A/N the First: To mxpw and all of my wonderful pre-readers, thank you for continuing to be amazing. Thank you for any and all reviewers or for even being here. You redefine amazing in phenomenal new ways.

All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware. — Martin Buber

Proceed with Caution

12 JULY 2008
FLIGHT 6442
10:18 GMT

He hadn't expected to sleep, as he had never slept much on planes—Sarah's tiny Cessna aside—but the minute Chuck reclined the seat on the private jet, he was out like a light. It wasn't so deep of a sleep that he didn't wake when Sarah or Casey moved around, but for the most part, he dozed his way across the Atlantic. At least, he assumed it was the Atlantic. They were heading east when he fell asleep.

The compass still said east when he woke.

"Morning," Casey said when Chuck, bewildered and befuddled, sat up. "Have a nice nap, sunshine?"

Chuck grumbled at him. "Any news?" he asked. His voice sounded rusty, so he cleared his throat.

"Haven't checked. You can call when we land."

"When's that?"

"'Bout an hour."

"Okay." Chuck rubbed sleep from his eyes and looked around. In the row behind them, Sarah still had her chair reclined; she was curled on her side, facing away from him. He paused in the aisle, studying the line from her ear to her shoulder, marred only by the fall of her hair, as the clubbing outfit really didn't cover much. He peeled off the jacket he'd been wearing the night before and wrapped it awkwardly around her torso on his way to the bathroom.

When he returned, a little more awake, she was using it for a pillow. He shrugged to himself and sat down. "I feel like hell," he told Casey.

"Look like hell, too."

"Thanks." Chuck rubbed at his wrist and winced as he thumbed one of the bruises left there from the handcuffs the day before. His watch told him it was five in the morning on the east coast, which only made him wince again. No wonder he wanted more sleep. "Where're we going?"

"Wherever the plane goes," Casey said.

"You're helpful."

Casey shrugged.

"Get any sleep at all?"

"What the hell is up with the chatty cathy-ism, Bartowski?"

"Going to take that as a no." Chuck pushed himself out of his seat again and went to the wet bar up at the front of the cabin, his stomach rumbling.

"Bit early for a drink. Or late. Whichever." Casey's tone held every bit of judgment that either outcome merited.

"Don't want a drink. Hungry." He rummaged through the cabinet, whistling under his breath at the caliber of the alcohol present. There wasn't food to go with it, which he thought was a bit of a rip-off. In the end, he grabbed a jar of maraschino cherries and the cup of toothpicks and headed back to his seat. He gave Casey's incredulous stare a look. "What? They're fruit."

"Give 'em here, I'm hungry, too."

In quiet solidarity, the men speared and ate drink garnishes while the plane flew on and Sarah slept. Chuck tried not to think about that, or his sister. It was simpler to eat the cherries and not think for a little while. Or so he figured. His brain evidently didn't agree, as thoughts filtered right through his barriers.

He worried about Ellie. They'd loaded him onto a plane and whisked him away with only one chance to say good-bye to Ellie while Casey and Sarah collected their emergency gear. Ellie had slept through his good-bye, which meant she'd have to find out in the morning that he was gone. Devon would have to tell her that news while she was cranky from the morphine—Bartowskis never reacted well to drugs for long, which made them very bad patients—and hurting and dealing with the ramifications of nearly being killed.

He bit hard into a cherry. She shouldn't have even been there at all. She'd been at the Intersect upload for him, Chuck knew, which made him feel sick to his stomach. What if Fulcrum had planted a stronger bomb? What if she hadn't been at the back of the room? What if instead of flying away from a sister in a hospital bed, they were pulling him away from a funeral?

They weren't. But since he was flying away from her as fast as he could, and he had no idea what was going to happen next, that didn't seem to be much comfort. Chuck stared out the window and tried not to imagine the worst.

12 JULY 2008
PISA, ITALY
13:42 ITA

By the time the plane landed and they shuffled out onto the tarmac, Chuck's body felt like it had endured one long punishing session with Casey's ex-second-in-command, old Lieutenant Smith. The description was more apt than he knew, he discovered: the signs leading into the airport were in Italian, where the selfsame Smith had originally laid his beat-down on Chuck and had been tranqued to within an inch of his life by Sarah.

