A/N: Hello again. All of Tom Sawyer in one chapter. Minimal but important interactions between Chuck and Sarah in this episode. A few bits to tidy. We are led to believe that Ellie's discussion with Sarah prompts the appeal to Stanford for Chuck's degree. However, this episode transpires over the course of 48 hours, two jam-packed days. How did she get a diploma that fast? I studied that screenshot. The date is written out longhand-June 15, 2008. Backdated but it would have made more sense, rather than in the middle of October. And also would explain the delay in shipping.

A/N: Had a guest comment, wondering why the rating. The early chapters for one...and trust me, it heats up once I'm into Season 3. The show was tame, so just not much M going on. Now anyway. Thanks for reading.

I never anticipated how facing my past the way I did would affect me. I thought I had done a fair enough job of leaving all that behind–but I hadn't. Heather Chandler and Dick Duffy had brought it all back…those feelings of sticking out, not belonging. How everything that happened while my father and I were in San Diego set me on the collision course with the CIA. Chuck had done his best, after initially making it worse, to make it better, by telling me he thought those feelings of me sticking out and not belonging were normal.

In a very generic way, they were. But why…and what happened afterwards…Chuck couldn't understand. I didn't want him to be able to understand, if I was being honest with myself. My mystery kept me safe, protected me from his scrutiny…and my need to keep things professional between us. Or at least, as professional as it could be, at the current level of cover dating status, in October of 2008.

Knowing that Chuck knew, the little bit that he had found out, had the strangest effect on me. He never brought it up, never mentioned anything again after that time in my room with the cheeseburger, but it was still there, like static in the background, whenever we were together. Not the annoying kind of static, that crackles when you are trying to assimilate important information; more like the white noise static, the kind that can lull you to sleep in the dark when the sounds of the world won't let you sleep. It was a form of comfort, that Chuck knew more than anyone else. I wished it could have been more, everything, but I was still too afraid here, both for my own heart as well as his status as my asset.

Four days after we shared that cheeseburger in my room, Beckman let us know there was another mission. The NSA had gotten word that a French terrorist was on U.S. soil, in the French Embassy in Los Angeles, posing as a diplomat who had gone missing two months before. Beckman's plan was to send Chuck into the Embassy during a meet and greet for the newest round of attaches. Her hopes were that Chuck would flash, either to rout out the terrorist or to find out more information about the other man's disappearance.

It was becoming standard procedure, sending Chuck on missions, straight into harm's way. I commented on this fact, trying to sound neutral, reminding her that our first priority was protecting Chuck, and protecting him was more difficult if he was constantly going on missions where he needed protection. She was short with me, as usual, telling me that was what Casey and I were there for, and furthermore, protecting Chuck without utilizing the full potential of the Intersect was a danger to national security. The greater good again. I bit my lip and yes-ed her, wondering where the gray line was, whose good she was referring to.

It wasn't Chuck's, and it wasn't mine.

The mission went off without a hitch, surprisingly. Chuck went into the reception in disguise, with me posing as his date, and Casey running surveillance in a spy van. After only about 30 minutes, Chuck flashed. His flash confirmed what Beckman had been suspecting–that the person posing as the missing diplomat was in fact the terrorist in question. We were only supposed to be doing reconnaissance, not moving on the target. However, Casey thought we should just move now, afraid we would lose track of him, having no way to follow him when he left the reception.

That left Chuck and I to make small talk while Casey called in tactical. Chuck couldn't do a French accent to save his soul, so I told him to let me do the talking. I spoke French fluently, and I was skilled enough to speak English with a French accent, so I blended in. I was better at flirting than I was making small talk–that was Chuck's department. Chuck would whisper a word or a phrase when no one was looking and I could expound on the conversation that way. It was fantastic teamwork, better than even Bryce and I had been when we were in the field together. I told myself it was because I did my job well, even though I was deceiving myself, afraid to admit it was because we knew each other so well.

Casey and the tactical unit eventually took the terrorist down after I had signaled to Casey that we were out of harm's way. The entire operation was seamless, without a hitch. It did, however, take all night to wrap everything up with paperwork and statements. Chuck was stuck at the embassy with us until almost four in the morning. He had a morning shift at the Buy More, and I tried my best, but he still was looking at only a few hours sleep.

