A/N: We're past the holiday in real life, but in this story, time is passing more slowly.
Bite the Hand
Chapter 8: Needful
Los Angeles, California
December 24
Very Early Morning
Moving out of the immobile shadows of The Marquis, Sarah lifted the hood of her jacket, covering her blonde hair, obscuring her face, becoming a mobile shadow herself. She often felt a strange kinship with her shadow, as if it were really her, and her body only a material shadow cast by her essential, immaterial darkness.
The small hours of Christmas Eve morning revealed Los Angeles quiet, the sidewalks and streets almost empty. Christmas lights blinked but blinked for no one.
If a Christmas light blinks and no one sees it, does it make merry?
Sarah huddled into her jacket, trying not to think at all — not about where she was going — not what she was planning.
She had no future; she had to accept that. Dark lay behind her, blankness ahead.
I have accepted it. Or, I had.
No future is easier with no past.
That's what she had told Chuck; she supposed she believed it.
Certainly, her lack of a future would have been easier just then if she had not yielded to her unpredictable but irresistible desire for Chuck in the hotel room. Her immediate past clashed with her planned un-future.
The heat and brightness…and promise… of Chuck contrasted depressingly with the cold, gray betrayal she was about to face. Graham's. Her life had known many men like Graham, more or less powerful and power-hungry, none like Chuck.
Chuck — her brief encounter with him in the warm, moving water and beneath the twinkling twinkle lights — Chuck had made what she was about to face, what she must face, easier and harder.
Easier and harder.
As had Molly.
Molly had taught Sarah that Sarah's conviction that she was nothing but a spy, a killer, was wrong. She was more, could be more; she had begun to become more. A mother. Clumsy with and ignorant of a little girl at first, radically unsure of herself, terrified (to be honest) of a toddler — Sarah had gotten better. Coped. Then — more than coped. She and Molly had bonded. It seemed that the little girl had been only marginally better loved by her parents than by the mobsters. Molly's parents had taken better care of her, no doubt, (toys everywhere in her room, proper food) but the little girl seemed desperate for affection, attention, lonely. Alone.
Sarah knew something about lonely little girls, having been one herself.
Having grown into a lonely woman, a shadow.
She and Molly quickly understood one another, and then began to need one another. Their mutual loneliness stretched between them, attached them, then pulled toward each other, close.
Needs.
But Sarah was dragging the Company behind her, dragging Langston Graham, and they pulled her in the opposite direction, away from the little girl. Even if Graham thought Sarah was dead, believed it, he remained a live threat. He might at any moment question the evidence, the knives, the ashes: he was no fool, not easily fooled; or, his vast network might detect her — security cameras everywhere, like the eyes of flies, with state-of-the-art Company AI monitoring, processing 24/7. Facial recognition. Sarah was vigilant, wore coats with hoods, hats, sunglasses; and swaddled and hid Molly in the pink blanket. Kept her eyes sharp for cameras.
But all it would take was a stray selfie with Sarah in the background, or with Molly there. A buzzer would sound in DC. And all hell would be unleashed.
Sarah's mother was under orders to cut Molly's hair and dye it. Keep her as much out of public as possible, at least until time for preschool. By then, with any luck, Molly would be grown enough for the cameras to miss her, mistake her, stump the algorithms.
Sarah slowed her march and glanced upward, past the edge of her hood.
The Marmoreal rose before her, dark and wide and tall, a block away. Her eyes scanned the penthouse, no lights showing. She was grimly pleased.
Graham was a creature of habit, a strength, and a weakness. He came to LA just before each Christmas and came to The Marmoreal. Sarah was unsure how he explained the trip to his wife, but it was yearly clockwork. So too was the long, pricey visit from a top-shelf, specialty call girl. One always spent December 23rd with him, leaving at around midnight, leaving him asleep, exhausted.
Graham's Christmas present to himself.
Sarah knew all of this from a conversation with one of Graham's personal Company bodyguards a few months before Budapest. Andrew. He and Sarah crossed paths in a bar and he hit on her, unsuccessfully. She had only stepped inside on a whim, to warm her cold feet for a moment. Her feet had been cold even during the daytime that winter, and each winter since.
