A/N: All of Marlin in one long-ish chapter, better than breaking it up. Ironing out kinks here. What always bugged me here...Beckman tells Sarah the order has gone out. She just goes and works her hot dog shift? Really? My theory-she believed that she would handle his transfer, like she told them. This was an epic fail for Operation Bartowski, so I tried to include that here. They went 30 days without sweeping for surveillance? What were they doing? Here goes.
It was three days later when the next crisis began.
I was working a typical hot dog shift when Casey appeared in the middle of the day, not something he usually did. He was in his Buy More uniform, at work and keeping an eye on Chuck like he was supposed to. His face when he came through the door of the Wienerlicious absolutely terrified me. He was grim, intense, even more all-business than usual. His only words to me: "We have a problem."
I asked him what he meant. He placed a bug, a listening device, on the counter in front of me and told me Chuck had found it in the Buy More. It was a GLG-20, not the type Casey had used in the Buy More.
It wasn't us. Which meant someone else was spying on us…on Chuck.
I held the bug in my hand, repeating Casey. I thought my heart had stopped beating. In terms of failure, allowing an enemy agent to have full access to your asset via a listening device…that was about as bad as it could get, other than having Chuck literally kidnapped out from under us. Ultimately, it was my job to protect him. Worrying about Lou and Bryce and kissing him and Lon Kirk and all of it…I couldn't deny I had let myself get distracted. It was unacceptable, completely unacceptable. Before I had ever met Chuck, I would have considered the failure in itself unacceptable, for my record was perfect. Now, the failure was inexcusable because by not doing my job, I had put Chuck in danger. I was already well aware of the fact that the thought of being without him was unbearable to me. I couldn't cause that loss. Damn it, I swore to myself.
We called Beckman and Graham from the computer console in the Wienerlicious. Fortunately, Scooter wasn't there, so we locked the door to the restaurant so we wouldn't be disturbed. Casey made it a point to tell me not to talk to Chuck. He was right, but it made my uneasiness worse. He wanted to wait, until the full amount of damage could be assessed. It was that bad.
Beckman and Graham described the nature of the bug we presented them with, telling us that in order for it to function, it needed a receiver which couldn't be positioned that far away from the bugs. Most probably it was inside the Buy More as well. Graham told us that particular type of bug was a new favorite of Fulcrum.
Fulcrum. The group that had taken Bryce to Europe after Casey had shot him. The group Beckman had sent Bryce in deep cover again to take down. We dodged a bullet before, stopping Tommy before word was spread to other Fulcrum agents that Chuck, not Bryce, was the Intersect. Somehow, maybe by process of elimination, Tommy went after Chuck for that reason. Obviously, someone else had been suspicious. Intelligence like that was very hard to contain, hard to track when it was disseminated. Who knew if somewhere between finding Bryce in the CIA facility and coming after Chuck in the Buy More, Tommy hadn't told someone about Chuck. At the very least, the Buy More was a potential hot spot because he had been apprehended there.
We were sloppy. Very sloppy.
Once Graham had mentioned Fulcrum, however, I thought Casey had made a huge mistake, one I thought he didn't catch, thinking he was just as rattled as I was. He replied to Graham, "So you mean the secret government cabal that kidnapped Bryce Larkin and came within a hair of figuring out Chuck's the Intersect is now skulking around the Buy More?"
I did everything I could to keep my face neutral, despite wanting to scream to tell him to stop. I watched Graham's face on the monitor. There was only the slightest twitch when all of that information seemed to register–Bryce was alive, had been kidnapped by Fulcrum and was now apparently somewhere else at large, and Fulcrum had almost kidnapped Chuck out from under us during that mission.
I thought about Graham's questions when he'd called me back to D.C. I hadn't lied, technically, just talked my way around most of what he asked. I never offered the information, but he also had never asked any of those questions directly.
Beckman's face was oddly clenched as well, her lower jaw pulsating, something I had almost never seen from her, cool as she usually was. She had noticed Casey's slip as well, but hid it from us and from Graham, or so I thought. I would soon find out I was wrong, misinterpreting all I had seen and heard because I didn't have all the information.
I tried to focus on what they were saying. We were given 48 hours to find the receiver and identify the enemy operative. If we failed, they were relocating Chuck to a secure facility. Bunker him, just like Casey had wanted to do on that first day. My biggest fear, what I had been working all along to prevent, why I had proposed what I had proposed on that same first day. We had a mission, but the way Graham ended the call…it was like he expected us to fail. That he wanted us to fail. All of my spy senses were on alert.