"It's ok," he told me. "It makes me feel like I'm in college again," he joked. "The good part, anyway."

He hadn't brought it up in a while, not since the incident with Bryce returning, but I knew there was some unresolved tension from the past with Chuck and Stanford. Going back there had helped some of those feelings, definitely finding out the reason why he was framed for cheating. But the unfairness of it was still haunting him, dragging him down, keeping him from moving on. Those words just reminded me again.

I also had an early shift at the Orange Orange, but we opened at 10:30, not 9:00, like the Buy More. I got a little more sleep than Chuck and Casey, but not much more. I was still feeling the lack of sleep the next day. While I was working, Chuck had flashed on a terrorist he saw lurking around in the Buy More. One who, strangely enough, was looking for Jeff Barnes, one of Chuck's direct reports in the Nerd Herd, the oldest and most hopeless. A washed out alcoholic, sometimes drug user, who worked at the Buy More because a place like Buy More was the only place he could work with the work ethic he possessed, which was naught.

Like I've mentioned before, Chuck has this uncanny knack for seeing inside of people, seeing the best of what is inside and pulling it out. He did this with everyone we know–Morgan, Casey, Big Mike, General Beckman, and even Jeff Barnes. Jeff's potential remained mostly untapped, but once his, uh, cognitive issues were diagnosed by my brother-in-law, Jeff was able to figure out the Omen Virus, no less, this complexly coded virus that could wipe out all of the computers in the world if let loose. More on that later, but suffice it to say here, Jeff seemed hopeless at this point, but no one in Chuck's circle ever stayed hopeless. When I say Chuck is a gift, I mean it. To everyone who knows him. But I digress.

Casey called it in, and I was called to Castle for the briefing. Beckman talked to Casey and me before we called Chuck. She wanted Chuck to exploit his working relationship with Jeff and approach him socially, so we could find out what was going on. Chuck and Jeff weren't friends, just co-workers, but Chuck had supervised Jeff for almost five years at this point. It felt awkward to ask Chuck to do that, but we didn't have a choice.

While we were in the middle of the conference, I saw Ellie on the monitor, walking into the Orange Orange, apparently looking for me. I left to go meet Ellie, wondering why she was there and looking for me specifically.

She wanted to talk to me…without Chuck.

I tried to sound calm, but it made me nervous. I knew we were on the surveillance camera and Casey and Chuck were still in Castle, potentially listening. Casey did shut it off, but I only found that fact out later. Ellie didn't want Chuck to know she was talking to me behind his back. I smiled and told her her secret was safe–a lie, of course, since Chuck already knew.

Ellie asked me if Chuck had any plans.

In retrospect, I know what she meant. Big plans, big picture plans, like his five year plan or whatever. Where his life was going kind of plans. Turns out our late night mission, and more importantly, the excuse Chuck had to give Ellie as to where he was, had started her worrying.

I let it go over my head, telling her he had plans with Jeff, like it was no big deal.

I felt scolded when she replied, very sternly, that she and I needed to have a talk.

I had dealt with Big Sister Ellie before, but I had never been on the disapproving end of that before this moment. Ellie believed that I had been a positive influence on Chuck and his life. What she didn't know could fill volumes. In a roundabout way, maybe she was right, but never in the way that she understood it. Chuck's spy life had built that confidence in him that she could see. Why she thought it could have been me, I can guess, but it's ridiculous. According to my cover story, I had moved to L.A. from D.C. to work first in a hot dog restaurant and then in a yogurt shop. On paper, I looked only slightly better than Chuck…because I had my own place.

What she had actually seen, what I had worked very hard to ignore, was the change in Chuck brought about by his feelings for me. He wanted a life with me, and was making adjustments all along to make it a reality, as impossible as it seemed sometimes.

I had unintentionally made the whole thing with Ellie worse, but I only suspected it here. I would find out later how serious it all really was.

So Chuck made plans to hang out with Jeff at the Buy More, with Casey on surveillance in Castle, while I went to have a talk with Ellie. I purposely didn't tell Chuck about Ellie, because I wanted to not make him any more uncomfortable talking to Jeff than he already was, and also because I wanted to keep the promise I made to Ellie that Chuck not know. My role in that discussion with Ellie was to get her to back off, however possible.

