A/N: Back again. All of the Ex in one chapter. These episodes are full of pain for Sarah, pain that Chuck almost completely ignores, or refuses to see. He settles for Jill, although Sarah never saw it that way. My thoughts anyway. Weird stuff to consider: What caused happy Chuck at the end of Tom Sawyer to turn morose at the beginning of the Ex? We also missed Halloween, so I threw that in there. There's a lot of behind the scenes things that get swept aside, and I did my best. A little tidbit I learned-Apple only allows its product placement for "good guys." Guy using his MacBook in his hotel room right away is a clue that he's innocent of wrongdoing. My bigger picture issues-we know Jill was Fulcrum, has been Fulcrum since they were in college. Was the call to the Buy More fake? Was everything she did fake, or was any of that genuine? And if so, what was she really trying to do? Once Guy is dead, what is her motivation? Wolf Den was Fulcrum...and so was she...so why sabotage the bioweapon? I still can't figure that out...maybe in a following chapter. Here goes nothing.
Things were good for a while. Almost two weeks went by without a major incident. Minor…maybe a bit. Ellie had another Halloween party. This time, since Chuck and I had been cover-dating for well over a year, the situation was different this year. Ellie jumped for joy when Chuck and Morgan decided it was time to retire the Sandworm costume. Morgan had Anna, and Chuck had me. Chuck thought we should coordinate our costumes, even though he admitted to me he thought it was a little cheesy. He also told me, a little reluctantly, that the last time he had done something like that was with Jill.
As long as I had been with Chuck, around Chuck, I knew surprisingly little about Jill Roberts. The CIA hadn't even listed her by name in the dossier they sent me when they sent me after Chuck. What I knew, I knew from the little bits I'd heard here and there from Morgan or Ellie, and even more infrequently, from Chuck. Although I didn't know the whole story, apparently Ellie had coached Chuck about not talking about his ex in front of other women, advice he used on our fake first date, and something he continued to do, even after he knew we were fake dating.
So I knew from Morgan that Jill had broken up with him at Stanford after he was accused of cheating, and that Bryce had then started dating Jill soon after Chuck left Stanford to come home to Burbank in March of 2003. Bryce had never mentioned Jill, but that didn't surprise me. Bryce and I never talked about anything in our pasts.
But I didn't know anything else about her–what she majored in, where she lived, even what she looked like. I had seen old pictures of Chuck at random times in his apartment; Ellie loved to take them out and show me. Elementary school, high school, college and beyond. There were no pictures of Bryce…and none of Jill. It was like they had both been surgically removed from Chuck's history.
Anyway, I used the Princess Leia costume again, and this time, Chuck dressed as Han Solo. (He had to explain it to me first…since I had no idea and didn't remember who he was supposed to be in those fake photos.) Morgan and Anna went as a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Morgan was peanut butter. There was actual bread involved in the costume. Ellie was flabbergasted; we thought it was hilarious.
Morgan had been a little upset that Chuck never mentioned finishing up his college courses. Chuck lied pretty easily to Morgan about not wanting to say anything because of the pressure and his fear of failure. The whole premise was fake, and I know Chuck hated lying, but he was getting better at it. The thought left me uneasy.
We backdated Chuck's diploma with Stanford, so he received the alumni newsletter randomly at the beginning of November. I'm sure it has to do with donations or whatever; the alumni office jumped at the chance to solicit more donors. I was at Ellie's apartment with him having dinner when Ellie saw the newsletter in the pile of mail Devon had left on the counter. Once dinner was over, she picked it up and started flipping through it.
"Chuck, did you see this?" Ellie called from the kitchen. He looked over his shoulder. She didn't say anything else, just approached him with the folded newsletter and handed it to him.
Looking over his arm, I scanned the paper as well. Jill Roberts. The photo was captioned with her name, something about last year's PhD graduates and their fields of study. It made sense why Ellie didn't say anything out loud, although it was strange her calling Chuck's attention to it.
I couldn't read the expression on his face, which was unusual. He was always an open book, always so expressive of how he felt. He eventually turned to me with a lopsided grin on his face, but his eyes were sad. "That's Jill," he said, angling the newsletter towards me.
She wasn't how I pictured her, I'll be honest. I think I thought of her as more nerdy, less attractive than I thought she was. Not that Chuck couldn't have had a drop-dead gorgeous girlfriend–with his confidence and charm, he could have had anyone he wanted. It was just the way Morgan always referred to her. She was beautiful. Dark everywhere I was light–brown hair and brown eyes.