I reeled on Casey the moment the connection was cut. "You just told Graham everything, Casey! He didn't know Bryce was alive or anything about Tommy or that mission or where Beckman sent Bryce."
"Easy, Walker," Casey replied, a tad condescending in tone. "Beckman pulled him in." He didn't elaborate.
I didn't think Casey was lying, as strange as I still felt. Nevertheless, now I couldn't explain what I saw on Graham and Beckman's faces. In retrospect, I know those looks which I mistook for surprise over Bryce and Fulcrum were that silent communication about the termination orders for Chuck that were known to Graham, Beckman, and Casey…but purposely not me. Whatever was happening with Bryce and Fulcrum, Graham now knew, because Beckman had told him.
Whatever distrust had been circulating about Graham was not as important as the termination order. In the end, that was what all of that meant. There was much more that we found out later, but in this situation, without that foreknowledge, I was confused.
But I had a mission, probably the most important mission I had been given since being stationed in Burbank. Find the receiver and the mole…or lose Chuck forever. I had no room for failure. I pulled out all the stops.
We called for a backup team and staged a robbery at the Burbank Buy More. CIA style, which meant we cleared the entire store out, wall to wall, fixture to fixture. Two tractor trailer trucks in the middle of the night at the loading dock. We disabled the security footage and unscrambled the locks to get it. With the massive team we had, it took about two hours to move it all. We transported everything to an empty airplane hangar leased by a shell corporation, covering for the CIA. We spent all night sweeping the entire contents of the store. We found 29 more bugs, for a total of 30, but no receiver.
Twenty-nine. Under our noses, enough bugs to record literally everything we had ever said inside the walls of the Buy More. I was in charge of the scene, but the head agent who was running the op gave me this funny look, like he was shocked at just how badly our protection had actually been. It was that pat-me-on-the-head, what-do-you-expect-from-a-girl look. It made me want to scream. It was worse because at least here, he seemed justified in that theory. Poor love-sick agent, too busy batting her eyelashes at her asset to notice 29 separate incursions.
Casey appeared on the scene early in the morning, after the sun had come up, to check on our progress. He ended up calling Chuck and telling him to meet us there. He called Casey when he arrived and Casey went and got him in his car.
Chuck was surprised when he realized it was me. He was also somewhat frazzled, more so than I thought he should have been, for a bizarre robbery that he didn't know affected him yet. He wanted answers, asked frantic questions.
Casey told him bluntly that the bug he found wasn't ours. I tried to explain better. I told him the bug he found wasn't the same model as the ones Casey had installed. I also told him it needed a receiver, and that meant someone had been spying on us the entire time, in the Buy More. I had to repeat some of it, as he just didn't seem to register the seriousness of it. I know now, he was just so worried that he had lost the diamond engagement ring Devon had given Chuck to hold for him, his own plight was pushed to the background. He never once thought of himself, always others.
Casey had to bluntly state–again–that Fulcrum did that because they were looking for the Intersect. Chuck had faith in us, that we had fixed everything. He was ready to go back to the Buy More, go about his business, after he found his sister's ring. Casey blurted something else out again. I had to cut him off and ask to talk to him privately.
Chuck is a very intelligent person, and he often caught on to things, figured things out, faster than a lot of trained, seasoned agents, even this early when he was so inexperienced. If he had been calmer, in his right state of mind, he would have understood what we were trying to say. But it was very obvious that what we were saying just wasn't getting through to him. He wasn't processing the information. Casey blurting everything out was not the answer. Casey was a good agent, but he lacked finesse. That was my job, and not just because I was Chuck's handler. For the most part, I felt like I knew how to talk to him. We were in tune with each other, which may or may not have been appropriate, but it was still true.
While Casey and I were still arguing, the lead agent called us over to view something. The security camera had been turned off, but, as we saw on the feed, a drunken Jeff and Lester, Chuck's Nerd Herd workers, had turned it back on again. A comedy of errors, but it worked in our favor. We saw the video footage of the mole trying to take the stuffed fish from the wall in Big Mike, Chuck's store manager's, office. The spy heard Jeff and Lester and didn't end up getting the receiver, but it was in the fish. Then we watched Jeff and Lester take the fish–why, we had no idea, other than they were drunken idiots. We had found it.
