Posted November 21, 2023
A/N: It's better when the PLIs are gone before now, but we're stuck with this one.
"Chuck vs the Fat Lady" (2x07) Recap
Here are a few things you might need to know.
Dressed in black, like for a mission, Chuck hurried up a stairwell, blocking out the sensors. He broke out onto the Buy More roof, followed by Jill. They were trying to have a romantic picnic, away from surveillance.
Down in Castle, the NSA agent got a kick out of moving a camera Chuck missed, and he taunted Sarah about her "supercomputer boyfriend trying to browse someone else's network." She countered she was just his cover girlfriend and he was entitled to a real one.
Chuck entered to protest the date invasion, but Sarah put him off, apologizing for Casey, and sharing the new mission they were just assigned. Chuck said he liked someone knowing the real him. Sarah said she seemed great. Chuck asked for them to ease up, and Sarah said she'd talk to Casey.
The next day at Buy More, Morgan revealed the (illegal) Q-36 game copier which could bypass copy protection.
At the apartment, Jill asked Chuck about going to a hotel with his cover-girlfriend. He defended saying overnight missions involved Casey and a whole lot of firearms. She asked about Sarah. He tried to downplay her looks and said there was nothing sexy about the mission. Then, they walked into Casey's where Sarah was dressed as an escort in a red dress and fishnet stockings.
On the mission to break into Guy's sealed hotel room, Chuck confronted Sarah about her outfit. Sarah said it was necessary to sell the cover because the hotel was known for high-end businessmen and their trysts.
Chuck, Sarah, and Casey snuck through the ventilation system. After Chuck asked how long it was going to take, he accidentally called Jill. She jumped to the wrong conclusion because she heard Chuck ask Sarah if an hour would be enough to have sex and heard her tell him to move his hips.
At Buy More, Emmett tried to get information from Morgan about where Chuck was always going. Morgan didn't like the idea of questioning Chuck's patriotism towards "Buy Moria."
In Guy's room, Team Intersect found a Venetian puzzle box. Chuck solved it, but that released a powder. Casey escaped to get a containment unit. Chuck and Sarah were hit with the chemical, so they stripped to their underwear and got in the shower together to rinse off.
Chuck and Sarah had a moment, but they were too scared for their lives. Chuck answered the door, but it wasn't Casey; it was Jill. She saw he and Sarah had just taken a shower and jumped to the wrong conclusion.
Casey analyzed the powder and revealed it was for fruit punch. Chuck couldn't believe Jill was never gonna speak to him again because she caught him, rinsing off fruit punch with another woman.
At Buy More, Jeff and Lester revealed to Emmett they saw Chuck with another woman, cheating on Sarah. Morgan saw Jill come to the store to hear Chuck's explanation. In shock, Morgan said it was Jill, which Emmett overheard.
Chuck told Jill the full story, and she believed him, wondering what kind of fruit punch. Because Jill knew about Guy's puzzles, he blindfolded her and took her to Castle, where she used a Castle mass spectrometer to get the exact formula of fruit punch: Rootin' Raspberry-flavored Hi-C. Casey opened a secret drawer in the box by signing a high C, like a choir boy. The drawer held opera glasses. Chuck opened their stem to reveal a key. It was something the Culper Ring did in the Revolutionary War.
The key worked in a box on the floor of Guy's family box at the opera. They opened the box on stage. Inside, it looked like a bomb. There were blocks for the music of the opera to stop a countdown. Chuck and Jill worked together to stop the timer and a jump drive popped up. They celebrated with a kiss.
At Castle, the agents started decrypting the data. Chuck wasn't there because he had gone back to his room, with Jill. Chuck couldn't perform because there were cameras in his room. He gave Jill a code of when to meet at Buy More.
At Buy More, Chuck asked Morgan to cover for him because he was going on a romantic getaway. Morgan confronted him because it was Jill, not Sarah. He'd cover, but he didn't like it because friends don't lie to each other.
Chuck and Jill stopped along the road. While Chuck was inside, Jill was captured as a hostage by a Fulcrum agent as trade for Guy's list.
Back at Castle, Casey got mad at Chuck for going deliberately off grid and he refused the drive with the list of Fulcrum names. Chuck took the list anyway to save Jill and locked his protectors in Castle.
