A/N: DC here. We've had a lot of questions so let me try and answer some of them here. 1. Why not a joint account? Well, SC has done that and you lose a lot of followers that way. Plus she invited me along for this crazy ride and she has been here since the beginning, so it made the most sense to use SC's account. 2. Are we switching chapters? Hell we jump in the middle of sentences sometimes. And we discuss EVERYTHING. I mean EVERYTHING. 3. Are we sticking to canon? Wellllll kinda...but we have the caveat of adding scenes, eps, taking eps out, rearranging (Whaaaaaa?) Look, here's the best I can tell you. We have a plan...we also are known to go rogue and do whatever hits our fancy, whenever. We have already made subtle changes but they will affect the long run. This is how we look at it: we have a template, but we can freestyle with the best of them. 4. Will there be angst? Shall we side-eye them, SC? This will not be MY (DC) normal, off they go, everything is okay, and they'll live happily ever after. This is us doing a TV show. The way WE would. There will be drama, conflict, jealousy, and even misunderstandings, and possibly breakups. BUT I don't think anyone will lose their mind with our ideas. All that being said….trust us. Have we ever given you anything but Charah? Either of us? Seriously, THANK YOU for reading. THANK YOU SC for having me along. This is FUN. More fun than should be allowed by law, and I'm just as much along for the ride as you guys.

Disclaimer: We don't own CHUCK, we don't own the CHUCK characters, and we're making no money off of this, but maybe send help because we're having way too much fun and this is dangerous.

To say it had been a weird morning was an understatement. Chuck had woken up on the ground, Morgan looking down at him, weird visions swimming around Morgan's head. He wondered if Morgan had spiked the drinks last night...Spoiler alert, he had. Of course he had. Chuck's head had felt...full. It wasn't uncomfortable it was just….well...full. But that wasn't where the weirdness stopped. He was in the shower when a traffic report on the radio made images flash through his head. He hadn't felt something like that in a long time, not since he was a young boy, and that was disconcerting as well. He quickly realized what the images meant, which was weird. Really weird. He felt so weird he had Morgan drive. Chuck made sure to warn him to skip the 5 because the police were in phased deployment….that's what the pictures he had seen while listening to the radio had told him, and obviously that was something...what, he wasn't sure, but something.

He had gathered all the nerds (Anna, Jeff and Lester) to warn them of the day's incoming disaster...Because it was the Buy More, and disasters were a daily thing. Today's specialty: the Irene Demova virus. He showed the herders the virus, after warning Anna not to look, not that she listened, because, well, she was Anna. Lonely guy call volume would be high on this one, and the smirk on her face made him realize that might be sexist. He was ending the meeting when he heard one of the TVs that Morgan was showing to a customer. Chuck turned toward it, seeing a newscast.

"... to arrive in Los Angeles later today to deliver a speech before the Pacific Security League tomorrow evening…" Chuck began to concentrate on the man walking in the picture. He felt something in his head similar to earlier this morning. "... the general has drawn fire for his criticism. General Stanfield, the former allied commander of nato…" The flashes in his head began again. They were nonsense really, but at the same time they weren't. The random pictures meant….something...information that pooled into his brain and allowed Chuck to come to a conclusion.

"He's already here. He landed last night," he blurted out.

Anna leaned in toward him. "Who's already here, Chuckles?"

Chuck was confused. He knew he had just said "he landed last night," but Chuck wasn't sure what it all meant. "I don't know," he answered. Anyone else, it would have concerned. The nerd herd gang...it didn't even phase them.

}o{

After embassies, mansions, dark hotel rooms in the rain, and the interior of multiple planes, there was something strangely...comforting...about walking across a packed parking lot in the middle of the day in Southern California. And towards such a ridiculously large, monstrosity of a building with BUY MORE printed in ugly green and yellow letters.

It was so normal, walking into a corporate electronics store like this, as though she was merely looking for a new television. And part of her wondered if there were other paths she could've taken in her life that would've made that silly little image the truth. Going into a Buy More to buy a new TV.

That was never going to happen. And frankly, she thought she'd never really want that life for herself. Not now. She wouldn't even know how to handle something like that, unless it was part of a cover.

Like now, she thought to herself, stepping through the automatic doors and stopping just inside. She saw a man in a green polo in the corner of the store, struggling under the weight of half of a fifty-inch TV, his coworker walking too fast for him. As she glanced in the other direction, a mother and her son were buying some electronic book reader thing for kids at the cash registers. And then she finally looked right down the middle aisle.