I had to tell Chuck that we never found a ring in any of the inventory we had taken from the store. He was beside himself over that, and I had to be the one to tell him that was a minor problem compared to what we were facing. That receiver had been in the Buy More for no one knew how long. Listen long enough, it was almost a statistical probability that some conversation that referenced the Intersect had been recorded. Only one example we were sure of was Chuck telling Casey about the Grand Saville and all the Russians he'd flashed on. There were bound to be more.
I tried my finesse, but I think Chuck saw something on my face that made him question. He actually said, "Say it. Say what you're not saying." I was a trained CIA operative, raised by a con artist. I knew how to say just enough, to never make anyone question what I said or how I said it. Twenty-six years of training were no match for Chuck and his ability to read me. No one had ever been able to do that before, not even Bryce. It startled me enough, acknowledging that Casey had to be the one to break the news about the bunker.
For what it was worth, Casey did shock the urgency of the situation into him. He looked so helpless, so worried…I couldn't keep eye contact with him. My fault, this was all my fault. I couldn't shake that feeling, but it was self-indulgent and useless here. I had to pool all of my effort to find the receiver. I was out of options.
Casey had the idea to take Chuck back to the Buy More and question Jeff and Lester, since they knew the last known location of the stuffed fish. It seemed pretty straightforward, that once Chuck and Casey could question Jeff and Lester, that we had the receiver in hand. I called Beckman to update her on the situation.
She told me over the phone that, in essence, what we were doing didn't matter. The identity of the Intersect was potentially compromised, so they had basically rescinded their 48 hour window and sent out the order to bring Chuck in. I actually argued with her, reminding her of what she had promised, though in actuality, she had promised no such thing. They always told us as much as they wanted us to know, no more.
I was angry, stunned, when I hung up the phone. Graham's words and his demeanor from before stood out in my thoughts. He expected us to fail, because our finding it was never the solution. It was an excuse to pull Chuck into protective custody. I never knew what Graham's endgame was, what would have happened if he'd succeeded here. It was always just conjecture, but I suspected there was some type of experimentation Graham wanted conducted on Chuck…and he wanted the opportunity to complete it all before they ordered Chuck's execution. It makes me sick and angry to even think about that, that I was ever a willing participant in an agency that felt emboldened to wreak such havoc on innocent people like that.
I didn't even really understand that this was when this started, but as I paced through the airplane hangar, I was thinking about what I could do to protect him, just get Chuck away from the CIA and the NSA. The threads of that plan were weaving themselves in the back of my mind, without any real conscious thought. Running away, planning an escape route…that had been something I had started learning to do when I was eight years old. It never occurred to me before this moment that I might have devised some type of escape route from my current predicament…that there was even a way possible for me to get away from them. That seed stayed planted, growing without my knowledge, for another 18 months…until it was ripped from the ground and left to die in the scorching sun. But that's for later.
I was torn, worrying, but, of course, I had a stupid hot dog shift I needed to report for, and I was on report again and close to being fired due to repeated absences, so I had to go. I was hopelessly distracted and I managed to burn myself twice. I don't know why I thought I would have time, that I would know when the CIA came to extract Chuck, but somewhere in the back of my mind I had set that as fact, and never questioned it. I thought I had time, or believe me, I would have dropped every single wiener in the boiling oil and took off to get Chuck, no questions asked. But I thought I had time, and I was still wrestling with the truth of my feelings at this point.
There was quite a convoluted plot that was unraveling while I was slaving away at the Wienerlicious. The whole story? Apparently, Jeff and Lester had taken the fish to Chuck's apartment so Big Mike wouldn't blame them. In the meantime, Morgan had broken into Chuck's work locker and took his entire bag back to Chuck's apartment because he was trying to borrow and play the newest advance copy of a video game Chuck had in his possession due to his role at Buy More. In the midst of that, Morgan found Devon's great-grandmother's diamond ring in Chuck's bag and thought Chuck had bought that for me.
Worth stopping here to say…to put it mildly, Morgan was not living to his full potential during this time. I think about his logic here and it blows my mind. First of all, Ellie's engagement ring was over a carat, easily over ten thousand dollars at that time. Chuck made 11 dollars an hour. Honestly? Second of all, if Chuck had purchased an expensive ring like that, would he have left it in his work bag at the Buy More when he could have just hidden it in his room? Third, Chuck and I had only been fake dating for four months. Ellie and Devon were the perfect couple and they had been dating for seven years, though, granted, they were younger than Chuck and I when they met. Now, Morgan concedes to how stupid that train of thought was, for everything except the amount of time. His argument for that? He, and literally everyone else who ever saw us, including Jeff Barnes, who carried around a business card with his own address on it so he wouldn't forget it, knew how much in love we were. There's a lot of truth to that…even if we were the last two people to see it.
