Author's note: My stories and I are up for quite a few Awesome Awards. Vote for them if you so desire, but if I have to ask you to vote for one, it's the JEFFSTER! Award for lifetime achievement. Given the amount of work I've put in over the last four years – both on stories and on our discussion forum here – I would really like to receive that sort of recognition from my peers. http : / forum . fanfiction . net / forum / TWoP _ Kicked _ Us _ Out _ But _ We _ Still _ Love _ Chuck / 49974 / - make sure you remove all the spaces.
Enjoy!

I had the oddest dream last night. Well, odd might not be a good way of putting it. Disturbing. Horrifying. Mind-breaking.

What was even worse was that when I woke up and went searching for proof that it was JUST a dream, it was instead confirmed to be a suppressed memory coming back to the surface.

Contents of this dream, you ask? Well, I dreamed that I walked into this hotel room. I walked into the hotel room to find John Casey, stripped to his t-shirts and shamrock boxers, handcuffed to the bed. And then, of ALL THINGS, I took a picture with my iPhone.

Now, in any other situation, that could've just been passed off as a nightmare. But when I woke up, I was flooded with a series of memories from what seemed to be the same mission, not the worst of which was the one where the principal from Glee had a giant golden gun to Chuck's head.

(Okay, so it turned out it wasn't actually Mr. Figgins. It was just a really hairy guy who looked like him. And I don't want to hear it about the CIA's tough-as-nails Sarah Walker watching Glee, either. I watched crap like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and My So-Called Life back in the day. Not to mention I watched a lot of Nick at Nite back in the 90s. Shut up.)

Anyway. So I got out my iPhone, and looked back through my old, old pictures (it turns out this is my sixth iPhone since I got to L.A.; fortunately, it seems that Chuck was able to transfer my pictures each time), and sure enough, there was the picture I saw myself taking.

Ew.

Well, Carina had popped up quite a bit in these memories, so I gave her a call, and we got to talking about the mission. It turned out that she hadn't heard anything about my memory issues, and she got pissed and threatened to kill Nicholas Quinn.

She was mollified when I told her I had already taken care of that loose end.

Carina told me that we should meet up for coffee this afternoon, and she could fill me in on some of the details from that mission – those that my memory had not refreshed.

So we met, and the first thing out of her mouth was, "So, with no memories, are you and Chuck still together?"

The reply that automatically popped out of mine was, "He's mine, you know that, back off."

Surprising. I have absolutely no memory of Carina and Chuck interacting, yet the moment she even jokes about making a move on him, I get my back up, as if there was an undercurrent of something there.

"Don't worry about it," Carina told me later. "I would never make a move on Chuck – heck, I wanted to, that first mission, even tried. He turned me down, and then…"

She paused for a moment, and smiled. "Well, I just couldn't."

"Why not?" I asked with a frown. "From my understanding of the way things went, Chuck and I didn't get together for… well… more than two years after this mission."

"Oh, Sarah," Carina said, laughing and shaking her head. "Are you kidding? The way you looked at him back then, you were already head over heels for him."

I scoffed. "Come on, Carina, I was just his han-"

And I stopped. Because that was when I realized, she was absolutely right.