Like I have stated before, once I understood the complex nature of Chuck and Ellie's relationship, I was much more forgiving of the way they were with each other. It was why I could tolerate the way Ellie spoke to me that night, when a huge part of me wanted to get angry and tell her to just mind her own business, that she wasn't Chuck's mother. She seemed overly meddlesome to me this time; I'm not sure why. Maybe because she had seen signs of things going in the right direction and then falling back again, though that was Fulcrum's fault and not Chuck's. She just didn't know that.

Getting angry at Ellie would have been the worst thing I could have done. Driving a wedge between Chuck and his sister was the last thing I ever wanted to do, mostly because without Ellie's support, everything with Chuck got all that much more difficult. I couldn't squander the trust she had in me, however misinformed and misdirected it actually was.

We were chatting over glasses of wine. Ellie started by saying she thought something was up with Chuck. I was instantly concerned, thinking that Ellie might have come across something that could implicate Chuck in his spy life, something that couldn't be explained away, like his shoebox full of fake passports. Ellie finding out Chuck was a spy at this point would have meant Chuck in a bunker and the rest of his family and friends WITSEC'd. Epic failure that I couldn't allow to happen.

I asked her what she meant. She started talking about how Chuck seemed to be slipping back into what she called "old Chuck mode." No confidence, no direction. How he had been on the day I met him. I knew that, but I never really heard it phrased that way. The Chuck I was with on our fake first date had shown signs of those traits, but he had also run into a building with a bomb inside with the hopes of defusing it. At his worst, at least according to Ellie, he was still heroic. It made me so angry that because of all of the secrets, Ellie couldn't see that.

During that conversation, Ellie told me that Chuck was only 12 credits shy of graduating from Stanford. It made sense, logically, since Bryce had framed him for cheating on his midterms, in March of 2003, what would have been his senior year. He was expelled and never received credit for the four courses he was enrolled in during his last semester. Hearing it the way she phrased it made it seem worse to me, more tragic, Bryce's actions more damning somehow.

Bryce was protecting Chuck. There was no malice in his actions at Stanford, perhaps just a bit of misplaced arrogance, in appointing himself Chuck's savior. Bryce was, even if he never knew it. I know if Bryce hadn't done what he did, Chuck would have been a casualty of the Omaha Project, perhaps even by my hand. But to be so close to finishing and have it snatched away…no wonder Chuck had wallowed in self-pity for such a long time.

I was still irritated with Ellie. She was his sister. Even here, in 2008, she knew him better than anyone on earth. Could she not understand what a complete wreck Bryce had made of Chuck's life? Ellie had to know Chuck hadn't cheated, that he was wrongly accused, suffering unjustly. I have to remember, Ellie wasn't just his sister; she was his substitute mother and had been since he was nine. Then, and now, she was acting as his mother. Trying to pull him out of his funk, making him face reality without dwelling on the past.

I understand it better now that I have my own children. You so desperately want to fix things for them, but a good mother can't do that. A good mother is raising a child to be an adult, one that has to cope with the world as it is, unfair and cruel as it can be sometimes. That was what Ellie was trying to do, even here, when Chuck was 27 years old.

I was in the middle of telling Ellie what a mature and responsible guy I thought Chuck was…when Chuck showed up with Jeff, passed out, slung over his shoulder. Chuck proceeded to dump Jeff on Ellie's sofa. Jeff woke up enough to tell Chuck he wanted a "crack" at me.

Ellie was outright disgusted, and was soon exasperated with Chuck. To save face, I sort of had to play along with Ellie, which killed me to do, because I knew I was making it worse. I let my overall disgust with Jeff show, then translated it so it appeared to encompass Chuck and his actions as well.

Ellie started arguing with Chuck about why he brought Jeff back to their apartment. Chuck argued back about it not being safe for Jeff to drive, which was a legitimate argument. Ellie countered, asking why Chuck hadn't taken Jeff back to his own place. The truth made sense to me, that they had run from a terrorist with Casey, but again, the truth was not for public consumption, so Chuck looked like a high school boy letting his drunk friend crash in his sister's apartment. Ellie was livid.

I excused myself, embarrassed to seem proven so wrong at what I'd tried to tell Ellie. Chuck looked confused, mouthing to me…"What are you doing here?"...before I gave him a quick peck on the cheek without an explanation.

