Chuck prattled, "I hung around with Morgan some, when he wasn't with Alex—uh, don't mention that—it's supposed to be a secret." Ellie did a double-take on the word 'secret' and he winced. "Sorry, sorry. And, of course, I spent time with Sarah, and… Oh yeah. I've been spending some days at the old house clearing up Dad's stuff."

Ellie balked. "The old house? Didn't Dad sell that years ago?"

"Uh, no, no. It's still there and it's actually not in all that bad a shape considering that, you know, it's been empty for like seven years and the floor needs a good polishing and the rugs need to be replaced, maybe some new counter tops and appliances too, but it would be, all-in-all, pretty much…"

"Chuck, you're babbling," Ellie interjected. "Are you talking about upping the resale value with a few improvements?" Chuck met her stare guiltily and Ellie's eyes grew large. "Oh my God…"

"Actually, Sarah and I are thinking of moving in there… together," he blurted out.

Ellie stared at him for several seconds before standing up and taking a few steps away. "I'm sorry, Chuck," she said, "really I am. But I just don't know how to react to that right now."

"Well, I was hoping you'd be happy for us and wish us well. Weren't you the one that was so excited when Sarah and I babysat that house in the valley last year?" Ellie took a few more steps away and Chuck stood to follow her.

"That was before."

"Before? Before what? What are you saying, sis?"

Ellie spun to face him. "I'm saying she's not who I thought she was. She's…"

"El, it's Sarah," Chuck stressed. "You know her."

Ellie gave him an incredulous look. "Know her? Really? Chuck, your girlfriend did nothing but lie to me for three years. When I think back now at all the times she… Do you know what she told me while we were being held hostage at the BuyMore? She said she was nervous because she'd never been that close to a gun before. And naïve me, I believed her and tried to comfort her. So, now I feel like a total idiot, because…"

Chuck tried to raise an arm to cut her off but Ellie would not be deterred.

"…because Sarah, it turns out, is some kind of 'La Femme Nikita' CIA assassin who recruited you into this life in the first place. She's undoubtedly been handling guns for years. And then… Chuck, I chose her to be my Maid of Honor! God!"" She put a palm to her forehead and groaned.

"Look, sis, she had to lie to protect our cover, that was her job. The important thing is that she stood up for us, putting her life on the line when it counted. And I'd do the same for her in a heartbeat."

"That's just it, Chuck. I don't want you to have to put your life on the line for someone! Sarah's part of a world where that kind of thing can happen, a world I want you out of for all our sakes." Ellie retraced her steps and touched his forearm. "I'm afraid that if you stay together, someday you're going to be pulled right back in."

Chuck frowned. "No, that won't happen. Sarah understands the promise I made to you. She said we'd find a way to work it out and we have. I trust her. And you should too."

Ellie seemed to consider his plea for a moment, but shook it off. She leaned towards him and lowered her voice. "Chuck, I've been thinking about this. Isn't it possible that Sarah took advantage of the state you were in after Jill? Maybe she saw you were at a low point and seduced you into joining the government to be with her. All that time you guys were on-again, off-again, I could never understand what was going on. But now, now I get it. She was keeping you on the hook, getting you interested but not letting you too close. Using your attraction to her to lure you into doing her bidding."

Suddenly, Ellie's eyes shot open wide and she grabbed Chuck's forearm, making him flinch. "And the worst thing, the very worst thing about all of this is that I supported her the whole time! I pushed you guys together thinking it was the right thing when all I was really doing was helping her pull you into her world. Oh, Chuck, I'm so sorry!" Ellie drew him into an embrace, but after feeling a series of brief tremors run through him she pulled back. "Chuck?"

What she saw wasn't the empathetic, revelatory reaction she'd been expecting. She stared at him with mouth agape.

Chuck was trying to suppress a laugh.

Flushing with anger, she smacked him on the arm. "I'm serious!"

"I know," Chuck apologized. "But your theory… I mean, it's just… it's all wrong."

"Really?" She put her hands on her hips and glared. "Well why don't you tell me what I've got wrong, then. The truth."

He knew that Ellie had just given him his opportunity to tell his side, to set things straight. But still, he hesitated, trying to find the right tack, debating how much he could really reveal. He took a deep breath.

"Our world."