Anyway, Morgan freaked out and ended up showing the ring to Ellie (which she never told Devon she ever saw, not wanting to ruin the surprise.) Morgan hid the ring in the fish and put it in the freezer at the Wienerlicious, thinking he could, and I quote, "talk some sense into Chuck before he popped the question to me."
If I had actually been paying even a little bit of attention at work, I would have seen the stupid fish in the freezer. I usually had to go in there at least once a shift to restock. I was too busy worrying about what was going to happen to do my cover job to any semblance of competence. As it was, I was only pulled out of my reverie by an email from Chuck, asking if the mole could be the shawarma delivery girl. I literally saw the email right as she walked in the door. Fortunately, Chuck had the sense to send a picture of her with his email.
She asked to go back and get something in the freezer. She obviously had no idea who I was, because when I told her no, she pulled a gun out of her paper bag and pointed it at me. I grabbed the gun, hard, and wouldn't let go. She pulled me over the counter, my grip on the gun she held so tightly binding us together. I fell onto the floor and she kicked the gun out of my hand. I punched and kicked her down and then went to retrieve the gun. I pointed it at her, and she kicked a table at me and I went down again, losing the gun to her, but I managed to kick it out of her hand once more. I almost had her, but then customers came in the door, distracting me just for a second, and she chopped at my thigh with all her strength and I went down hard. I was able to turn on the surveillance camera installed in the Wienerlicious ceiling, but she pulled the gun on me and I was done.
She forced me into the freezer and told me to kick the fish out to her. Then she locked me in the freezer. I was in there for about ten minutes, give or take. I heard her break the fish on the floor and then depart. It was the bell on the door that I heard later. Not that long after, I heard Chuck stuttering the longest string of the word "no" I had ever heard. I yelled for help.
I was freezing in my short skirt and flimsy peasant blouse. He saw me locked in the freezer. I told him it was Lizzie, the shawarma girl, and that she now had the receiver in her possession. He started freaking out, realizing the gravity of the situation. I told him I had a backup weapon in an empty jar of horseradish sauce. He was nervous and rambling; I had to make him focus. My shattering teeth made me a little extra irritated with him.
He was reluctant to use my gun, telling me he had never even held one. I knew that without even thinking, but I knew he could do it if he had to. The safety was on the first time he tried to shoot. I probably should have explained to him how to do that, because he ended up dropping the magazine onto the floor instead of disengaging the safety. While he was in the process of that, the detective from the Buy More was there and pulled his gun on Chuck. I hid, instinctively, but the detective took Chuck into custody. It never occurred to me that Conway wasn't who he said he was.
I think I was in the freezer for another 30 minutes. Casey had to question Morgan again about where Chuck was, where the fish was, and finally realized he needed to go to the Wienerlicious. I heard the bell on the door and yelled again. Casey shot the lock and got me out. I was breathless and fatigued from being so cold for so long, but I told Casey everything.
We reviewed the surveillance footage that had been captured after I had deployed it, looking for clues. We watched Lizzie break open the fish, take the receiver, and the engagement ring. Then she made a phone call. Casey got right to it, and moved to get a track on her phone to locate her. We called Beckman and Graham and explained all of the developments. I told them Chuck was in police custody.
Beckman's words, "The Intersect is no longer your concern, Agent Walker," cut through me like a knife. From almost the first moment I had met him, the Intersect had never been my concern–only him. I felt like I had gone partially deaf, barely hearing all of Graham's words that Chuck was on the way to the extraction point with Conway, who was really CIA. Something must have shown on my face.
Graham gave me his best lizard stare and asked me, "Is there a problem?"
I know I stuttered, trying my best to seem calm and nonchalant. I told them I just thought I would be the one to handle the transfer. That I would have had time to figure out what to do…how to save him from that fate.
Beckman was stone cold, telling me to forget Chuck and find the Fulcrum agent. Casey broke the connection, as he had seen the same thing on my face, whatever it was that I could no longer control. He told me he was going to get Lizzie…and I was going to get Chuck. He stunned me, Mr. Sacrifices For The Job. I thought about Ilsa, what we had learned, and it gave me hope. There was some compassion in his eyes when he told me to go before he changed his mind, bending orders for a personal reason. I don't know if he did that because he thought I could stop the transfer…or if he just wanted to give me a chance to say goodbye to Chuck. I didn't hang around long enough to ask him. I changed in my car and took off.