"Italy?" he asked, blinking against bright sunlight. He shouldered his backpack. "We're in Italy?"

"Pisa," Casey said. He shoved Chuck toward the airport.

"Wait, with the tower? Can we go see the tower?"

"No. Move."

"Why even come to Pisa, then?"

"Because that's where we landed."

Chuck sighed and let himself be pushed forward. Sarah followed. She hadn't said a word since she'd woken up on the plane. She'd merely handed Chuck his jacket back and had disappeared into the bathroom. To be honest, she didn't look like she'd slept at all, and the silence was beginning to unnerve Chuck.

They were met at the door by an agent in a G-man suit, who simply handed Casey a duffel bag and left without saying a word.

"Make sure it's not a bomb," Chuck said.

Casey rolled his eyes. "Don't say 'bomb' in an airport, moron."

"Why not? You just did."

"Is the entire trip going to be like this?" Casey asked. Before Chuck could open his mouth to deliver the natural smart-ass reply, Casey reached into the duffel bag and shoved something at him. "Take a minute. And then come back in a better mood."

It was a cell phone, not as technologically advanced as the one he'd had to ditch in D.C., but it made international calls. Chuck wasted no time; he stepped away from Casey and Sarah and dialed Devon from memory.

The prognosis made him weak-kneed with relief yet again as he returned. "She's doing better," he said. Sarah was nowhere to be found. "She was asleep, so I didn't talk to her, but she's doing okay. There weren't any complications after we left. The doctor's coming in to check on her soon, so I'll call back again, but for right now, things look good."

"Good. Here." Casey handed him a packet. "Go get changed."

"New clothes yet again," Chuck said, saluting him with the packet. "I wonder what persona NCS has picked out for me this time."

"I always hold out hope that it's a mime," Casey said. "So far, no luck."

Chuck laughed. The clothes were nondescript to the extreme, just a blue shirt and dark pants with cargo pockets and regular brown shoes. He debated these for a minute and chose to stick with his chucks. If he needed to get away, he'd rather be wearing familiar footwear. There was a pouch full of euros and his passport stuck in one of the cargo pockets. He hung the pouch around his neck, under his shirt, and tried not to frown too hard at the passport. Apparently he'd gone back to being Pete Rogers.

Sarah was waiting for him outside of the bathroom. "I had nothing to do with it," she said. "They must've used my old contact and he probably thought it was a joke."

"Feels like old times."

Sarah gave him an odd look, but didn't comment. He wondered if he should ask. She'd been so quiet, intensely so, ever since they'd left the hospital. Was she reliving those moments when she had thought him dead? She never said one way or the other. She had simply stayed quiet, her eyes lingering on him once or twice until he'd ignored it by falling asleep. It was probably a coward's move. Maybe he should have pushed.

He'd push later. Right now, they were in the international airport at Pisa, which for some reason had a huge statue of a pigeon on the lawn surrounding it. It hardly seemed like the time or place.

Casey waited for them by the pigeon, swinging a set of car keys around one finger. "IDs?" he asked.

"Pete and Diana Rogers," Sarah said for both of them. "You?"

Casey looked like he had swallowed something foul. "Barnabas Lynch."

"Again?"

"What do we call you?" Chuck asked, squinting at him. "Barnabas? Barney? Are you a Barney? You don't really look like a Barney."

"In a second, I'm going to look like the guy with his foot up your ass."

"Lynch it is," Chuck said. "So...what's the plan?"

Casey held up the duffel. "First stop is to drop off something for Beckman."

"She put us on courier duty?" Sarah asked, frowning.

"Had to justify the use of the jet. We need to drop this off in Florence."

"Florence?"

"What of it?"

"Why didn't we just fly in there, then?"

"Because our contact is in Pisa." Casey's tone said what his words didn't: get with the picture, Bartowski. "It's a simple stop-and-drop mission. Even we can't screw this one up."

