A/N: And Gravitron all in one chapter. Glad to be done with this Jill stuff (for the most part, at least for a while.) Chuck drives me crazy in this episode, how he keeps trusting her! Ugh, I hate it. Also a few plot snafus I tried to patch. Sarah tells him they'll be right there...but they made it home before Chuck and Jill. Huh? One of the cut scenes has them go to Catalina, so I added that. Also...at the end, they are both wearing different clothes. He didn't go home...where did he get that shirt? Why would it matter to Fulcrum if Jill was dating Chuck? I added a little spin...because nothing in canon contradicts it. Here goes. :)
I was sleep deprived, barely holding myself together, 24 hours after Jill had disappeared with Chuck. I had been in bad situations before, desperate times when I wasn't sure what my next move would be. But somehow, I had never been quite so distraught, so helplessly panicked, before.
This time, it wasn't just about me. I think if it had been, I would have been fine. But it wasn't me–it was Chuck. My first priority, my mission, both government sanctioned and personally pledged, was to protect him, and I'd failed, worse than I had ever failed before.
I had let my personal feelings interfere with my spy skills, so blinded by jealousy and hurt by Chuck's seeming disregard for my feelings, that I had missed every sign, every clue, that Jill was an enemy agent. She was good, I admit, giving a perfect performance in which she used every point to her advantage.
Casey's plan had been to go back over what we knew and try to find Chuck without the aid of his tracker, which he had left on his nightstand. We knew he had tried to escape with her for a weekend getaway to the mountains before Fulcrum had thwarted those plans, faked as we now knew. Casey started searching every hotel and resort within a 200 mile radius of Los Angeles, checking for registrations. Casey did most of the work; I hated that it was so obvious, especially to Casey, that I was so frantic I had trouble focusing.
What made it so awful was that it wasn't just Chuck's life that was in danger, the fact that Fulcrum could be torturing him somewhere, causing him physical harm. He could have been killed before we ever found him.
But Chuck loved her. She lied to him, who knew for how long…but he loved her, at least the lie she had been portraying all along. I kept imagining the utter devastation he would have endured once he realized she had betrayed him. I knew what it felt like to be betrayed–the acid that burned to the center of you, and I didn't even love Bryce.
In retrospect, finding out that Jill was Fulcrum made it easier on me. If their relationship had been real, genuine…it would have been worse. The week before this instance was painful, watching them together, watching how…happy she made him. Those few hours before we knew the truth about Jill, agonizing over the fact that they were having sex, I was gutted, sick to the point of nausea.
I had been dreaming of that with him for over a year, imagining his hands and mouth on my body, of how he would feel inside me. The pictures of him, in bed with her, left to my imagination behind the veil of Jill's blouse over the camera…my last glimpse of Chuck's eyes as he gazed hungrily at her…could not be banished, playing even behind my closed eyelids.
If I hadn't been working in Castle, I don't know what would have happened. Too much alcohol, I'm sure…and maybe a stranger I could fuck in the front seat of my car. I know the thought crossed my mind, as awful as it is to have to admit to myself. I believe I did fuck some men I didn't know, men I don't remember, after those nights high and drunk with Carina while we were CATs. But I had never intentionally sought out a stranger in a bar the way Carina always did. My real partners had been Sam and Bryce…and no one else.
But my perpetual loneliness was bearable…and losing Chuck was not. Not that fucking someone would have made that better. Trust me, I know. I let Daniel Shaw fuck me when I thought I had lost Chuck forever, while my heart was broken. This is for later, but I can say here, it would be like consenting to being raped–a contradiction by definition, a submissive surrender of my own will.
There was no shortage of men willing to do that, so long as I looked in the right place. I could choose him, take him to my car, open his pants and force him inside me. I could ride him until I orgasmed, probably more than once, before he finished. It would feel good…after so long a time of me alone in my bed with just my vibrator. But it wouldn't be me. It wasn't even something I wanted. It was only my body; my heart was untouchable, broken and bleeding and destroyed.
Even now, that thought frightens me. But it didn't happen, because I was working.