She recognized him from his picture immediately, standing there under the massive Nerd Herd sign, behind the round desk, a phone smashed between his ear and his shoulder.

Agent Walker smirked. God, this was going to be so easy. Such a quick and easy mission. By tomorrow or the next day, it'd be over. And she could focus again on what was really important. Whether or not she'd be back to the CIA after that "vacation".

Pushing that out of her head so that she could actually focus on the assignment at hand, she walked towards the desk, not taking her eyes off of her mark for even a moment. It took a few seconds for her to actually arrive at the desk, and in that time she picked out a few things: His hair was messier than it had been in his dossier photo. He was lankier than she'd imagined him, in spite of his six foot four height printed in the file. He had a softness in the way he held himself, and she could even see a vulnerability and lack of confidence in the very slight slump to his shoulders. She'd feel worse for him if she wasn't so eager to exploit that to learn whatever she could, as fast as she could, and rush back out of this city like she'd never been here in the first place.

But then his friend must have caught sight of her, even as Charles himself was focused on the file he held in his hands, or maybe whatever hold music was playing over the phone. The short man with the bad hair and the beard said something about a Vicki Vale person, which was...strange. But she was unfazed as she closed the rest of the distance and stopped right in front of her mark.

"Vicki Vaaaale, vuh-vick vuh-Vicki Vaaale! Vickety-vickety Vicki Vaaale vuh-vick-" He moved the files in his hands and opened the one that had been on the bottom, smirking at his own antics, and then he glanced up and looked right into her eyes, before lowering his gaze to the contents of the file again. He did a cartoonish double-take and the phone fell from where he'd trapped it against his ear, the file plopping down on the desk, and he put his hands on his hips in an inherent and seemingly unconscious attempt to play it cool.

It was almost...funny.

"I hope I'm not interrupting," she said, unable to keep the amusement from her voice, the smile on her face a lot more natural than she'd planned for it to be.

"No. Not at...all." He glanced to his friend, his chest puffed out a little. And she couldn't help noticing that he wasn't taking his eyes away from hers. Not even for a moment. Not even to let them wander down the rest of her. It was interesting, to say the least. "That is...that's from Batman," he rushed out, playing with his tie a little as he glanced at his coworker. His coworker who seemed like he was looking at the rest of her.

"Oh, right. 'Cause...that makes it better," she said, wondering why in the hell he felt the need to even tell her that.

He let out a nervous laugh, but before she could take in a bit more of him, his coworker cut in, like most men usually did when their friends were...struggling, to put it nicely.

Then again, was he struggling? Really? She couldn't really tell, and maybe she was being a bit hard on him. And maybe she shouldn't be thinking like that because a rogue agent had sent this man some incredibly sensitive government intel he absolutely shouldn't have-especially considering what she'd witnessed in this place where he worked so far.

"Hi. Hey. I'm Morgan." Then he gestured with a flick of his head to her mark. "This is Chuck."

She decided to play a game, test him out a bit. And she found herself wanting to put a bit of a flirty edge to her voice as she teased them. "Wow, I didn't think people still named their kids Chuck...or, uh, Morgan, for that matter," she added as an afterthought. She didn't want Chuck to know she was gunning for him in particular, after all.

But he looked amused, seeming to have settled into himself after the shock of her appearing at his desk out of the blue. She was almost impressed by how easily he'd done it. And by how quickly he threw her teasing back at her.

"My parents are sadists. And carnival freaks found him in a dumpster…"

"But they raised me as one of their own." She switched her gaze over to Morgan and he seemed to almost cave in on himself in embarrassment, finishing it with a weak, "So…"

"How can I help you...?" Chuck interrupted.

"Sarah."

"Sarah?" he finished. She could tell he had a certain amount of social awareness, moving things along like this, and she thought maybe he was at least somewhat professional, though his nametag said he was the Nerd Herd supervisor, so maybe he had to be the responsible one. His friend didn't quite seem the type.

"I'm here about this," she said, putting a cellphone she'd bought in a Radioshack down the road on her way here down on the desk between them. An analyst had told her which phone to buy-the Intellicell had some problem she hadn't paid much attention to when she was told about it. All that mattered was that it was a legitimate issue, and if this Chuck Bartowski guy was good enough to be the supervisor of this desk, he would be able to tell if she brought a cell to him with a fake issue.