Fortunately for me, LongShore never deactivated the tracker on Chuck's watch, so I found the rooftop where the chopper was due. I was breathless at the top of the stairs after running all the way up, but I yelled to LongShore to make him stop. Chuck turned around when he heard my voice. Oh, god, it hurts even now when I remember how he looked, so frightened, so anguished…and then so relieved, because I was there. Relieved. Had I ever caused that reaction in another human being, simply for just being there?
I was breathless from running, even more breathless from the emotional reaction seeing him like that had caused, but I forced my tone neutral, business-like, explaining what we were doing, telling him he could wait. He was all protocol, telling me if there had been a change, he would have been notified. I argued anyway. I begged him for more time. Without even my awareness, my hand drifted back to my gun, tucked behind my back. Would I have shot a legitimate CIA agent in cold blood like that to free Chuck? It was my first thought. I didn't, because I knew Chuck and I knew the picture of me killing LongShore would never leave his mind and the guilt of that man's cause of death would never leave him. I let go of my gun, realizing I had only bought us enough time to say goodbye.
I walked across the rooftop to stand in front of him, his hands cuffed together in front of him. "I'm not ready, Sarah. I'm not ready to disappear," he gasped, his voice trembling.
"No, I know. I know," I told him. My vision blurred as tears formed. I couldn't hold them in, looking at the anguish on his face.
"I need you to talk to Ellie and to Morgan and my friends and–and–and tell them…I don't know. I… Look, if I'm supposed to be dead, just say something that will make it ok, that will make them feel alright." My eyes were burning and I couldn't blink or all my tears would spill down my cheeks. I couldn't speak because of the burning in my throat, but I nodded. His first thought, his first worry was never about himself, but the people who loved him, who would be damaged by his disappearance. They loved him too. Was there anything I could say to make that ok?
"Just make sure they know how much I love them," he gushed in a hurried breath. "You can do that, right?" I nodded.
"Course you can. You're Sarah. You can do anything," he said, so surely it took my breath away. It was like a hand had closed around my heart and squeezed. My chest ached.
His eyes teared as well. He gave me a tiny half-smile, forcing the levity. "And, hey, there's a silver lining to this, too, you know, 'cause we're not working together anymore, which means we can go on a date. You can come by my cell, and we can hang out, and you can tell me who the president is." As sad as I was, he still made me smile.
He reached for both of my hands and held them, running his thumbs across them. "And maybe, uh…maybe we can see how we really feel."
He said a lot in just that short bit, which was a lot for Chuck. He accepted me the way I was. He understood why I had pulled back after the kiss. He understood at least part of what he had seen in me was real. Why now, when I couldn't do anything else but watch him go?
I felt the tears fall, my full eyes unable to contain them. He said goodbye, forcing himself to be strong, and then turned to walk away after we were told our time was up. His back was to me, and I called him. He turned around.
"I'll save you later," I whispered, trying to give him hope, however I could. He gave me that half smile, one side of his mouth turned up. This couldn't be the last time I would ever see that. But I watched helplessly as he turned again.
Just as Chuck stepped in front of Long Shore, the agent was shot in the back. I ran to Chuck, told him to get down, just as I saw Lizzie appear at the top of the stairs. How did she find us? She was able to shoot the gun out of my hand. I pushed him in front of me and motioned for him to run down the stairs. She was close behind, double fisted with guns, shooting at us. We were hiding, but we both heard her say that she listened to the receiver.
Chuck and I looked at each other, dread on each other's faces. She was Fulcrum, and she knew, without a doubt, that Chuck was the Intersect, not Bryce, like most of Fulcrum was led to believe. The only saving grace was she said her superiors didn't know yet. Why would she have waited? Could we even believe her?
All I knew, I had to protect Chuck, and I had to stop her. I told him to distract her, and I ran, thinking if we were separate, we had a shot. She was almost certainly given orders to not kill the Intersect. He ran and she followed back onto the helipad. I circled back around and climbed up the same set of stairs where I had first emerged.
I heard her say, "I have two guns. What do you have?"
"Me." I told her, then tackled her around the waist and pulled her down. He did have me. He would always have me. I renewed that vow, raised it to another level, at that moment. She grabbed me around my neck…I kicked her away. She kicked me down; I jumped back up and fought back. She roundhouse kicked me, and I fell back, but I kept coming at her, almost not feeling any pain, I was so charged, so focused on protecting Chuck.