Chuck went to the trade at the opera house, and Casey and Sarah escaped and went to stop him, but they were too late. Chuck traded the jump drive for Jill, and the Fulcrum agent destroyed it and escaped. During the mission cleanup, Casey threatened Chuck, but the computer expert had made a copy using the game copier, which they could still use to decode the list.
Jill apologized to Sarah for not trusting her with Chuck. Sarah said to pay her back she better not hurt Chuck again because it was her job to protect him from anything.
At Castle, Casey and Sarah resumed the computer's decoding of the list. Meanwhile, Chuck couldn't celebrate with Jill in front of the cameras again.
The Castle computer revealed one of the Fulcrum agents was none other than Jill. Sarah and Casey rushed out of Castle, but Chuck's room was empty. Chuck and Jill were in her car, going off-grid again.
Songs (from 2x07):
"Libiamo Ne' Lieti Calici" (from La Traviata) by Verdi
"Keep Yourself Warm" by Frightened Rabbit
www. imdb. com (8.7/10)
chuckthisblog. wordpress. com (56/91)
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Echo Park Apartment Complex
Sarah had never been so furious at Chuck. Right after they met, she could have killed him twice (not that she ever really would). Those were the closest two times she got, which was admittedly not that close. She was just mad. At that first dinner with Ellie, Devon, and Morgan, he thought she was a traitor. Then he flew a helicopter.
Those times only paled in comparison to how she felt at the moment.
In the grand scheme of things, she didn't care about drowning a CIA-prop soufflé that she hadn't made anyway. She never liked it when he could have died trying to save her life, like when he swung off a building on a Buy More banner, but he was never on his own, without her. She wasn't with him this time. This time, he jeopardized his own life, picking his Fulcrum girlfriend over her, which meant Sarah wasn't there to save him.
She was also mad at Casey for his suffocating surveillance. If it weren't for that, Chuck would have left his watch on. Then she would have been able to get to him before it was too late.
Those were two of the people she was mad at, but they weren't everyone. Also on that list was herself because this was all her fault. A few weeks ago, it really hurt her when Chuck broke up with her—more than it should. The strange thing is it hurt her in ways that not even Bryce's betrayed did.
Considering how Chuck treated her afterwards, she was convinced she would never really lose him. That was a monumentally bad assumption because at the time, she didn't know his evil-harpy-ex would come back into his life. The past few days, Sarah had tried to be a friend and let him have a real girlfriend; he deserved one. He didn't deserve one from Fulcrum, though. Sarah was mad at herself because Jill wouldn't have had a chance if Sarah had tried harder to keep Chuck's eyes from wandering to anyone else.
Her job for over a year had been to control Chuck. She didn't like to think of it that way, and the truth was that most of her time with Chuck didn't feel like work. She should have done her job as Chuck's cover-girlfriend better, though. Part of her job as his girlfriend was to make sure she was his focus, not other women. With him focused on her, she could redirect his focus to the overall mission.
Sarah was mad it herself because she never should have been as "understanding" as she was. Chuck's lips were hers and hers alone. It was safer for him that way. With Chuck, it wouldn't have bothered her if she had blurred the "cover" even more. Thinking she had to follow the rules a specific way, she was wrong. The problem was that she didn't blur the cover enough. Since she had been assigned to Chuck, she failed twice: first with Lou and now with Jill. If only they had showered together before he was seeing someone else, they didn't think they were going to die, and they weren't interrupted in a hotel room by his actual girlfriend…
As mad as she was, she couldn't help but keep a tiny smile off her face for an instant. Thinking Chuck was going to die was not fun, but now that she knew it was only a stupid fruit drink powder, the memory was a happy one. More happy memories for him would have helped keep the succubus away.
Sarah glanced around and ensured herself that no one saw her reminisce. All traces of the smile disappeared, and she was fully furious again when she slammed her fist on the top of Casey's car. What's taking him so long? Since Chuck's watch tracker was out of the question, Sarah had raced out of Chuck's room to Casey's car so they could get back to Castle and maybe track him some other way. Casey should have caught up to her by now.