She'd taken the back off, along with the battery, and she set those down, too.

"Intellicell! Yeah! Absolutely," he said, and she heard a sudden bout of confidence in his voice. And he picked it up, slipping the battery back in its place as though he'd done it tens of thousands of times before. "Uh, this model has a little screw that pops loose…"

He produced a small screwdriver and began to fix the phone, explaining as he went. And when he stuck the back of her phone between his lips as he worked, such a completely unnecessary thing for him to do, it was… Well, it made her smile, and she didn't know why. Maybe it was the way his voice sounded when he talked around the back of her phone. Or maybe it was the fact that she'd been standing here for about two minutes and had even semi-flirted and teased him, and he had yet to hit on her, or even look at her in the wrong way. And she was almost surprised by that. Not because she expected a constant barrage of men hitting on her all the time, but because he fit the bill of a guy who...might.

Then again, there had been that slump to his shoulders she'd spotted right in the beginning. Was it a lack of self-esteem? Or was he just...a decent guy?

Either way, as he grabbed the piece of her phone out of his mouth and popped it right back into place with a quick, almost sweet, "Good as new. No problem," she found this all very...unexpected. Not that she'd lost control of this situation. Not by a long shot. But he was...different than she'd thought he'd be. Already.

"Wow!" she exclaimed with an impressed look at Morgan first, then back up at him. "You geeks are good."

"Nerds!" he said after a bit of a loaded pause. His friend backed him up as he tried to correct her politely, explain to why nerd was the preferential term, both men rambling a bit as she pressed her lips together and smiled at Chuck in amusement.

She wasn't ready to make any judgment on whether or not he was actively helping Bryce, because there was an awareness and intelligence in his eyes that no one else in this building had. And she wasn't sure if it was just self-awareness, or if he was perhaps sharing a joke with her as their eyes met.

"E-Excuse me! Excuse me!" A man ran to the desk, out of breath, holding the hand of a young girl dressed as a ballerina, stress all over his face and confused concern on hers. "I-I don't know what I did wrong," he breathed as he thrust a digital video camera out towards the Nerd Herd supervisor. She shifted to the side a bit to watch. "I shot the entire recital and now it won't play back."

Chuck blinked, probably at the suddenness of the man's arrival, or the desperate panic in him. And then he glanced down at the daughter. "O...kay. Okay." His smile was inherently warm and reassuring towards her. "We'll just take a look-" He opened it up and immediately furrowed his brow with, "You don't have a tape...in here."

"But...it's digital," the dad said quietly.

"Ohhhhh, boy," Morgan said derisively, and yet there was no judgment or rudeness from Chuck, she noticed. His tone didn't change; he was still just perplexed, and maybe he was wincing a little for this poor man.

"Right. Yes. But you still need digital tape."

The anguish that came over the dad's face was palpable, but worse than that was the way the little ballerina dropped her gaze and frowned. "Ohh. Ohhh no. Her mom is gonna kill me. I mean, my wife was-Oh no. The whole thing…"

Chuck looked down at the ballerina again, at her disappointment, then back up at the dad...And then he turned and looked right at her. She saw so much in his face in that moment, but she didn't know what it was until he snapped out a determined, "Morgan...I need the wall."

Morgan dashed off and Chuck turned to look at her again. "I'm so sorry," he said, genuine regret on his face. That had been what was in his face. He was deciding: should he stay and continue talking to this woman who was pretty and flirting with him, or help this clueless father and his small ballerina? He'd made his choice as he told the dad and little girl to follow him.

And Agent Walker was almost gobsmacked as she watched him scurry after his friend towards the wall of televisions in the back of the store. Not just because of the choice he made, but how quick he was at problem solving. He'd just left her here at the desk, too, and instead of being offended, she was almost… Well, something was stirring in her chest. Something she didn't recognize, and she decided not to think too hard on it, instead moving a bit closer to watch Chuck orchestrate everything with a few other Nerd Herders and Morgan as the dad and daughter stood off to the side in confusion.

He asked the dad if he knew what song she'd danced to, and when he answered, Chuck snapped his fingers and pointed towards the CDs section of the store. A Buy More salesperson sprinted past her to go find it as Chuck and another employee set up the tripod, put digital tape in the camera, and angled it at the wall of TVs. They connected wires, cleared the space to make something of a stage, and Chuck slid the CD into a nearby stereo system.