And then everything turned on a dime. Chuck was still in danger, at risk for torture or death…but Jill was an enemy. An enemy Chuck loved, but an enemy to be eliminated, no longer competition for his heart. That's what made it easier. Not that I believed he would get over that any time soon–he had barely gotten over her breaking up with him five years ago, with what I would consider a minor betrayal compared to this. But she would be gone, and it would be just us again, in that same painful limbo.
But I would have hope again. That was what I needed.
I just had to find him, get him away from her…before it was too late.
Beckman was furious that we had lost track of Chuck…to a Fulcrum agent. Casey, never one for offering words of comfort, kept reminding me that if Fulcrum was torturing Chuck, he had next to no endurance.
Partially to shut him up, partially to calm myself, I reminded Casey that despite it all, Jill had no idea that Chuck was the Intersect. She knew he was a spy, but that important detail was crucial to keep a secret from as many people as possible. And, because of Chuck's quick thinking in the opera house, Jill had no idea that we knew she was Fulcrum. It wasn't much, but it made things a little less dire. Just a little.
Early in the morning on the next day, Chuck finally turned his phone back on, probably when he woke up in the morning. We were able to triangulate his location from the cell tower that pinged when he turned it on. They were in Catalina, an island about an hour off the coast of L.A.
Casey and I took off, hoping to intercept the couple before they left the island. Casey stayed peacefully quiet the entire time. I did remind him we couldn't go in guns blazing; we didn't know what had happened and tipping Jill off that we knew defeated the plan. If they were at a resort in Catalina, she was still playing the game, twisting him around her finger, fucking her mark once more…because she could.
We arrived at the resort, disguised ourselves as resort staff. We got the room number and then waited in a cabana, observing the situation.
After only about ten minutes, Casey alerted me that Chuck was moving. He'd left his hotel room. We switched cabanas, ducking into one that was on the path he was utilizing. Casey peeked, giving me this strange look. He said, very softly, that Chuck was barefoot and panicked, looking like he was running for his life.
Something had changed, but what? Why was he so agitated?
Casey grabbed him and pulled him into the cabana as he started to dart by. Casey flung him, a full body slam, onto the massage table, all the while cursing him for dodging his protection and generally being an idiot. All I added was that Chuck should never do that again.
He had landed face first on the table. When he turned, out of breath, I got a good look at his face.
He knew about Jill.
He was frantic…but his eyes were so…sad. He was in a complete state of denial, even though he was terrified. Selfishly, I thanked the fates that he had found out about her on his own and that I didn't have to be the one to tell him. Our previous suspicions about Lou had gotten his defenses up, and I was sure if I had been the one to tell him Jill was Fulcrum, without that flash of corroboration, he might have reacted the same way–suspicious of my motives, looking for a way that we could be wrong. The hard salami had driven that point home, even though we had hard evidence this time and not just a surveillance photo.
We knew, in a very broad sense, that the Intersect could break codes. Sam's algorithms, the ones he had used while under cover in Al Qaeda, had been incorporated into the first version of the Intersect that Chuck downloaded. Bryce and Graham had confirmed that information. Chuck had seen a coded text message come across Jill's cell phone. Why she left it alone with him, I have no idea, other than she had let herself slip out of spy mode, lost in the moment and just enjoying the physical pleasures of having sex with him. She had no idea, not an inkling, that he was the Intersect, or she would have been more alert, more cautious.
In the same breath he tried to tell us Jill was Fulcrum, and we confirmed it, he backtracked and tried to deny it to us. He rambled on about how long he had known her, that it had to be a mistake. He started getting sentimental, sharing too much about the night they had spent together, which made my stomach burn with acid.
Casey said Jill's code name out loud and Chuck flashed. It was quick, but when he recovered from it, I saw how devastated he was. I told him I was sorry, and I meant it. The last thing I ever wanted to see was him in pain. If Jill had been for real, and made him happy, as much as it hurt me, it would have been easier than seeing him in pain. It was like I could feel it, it was so intense, watching his dreams collapse before his eyes like that. And it was about to get worse.
We had to send Chuck back to Jill to play out the double cross. I had to pep talk him, but I knew it wasn't enough, as we sent him out of the cabana. Chuck didn't have the emotional fortitude to go back to Jill and pretend like everything was the same when his entire world had been turned on its head. Five years ago, it would have been hard for me, the Ice Queen. I didn't know how he was going to pull it off.