Except for now, oddly. That seems less California — and more Chuck.
Despite Andrew's failed attempt to hit on her, she and he had chatted companionably as he continued to drink, and eventually he started talking incautiously, perhaps still hoping to impress her. He told her about Graham's LA stocking stuffing trips, as the bodyguards called them. He had gone on and on after that, more about Graham. But Sarah stopped listening and started looking for an excuse to leave the bar; eventually, she found one.
Sarah had filed the information about LA away, disquieted by it but otherwise uninterested. She was not Graham's keeper, thank God. But the information returned to her when she began to think about how to protect Molly.
Protect Molly permanently.
Terminate the threat of Graham.
She was trained for such termination, trained by Graham, by the Company. She was going to bite the hand that fed her. Bite the hand that taught her to bite. It was a suicide mission. Not that she wanted to die, but she was a professional. She knew how to calculate odds, and how to assess missions. This was a frontal assault. She would have certain advantages, assuming Chuck succeeded in shutting off the power — surprise and darkness. But the number of guards and the firepower, the similarity in training (Graham's guards were all hand-picked, elite agents), all made the odds of her living to see the sunrise slim. That was the realistic assessment. Agent Walker, the shadow, would materialize in Graham's penthouse, and dematerialize…when it was over.
She was willing to pay that price for Molly.
And now for Chuck.
Chuck.
Chuck had taught Sarah that Sarah's conviction that she would never make love to a man was mistaken. She had never been a cynic, never been so narrowly self-centered as to think that what she had not experienced did not exist. She had had sex with men, last with Larkin — but she had not made love to one. She could not articulate the difference between the two but she did not deny it. Any number of good things in life, the best sweeteners of life, were things that she was denied — denied by her personal limits or by the limits of her professional life. Denied, past her boundaries.
Making love was one of those.
Love was one of those. Spies don't fall in love.
Or so I thought.
Of course, she couldn't say positively that she loved Chuck Bartowski, but she could say positively that she had not merely had sex with him. Something different had happened — not just something more (a difference of degree) but something different (a difference of kind). Mutual. Sarah had made love and been made love to. Her emotions had transformed the experience, not merely added to it.
She could not define the difference but she had known it when — as — she felt it.
Her life had now known the sweetness of a real child and the sweetness of a real lover. It was hard to face the end of that life now that she knew it could admit such sweetnesses, but at least her life knew them. Sarah knew them.
Years of fighting monsters had not rendered her wholly monstrous.
She had tasted those sweets. Visions of sugar plums danced in her head.
Sarah Walker was real. A real girl, a real woman. She had come into being, claimed her flesh and blood. She was not her shadow.
At last. At the last.
She merged into the inky shadows that enveloped the stairwell door of The Marmoreal and stood still, slowly looking around. The streets remained nearly empty, the sidewalks completely so.
Her phone was in a rear jean pocket. She called up the floor plan Chuck had found for her and she studied it. Years of mission practice allowed her to commit the floor plan to memory in a few seconds. Graham's bedroom was on the far end of the penthouse, opposite the door.
Sarah dug into her jacket pocket and found the bobby pin she habitually kept there, along with a rubber band and a shoestring. Each a tool or weapon — but common, undercover. A moment later, after a few twists of the pin in the lock, she had the stairwell door open.
Steps stretched upward, flights and flights. The penthouse was on the twelfth floor.
Blowing out a breath, Sarah began to climb. She stopped when she reached the tenth floor, panting, giving herself a moment to recover. The final couple of floors she would need to climb quickly. Graham would have two guards in the hallway, outside the penthouse door. The rest would be inside. Three more, according to the story she was told at the bar. Five guards in total, hand-picked, all heavily armed, well-trained, always the same five.
Graham slept with a loaded gun beneath his pillow.
One of the canisters from her suitcase was in her other jacket pocket, and she took it out, grasped it in one hand, checked it, its heft, and then put it back in her jacket. She pulled out her gun with her other hand and fished the silencer from a front jeans pocket. Quickly, she screwed the latter onto the former.
She put the gun into her other jacket pocket and then she took her phone from her rear pocket again and called The Marquis, asking for her room, Chuck's room.
