CHAPTER 5

She kind of broke into his car-well, the company car. They were chased by a black SUV which ruined the front of the Herder. They went backwards down stairs. People from the NSA were after him. The Herder was hit by the SUV. Sarah was almost run over until she knifed a button like some kind of super sexy ninja. And then she asked about Bryce Larkin and the e-mail he sent. Sarah was a CIA agent. One of the NSA guys made it up to the roof. Sarah pulled a gun on him. And then he turned and more flashes filled his head.

"They're gonna kill him," he realized, remembered, knew. It was like he suddenly knew a dozen pieces of information which lined up and fit together like a puzzle to paint exactly what would happen.

And Bryce died giving these secrets to him. Superman died, and unlike the comics Bryce wouldn't be coming back. But he was Batman, he knew things no one else did. IT told him the fastest path to the conference hall, but the intersect wasn't telling him how to disarm a bomb.

"Chuck is there anything else you remember about the bomb?" Sarah asked, turning from him to examine it as he stared at it.

Watching the numbers tick down he felt another flicker of recognition, only it wasn't the images Bryce sent him. It wasn't the Piranha. It was Chuck. Chuck had worked on this computer dozens of times. He practically had to rework them every few weeks whenever the malware from Jeff's weird porn sites built up.

"Porn!" Chuck exclaimed, earning odd looks from both agents as he sank to his knees in front of the computer.

The NSA agent, Casey, grabbed his hand to stop him. "That's not an Xbox and you're not an X-Man."

IF they weren't about to die Chuck would be insulted by the flagrant misuse of references. "I understand. This is a Prism Express laptop, okay? We sell this at our store. It has a DOS override." He looked to Sarah, who looked to Casey. "I think I can do this. I can do this. Please."

Sarah nodded. "He's our best shot."

With a glance to the bomb Casey released him. "Go!"

On instinct Chuck flexed his fingers, cracked his knuckles and got to work. This would be a breeze. "Mr. Bomb, meet Mr. Internet."

Upon seeing him bring up a search engine and type in Irene Demova Casey scoffed. "You're actually looking for porn?"

"Uhuh," Chuck said raising a hand in the agents face to shut him up while his other typed.

Sarah watched him hit enter and winced as dozens of windows appeared while a… rough looking Serbian woman moaned. "Food is sexy! Am I Sexy?"

Chuck barely heard anything even after he opened his eyes. His heart was pounding to get out of his chest. Suddenly he could almost feel the gun in his side again, smell the stale soda and nacho cheese in the air mixed with the copper scent of blood and Morgan's anti-dandruff shampoo.

He clamped his hands into fists to keep them from shaking. He was pushing back the memory, the feeling of blood pumping through his pants and staining his knees, the feeling of Morgan's hands sticking to his thanks to the blood. He barely realized he was outside again, and saw the agents arguing so made his way toward them.

"What do we do about his sister?" Sarah asked, ripping Chuck from the haze enveloping him.

"What about my sister?" He asked coming to a stop between them.

"Nothing," said Sarah, "we were just discuss-"

"No, no, no, hold on a second. You have to leave my family out of this."

Both agents looked to him as Casey offered a vague, "We'll see."

Chuck took a second to clamp down the maelstrom inside him, looking to Sarah. At least she just made him sad, not angry. "Look, Bryce sent that email to me. I'm the one remembering your secrets, which means you have to listen to me. Both of you." He looked between them deciding, "And right now… I'm gonna go home."

When he turned to leave Casey grabbed his sleeve. "No you're not. Uhuh."

Chuck pulled his arm free. Pointing at Casey before waving his finger between them. "You? You need me." With a slight scoff toward the bulky agent he turned and left. Not that he could do much or go far, but he walked for a while until he got to the beach and sat on the shore listening to the waves crash ahead of him.

Part of him wanted to laugh. It was almost funny. He'd actually felt so good, and just like that day he lost his one true friend, his best day turned into his worst. Maybe that was part of the curse. Or maybe it was just science. Not even anything complex, just good old fashioned what comes up must come down, only with the extra Bartowski kick of making sure it goes down worse than it went up.

He could try to tell himself at least he wasn't wrong these last few years, he really was a loser. It just turned out he was an idiot also. The naive, colossal kind too. The kind who let himself think he could ever get a girl like Sarah. That he could be happy.

If he was half as smart as he liked to think he was at times then he would have recognized that a woman like Sarah would never be interested in a guy like him. She didn't overlook or not mind that he worked at the Buy More or drove a Herder, she just didn't care. He could have showed up in a garbage bag driving around a moped and she would have gone along with it.