I told Chuck we would be right there the whole time, but as it turns out, we weren't. I argued with Casey, but he said we needed to get back to L.A. before they did, and that Jill didn't suspect a thing and they would be fine until they got back. I was nervous, but I went along with what he said.
We were waiting for Chuck in Casey's apartment. Chuck and Jill arrived at Echo Park after lunch. We could hear them talking. I was monitoring the video. Chuck looked stiff, uncomfortable, the polar opposite of his demeanor when I had last seen them together. Could Jill tell? I don't know. But that passion I had seen was gone, just a tight, open-eyed peck for goodbye instead of the deep kisses I had seen before.
Chuck was heartbroken when he dropped himself down at Casey's table in front of me. He was numb, blank, so angry and betrayed he couldn't even look at me. His jaw was clenched, his nostrils flared. Rarely had I seen such rage in him, just barely contained below the surface.
"Are you ok?" I asked him.
"You know, for a few days, I thought things were going to be different. I could have a life. I could have a girlfriend. I could be a regular human being. I thought Jill was…"
"Different?" I asked sympathetically.
"No. Normal," he retorted sharply, his eyes going right through me as he said it.
I don't think he meant it to hurt me, but that was like a slap in the face. He didn't understand the full implications of what that meant, not meaning it as the insult I took it as. Him telling me I wasn't normal felt the same to me as me telling him he wasn't a spy. Both just factual statements, but cutting to the heart of our inadequacies, our fears, the ultimate proof of why we would never be together.
In the deepest, darkest part of my soul, all I ever wanted was to be normal. A wife, a mother…a normal girl who had a normal life, a husband who loved her, accepted her. A love that was real, someone not repulsed by what I had let the world turn me into.
I don't think I ever achieved normal, but the good news was, I never had to. Lucky for me, I had Chuck. My husband, a man who loved me and accepted me for who I was, all of me, even the darkest shadows that scared and repulsed him. He did want normal, but he also wanted me. He rearranged his entire life so that the fact that I wasn't normal, and never would be, didn't stand in the way of us being together. That's how much he loved me, how much he still loves me.
Even in this dark moment I'm retelling, he loved me, just as much as I loved him. That love was buried under huge piles of debris, both from my life and his. We spent a very long time clearing that away. Maybe it started here, after this incident. I'd like to think so.
Beckman's theory was that Jill had been recruited at Stanford. Chuck was too bitter in the moment to realize the full meaning of that…just how long Jill had been lying to him.
I advocated for Chuck, telling Beckman we were asking too much of him, that he could barely handle just that goodbye we witnessed in the courtyard. For once, she actually was on my side. Chuck was the one who volunteered, much to my surprise. He was that angry, that hurt and betrayed, that he was willing to take a front row seat and a hand in bringing her down.
He left without talking to me, mumbling about needing to get ready for work. He was working a half day at Buy More, unable to take the whole day because it was the day before Thanksgiving and he needed to be there to sign in extra deliveries of Black Friday merchandise.
Casey and I went to our cover jobs as well, waiting for Jill to make contact with Chuck. Apparently, she called after about an hour to make a date for that night with Chuck. Casey was there when he got the call.
Chuck hung up with Jill and came straight to find me. I was in Castle, but he came down to see me. He said he needed my help. He looked so lost, so upset. He didn't know how he was going to survive a fake date with Jill.
I tried to coach him, the way I had been coached at the Farm. I explained about knowing what your mark wants, which in this case was Jill. I tried to explain that she was going to make sure that she had him…when he was most exposed. Like a kiss. He looked wary, uncertain.
I told him to imagine I was Jill. I got very close to him, told him to look into my eyes. He was stuttery, rambling, telling me he was distracted by the base, but he was also nervous standing that close to me. I could smell his cologne, almost hear his heart beating. I tried to stay detached, but it was hard. I was using a standard procedure, instructing him what to do…until I told him to move my hair behind my ear.
The feel of his fingers on my ear, against my cheek, almost made my knees buckle. It felt like years since he had touched me. He didn't just move my hair, his hand cupped my ear, cradled it. It was intimate because it was him, Chuck, the only way he ever knew how to be. I was in a trance…but it seemed like he was too. I almost closed my eyes when I felt his breath on my lips. I knew what it felt like to kiss him…and my entire body was on fire at that moment, wanting to kiss him like that again.