Tired of waiting, Sarah pulled out her pick tool and quickly unlocked the passenger's side door. Before she could slide across to hotwire transport, the driver's side door opened. Her partner was finally there.
"Don't get your pantyhose in a twist. We'll get there."
What? She wasn't wearing pantyhose. That was a stupid quip when they should be saving Chuck, instead of working on Casey's comedy act. As the unfunny man was starting the car, Sarah demanded an answer. "What took you so long?"
Casey grunted. "I went out the front door. I didn't see the point of jumping out the window like you did."
"We have access to more surveillance at Castle before they get too far. We need to go, NOW."
Casey complied, though not as nearly as quickly as Sarah would have. It seemed worse when they got to the expressway. He actually stopped for the traffic gridlock.
"Take the shoulder!" Sarah ordered.
Casey grunted again. "I'm not going to draw unnecessary attention when we have no hope. Look at the bright side. You and I will finally be assigned somewhere else."
"Only if we fail to find him. Chuck's watch isn't the only option. Jill rented a convertible, and they took that. We can track any rental through its GPS."
"I suppose so." He smirked. Sarah hated smirkers. "This is all because you couldn't seal the deal with Bartowski." With that, he chuckled a little. Sarah didn't understand what was funny about something that could never happen with her asset. The NSA agent knew better.
They weren't moving, so Casey looked over and saw he wasn't getting under Sarah's skin. She was so mad before his quips that they didn't make any additional difference. He changed his tune and sounded like he was going to cooperate. "I suppose I don't want to lose the asset. I have a perfect record on missions. We should make a call to Beckman."
"Really?" Sarah questioned in a doubtful tone. Casey was initially stoic and didn't act like he heard or even cared if he heard. After a moment, he grunted. Chuck was better at translating Casey's grunts, but she easily understood that one. She didn't believe her partner's record was perfect.
She refrained from starting an argument by saying she didn't believe him. She knew Casey's claim couldn't be true because if a good spy's record was ever perfect, the bosses would give more and more difficult assignments until one was too much. That's one reason why even the top spies died on missions. She heard that before she graduated from the Farm, and she saw it happen to the best agents ever since then. Graham shielded her from most of that, and Bryce's incompetence added "blemishes" to her record. She made up for his mistakes when she could, but she could only do so much to cover for her partner. That was a major reason for an imperfect record: incompetent partners. Hadn't Casey ever worked with a partner before he protected Chuck?
Even great agents without partners, like Carina, didn't have perfect records. If they always got the job done (albeit sometimes with Sarah's help), if didn't matter because they played it to wild and loose. Carina's record was not perfect because while her results were, her file was filled with all sorts of warnings and red flags.
Casey has been a spy longer. Even the Reaganite couldn't be that good, that straight-laced, and never have an incompetent partner. None of that mattered at the moment. The important thing was Chuck.
In Sarah's opinion, Beckman didn't care about Chuck as a person, but she would care about Fulcrum getting their hands on him. Sarah didn't remove any of the lethal tone from her voice when she said the next thing to Casey: "We can call her after we start searching from Castle. We should have started the search ten minutes ago, but someone took a leisurely stroll through the apartment courtyard."
Her usually competent partner grunted. "Ten minutes ago, we were still on the way from Castle to Chuck's and didn't know he was gone."
Where's Chuck? Jill wouldn't know her cover had been blown because she thought the list of Fulcrum agents was traded for her safety. The Fulcrum agent destroyed Guy's original list. That meant she and Chuck might have gone to some place like a hotel, instead of a Fulcrum cell. That would be better. If that was true, the knowledge of Chuck together with that evil woman would torture Sarah, but she had withstood torture before. At least it wouldn't torture Chuck, and he would be safe. That was the most important thing.
They had to get to Castle to find Chuck because they couldn't fail to save him. She wasn't the bad partner to mess up Casey's "perfect" record, and she hoped he was a good partner that wouldn't make her fail to save Chuck. They just had to save Chuck so she could kill nerd.
Ok. She really wouldn't do that because it was her job to protect the tall, cute idiot.
Not being tracked
(by a watch, but really still trackable)
He did it! He was actually free from the watchful eyes of the government!