Their room. Their lights on the balcony, private stars, their constellations, telling only their destiny, telling it only to them.
The room phone rang. Once, Twice.
"Sarah?..." Chuck picked it up before the second ring ended, his voice plaintive, urgent.
That was unplanned.
Her heart leaped in her chest, but she ended the call, shaking her head at herself, at everything.
If she talked to him, she would never do what was needful. Her fortitude would crumble. She prayed he would do what she had ordered him to do, all of it, although the thought of Chuck tranqed, forgetting what had happened between them made her chest ache as she dashed up the final flights of stairs, two steps at a time.
Soon, no one would know it happened. The two of them, living water beneath the twinkle lights, the new life she had tasted.
But it happened. She had tasted it. Maybe the universe would remember; maybe nothing was ultimately lost, maybe there was a law, conservation of emotion as well as energy, a physics of the heart.
Just as she reached the top floor, the lights went off.
Chuck!
The shadow was enshadowed, Agent Walker's element: darkness.
She opened the stairwell door to the twelfth floor, her gun now in her hand, no memory of reaching for it. It had become another body part, an extension of her hand and mind. Alive. Her hood slipped back, and she had a stray thought, an image of herself in the third-person, her silver gun and gold hair, silver and gold, the soft sound of Chuck singing inside her.
Voices in the hallway, in the dark. Two.
"What the hell?"
"Where are the lights?"
Sarah launched herself into one man, steering by sound. She grabbed him, her hand on his shirt collar, and she clubbed him violently on the head with the handle of her gun. As he crumpled, she fired, her eyes adjusting quickly, as they always did, to the dark. She could barely make out his body mass and she fired into it twice, her gun coughing.
She did not want to kill any of them but they would kill her if they could. Kill or be killed. It was a cruel logic, the brutal calculus of so many missions.
She did not hesitate, she grabbed the door handle and it turned. Expected, with guards standing in the hall. As the door opened, she heard voices from inside, their words unintelligible, but then she heard coughs that answered the coughs of her gun. Bullets struck the partly open door, but Sarah had fallen to her stomach, prone, wedging herself into the opening; the shots from inside were too high.
The interior of the penthouse was not as dark as the hallway. Light, dim, shone through the windows, the lights from the street. Two men were in the main room, both with guns out. She made herself take her time — one of her gifts, a certain grace under deadly pressure — and she squeezed the trigger gently. One of the two men went down. The other threw himself behind an armchair. Sarah fired into it, working out where he had to be. She heard a gasp of pain, and she bear-crawled away from the door. The man stood and fired, gun in one hand, the other hand clutching at his side. Sarah felt the bullet graze her back, neither quite a hit nor a miss, but a gouging, burning trench in the flesh of her shoulder.
She shot him almost at the same time as he shot her, but her shot was fatal. He collapsed face-first over the back of the chair.
Sarah stayed on the floor for a moment, blanking out the pain of her shoulder, every other nerve alert. No one moved. Four down, one unaccounted for. She crawled farther into the room and closed the door with her foot. She waited again, listening. All that had happened had not made much noise, not much that would have carried far anyway. There was a chance Graham might not have heard it. His bedroom, the master, was a distance from the main room, down a long hallway.
None of the four men she encountered was the man from the bar, Andrew.
Where is he?
She listened again but heard nothing. She stood up in careful stages; her shoulder cried out but she made no sound. Her steps were silent as she started down the hallway.
She regained control of her breathing.
No sounds; the penthouse was silent.
Her phone vibrated once in her pocket, a notification. What? She had not shut it off after the call to Chuck, a mistake she would normally never make. Her training told her to ignore it but she thought of Chuck, and she pulled it out after shifting her gun into her left hand.
The notification was a text.
From Chuck. His computer.
She scanned the room again and listened. Still no sound. Her thumb touched the notification and the screen shifted to a newspaper headline and story. Body of Strangled Sex Worker Found on Christmas Day. Why had Chuck sent her that? Now?
He was supposed to be tranqed. Forgetting. Forgetting them.