I heard Casey shouting, his presence registering in the back of my mind. No matter what, Casey would make sure Chuck was ok. That was my moment of relief.
She pulled me down, yanked on a fistful of my hair. She punched me; I punched back. She reached for my hair again and we rolled…straight off the building. I hadn't realized that was even what had happened until I felt my stomach lurch into my throat, the sensation of falling taking over. I screamed. I heard Chuck shout my name. I thought I was going to die, in that split second I was tumbling through the air. But it was alright…Chuck was safe.
My primal screaming ended as I hit a pile of garbage in the dumpster into which we had landed. I felt the jarring landing in every bone, including my teeth…but I was alive. I stood first and punched her out. I never looked up, but I knew Chuck had run to the edge after he saw me fall over. He told me, later, that he had nightmares for weeks about standing there, looking over the edge, afraid he would see me dead and broken on the ground. I guess we both had that nightmare, at separate times.
The cleaners ended up refilling the Buy More with the contents of the airplane hangar, under the guise of the police finding the robbers. How they explained that, I have no idea, but there was always some strange story that seemed to make perfect sense at the time. Casey took charge of that while Chuck and I spent the rest of the night, until the sunrise, sifting through the dumpster, looking for Ellie's ring that had fallen off Lizzie's hand while we were fighting.
That was probably one of the most disgusting things I've ever had to do. I tried to convince Chuck that the CIA could just replace the ring, as I was sifting through wilted celery scraps and he was digging through feminine hygiene products. It had sentimental value, something I understood theoretically, but not in practicality. Everything I owned fit in one suitcase and almost all of it was clothing. I was like a non-person, no souvenirs, no symbols. It wasn't until Chuck gave me his mother's charm bracelet for Christmas the next year that I actually owned something that meant something to me. Looking back, it makes perfect sense why he wanted her ring and not a ring.
He found it, finally, about an hour after dawn. We took off in his Nerd Herder, back to his apartment. The entire inside of his car smelled like the dumpster, and I was gagging when I realized it was us. I was going to have to burn the clothing I was wearing rather than explain to the hotel laundry service why my clothing smelled like I had rolled around in trash. Devon had actually been waiting, all night, to give the ring to Ellie.
Chuck climbed in through his bedroom window with the ring and I waited outside. He came out the front door. He gave me the sweetest look when he shut the door, saying with a soft smirk, "Mission accomplished." I encouraged him to spy on the proposal through the window. He was reluctant, but he followed my lead. I don't know really what possessed me to do that, other than my pure curiosity, wanting to see what that actually looked like–two people, pledging their lives to each other, beginning in one moment, with one question.
I watched Devon get down on one knee in front of her, while she sat on the sofa. I don't know what he said to her–I couldn't read his lips. I do know she didn't let him finish, just started waving her hands excitedly, nodding, then diving and grabbing him around his neck. Of course she said yes. Ellie loved Devon, and Devon loved Ellie. They were the perfect, normal couple.
Chuck got emotional, his voice very breathy when he said, "She looks so happy." That was pure joy for his sister, mixed with the sudden sharpness of the feeling of almost losing her forever, his potential to cause her endless pain if his whereabouts were suddenly unknown.
He brought that up, though, his close call. After the fact, with confirmation that Fulcrum did not have any information that compromised Chuck's cover, with the receiver and the mole in CIA hands, Beckman and Graham rescinded the bunker order, allowing us to stay with him in the field. He was still worried, about the danger and about Fulcrum. I changed the subject, telling him he should go inside and congratulate his sister. Truth was, I was worried, too, and he relied on my strength and reassurance, so deflecting was better in this situation.
He asked me if I wanted to come in with him. I wanted that more than he had any idea. But I told him, no, it was family time. I didn't belong there–his fake girlfriend.
He half turned, over his shoulder, saying very softly, "I know." My insides felt like a tidal wave was swishing inside, from my head down to my feet.
It hurt, but I told him goodnight instead. He went inside, but though I wished him goodnight, I stayed. I watched them through the glass, aching, wishing that everything that we had been pretending for four months was real, all of it. Or that there was a way that someday it could be, only I had no idea how to get from here to there.
Eventually, Casey was there, coming up behind me while I was still lurking beside the window, out of sight. I was exhausted, sore, and I reeked of garbage. Maybe he saw that sad, wistful look on my face. He told me we could only keep Chuck here, like that, for so long.
He was trying to prepare me, knowing what he, Graham, and Beckman knew, that I didn't yet.
He was also trying to justify those orders to himself, because he knew how hard they would be to complete.