She looked like someone Chuck would have married if Bryce had never needed to save him. The Charles Carmichael story he had told me…that man's wife would have looked like Jill.
"See Chuck, you have Sarah now. Everything happens for a reason," Ellie had said from behind as we sat there.
Of course, she thought that was the right thing to say. She thought Chuck had moved on to me and that we had a serious relationship. He smiled, but I could tell his eyes were still sad. He covered well so Ellie never saw it.
I don't know if it was our Halloween costumes, the newsletter, or what Ellie had said, but Chuck crashed from that high of completing his degree. He withdrew, not drastically, but enough that even Casey noticed.
There weren't any missions for a while, which was both good and bad. Chuck wasn't in the best of moods, so at least we didn't have to worry about protecting him. But it was two-fold; Chuck had nothing to distract him from his misery, so it lingered.
Beckman had sent Casey and I some information about Fulcrum's advancing activities in the United States. Bryce was still undercover, deep in the field somewhere, on his mission to take them down. It made me think Bryce had recently recovered some intelligence that led him to believe that Fulcrum was more of a threat than we had originally believed. They weren't just after Chuck for the Intersect. They were rumored to be attempting to create their own Intersect, part of an effort to subvert the structure of the DNI from within.
It made me worried for Chuck. We were protecting him, but more and more, it seemed like we were protecting him from Fulcrum. And Fulcrum was quickly getting the upper hand.
Chuck got a legitimate Buy More onsite call to the Sheraton for a conference. Casey monitored him, as he usually did when he was working. I was at the Orange Orange, serving frozen yogurt, wondering how I could help bring up Chuck's spirits.
Right after lunch, Casey came upstairs from Castle and told me Chuck had checked in with him, that he had flashed while he was setting up the internet connections for the conference. He "ran it up the flagpole" and was now coming to tell me Beckman had some information. I thought it was odd that Chuck had called Casey instead of me; he so rarely did that. I was on my way down to Castle when Casey told me Chuck had flashed after he had bumped into his ex-girlfriend at the conference.
I was surprised. What were the chances that after five years, he runs into her now, now that he's depressed about the past again? It did make me a little apprehensive, just the thought of her interacting with Chuck again, even with a simple hello.
Before everything had gone sour, Chuck loved Jill. I didn't know it yet, but she was his first love, his first time. At one point that woman had been the entire world to Chuck Bartowski, before she had decided Bryce was a better choice. She was the opposite of me, I thought. Dark where I was light. I had unconsciously compared the two men and had unequivocally chosen Chuck. It biased me, I admit, colored my impressions of her to know she was the type of person who preferred Bryce to Chuck, even before Bryce was a spy.
Chuck and I were in this strange limbo, not together but still together. I couldn't deny what I felt, even if I couldn't give every emotion inside me that concerned him a name. Hopelessly in love with him, it turned out, even though I tried for so long to deny it. Hopeless because there was nothing either of us could do to make the situation better.
But the second Casey brought up her name, I asked myself a question, one that would haunt me for months. Did Chuck still love Jill?
The answer to that is extremely complicated, although it's easier to dissect now, so far removed from all of that. Walking into Castle and seeing Chuck, afraid to turn and look at me, his shoulders sagging and his posture defeated, I believed the answer to that was yes. Five years later, and despite what he may or may not have felt about me, he still loved Jill. The girl who had left him at the worst moment in his life up to that point. It was unresolved, lacking closure.
I say it that way because the Jill Chuck met at the conference five years later wasn't the same girl he remembered. People change, always, and the longer the separation in acquaintance, the more drift from who they were to who they become is evident. The girl I was when I was 17 was unrecognizable from the woman I was at 26, when I met Chuck. He was seeing what he remembered, what he wanted to see. Turns out, Jill was so deceptive, even that old image of her he had was false. We'll get to that in a bit.
Beckman told us Guy Lafleur, Jill's boss and the man Chuck had flashed on, was a head researcher at Cole-MacGregor Pharmaceuticals. He was suspected of potentially engineering biological weapons, Beckman told us.