It was almost painful to pull away, stop him and that dreamy look he had, like he had forgotten everything but my lips that close to his. He was still hurting, bitter. Kissing him here would have just complicated things worse than they already were. He needed to get over Jill completely, get her out of his system. I wasn't going to make it worse by confusing him more.
Casey came in. We both pulled away like we were doing something wrong and had almost been caught. Jill had purchased tickets for a concert at the music center. That was where we planned on following them. Chuck left…and I let out the breath I was holding, frightened by how close I had come to losing myself in him, just like that.
Casey and I got ready in Castle. We were halfway to the music center in Casey's car when Chuck's signal dropped off the tracker…just a ghost to throw us off. I refocused the tracker, and found him…but we were over 40 minutes away from where Chuck was now. It was an intentional diversion to keep us away from Chuck, since he was supposed to know nothing about the ticket purchase.
This became about more than just surveillance. Whatever Jill's plan was, they were moving now, tonight. Chuck was in danger and we were on the other side of the city. They were at a carnival, as it turned out. Casey and I took off running to find him.
It took a while. There were people everywhere and we were trying to be inconspicuous. It was actually the sound of a gunshot that we heard coming from the hall of mirrors that cued us to where Chuck could be. I took off running, praying that we weren't too late.
I saw them leave, Chuck first and then Jill. She had a gun.
I told her to freeze and then Casey tackled Jill to the ground. I heard Chuck shouting at Casey to not hurt Jill. He actually said that she saved his life.
I stayed cool, but his quick defense of her unnerved me. What had she said? Had he fallen under her spell, just like I'd warned him about? I needed to get her claws out of him. Whatever it was she said or did, the truth was she was a spy, and had been, even when Chuck was still her boyfriend.
We took Jill to Castle. Beckman instructed us to question her, a standard operating procedure in a captured spy situation. First was the lie detector test. It had been a long time, but there were worse things Casey and I could do during an interrogation. Chuck wanted to be present, and insisted that he be present while we were questioning her. It upset me, thinking he thought he needed to stay to protect her from us…but I feel like that was probably the truth. Whatever she said to him, she had messed with his head to the point where he didn't know what to believe any more. I know he wanted to believe that her saving his life, her turnabout, was legitimate. I never liked Jill, never completely trusted her, and I still didn't.
We found out the location of Jill's handler, a mobile medical unit for Fulcrum that was in an office building in downtown Los Angeles. I specifically asked her if it was a trap, and she denied it. She passed the lie detector test. I'm sure she was trained by Fulcrum to pass tests like that, just like we were. I didn't take her answers as gospel, but the machine had a good baseline. Turns out it can be the way the question is asked that allows for the type of answer Jill gave.
I asked if it was a trap. She said no. Technically, she wasn't lying. The medical unit wasn't a trap. The trap, the switch, was more complicated than that, no direct question able to ask her if all of this was one giant lie to allow Fulcrum to infiltrate Castle. That question, she would have failed.
Casey and I left for the location Jill had given us, leaving Chuck in Castle with Jill. I warned him, reminding him that she seemed like the person he had always known, but that he couldn't, and shouldn't trust her. I wish he had listened. But Jill was a very good spy and she knew exactly what to say to him to get under his skin again. His feelings ran so deep, it was impossible for him to deny them, even when he was in pain.
With the tactical team, it was easy to infiltrate the building. We found Leader in surgery, just like we were told we would. Everyone was taken into custody and Casey and I took custody of Leader, with direct orders to interrogate him in Castle as we had just done to Jill. Looking back, it was perhaps a little too easy, but every once in a while, things went off without a hitch, so we never questioned it.
I called Chuck to tell him we had Leader and we were on our way back. His voice was strange on the phone, but he'd had a really bad couple of days. And it was Thanksgiving and he was away and not at home with his sister, instead stuck in the base with someone he was trying not to love. I let it go, even though I was suspicious.
We brought Leader back to Castle through the Orange Orange, since two of those Buy Morons were in the closed store guarding it. Casey blindfolded him and we were making our way down the stairs when I saw Chuck.