"What?" Ellie asked, confusion written all over her face.

"You said she pulled me into her world. But you're wrong. It was our world already, we just didn't know it."

"Chuck," Ellie faltered, "I don't understand."

"Our dad, Ellie. He was already up to his neck in that world. He left to protect us from it. All those years he was gone he kept watch over us, kept us safe as best he could, but the danger was always there. We were just oblivious to it. He was an amazing man, Ellie, but he couldn't stop everything, and eventually I got pulled in. And El," Chuck took a deep breath, "it wasn't Sarah who did that. It was Bryce."

Ellie gasped. "Bryce? Bryce Larkin? Are you trying to tell me that Bryce Larkin – from Connecticut – was a spy?"

Chuck nodded.

"But, what… when…?" Ellie rambled, and Chuck could tell her mind was awash with all the things she thought she knew about Bryce that she could no longer trust to be real.

"A long time ago, but—you know what? It's not important how it happened, what's important is that it did. And when it did, I was in deep trouble, El. Bryce sent me information. Information that was incredibly valuable to the government, but no less valuable to a number of other organizations who would have used it for their own ends. Those organizations would have had no qualms about torturing me to get me to cooperate, to give them that information.

The government's response to the situation was what you might expect from a large, faceless bureaucracy – they wanted to throw me in a bunker for the rest of my natural life – or until they decided, at their leisure, that I was no longer a threat to them. I came within a hair's breadth of that happening. My life, as I knew it, almost ended right there on my twenty-sixth birthday." Chuck paused to let that sink in.

"But wait, I would have known you were missing, I'd never have stopped looking for you," Ellie countered.

Chuck shook his head. "These are powerful organizations, El. They'd have just manufactured a fake death, one without a corpse, and you wouldn't have been able to prove otherwise. Trust me, they do this all the time."

Ellie considered this for a few seconds. "So, what happened?"

Chuck smiled broadly and fixed Ellie with a pointed stare. "Sarah happened. The rest of the government wanted to lock me up and throw away the key but for some reason I still can't fathom she took my side and argued them out of it. She saved me. Because of her, I got to stay here, in my current life, as long as I agreed to work with them. This is why we couldn't tell you the truth. If you knew, you'd become dangerous to the government and they might want to throw you and Devon in a bunker. I couldn't risk that."

Ellie looked away, and Chuck could sense her resolve weakening.

"There are so many more things I wish I could tell you about what Sarah's done for me, what she's done for this family. I can't do that, because the details are classified and I've already said more than I probably should. But there is one very important thing you need to know about Sarah and I, something you've got completely backwards:

Sarah never wanted me to become a spy. She did everything she could think of to convince me not to do it, including throwing away everything she knew to run away from the government with me. I think she was afraid of losing the person she knew, the person that she, you know… loved."

Ellie's gaze fell.

"You were right all along, El. She was into me, back then, even though she couldn't admit it to anyone else, even to herself. And though she may have lied to you about some things, like our cover and our missions, she never lied to you about what was most important – how she felt about me. Maybe you see Sarah as some kind of cold, unfeeling ninja assassin, but that's just not the truth. Sarah was a woman trying to find something worth caring about in a world filled with nothing but lies and deception. Together, you, Devon and I… we gave her that. We gave her a circle of friends who cared about her. We gave her a home."

Ellie broke eye contact with a shake of her head and a soft growl of protest. She trudged past Chuck to crash back onto the couch, grabbing a tissue on the way to blow her nose. Her eyes flicked from one spot to another around the room, the shifts seeming to echo the changing viewpoints battling it out in her head. After a minute, she emitted a loud sigh and seemed to sink even lower into the couch. She looked run down, exhausted. "Sarah didn't really have to go in to work today, did she?"

"Uh…" Chuck began, and Ellie pinned him with a piercing glare. "No. She just thought it might be better if I spent the day with you." He sat down next to her.

She shook her head and exhaled sharply. "And her own father?"

"He's not really around much anymore."

"So she's alone today?"

Chuck nodded.

Ellie chewed incessantly on her lower lip while she evidently came to a decision. She took out her cell and made a call while Chuck watched with rapt attention. "Hi. Uh… Look, maybe we should talk… Yeah, I'm sure. I don't know, how about right now? Chuck's over here and I made him tell me—" She stood abruptly, eyes wide, and Chuck followed her line of sight to the front door.