12 JULY 2008
RENTAL CAR
17:08 ITA

"Really, Casey?" Chuck asked, shifting the icepack so that it fit better against the front of his face. "'Even we can't screw this up?' Why not just say, 'I've got a bad feeling about this' or even, 'Here, kitty, kitty, kitty?' Typical." He slouched back against the backseat of the Fiat.

"What're you so cranky about, Bartowski?" Casey asked. "We dropped the package off."

"I don't know, Casey. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I can't feel my face—because you jinxed us!"

"I didn't jinx it," Casey said.

Sarah, in the front seat and nursing her elbow, said, "Actually, Casey, you kind of did."

"We finished the mission, didn't we?"

"Chuck got hit in the face."

"Twice," Chuck said around the ice pack.

"And now you've got a long vacation to rest up and relax and get over it. See? It all works out."

"It would've worked out better if I hadn't gotten hit in the face," Chuck said.

"Sounds like a personal problem, Bartowski."

Chuck glared at him. He peeked at Sarah, expecting to see some sort of sympathetic look in the visor mirror like she usually had whenever Casey gave him a hard time. She, however, was looking down and away from him. In addition to her uncharacteristic silence, this seemed like a huge sign that something was indeed up. He turned the subject over in his mind.

He also wondered what she had gone to talk to Gwen about. Should he ask? He glanced at Casey, who was gripping the steering wheel and glaring at the other Italians on the road as though he were in a Grand Prix race with all of them, and decided against it. Sarah hadn't mentioned going to see Gwen to either of them. She might not want Casey to know.

"Where are we going now?" he asked instead. Outside, Italy rushed by, looking both oddly like California and yet lushly green at the same time. The road signs were in Italian, which he couldn't read, though at least it wasn't Greek. If they were going to be spending any length of time here, he needed to pick up an Italian-English dictionary.

"Vacation. We could use a break."

"Vacation where?"

"Where there are tourists. Where else? Now, be quiet, driving in this country is worse than trying to fight a land war in Asia."

"Well, they say never go up against a Sicilian when death is on the line," Chuck said, and was glared into silence by Casey. After a moment, he shrugged to himself. As he did so, he caught Sarah looking at him with the visor mirror. She shifted her gaze away, but not in time, and he was reminded of their not-argument the night before. They'd made a pact to be friends, and friends talked about things that were on their minds.

Once they arrived wherever they were going, he decided, they really needed to talk.

12 JULY 2008
RIOMAGGIORE, ITALY
17:42 ITA

It turned out that the town the government had leased them temporary apartments in couldn't even be approached by car. The only ways to get there, Chuck discovered, were by boat and train, as Riomaggiore was a tiny little town of brightly-colored buildings stacked one on top of the other, jutting out onto the rocks of the coast in the Italian Riviera. He could understand why tourists flocked there: it was colorful, cooled by the sea, and every direction led to a brand new and fascinating postcard vista.

But he felt a little antsy when they left the car in Corniglia, hiked down through the town, and took the regional train to Riomaggiore. Neither Sarah nor Casey seemed particularly perturbed, though, so he didn't mention it. Apparently, the train connected five little towns and then headed south to La Spezia, a slightly-less-tiny town to the south of the Cinque Terre region. It was remote, but according to Casey, should be swarming with tourists.

"Are you sure this place is where the tourists go?" he asked, craning his neck to look around. Riomaggiore had one principle street, which climbed at a steep incline. It was lined with shops, a lot of them closed, and restaurants on the first floors of the buildings. The second, third, and fourth floors looked like apartments of some type, all bright colors that matched the paint that had covered Sarah's clothes earlier. "It looks pretty empty."

"It's a day-trip location," Casey said, re-shouldering his backpack. "The only ones here at night are the real out-of-towners and the locals. Which means we can watch out for any repeat offenders."

"Oh. Great." They continued walking up the cobble-stone-paved road.

"Chin up, Bartowski," Casey said. "There's some great hiking to be found. Lots of little places on these paths for you to get in trouble."

"Provided you don't jinx it," Chuck said.

Sarah rolled her eyes. "Does anything ever change with you two?"

"Sorry," both Chuck and Casey said.

Sarah checked her phone and nodded to their left. "This is it. Up the steps, on the second level. They left the keys under the mat."