No time to think about it, she shoved the phone into her pocket again, shifting her gun into her right hand. The door to Graham's bedroom was closed.
Still no sign of Andrew.
The bedroom doorknob turned as had the penthouse doorknob.
Sarah pushed the door open, with her free hand as she knelt, gun out, ready, her senses extending into the room as the door swung.
Graham was in bed, asleep. He had on a blackout sleep mask — the light from the window showed her that. Earplugs. No wonder he had not awakened. He was beneath a white comforter, and a pair of black women's hose were on top of it, stockings. The sleep of the unjust.
Her eyes were drawn to a painting above the bed, two panthers, staring, blank silver eyes, wary of each other, perhaps stalking each other, moving serpentine in a field of gold. She thought of herself and Graham, the long years she had worked for him, doing his bidding. But then he had started hunting her; now, she was hunting him.
The room smelled faintly of perfume, expensive, lingering. The call girl. And then Sarah wondered about the text from Chuck. What did it mean? Why send it?
Her phone vibrated again. She grabbed it. Another text from Chuck, this time not a newspaper article but an actual text:
Graham killed her. She was a gasper. All his prostitutes are gaspers. I have proof, more or less
Sarah shook her head. How does Chuck know any of this?
Gaspers? Sarah knew the term, erotic asphyxiation, the intentional restriction of oxygen to the brain for sexual arousal. The seduction classes at the Farm had detailed every known kink or twist, all the mazeways of the human sexual psyche. The varieties of paraphilia. Erotic asphyxiation was particularly dangerous because it could easily lead to an accidental choking death, strangulation, and often did.
The black stockings. Graham's stocking stuffers. Oh, God!
Her phone vibrated again. She had forgotten everything else, standing transfixed.
Could this be what you know? What Graham thinks you know?
Another text, a photograph.
A Company photo.
Andrew.
He's dead, Chuck texted. Dead on a mission shortly before you were sent to Budapest
Patterns. They're my thing, Sarah, it's why I'm great with computers
Sarah shook her head again. It was all too strange, all happening too fast.
Sarah?
She heard a soft sound from outside, on the dark balcony. Movement.
The fifth man!
She saw the orange end of a cigarette, saw it tossed into the air, over the railing. The man did not know she was there. He had not heard anything standing outside. Muted sounds muted further by doors and by street noise. Sarah looked at the man as he turned, streetlights playing across his face.
It was not Andrew. It was a man Sarah had never seen. He exhaled smoke and reached for the door.
Then Sarah knew, thanks to Chuck — a leap of long-trained intuition.
She did know something about Graham, but something she did not know she knew, something of a sort she would never have suspected. Not espionage, but death all the same. Andrew had talked to her and mentioned Graham's LA trips, and somehow, Graham had found out. Last Christmas, Graham had killed the gasper he hired — perhaps accidentally, perhaps not — but either way, Graham could not allow it to be known. He had used his bodyguards to cover it up.
But Andrew met Sarah in the bar and said too much and Graham killed him for it. And he said it to Sarah; Graham somehow knew that.
He had sent her to Budapest, to Ryker, because he feared she might somehow put it all together. Intuition, like now.
The balcony door opened, and Sarah shot the man. He saw her just as she pulled the trigger, and he fell backward onto the concrete, his eyes wide in disbelief, and with a loud moan, his hand on his harmless, still-holstered gun.
Sarah turned to Graham.
He was moving now beneath the comforter, stirring, tossing, his sleep disturbed by something, a bad dream, maybe. I hope. Although he's about to wake to one.
Sarah had done it. Reached him alive. Lucky, in matters of life and death, like she told Chuck. But she had not expected luck tonight.
She had not needed the canister, the explosive, the backup plan, the one she expected but hoped not to use.
Sarah steeled herself and put her gun away.
Blood was running down her back, soaking into her jacket. Ignoring it, she stretched across Graham and grabbed the black stockings instead of her hunting knife. A handful of nylon.
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care.
The stockings would do.
A/N: We finish with two chapters of Chuck's POV.
Sorry that this took longer than expected. I've been ill and it wasn't easy writing. My thanks to MicroGirl1225 and Smatterchoo for pre-reading.