It was slowly opening.

They both knew that wasn't how Devon opened doors and from Ellie's sharp intake of breath Chuck knew who she thought was about to appear. Feeling a jolt of adrenaline speed his heart and hearing Ellie's premonition ringing in his ears, he jumped off the couch to stand next to his sister. Side by side, they looked on, mesmerized, as the door swung fully open.

But it wasn't their father coming back from the dead to utterly freak them out. It was Sarah.

She stood in the doorway, holding her own cell a few inches from her ear, smiling nervously. She made a small wave with her other hand. "Hi. Uh, is everything… okay?" she asked, noting the expressions on their faces. Behind her, Devon peeked over her shoulder from the courtyard in trepidation.

Chuck and Ellie let out their pent-up breaths loudly in relief. "Yeah," they said in unison, turning to share embarrassed looks. Ellie took a couple of steps forward before stopping with a puzzled look on her face. "You weren't outside the whole time, were you?"

"Uh, no…" Sarah replied in a conciliatory tone. "I was kind of in the neighborhood…"

"Then how did you know when I'd…" Ellie waved her cell phone.

For just a second, Sarah froze and Chuck held his breath. Then with an impish grin, she said, "Hello? Spy."

Chuck winced. It was funny. It was adorable. It was also the last word in the English language Sarah should have mentioned at that moment. In panic, he lurched forward, convinced he was going to have to interpose himself between them.

Time ran in slow motion.

For an instant, Chuck saw Ellie's eyes flick over to his. It was as if she was, at the last possible moment, deciding what she would do. A split second for a decision that would set the tone for all of their lives for months or years to come.

Then, before he could reach them, her eyes flicked back, an ear-to-ear smile split her face, and she pulled Sarah into a big hug.

Chuck yanked himself to an ungraceful stop and watched, entranced, as Sarah's initial stiffness melted, a little at a time, inside Ellie's embrace. He smiled when he saw Sarah tentatively put her arms around Ellie, her eyes fluttering closed when she squeezed. And he beamed when he saw the serene smile appear on Sarah's face, along with an emotion he had no words to describe other than… home.

Ellie touched Sarah's shoulder. "So, Tuesday at the old house, seven o' clock, to plan out the redecorating, right?"

"Right," Sarah replied, "we'll treat you to dinner after, it's the least we can do for your help." She smiled back at Chuck. "You ready, sweetie?"

"Yeah, I'll be right there, I just want to ask Ellie something, if that's okay." He widened his eyes purposefully.

Sarah got the message. "Sure. I'll just say bye to Devon and meet you at the car." She flashed a final smile at Ellie and closed the door behind her.

Ellie turned to Chuck. "So, a question?"

"El, do you remember Dad's yellow bathrobe? You know, the one he used to wear around the house all the time?"

She blinked twice and stared. "Gosh, yes. Although I haven't thought about it in years. Oh—wait a minute…" She walked over to the couch and grabbed the photo album, quickly flipping pages until she found one in particular. She put the album in Chuck's hands and pointed to a photo in the bottom right corner, an old Polaroid of their dad making breakfast.

He was wearing the bathrobe.

There was nothing on the left breast.

Ellie took in his expression and frowned. "What is it, Chuck?"

"Oh, nothing important," he said, handing her back the album. He smiled. "So, Sarah's waiting, I better go." The subsequent hug squashed the photo album between them and Chuck thought he heard a tiny "ow" from somewhere near his shoulder. When he pulled back he gave her an earnest look. "Thank you," he said, emphasizing each word.

She smiled back and breathed a laugh. "Hey, what are sisters for?"

She watched him walk to the door and open it, turning only when most of his body was already through.

"See you Tuesday." And with that, he was gone.

Ellie looked down at the album and the photo of her dad in the kitchen. Without taking her eyes off it, she drifted back to the couch and sat, even managing to pickup her glass by touch for another sip of wine. After several minutes of taking in every detail, she deliberately grasped the left half of the album and swung it shut. "Goodbye, Dad," she breathed softly.

She laid her head down across the backrest and closed her eyes.

[A/N Part II: Since this is part of the Season 4 Premiere Anniversary Challenge, all four chapters have been posted at once. No waiting!]