He was seated at the computer console, his back so tense I could see his shoulder blades bunched under his shirt. His hands were folded, his fingers pressed over the bridge of his nose. I could only see the side profile of his face…but he was in emotional agony. I immediately asked him what was wrong.
"You promised that you wouldn't hurt them," he called out to some unseen threat. I didn't know what he meant, what was going on. I had a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach…
That was confirmed when Jill appeared, double fisted with guns, disarming Casey and I.
Chuck started rambling, apologizing, admitting that he let her out of her bonds. I was shocked.
Hadn't he listened to anything I said? How could he trust her again after all of that?
What crushed me the most was realizing it was how he felt about her that wouldn't let him believe the worst of her. He loved her so much he was blind to the person she had become, so completely changed from the girl he had met at Stanford who he had fallen in love with for the very first time.
Leader took Casey and I away at gunpoint. Chuck turned around, looking horrified and chagrined, as we backed away.
Casey and I were locked in a cell and then Leader left us. A few minutes later, Jill brought Chuck back at gunpoint and locked him in the cell across from us. I was afraid I was going to watch her kill him, locked helplessly on the other side. Thankfully, she locked him in and left, not before she admitted they were looking for Bryce. All of this elaborate scheme…to find Bryce.
He apologized to me again. I was angry, but I tried to encourage him, tell him we would find a way out. He said he had a plan.
Somehow he had grabbed the Castle manual and figured out how to lock them out of the computer system, and removed their access to the locking mechanisms on the doors of our cells. He also jammed communications and accessed the trouble alarm. He did all that in about four minutes, without the help of the Intersect. That was all just Chuck…or the Piranha, even though I knew nothing of that here.
He did get a little smug…and Leader called his bluff. Leader attached an explosive to the outside of Casey and my cell. If Chuck didn't comply, he would watch us be killed in the explosion while he was trapped behind the bullet proof glass. Jill and Leader knew Chuck's weakness was his heart, so they knew all they had to do was threaten us, or namely me, to get Chuck to do what they wanted.
Chuck never learned that lesson, to not show his emotions in order to give himself away. It was why unfortunately we were always the targets…why Robin Cummings took Ellie, why Quinn took Chuck and later me. It was brave of him, to love anyway, rather than cut off liabilities like Casey had done almost his whole life.
I told Chuck to stay, not worry about us. We didn't matter; his safety was what mattered. That was the CIA agent talking, but also the girl that loved him. As long as he was safe, what happened to me didn't matter. He felt the same, which is why he didn't listen. I mattered more to him than the Intersect and the rest of the world.
He unlocked his own cell door and Leader took him away. Jill removed the explosive device from our cell. I moved up to the glass, growling at Jill, trying to tell her that if she hurt him…but I couldn't finish. There were no limits to what I would do if she harmed him or killed him. She looked me up and down like I was pathetic. Maybe I was…a spy compromised by my emotions.
I would rather be pathetic and have Chuck's heart…than a good spy like her. It was something I had never admitted so plainly to myself before.
Once they were gone, the panel inside our cell came to life. It was a message from Chuck. He had also unlocked our cell. He said he had taken Leader out through the Buy More.
We followed them.
Leader tripped on a wire that Jeff Barnes had apparently strung as a theft deterrent, and Casey tackled him. I took off after Jill.
"Sarah, don't hurt her!" Chuck screamed after me.
I actually turned to look back at him, stunned that he was still defending her, looking out for her. What did she have over him that no matter what, he couldn't stop caring the way he did? It was angering, frustrating.
I followed her into the back rooms of the Buy More. I moved all the way down to the break room, but she was nowhere. Turns out, she ducked into Big Mike's office, and ended up behind me, in an area I thought I had already cleared.
Chuck saved my life, although I didn't realize they were ever together in that hallway. He coaxed Jill outside, with the trick that he was helping her escape, when he trapped her in the Nerd Herder in detention mode.
I finally ran outside onto the loading dock, where I found them. Jill was trapped in the car. I heard him talking to her.
"You should know I was going to let you get away. But when you were about to kill Sarah, you made the decision for me. You're under arrest, Jill, and I'm breaking up with you."
He stood there, glaring at her through the car window. I don't think he even knew that I was there. He just turned and walked away.