Chuck asked Beckman if Jill was involved. I think he was worried for her safety more than he was worried about her being in on the plot. Beckman ordered him to get intelligence from Jill, and Casey and I were back up. I bristled, but kept quiet. I had already tried to argue about my old high school classmates, and Beckman didn't care. Beckman shouldn't have cared, either time. She had a job to do and the emotions of the people involved couldn't concern her. It bothered me a little that I used to know that, and had accepted it in the past, but now, it upset me.
When he prompted Beckman for a better explanation, and she ordered him to make a date with her, he instantly paled. He looked like he was going to be sick. He argued back, in his usual way–not harshly, and very emotionally. The words he used–"she destroyed me" crushed me on the inside. I knew it, intellectually, but I had never heard him say it like that, using words like that. It suddenly made more sense to me why no one said her name, why all the pictures of her were missing.
Casey made a stupid joke about Bryce, which didn't help. I tried to highlight the positives, knowing no argument from Chuck would change Beckman's mind. I reminded him that this could be his opportunity to get the closure he never had. He still looked miserable, and Casey continued to make it worse.
Once Casey left, Chuck was awkward with me. He didn't want to talk about Jill in front of me, so I didn't bring it up, even though I wished there was some way I could make him feel better. I told him I would wait and listen while he called her, but he refused. He went back upstairs to the Buy More and called Jill at her hotel while he was working. He texted me to tell me she had accepted the invitation to dinner.
Casey and I got to work with the details. Beckman had agreed that we needed to "stick to the original cover story" Chuck gave her at the hotel. I didn't know what she was talking about. It was Casey who told me that Chuck lied to her when confronted, apparently too embarrassed of his "loser job" faced with her PhD. Lying, outside of spywork, was not something that Chuck ever did, so I knew he had to have been extremely upset during that meeting. Beckman thought the more successful Chuck looked, the easier time he would have extracting information from her.
An expensive suit, an expensive car, and a restaurant full of agents who were instructed to act as if he were an investor. He didn't have any confidence, apparently the state that he found himself in whenever he was around Jill. Her rejection made him feel worthless. It made me angry, that someone as amazing as he was thought so little of himself when faced with this girl. I started out not liking Jill. And my opinion of her never improved. I never gave her the benefit of the doubt, and I was jealous and biased, but I did end up being justified for those thoughts. Just not at this time.
I was posing as a waitress in the restaurant and Casey was the host.
The first time I saw Jill Roberts in person was seated across from Chuck in the restaurant we had rented out for the evening. She was dressed very elegantly, which made me wonder how Chuck had described where they were going on their date. She looked like the photograph I had seen, but also older, more careworn. I guessed real life had taken its toll from her starry-eyed expectations.
Her body language was odd. She was leaning towards Chuck, but also reserved, stiff, almost guarded. She had a lot of perfume on, a heavy musk. I could almost taste it when I stood there, asking about wine. Chuck was shocked at first that I was the waitress, but he recovered quickly, and I'm sure Jill couldn't tell. I walked away.
We were listening to Chuck on coms. He was supposed to be getting information from her about her boss and the company she worked for. Instead, he ended up grilling her about what had happened between them. He wanted closure, and I had even suggested this was the way for him to find it, but he was coming in too hot, too angry, and it was bound to be off putting. He was right, the things he said…that she should have believed him about the tests. She was his girlfriend; they were in love. What kind of girl would just accept that as fact? Anyone who knew Chuck for five minutes could tell what a decent, honorable guy Chuck was. She was in love with him for years and didn't know?
I heard him say, "Yeah, Bryce must've made a very convincing argument for you to dump me and then hop right into his bed." I felt like someone had slapped me. He may have been angry, but he was hurt more than anything. Nothing hurt me more than knowing he was in pain.
Casey gave me a look. I had to go run some interference before she got up and stormed out and the whole mission went bust.
I went to the table with the story that Chuck had a phone call at the bar. He glared at me when I arrived; I wasn't sure if he was actually angry at me for interrupting, or angry at her and the expression stayed on his face. I glared back at him, my only point to straighten him out.
For me anyway, focusing on the mission was the way to avoid feeling pain. Emotional sensitivity had no place on a mission. I had to get tough, and I did. I was sharp with him, asking him what he thought he was doing. He pretended to talk on the phone, talking to me through gritted teeth. He was angry at her, but he was angry at me, too. Casey's ribbing just irritated him more. Mission first, that's what I told him.
"I'm not like you, Sarah. I can't turn my emotions on and off like some robot."
That felt worse than a slap. Those words went through me like a dagger.