"Is that safe?" Chuck wondered as Casey led the way up a narrow set of steps. The buildings were built into the face of the mountain, which meant that there were pathways on each of the tiers; overhead, laundry lines were strung, displaying the wash.

"You just said there's nobody here, Bartowski."

"Even so, it's still a tourist-heavy area and—"

"Oh, my God," Sarah said. "Shut up! Both of you!"

Chuck started, and unfortunately chose the worst moment for it, as his toe caught on the edge of the stair. He nearly tumbled. Only a last-minute grab of the banister spared him from a fall. When he righted himself, however, both of the other spies were staring at him. Casey snorted. Sarah let out a long sigh through her nose and turned away. She headed into the first door closet to the stairs, without another word.

"Wonder what's eating her," Casey said, and headed for the next door. Chuck followed him, glancing back over his shoulder at the door she had gone through. He nearly crashed into Casey, who'd stopped and was now giving him a funny look. "Where do you think you're going?"

"Uh, aren't we roommates?"

"Nope. Your cover is Mr. Rogers. Married to Mrs. Rogers." Casey pointed gleefully at Sarah's door. "Toodles."

He shut his own apartment door in Chuck's stunned face.

Chuck swallowed as he turned and headed to the first door. He thought back to that small condo in Athens, the one he and Sarah had had to abandon in a hurry because of Bryce. They'd been staying on the Aegean Sea then and now it was the Mediterranean, but everything else fit. They were once again uncertain of their place and of the enemy. The Intersect had just blown up. Sarah was tense, as she had been then, tired and almost cranky. Full circle, he thought again, and paused at the door. Should he knock? Technically, it was his apartment, too, but...

Sarah pulled the door open. "Come in."

"Sorry—I wasn't sure—I could go down and find a hostel or something."

"It's fine. There are two rooms." Sarah waited until he'd stepped inside and shut the door behind him. The apartment was a little spare, Chuck saw: there was a small kitchen immediately off to his right and a common area directly ahead. To the left, doorways led to what he assumed were the bedrooms, and a bathroom.

"High class," he said, attempting to smile.

"Beats living in a barn," Sarah said, rolling her eyes.

"That wasn't what I meant," Chuck said. "And I wasn't in any way, shape, or form knocking the night we did spend in a barn." He barely remembered it, after all. Their entire journey from the bunker to the air base in Italy was more or less blurry in his memory, possibly thanks to the fact that his brain had been in a state of constant confusion and fear. "Sarah, are you okay? You're..."

"I'm what?" Sarah asked, her tone sharp.

"Never mind. Which room do you want?"

"Whichever."

"Helpful," Chuck said, and immediately wanted to take it back. Indeed, Sarah glared. Since there didn't seem to be anything he could say without getting his head bitten off, he chose to shrug and headed for the room farther back into the apartment. Like the rest of the apartment, it was bare of everything but the essential furniture: two single beds—he'd picked the kids' room—and a small chest of drawers. There was a crucifix on the wall; he gave that a wide berth as he looked around, peering out the room's small window to the town around it. There was even a bell tower outside his window, though the bell looked rusted and disused. Evening sunlight lit everything in faint gold, casting an ethereal glow over the world.

Even though he was tired and his face hurt, he set his backpack on the bed and headed back into the common room. "It's gorgeous out," he said, jerking his thumb at the window. "Want to go for a walk?"

"No," Sarah said.

Chuck drew up short. She was sitting on the couch, hunched forward and pinching the bridge of her nose between her forefinger and her thumb.

"Can I get you anything? Tylenol? You're starting to freak me out a little."

"I'm fine. Go take your walk."

"Are you s—"

"Chuck! Just—please, leave me alone. Okay?"

It was hard not to feel like a kicked puppy. He reminded himself that she was tired, that they were all stressed and jet-lagged, and it had been the twenty-four hours from hell. She didn't mean it. He still felt it like a punch to the gut, though.

"Yeah, sure," he said, his voice a little cooler than he expected. "Whatever you want." He headed for the door. "I've got my cell phone and my watch."

"Like that's going to do any good," Sarah said, without opening her eyes.