Ellie had stormed off, so I called Chuck from my car and explained what happened, telling him Ellie had invited me over. That was when he explained what happened, why he ended up taking Jeff back with him, so Casey could keep an eye out overnight until they could figure out why Farrokh was back at the Buy More once again. Chuck was upset, fretting about what a loser his sister thought he was, and he couldn't tell her anything to set her straight. I felt awful, telling him pretty much the same thing. I wished I could tell Ellie the truth, just so she would stop telling me how disappointed in Chuck she was.

What I wouldn't have given to be able to tell her…how amazing he was. More than she even thought or knew. Sadly, I wouldn't get that opportunity for another two years.

I just advised him to smooth things over the best he could, and I assured him I had done as much of that as I could while I was there as well.

When I got to the Orange Orange the next day, Casey called first thing and told me to go get Chuck, as Beckman had notified him they had more intel. When I entered the Buy More, Chuck was talking to Jeff.

I very thinly veiled my contempt for Jeff when I pulled Chuck away. What can I say? Ellie wasn't that far off. Creepy…just not a serial killer.

I told Chuck we had to talk and his first response was that he already knew…Ellie thought he was an idiot. I hadn't elaborated that far on the phone the night before, so apparently Ellie must have laid into him again before he left that morning. It was then that I started thinking about what I could do to fix that, independent of the mission as it was unfolding. I had some research to do, but I committed to getting it done.

After Chuck had informed Casey about the flash he'd had about Morimoto, Casey had started digging. Apparently, the video game designer had also worked with the Japanese military to create a weapons satellite, in 1980, but the equipment was still in orbit, albeit dormant. Farrokh had been spotted outside Morimoto's office at Atari Headquarters. How Jeff fit in, we didn't know, but we needed to find out. That involved infiltrating Atari Headquarters.

Chuck actually came up with the plan on his own. A computer virus attack…that the Nerd Herd could conveniently respond to, and Chuck and Casey could get in. Chuck volunteered the information that he could create said virus in less than an hour. He joked that he had done stuff like that at Stanford all the time, like it was a game or something. Neither Casey nor I knew enough about cyber criminals to know how impressive Chuck was, the speed at which he could disable their system, security and all. Simple virus, right?

Wrong.

Chuck never explained, and I never put two and two together until after we were married and Morgan let the Piranha out of the bag, so to speak. The kind of virus needed to disable security was more complex than we ever dreamed. I didn't know it then, but Chuck could disable security that quickly almost anywhere, even the CIA's mainframe. And he had known how when he was 16 years old. He downplayed it of course, never boasting about it. Partly because it was criminal, even if he never broke any other law, partly because it just wasn't his style.

It was a good plan, but the nerds at Atari were unimpressed with the Nerd Herd. So Chuck's plan crashed and burned. Fortunately, there was a Plan B. Me.

Computer programmers, geniuses, PhDs…they were a dime a dozen at Atari. Add one pretty girl and…wham, a room full of geniuses reduced to stuttering school boys. So typical it was almost sad. It reminded me of how the CIA had explained Chuck to me, how he would have been when I walked in with my broken phone. Anyone of those clowns would have fit that bill. Chuck was different. I knew that in my soul, and this was just more proof, since I saw it firsthand.

Those nerds were practically slobbering all over me. Chuck was worried that I didn't know anything about computers and that I would blow everyone's cover. I batted my eyelashes and raised my voice an octave in my dumb blonde voice, then let them try and wow me with their computer jargon. It was all gibberish…ghost drives, BIOS, whatever else I had no idea about. It was a diversion enough to get Chuck and Casey upstairs without anyone noticing.

I was behind the desk with those nerds for about ten minutes when the entire building rumbled, like there was an earthquake. Two seconds later, the fire alarm went off. Explosion. That was my gut instinct.

We were told to evacuate the building; the nerds were tripping over themselves to escort me out, phony chivalry for something they thought was silly. It was only when we were outside at the muster point for the building that we could look up and see the smoke and fire spewing out of the broken windows of the penthouse.

Chuck…

My legs almost gave out, standing there looking up at the fiery destruction. A few of the guys thought I was frightened, and they tried to pretend to be brave. I say pretend, because I know bravado when I see it. Chuck was brave. I couldn't forget the difference.