He was angry, and lashing out, not thinking about what he said. That was what I told myself, how I tried to push the emotions away. But he was right, too…and damn, did that hurt. I held everything inside and never let him see, which to him, was the same thing. He didn't know everything that I felt that I could never tell him, never show him.
But he knew that, didn't he? I argued with myself. He didn't know, because I always left him guessing. I don't think I ever realized how badly my hiding my feelings hurt him. He lashed out at me, just the same as he lashed out at Jill. A knee-jerk reaction to pain.
He apologized right away. I acted to ground him, telling him to stop feeling sorry for himself and go back and finish the mission.
He thanked me for setting him straight.
I watched him go back and listened to what he said to her. He was brilliant with his apology. She warmed to him again, her body language much less guarded. She leaned across the table on her elbows until their food came. They were chatting in general. Jill asked about Morgan and Ellie, and also asked him if he was seeing anyone. He said no right away. Here, in this situation, that was correct. He didn't need a cover girlfriend when he was trying to basically wine and dine information out of a girl. But it was hard to hear like that; I had been hearing the lie so much it was almost believable. If I hadn't known they were each other's exes I would have believed that was a fantastic first date.
It was painful, like swallowing a razor blade and carrying it around in my stomach. I had advised about getting closure, but it had seemed to me he had reached back and opened the door wider instead.
He asked her about her work as they were walking out of the restaurant. Honestly, it was perfect spywork. He did everything correctly, and she was talking. She explained something complex to Chuck, but Casey nodded to me, that he was recording what she said so it could be examined in more detail by experts. She was ready to explain her current work project when two of those buffoons from the Nerd Herd pulled up to the curb and called him out.
His cover was blown. And, because it was Jeff and Lester, Casey and I couldn't intervene or our covers were blown as well. It was a little sloppy of us, not having someone stationed at the restaurant door. Chuck had never run into someone he knew on a mission before, though. We took precautions after this incident, but here, we were out of luck.
Chuck came back inside and told us she left in a cab. I offered to take Chuck home, but he refused, driving his rented Ferrari back to the Buy More, now a perfectly explainable situation. He drove himself home in his Nerd Herder. I had never seen him more down on himself than when he left.
The next day, Casey and I went to do surveillance on Jill and Guy at the hotel. Casey set everything up and we were monitoring communications from a van parked on the street outside. I never told Chuck what we were doing the next day, but he came and found us after his shift at the Buy More. He didn't even knock, just opened the van door. Casey and I both pulled our guns; he should have known better than to sneak up on us, but he was thinking about Jill and wanted to see if she was ok.
The bug in Jill's room wasn't transmitting properly. I wanted to go in as housekeeping and place another, but Casey reminded me that she might recognize me from the restaurant. His solution was to tranq her. That suggestion got Chuck upset. He volunteered to go, apologizing and planting the bug at the same time. I reminded him about the bug, how to turn it on, how to place it.
The surveillance in the hallway was still working, so we heard what Chuck said as he knocked on Jill's door. Casey actually bet me that Jill wouldn't open the door for him.
"...I just wanted you to think I was someone special…"
You are, I said in my head, a reflex I couldn't control. I held my breath, waiting for him to say more.
"...because from the second I saw you again, I knew that I hadn't gotten over you yet, Jill."
Did Chuck still love Jill?
Yes, he did. He had just told her so, without using the precise words, but he had.
I didn't realize I was holding my breath until my lungs started to burn. I still don't know if it was holding my breath that caused that sensation, of the words themselves that burned through me like acid.
He loved her. Their relationship was real. Real was something he could never have with me, no matter how badly either of us wanted it.
Casey paid me the 20 he owed me. His irritation with losing maybe distracted him from my state of mind, because I was sure he would have made some barbed comment about Chuck to me in that situation.
We couldn't hear anything in Jill's room, which was odd. The sun, already low in the sky when he went upstairs, had set by the time he returned. I was anxious to find out what happened, maybe too anxious. I don't think I realized how on edge I had been after the last thing we heard was Jill talking about how wonderful she thought he was.
He was odd, distracted, in a way I couldn't remember seeing him. He was rambling, until Casey interrupted, clarifying we wanted to know if he planted the bug successfully. He said he did, but that he may have turned it off.
I asked him why he did that. It reminded me of Lou and his watch in the iced coffee. Then, his uncertainty made me think maybe it was just a mistake, because he was distracted.