Chuck stopped in his tracks. "Yeah," he said, his mouth getting away from his brain, "like I asked to get abducted. Right."

He heard a sigh. "That was a low blow. I'm sorry. I didn't mean that. You should go on your walk. I'm not good company right now."

It was probably smarter just to go outside and leave her to herself. Unfortunately, he'd heard misery in her voice, and he had a lifetime of not being able to walk away from that behind him. So he turned around, slowly. "Sarah, without biting my head off—"

"Biting your head off?" Sarah asked, opening her eyes to give him an exasperated look. "Really?"

"That's precisely what I'm talking about." Chuck took a deep breath and decided to try a new tack. "Is this jetlag?"

"Biting your head off?" Sarah repeated.

He heard Robbie the Robot warning him of danger—a second too late, as it always went. "I'm making sure this is just travel fatigue and not something I did."

"Because my moods revolve around you?" Sarah's look turned incredulous. She rose to her feet, and Robbie beeped a little louder in Chuck's head. "Is that it? What does it even matter to you?"

"It matters because if I've done something wrong, I want to fix it. Are you mad at me, Sarah?"

"I can be in a bad mood without it being about you, Chuck."

"Okay," Chuck said, holding his hands up for peace.

The move proved futile, as it only made Sarah's scowl deepen. "Don't act like that," she said.

"Like what?"

"Like I'm going to jump down your throat and kill you. It's insulting."

Chuck wisely refrained from pointing out that she was doing a good impression of the very thing she claimed she wouldn't do, as he valued his limbs. Instead, he fixed what he hoped was a calm look on his face, burying the annoyance as best he could. "Sorry."

"And you can't fix everything, you know. That's not the way the world works."

"I can try. Sarah, seriously, what's bothering you? You can talk to me about anything, you know that. I'm your friend."

He meant the statement to be reassuring—they'd agreed to be friends, after all—but it had the opposite effect. Sarah's scowl blossomed into a full glare. She sat back on the couch and didn't look at him. "You should go," she said, and Chuck knew in that moment, he'd been completely dismissed like a peasant from the court.

Now completely confused, he had no choice but to head for the door. "If you change your mind, give me a call," he said.

There was no reply as he left.

12 JULY 2008
RIOMAGGIORE, ITALY
20:01 ITA

There wasn't too much to Riomaggiore, Chuck discovered. Sure, it was interesting wandering through the buildings, discovering little churches and gardens and other domestic scenes. The town was cut into the mountain in a V-shape, with green vineyards rising up on either side in terraces and mingling with groves of lemon trees. To the west, there was the sea, which was an impossible cerulean blue that the Pacific Ocean had never quite achieved. But other than the scenery and a few shops, there didn't seem to be much there.

With the sun beginning to set soon, Chuck decided to stop roaming along the coast at the bottom of the village and head upwards for a better vantage point. He felt oddly restless and alone, and wondered if he should go back and try to convince Sarah to come out and have dinner. No, it was better not to. She had looked exhausted, she'd probably be asleep by this point anyway. And she didn't seem to want his company at the moment, either way.

She was also a fully grown woman. If she was hungry, she could find her own damned dinner.

He shook his head as that thought flitted through his mind. Apparently her bad mood had infected him worse than he'd thought. It was understandable, given that the day before, he'd had to literally escape from the bad guys, his sister had been blown up, and he'd officially been listed as a casualty. One international flight and a botched mission later, it was no wonder he was in a bad mood. Adding Sarah's own bad mood, which leaked into his, into the mix didn't help.

Maybe he was finally learning to roll with the punches. It had been an incredibly rough...year? Not even, Chuck thought. Ten months since Bryce had sent him the Intersect. Not only had he gotten free of the bunker, he'd gone back and returned to the land of the living a second time. He found a set of stairs that led to the next level up and began to climb. He'd faced down the Director of the CIA, a man who literally held control of Chuck's life with a single phrase. With Gwen's help, he'd carved out a deal with the government to recoup some damages. He'd made plans to continue having a life after his term working for the NSA and CIA, hadn't he? Sure, the plans of moving to the mountains and being on his own again had secretly been giving him an ulcer, but he'd made them. Empirical data pointed to the fact that Chuck Bartowski had indeed learned to adapt.