Please let him be ok…

It felt like hours and hours had gone by before I saw Chuck and Casey. The fire department had to get them out of the elevator, where they had been at the time of the explosion. Chuck looked pale, almost green; I couldn't remember seeing him look so…awful. Turns out, he was so upset because they had found Morimoto, after he had been victimized by Farrokh. Chuck had talked to Morimoto…but had been forced to run for his life with Casey, leaving Morimoto to die in the explosion. Casey told me he had to drag Chuck out of there. Like I said, Chuck was brave.

I did my best to comfort him, tell him it wasn't his fault. He was lamenting the fact that if his plan had been better, they could have gotten there sooner. Casey was quick to remind him all that would have accomplished would have been both Chuck and Casey being killed by Farrokh. Chuck still took Morimoto's death very hard.

Back in Castle, we got more bad news. With the satellite codes compromised, the military was taking over the operation. They were attempting to shoot down the missiles with an ICBM, which would result in what Beckman called an acceptable level of civilian casualties on the ground. Typical military talk, something that I had been trained to think myself–distance, people as a large group rather than individuals with lives. The distance allowed us to do our jobs, because we were faced with the reality that we couldn't save everyone.

Chuck was never trained to think like that. Everyone, every life, mattered to him. His number of acceptable casualties was zero. And he was appalled at the alternative if the Air Force missed. World War III.

Terrorism whose only end goal is Armageddon. The worst case scenario. We had been poised to stop it, but we failed.

Failure like that is a terrible feeling.

Made worse by the fact that our only hope, Chuck's last ditch effort, was Jeff Barnes.

It was why Farrokh had been looking for Jeff in the first place. Somehow Farrokh knew the codes were in the kill screen at the end of the game. Jeff had beaten that game back in the 80s…and had been briefly and locally famous for it. Thirty years ago. But it was all we had.

I stayed in Castle while Chuck and Casey dealt with Jeff. Chuck convinced him to do it. Then they spent a couple hours getting the game console and other crazy things Jeff wanted. Chuck even got Morgan to help him make a big production out of it.

Chuck called me to tell me he flashed on the local TV station, that that was where Farrokh was, how he was controlling the satellite. Then Casey appeared, ready to take control of the operation to shoot down the satellite. I told Casey we still had time, and I was going to the TV station to try and stop Farrokh. Covering all of our bases made the most sense.

Casey was a little too eager to blow something up in my opinion, but he had been trapped in Burbank for over a year. He basically told me he thought I was on a fool's errand, and that Chuck was too by trusting Jeff Barnes.

"I trust Chuck."

Casey's attitude was irritating, especially faced with everything that could go wrong. I was vehement…and I meant it. I only heard it after I said it, hearing it echo in my head as I ran up the stairs and out of the Orange Orange.

The only person I had ever had to rely on was myself. I didn't trust anyone. I had started to trust Bryce…and I had been burned. Even though he wasn't rogue back then, he still didn't trust me enough to tell me the truth. I was wrong to have trusted him the little I did, since it wasn't reciprocated. I had asked Chuck to trust me, and he had, without any legitimate reason to. But I did trust him. He was the only person I have ever trusted like that, the only person deserving of that level of trust from me.

It was an echo of that, somewhere in the back of my head, that told me I could…when he asked me after I didn't remember him anymore. I knew I had trusted him before, and I trusted no one. I realized I could trust him again. That was the way out of the dark for me, trusting him. It was like I remembered feeling like I felt here, even though it was disconnected from the memory.

While I was on the way to the TV station, Jeff Barnes passed out while he was preparing to play the game. Too much pressure, fear of failure. Jeff didn't realize the end of the world was in the balance, and none of us could tell him that.

Chuck told me later that he freaked out when he couldn't wake Jeff up. He called Ellie and apologized for disappointing her, frantic, like he was never going to talk to her again. I think when he hung up he made the decision…that he had to try, in Jeff's place. Chuck had played Missile Command when he was younger, but it had been at least 10 years if not longer since he'd played at all. Still, he was willing to do it, in front of all those people, because he was trying to help.

I picked the lock at the TV station. I took out two armed men right as I entered, then crept past the station employees who were tied up on the office on the floor. I took out a third man, then tried to access the satellite from the computer there, hoping there was a way to shut it down. Farrokh came up behind me while I was at the computer, armed with a knife. I had no time to pull my weapon, but I used my jacket to protect myself in that fight. I grabbed him and almost broke his arm, grabbing his knife and holding it to his throat.