Casey did a sweep and activated it, which I thought might have bothered Chuck if he was trying to run interference with Jill. He got this strange, dreamy look in his eye, dazed like he didn't even know I was there.
"Why are you smiling like that?" I had a sick feeling. I knew why; asking was my hope that he would prove me wrong.
"She kissed me."
Breathy, dreamy. It reminded me a little of how he had first brought up my kissing him in front of the Bryce bomb. That hit me like a punch in the gut. For her, not me.
"No spy stuff, no lies, just me."
I know he didn't mean to, but he was grinding salt in an already open wound. It had to have shown on my face, at least a little bit, or as much as he could read me, because when he finally looked at me, it was like he woke up suddenly.
He looked sorry, like he wanted to apologize to me.
Damn it, what did he see on my face?
Whatever might have been said was swallowed up as Chuck flashed while he was looking at the monitor.
An assassin on his way to Guy's floor. Casey and I took off, leaving Chuck in the van. We took the elevator; running up 11 flights of stairs would have taken too long. By the time we made it to Guy's room, we could hear the sounds of a struggle inside. Casey tried kicking the door in, for it was bolted on the inside, but ended up needing to shoot the lock open. By the time we entered, the room was empty.
Casey radioed down to Chuck that no one was in the room. His response sounded ghostly, like he was wheezing and he couldn't breathe. Wolf Den, as he was codenamed, had thrown Guy through the window of his hotel room, and he had landed on top of the spy van 11 stories below. Instant death.
The hotel staff called LAPD and we called the CIA cleaners. The entire scene was chaos. Police cars, cleaners dressed as firefighters. Because Guy had landed on our van, the CIA had to interact with the LAPD to collect evidence. By the time Casey and I were allowed near the van, we couldn't find Chuck.
Turns out, he was sitting on the sidewalk just outside a large circle of police cars. He looked stunned, dazed. I didn't realize until the next day that Guy's body had slid down the windshield of the van. It was the closest up-close view of a dead body Chuck had ever seen, and considering it was an innocent person we hadn't been able to save, it rattled him. He was mumbling something about keeping himself out of the way of the news cameras in case his sister was watching the news.
We didn't have the option to wait anymore, so Casey went through the CIA barricade and went to Jill's room. He extracted her and brought her back to Castle while I stayed with Chuck. Eventually, he told me he had spoken over the bug by accident, and that Jill now thought he was crazy for eavesdropping on her phone call.
Chuck and I watched Casey interrogate Jill through the two way glass. She was hysterically upset, not able to communicate in any coherent sentences. Chuck was so sympathetic, wanting to console her. I reminded him she couldn't know that he was a spy–no matter what. After the long night I'd had and the turmoil it had caused inside me, I was as cold as ice to Chuck, attempting to reset my emotions and my interactions with him.
Finally, she explained what was going on. Cole-MacGregor was selling a bioengineered strain of influenza as a weapon, and Guy had proof. He was about to present it at the conference, expose it, so the company could no longer profit from terrorism. She said it was up to her to present the information.
Chuck freaked out, pounding on the window, refusing to let us put her in harm's way. Casey had to come in, because Chuck was elevated. He argued with Casey, and then he pleaded with me. I could see it on his face, how worried about her he was. It made my insides pinch.
I told Chuck I would give the presentation, as coolly and calmly as I knew how to be. I walked away before he said anything else. I don't know if I wanted him to protest, to mention my safety as well, but he didn't. I was a trained spy and Jill was innocent.
Casey went back and told Jill that an undercover CIA agent would give the presentation in her place, to ensure her safety. We asked for all the presentation materials, which she provided. Casey then instructed her to go back to her hotel room and try and get some rest. Jill never saw me.
By the time everything was wrapped up in Castle, it was morning. None of us had slept. Chuck said he had to go take a CPR test at Buy More. Casey and I were preparing for the conference, and though we were both exhausted, we worked all morning. I told Chuck before he left that I would let him know when everything was said and done. He looked like he wanted to say something to me before he left, but he never did. I didn't give him the chance to.
Casey and I waited as everyone was screened on the way in. Nothing seemed amiss as the guests were getting to their seats. I was introduced as Dr. Lafleur's associate, Dr. Eva Anderson, my old identity from when I was pretending to be Bryce's wife. I added an Australian accent, something they taught in the CIA about increasing the attention of the audience in America. Americans listened better to British and Australian accented speech.