But then he remembered those moments… The ones he was sure he saw more. He'd assumed it was seeing through that business woman front, but now it felt like he was seeing through the mask of the agent. The way she laughed, the way she looked at him when she said she liked him, those were real, weren't they? God he'd give just about anything to know they were real, but she was a CIA agent.

And she was Bryce Larkin's partner. Did CIA agents even have partners? With a bitter laugh he thought that undoubtedly Bryce had been the perfect agent. An engineer, track star and gymnast? It almost seemed obvious. If he'd gone through with the criminology classes they joked about it might have been. Of course Bryce Larkin would be partnered with a girl like Sarah. He always got the best girls… Though that didn't mean he got her, right? They were just partners…

Did Bryce just hate him? It took a special kind of hate to get someone kicked out of their dream school, steal their girlfriend, and top it off by basically forcing them to become some kind of living government computer. He didn't just put Chuck in danger, he put Ellie in danger. Hell, he put the world in danger. What if Chuck wasn't able to see the images or it fried his brain? Did he shit in Bryce's cereal or something? Was he going to find out Bryce had always been the reason his mom left and he'd been sleeping with her too?

Or maybe he'd come along and sleep with Ellie to break her up with Devon and make both Bartowskis miserable. Chuck would rip his fucking throat out if he ever went near her. She deserved at least someone as good as Devon, and Chuck wasn't sure there was a better guy. He'd definitely never met one. The only one he'd thought might be had fucked his girlfriend and framed him and sent him government secrets that almost got him blown up by a bomb he only disabled because it was attached to a crappy computer he knew because a coworker at his shit job was too stupid to use a virtual machine.

These people weren't going away either, which meant his time as Piranha was basically done. He couldn't continue his search for Orion or the G-Man with them around. Now if they found his laptop he wasn't just going to jail, he was going to some hole in the ground where they would probably go all Clockwork Orange and torture their secrets out of him before throwing him in a river with an extra hole in his head.

The one good thing in his life was gone, again because of Bryce. He was never Batman, he couldn't even be Robin. He wasn't even sure there was anyone as low as him. If typing was martial arts he'd be Dan Hibiki being put down by Ryu. He'd be happy to be Ken, but Bryce was definitely the ever winning Ryu, and Chuck might as well go out, get a pink gi and start handing people his autograph.

He spent the night there, his mind aflood with thoughts as the sea crashed at his feet and the sun broke the horizon. It was no surprise that they had followed him, though he was relieved it was Sarah who finally approached him as morning came.

When she sat beside him he asked, "There's nowhere I can run, is there?" Even if the Piranha could, Chuck Bartowski couldn't. He couldn't abandoned Ellie, not even for this.

"Not from us," Sarah answered, watching him look back out to the waves. "Talk to me, Chuck."

"Yesterday I was making eleven bucks an hour fixing computers," he said not quite looking at her. "Now I have one in my brain and I can't figure out why Bryce did this. Why he chose me." He finally looked at her after asking, "What are you going to do with me? What happens now?"

"For now you go back to your own life. We'll protect you and you'll work with us."

He looked to her and met her eyes. If he had to lose the Piranha then maybe working with them would be enough good. "My sister, Devon, are they in danger?"

"Tell them nothing to keep them safe." Both looked back out to the sea. After a moment she looked to Chuck. "I need you to do one more thing for me."

"Yeah?" His voice felt hollow in his ears. Defeated.

"Trust me, Chuck."

When he turned to her his lip was pulled to the side in a barely there smile which she met before leaning over, bouncing off his side as they turned back to the sea.

They stayed there for a bit more, sat in silence together until it was broken by others and they got up and made their way back to Ellie's. The moment he was through the door Ellie was coming out of her room talking about how worried she was but Chuck didn't care, he just hugged her. She could be angry at him, but he needed his rock. Of course spotting the hug, Devon added himself in, but Chuck didn't mind at all. He didn't have much, and now it felt like he had even less, but he still had them. For now.

AN:

I freely admit I considered having a bunch of fake Bryces come back from the dead to lay into the Superman analogy. Just the idea of a fake Bryce with those big Eradicator Superman glasses amuses me.

The Dan Hibiki reference is further explained in a later chapter if it wasn't obvious enough or people don't feel like looking it up.

Main reason I separated this from previous chapter was to divide the uphill and downhill sections of the date. Hopefully people don't mind. Chapter lengths are kind of random.

I'm trying to save fucks in this section of the story for stuff dealing with Bryce to show his anger about him and more specifically here how aggressive his protectiveness can be. It's a change that cascades further in the story.