I demanded the code, but he didn't care about his own life, considering he was willing to die himself in the missile attack, so long as it wreaked havoc in the world. That's basically what he said to me before I knocked him out. I had never felt so helpless.

I moved back to the computer to try something, anything…when Chuck called. He sounded out of breath, like he had run the gauntlet. I could hear it in his voice, how proud of himself he was. He was trying to explain, but it didn't make sense, at least not the way he was telling me. But he had the code, and I was able to input it to stop the satellite before Casey could give the go-ahead to launch the missile.

Chuck had flashed on the music for the song that Morimoto was listening to when Chuck had seen him right before he died. The mathematical pattern in the song was the same as needed to defeat the game. Morgan put that song on, and Chuck was able to defeat the game, and then get the code.

I was glad that Chuck was proud of himself; he deserved to be proud. Chuck Bartowski had almost single-handedly saved the world, even if his sister still thought he was an idiot. He was a hero. My hero. I could hear everyone in the Buy More cheering for him when he pulled the phone away. I imagined how wide his smile must have been, and it made me smile just as wide.

I called the CIA cleaners to the TV station and went straight to Castle. I got in touch with Casey and explained the situation with Ellie to him. Then, I made the choice to tell Casey at least part of what I knew about Bryce at Stanford. Graham was dead, and whatever remained of Omaha was long buried with him. I told Casey that Bryce had intentionally gotten Chuck expelled from Stanford to protect him from Fleming's recruitment tract.

That was why Chuck's name was on Fleming's list. Casey figured it out once I told him. Casey took it a step further, telling me he wondered if somehow Magnus was looking for information about Chuck, or at least, who it was that had scored perfectly on the screen. I hadn't thought of that, but it was true. It made me wish I had told Casey about it when we watched the disk; hindsight is always 20/20. I didn't trust Casey enough when we found it to tell him. But it made me wonder.

With all that being said, I told Casey that we should petition Stanford. Their recruitment tract was still a functioning pipeline, even after Fleming's death. We had our in, and we had proof that Chuck was framed because of this information. It was easier to blame Fleming, because he was dead, rather than drag Bryce down, someone still working for the agency.

The CIA was fast. Lightning fast. They delivered Chuck's diploma to his house before Chuck was done for the day at Buy More, about five hours after he had beaten the game. The paperwork and official records were being handled behind the scenes, but Chuck's remaining 12 credits were granted for the coursework he had been in the process of completing, with a 4.0 I might add, when he was expelled wrongfully. I was ensured the date was modified, to make it look like he had taken online courses recently. His degree was dated June 15, 2008, which was the end of the previous semester, when he would have finished if it was real, rather than randomly in the middle of October.

I went to Chuck's apartment while he was still at work, relieved that the package was waiting for Chuck when I arrived. I told Ellie and Devon that it was Chuck's diploma, that he had been finishing his classes online and keeping it a secret. I wanted to tell the story, because it was a lie, and another lie to his sister was easier for me to tell than for him. I went out on the patio to wait for him.

I heard the entire exchange between them, glad that he rolled with the story I told.

He walked outside, smiling that beautiful smile that I loved. He thanked me for his fake diploma, I'm sure thinking I had it doctored up to get his sister off his back. I told him it was real. He didn't believe it.

I didn't tell him exactly what happened, just that Casey and I agreed he had done more than enough to prove he was worthy of a degree at Stanford. Anything less made it seem like he didn't deserve it, and he did. I told him he did.

The way he looked at me…everything inside me rushed to my feet. He thanked me, genuinely thanked me.

I was proud to say that at least half of what had been dragging him down all along I had a hand in making better. In a way, it was the last bit of fixing I could do, what I had vowed to do when I told Graham I was staying to fix Bryce's mistake.

I pointed out the star on the horizon that was in actuality the Air Force burning the satellite up in the atmosphere…and told him to make a wish.

I made my own wish, looking at him while he studied the glowing dot in the sky. I felt him turn and look at me after he made his wish, though I kept looking ahead.

We wished the same thing. I didn't know it then, but I know it now. It took a while, but we both eventually got our wish.