I had only spoken for a few moments when someone suspicious in the crowd rushed out the emergency exit, seemingly out of nowhere. Casey ran to investigate, and I took off running after the man.
I chased him through the lower levels of the hotel. I found bits of his disguise discarded on the ground, not sure if they were like a trail of breadcrumbs or something designed to throw me off track. I chased him through doors and hallways, back through and around, for what felt like hours.
While this was happening, Casey and everyone else in that room but me were exposed to the bioweapon. Casey called Chuck, during his CPR exam, and asked him to get an antidote from Jill, at any cost. That meant revealing himself as a spy to her. He showed up with the LAPD, the FBI, and the CIA as backup after Casey called it in. At least he was credible this time, something that may have taken him too long to convince her of otherwise.
I learned all this later, but the FBI was not prepared for a biohazard scenario; all of the required equipment was being trucked in by the CDC, but they ran out of time. Jill was prepared to go in and make and distribute the antidote, but Chuck told her he thought it was too dangerous and he volunteered. Brave, but beyond his capabilities. Chuck is extremely needle-phobic; he overestimated his ability to overcome that fear when faced with it head on. Nothing wrong with that, something he got better at overtime, but this was the first crisis situation he had to handle completely on his own like this.
I ended up in the storage area of the hotel's kitchen, in a shootout with Wolf Den. I tried to take him down, but he was shooting at me and my instincts took over and I killed him. He would have been much more useful if taken alive, but sometimes, there isn't much you can do in a life or death situation.
I did find the man's badge, and I was shocked to see he had bonafide CIA credentials. What was a CIA agent doing releasing a bioweapon?
A mystery I had to report back to Beckman. While it was true we were only told what we needed to be told, there was a chance that she knew more than she was telling us. Maybe this information would be helpful, meaning more to her than the puzzle it signified for me.
I called the CIA for a cleanup team, but I was informed that the CIA was already in charge of the scene at the hotel. That was Chuck, but technically, he was still CIA. The fact that they were already there made removing the body and evidence of the fire fight easier.
I went outside, deafened and blinded by the scores of emergency vehicles circling the area. By the time I had woven my way through that crowd to the entrance of the hotel again, everything was over.
Chuck had gone in, in direct communication with Jill, who was giving him instructions. He tried to have Casey draw his blood, but Casey was failing and the syringe dropped and shattered on the floor. Jill ended up getting a new one and coming back through the barricade to make the antidote from Chuck's blood.
Chuck emerged through the barricade to a round of applause from the emergency responders. I was just at the edge of this group when it happened. He was shocked, not expecting that reaction. This time, his heroics had witnesses. And while he may have needed some help, it was still the hero in him that agreed to be infected so his blood could save the others.
I smiled at him, and he saw me through the crowd of people. He was interrupted, though, by Jill, who grabbed him and gushed all over him about how amazing she thought he was.
And then I watched them kiss, a mutual, emotional kiss that seemed to remove them from the time and place with the rest of us. He lifted her off her feet while he was kissing her, to compensate for her short stature.
I had only seen Chuck kiss Sasha Banachek in the elevator before the doors closed. He had kissed Lou, but I didn't have to watch that. I had never endured torture in my role with the CIA, at least not real torture by an enemy agent, just the practice stuff they did at the Farm. I can't imagine it would have felt much worse than how I felt watching them kiss.
He was never really mine, but I felt like I'd just lost him. Like all my insides had been scooped out, my whole body was hollow. I'd never had him, but still, I'd lost him.
After we talked to Beckman, she confirmed that Wolf Den was CIA, but he was also Fulcrum, a rogue. What did Fulcrum want with Guy Lafleur and his research? Why had Fulcrum killed him? Beckman wanted us to find out, and to use Jill as bait to get those answers.
I told Beckman Chuck would never stand for us using her that way, not when he felt the way he did. She ordered me to lie to him, not tell him what was going on behind the scenes. I lied for a living, and I had lied to Chuck before, but not like this, not a bold faced manipulation, treating him like the asset he was, handling him like I would have if he meant nothing to me. I had really lost him, and now, the CIA was driving the wedge between us even further.
I didn't lose him, not really, I know that now. Like I said, it was much more complicated than any of us had dreamed.
What I think about most now when I think of this time?
I wonder what Fulcrum would have done to Jill if they had known how close to costing them the Intersect they had come, because of her.