If he had to be specific, it was the grunting "no secrets agency" neighbor's eyes he was most relieved to escape. Normally, Chuck didn't mind two of the sapphire eyes, but considering the situation, that would be awkward—especially considering that fact he was just in the shower with Sarah, with his hands all over her soft skin… really awkward.
Chuck could hardly believe he and Jill were back where they were at Stanford, before everything. The last time they went on a road trip, they were almost "there," but that was ruined when a Fulcrum agent took Jill hostage. No spies or Fulcrum agents were following them this time!
The "not really an agent" was really happy that a few weeks ago, when he made that wish on a "shooting star" (aka a Japan weapons satellite burning up on reentry), he didn't accidentally reveal his wish, making it not come true. He was tempted to tell Sarah for an instant because…well, Sarah could get him to admit anything. It was really hard to keep secrets from her. Fortunately, his older and wiser sister set him right: never reveal your wishes or they won't come true. (There really ought to be a special "secrets" category for things like gifts and wishes.)
Ellie wouldn't have understood the wish anyway. At the time, Chuck didn't understand it, even though he was the person who made it. His wish was that he could be with "the love of his life." He wasn't specific in his head, which was fortunate. The wish was smarter then he. The obvious person for that role was Sarah, but back at Stanford, he thought Jill was the love of his life. When he made the wish, he didn't think that was true anymore because Jill was not in the picture. Turns out, all that needed to happen was for Jill to come back into his life. Now the person he used to think was "love of his life" was back, and he was about to get his mojo back. His wish was coming true!
It did make sense in a way. Sarah was too good for him. She was gorgeous, always saved his life, and… she was way out of his league. Chuck and Jill had been together for years. They could work.
Chuck knew he needed to stop thinking about his fantastic cover girlfriend and think about the woman who was with him. She wasn't only with him because it was her job as a spy, like had to be the case with Sarah. Jill wanted to be around him for some reason.
As they turned into the hotel drive, he looked over at the women who wanted to be there with him, and she smiled back. Directly by the front entrance, Jill stopped the car, and Chuck rushed around the car to open her door. She thanked him, but stayed in the car. She said he should get a room while she parked. Chuck continued to hold the door open and explained the problem. While he had left the watch in his room, he was sure the CIA had his accounts tracked, so if he paid, it would be like sending up a flare for where they were. He didn't tell her that if Casey really wanted to, he would pull Jill's account information, making it a non-issue, but that would talk longer and maybe it wouldn't get that far.
Chuck needed to stop thinking of the worst case scenario. This place was better than his room because Casey didn't have cameras at the hotel.
The other thing Chuck didn't tell Jill was that he barely had the money to cover the room. He had a Stanford degree now, but he wasn't paid like someone with one. He still was paid by Buy More as a lowly Nerd Herd supervisor. He probably had enough for one night, but that would be for after the bill was settled. Until then, the hotel would insist on a credit card number as a hold. Chuck told Jill that he would pay her back. Fortunately Chuck did have enough cash in his Velcro wallet to tip the valet, so he wouldn't look like a complete jerk.
Also fortunately, Jill didn't seem as superficial as she was in college, when she picked Bryce over him. (Sarah was never superficial like that… and he still needed to stop thinking about her.) Back at Stanford, he was certain Jill would be offended by the situation. Now, she was unphased by all of it and seemed happy to be away with him for some reason.
Chuck definitely had his mojo back!
A/N: Last chapter was bittersweet, bit it was relatively Charah-friendly with a surprise friend-date. Sorry, this "in between" was unavoidably painful on the Charah-front. The good news is for Thanksgiving next chapter, the evil-ex will be gone.
If you saw "Chuck vs Phase Three," you know it would have been more satisfying if Sarah was unleashed at the hotel where Chuck and Jill went. At this point, she didn't understand her feelings, and she was still hiding from the 49-B. That means she didn't bust down the door. Oh well.
At this point, all Sarah knows it she needs to be able to find her guy.
MyNameIsJeffNImLost AU stories:
- "The Intersect Couple vs Flashing" (chapter 7-8. "Be Somewhere Else" and "Double Rancard Deux")
- "Chuck & His Roommate vs the Next Mission (chapter 7, "Squeaky Clean")