Sarah snuck in a bit closer once Chuck invited the ballerina to her stage, a flourish in the way he moved, a grin on his face. "It's show time." Then he stood to his full height, turning towards the little audience of shoppers who had gathered. "Quiet in the audience, please," he chirped in an official but teasing tone, and he clapped twice, then moved out of the way of the camera.

It was quiet, but the ballerina looked uneasy suddenly, her eyes darting to and fro, and Sarah recognized stage fright in the queasy look on her poor face. Her dad just stood off to the side, ready for the Buy More employees, and Chuck in particular, to save his ass, ready to get the show on the road so he'd have at least something to show his wife, so that he didn't end up in the dog house.

But then Chuck hurried to her side and immediately knelt down to her height, a warm smile on his face. "Ready?" She shifted even closer to hear as the girl directed the queasy look at him. "What's wrong?"

Oh, no. The tone he'd used immediately made something churn in her stomach, something warm and...oh, no.

"I'm usually in the back row," she said with a pained look on her face.

"Why?" he asked, genuinely confused, concern in his face. It wasn't an act. She could tell none of this was an act. He was just...like this. And...oh, no.

"I'm too tall," the ballerina explained. "I block the other ballerinas."

Sarah leaned to the side a bit to see and hear better as he lowered his voice. "Can I tell ya a secret? But you can't tell the other girls." She nodded, already looking like she was feeling a bit better just by having someone at her level, speaking to her kindly. "Real ballerinas are tall."

The way she smiled like that had just changed everything, filled her with the confidence... She saw right in front of her eyes, as Chuck put his hand on her back and grinned at her, one tall person sharing a moment with another, as this ballerina accepted her height that probably made her stick out like a sore thumb on stage, or even on the playground at school. She even looked a bit excited and proud.

As someone who'd spent her youth almost a head taller than even the boys, sitting by herself on one of the swings until someone kicked her off, and even in middle school and high school, when she'd hit an extra growth spurt before most of her male classmates had...Agent Walker felt something inside of her open up. That was the only way she could describe it. And it was terrifying. It was bad. She felt exposed.

But she couldn't go anywhere. She had to stay here and see the culmination of the Buy More employees' work to help this man and his daughter.

The television screens behind her filled with her image as she got into starting position and Chuck pointed over at his coworker near the CD player. Then he glanced at his other coworker behind the camera and she made the okay sign with her fingers.

As the music started, the ballerina put on quite a show for everyone who'd gathered to watch, confidence in the way she moved, a smile breaking out on her face. Sarah thought maybe Chuck had glanced back at her in her peripheral, and she swept her gaze over to meet his, tilting her head, her smile widening, before she went back to watching the ballerina. And it wasn't until she felt him look away that she looked back.

He was giving the dad a reassuring look as a coworker pat the guy on the back. And she found it interesting, strange, that these genuinely weird individuals were doing this, coming together to help a little girl and her dad.

But then the performance was over and everyone clapped enthusiastically. As the dad moved to make sure it had all been recorded, Sarah saw the ballerina look to Chuck for approval and he clapped even harder for her, his entire face lit by a grin that wrinkled his nose and the corners of his eyes.

Sarah moved back to the desk slowly, watching as everyone started clearing up the place, moving things back to where they were supposed to be. And then she spotted Chuck turning to glance at her, seeing she was still there and smiling a little, making his way back towards the desk.

She didn't have to try hard to smile back at him, leaning her elbow on the desk and waiting.

And then a coworker who hadn't been a part of the effort, she noticed, swept in front of him, stopping him.

It was the perfect out. She needed to get out of here, away from this situation. She shook herself a bit and pulled one of the Nerd Herd cards from the holder, writing the number of her burn phone down, leaving it on the desk, and hurrying away.

After what she'd just seen, and how Chuck's actions and behavior, the almost heroic gesture he'd made for people he didn't even know, and most importantly, how intense her own response had been, she couldn't talk with him again. Not until she could regroup.

Because Chuck Bartowski had taken her by surprise. In just five minutes, he'd knocked her back on her ass. And maybe this wouldn't be as easy as she'd thought.

A/N: Thanks for reading! Let us know what you think and leave us a review!

-SC and DC