So, why the hell did it feel so hollow?

Logically, he knew why. Physically, he was tired from all of the aforementioned awful crap that had happened to the Prometheus team in the past twenty four hours. Emotionally, he was a wreck, thanks to, as Ellie would say, a series of subliminal training programs that had hijacked the neural pathways to his amygdala to ensure that his emotions could be turned off like a switch. He'd gone from Chuck Bartowski, affirmed pacifist, to having killed at least three men. And now he was in an Italian paradise, presumed dead, with little but the clothes on his back anyway, and those had been a gift from Uncle Sam. He had no idea what the future held again. This time, the wounds seemed to cut so much more deeply, probably because once again, he'd allowed himself to hope and get excited about Dave's business idea.

Ellie was in the hospital, hurting, while he wandered through the Italian countryside. A terrorist group had blown up the Intersect. And all Chuck had was a cranky NSA agent for a partner, an even crankier CIA agent for a roommate, and a few newspaper clippings leading him to a man he wasn't sure he could trust.

The path opened out into a courtyard of some type, with an old stone church to his right. Chuck stopped to take a picture, mostly because the church had statues of what he had to assume were the apostles on pedestals halfway up the building. The giant arched doors were closed; otherwise, he might have wandered in, as he'd read somewhere that churches were always open in Europe. Maybe during the day sometime, as it looked like the team would be there for awhile.

With a shrug at that thought, he turned and continued west. Across the courtyard, he could see the building—painted white—labeled with a sign that said Il Castello. He really needed to get that dictionary, he thought. If Sarah were there, she would have known what it meant. The woman knew most every language on the planet.

He turned the corner around the Castello and abruptly wished that Sarah were there, for an entirely different reason.

The very beginnings of sunset streaked boldly across the sky, turning the water to a fiery hue in its wake. Pure colors dripped and melted into each other, far more perfect than any artist could ever capture on canvas. From where he stood by the Castello, he could see for miles into the water, with the sky turning a very faint blush of pink at the edges. Sunlight turned the mountains around him gold as they pushed out into the sea, and washed over the land. He could only think of one more beautiful sunrise or sunset he'd ever seen, and that had been at the Grand Canyon, while he'd shivered in the snow.

Sarah had shown up then. He'd needed her to show up. Just like, Chuck realized, he needed her right now. Maybe Casey had been right and he'd been subconsciously mad at her. Maybe they'd never work things out. What the hell did that matter? The night before, he might have died, just like he faced death on any mission. If he hadn't gotten away, he'd be a Chuck-colored stain on a government building wall. On the heels of that thought came perspective: he wasn't that stain. He was standing, watching the sunset, and above all, Sarah needed to see this, too.

He turned on his heel and headed for the apartment at a pace that was somewhere between a jog and a walk. She'd probably bite his head off, but he didn't care: she shouldn't miss the opportunity to see that sunset. Excited for the first time in twenty-four hours, he burst through the door. "Sarah! Hey, you here?"

There was no reply. Chuck frowned. "Sarah?" he called, since the living room was empty. The door to her bedroom was ajar; he pushed on it cautiously in case she'd gone to bed and had some kind of ninja move planned. The last time he'd woken her unexpectedly, after all, he'd ended up with a face-full of couch cushion. But the bedroom, with its double bed, was completely empty, though the sheets had been disturbed. There was a book on top of the covers.

That was different. He'd never once seen Sarah with a book. She usually preferred to read magazines. Chastising himself the entire time for curiosity—and knowing Sarah was probably going to kill him—Chuck edged into the room and picked up the book. The cover was faded. Spider-web lines of age cracked the spine and crawled along the cover. The title made him frown. "Poetry?" he asked aloud. "Really? That's..."

He didn't know what that was, but he did know that snooping on a spy was a bad idea, so he moved to put the book down. As he did so, something slipped out and fluttered to the ground at his feet.

Oh crap. He'd dropped her bookmark. Swearing under his breath, he bent to pick it up, and froze, his hand inches from the floor. She'd apparently been using a playing card to mark her place in the book.

And he recognized the pattern.