Casey had almost been taken down by Leader, but apparently, Big Mike saved the day, tackling him, thinking he was a thief. The tactical team Chuck had summoned arrived right on time, appropriately dressed like police so no one was suspicious. They took Jill away while I stood there, glaring at her the same way she had glared at me.
I tried to put the last thing I heard him say to Jill in perspective. Even after all of that, once again, he was planning on letting her go. It was seeing her about to shoot me that put him over the edge. It meant something…I just couldn't figure out what, not here, anyway.
Hours went by before I found Chuck. I can understand why he just needed a few moments alone.
"We have Thanksgiving at your sister's house, Chuck," I said to him when I finally found him.
"I totally forgot it was Thanksgiving," he muttered, rubbing his hands over his face.
"We need to change," I told him. I was maybe forcing a cheeriness I didn't feel, but I wanted us back to normal, normal for us anyway, especially if we were spending the night with Ellie.
He had a change of shirt in Castle, but I had to go back to my hotel room to change. We left in my car.
He told me about everything that happened while Casey and I had left him in Castle with Jill. I did tell him I thought she knew how to beat the lie detector, which he shrugged off. He told me her Fulcrum advisor had ordered her to break up with him, and then use the story that she was sleeping with Bryce. She told Chuck she never slept with Bryce, that they were never together. He also told me about what she had said at the carnival, about not being able to get out of Fulcrum once she was in.
The CIA recruited Bryce when he was a junior in college. It was a fair assumption to make that Fulcrum had done the same with Jill. So for two years, she was really dating him, in love with him, sleeping with him, in a serious relationship with him. Then, she heard about Fulcrum…and lied to Chuck, joining their ranks, putting aside the dreams I'm sure he talked about with her for her own ambitions. She was with him for another almost two years, sleeping with him, lying about the dreams she had once told him she shared.
While he was sorting out his feelings, Chuck came to this conclusion too. Maybe Jill loved him, but not enough to tell him the truth. The girl he thought he loved never existed, she was merely a fabrication, the ultimate lie to disguise the real Jill.
In the back of my mind, I wondered why Fulcrum would have ordered her break up and to blame it on Bryce. Did Fulcrum know Bryce was CIA as far back as 2003? Did Bryce know Jill was Fulcrum? Did Fulcrum know about the Omaha Project? Did Fulcrum know about test subject 0326? I never told Chuck about this, useless worrying that had no basis in fact.
I wished I could talk to Bryce…but I didn't know where he was or how to contact him. At least, thanks to Chuck's quick thinking, Fulcrum hadn't found him either.
Chuck waited in my car while I got ready in my hotel room and then we went to Ellie's. He was still talkative, telling me he knew he should have listened to me all along, that he was sorry for all the trouble he caused, that he put our lives in danger because of his clouded judgment.
He was hurting, visible pain in his eyes that I could see. I couldn't tell him I told you so. I just couldn't, even if he deserved it. I tried to tell him it was an impossible situation, something no one could have been prepared for. The only way was to deny your emotions, bury them, and that was something Chuck could never do.
He told me he was too trusting. That he wasn't used to lying.
I told him to not get used to it.
"What makes you special is that you're not like every other spy. You're a good guy and you want to help people." I winked at him. "Leave the deception up to me."
He looked relieved, a little calmer. His voice softened, deepened. He took my hand. "Well, I'm glad I have you."
I looked at our hands, clasped together, the cover dating hand hold.
"Yeah, we're better as a team."
He smiled then, a real smile, that wrinkled his nose and the lines next to his eyes.
We walked into a crowd in Ellie's house. Chuck had said something about Devon's parents, but they weren't there. Just Morgan, Devon, Ellie, and Jeff and Lester from the Buy More. I hugged Ellie, then walked over to greet Devon when Lester hugged me and wouldn't let go. Devon saved me, asking me to help in the kitchen so he could set the table.
I sat in the chair beside Chuck, like I was part of his family, like I belonged there. It hit me by surprise, how nice that made me feel, especially after the last two weeks of feeling so alienated from him.
Chuck made a toast. He looked at me over the rim of his wine glass, a soft look that melted me on the inside, before he clinked my glass and said very softly, "Happy Thanksgiving."
For the first time in my life, I actually had something I was thankful for. It felt incredibly good.
