A/N: Some of you will be happy to know...I needed another distraction from Shaw. This is quick, 7 chapters. Charah from the get-go, with a little bit if conflict. Twice a week like before, but balanced with the other one. Fake Name is intolerable unless in small chunks, interspersed with something happy. The title is a reference to the Catholic definition of mercy...some are spiritual, others corporal. Stuff my grandmother always talked about. It was too perfect, although there is are no religious connotations to this story. Just metaphors. Anyway...thanks for reading!
I love Chuck Bartowski…and I don't know what to do about it.
I've never been introduced to him, I've never spoken to him. I know how tall he is, but I've never stood beside him. I know his eyes are hazel, but I've only seen them in photographs. And you have to study them up close, because mostly his eyes look brown. I would recognize his voice anywhere, but I've never been addressed by him, or even been in earshot when he was speaking. I've only watched him from afar. He never interacted with me, and he never noticed me from any vantage point.
And yet, I love him. There is no doubt, no question.
He's all I think about. He's all I dream about. When I see him happy, I'm light as air. When he's sad, I fight tears. The closer I am to him, the harder my heart pounds.
I see his smile from far away and wish it would be directed at me. I wish there was a way, even if it was pretend, that I could be closer. That he would smile at me, even if the reason was false.
I could have wormed my way into his life at any time. My looks, courtesy of my employer, guarantee that most men notice me. As sweet as Chuck is, he's still a man. But I choose not to. I watch from a distance.
Because somehow I knew, if I allowed myself to bask in his presence, live within his aura, I wouldn't be able to maintain my professional distance. The tenuous balance would be disrupted. I couldn't risk harm coming to him, even to indulge my wildest fantasies.
And wild they were. I would wonder what his touch felt like, what his lips tasted like. I dreamed of intimacy with him. I would wake in a cold sweat, hating myself for having fallen so hard for him.
Like a wild cat playing with her food…or a black widow spider, ready to devour her mate. Hideous images that were closer to the truth than I wanted to admit.
It is only tempered by the fact that I am certain it is deeper than physical attraction. That what I feel is love.
But how can I love him if I don't know him? It would be like falling in love with a photograph, a make-believe person. And that isn't what I feel. Because, though I have never met him, I do know him.
He loves his sister more than anything in the world. He would do anything for her, even lay down his own life. But he lives for her too. He wants her to be proud of him. He makes decisions based on what she would think was best.
He's had the same best friend since he was five years old. Despite his friend's immaturity and his shortcomings, Chuck loves him like a brother. Chuck has been Morgan's greatest influence, both men the better for knowing each other.
Chuck's kindness emanates from him. He wants to help people, make the world better however he can. His past was tragic, but he never uses it as an excuse or a crutch. Instead it serves as his motivation.
I had never believed people like him were real. But he was. He is. I had seen it firsthand, when he didn't know I was watching.
He had taken my frozen heart and turned it to slush without even knowing I existed.
I have never loved anyone before, but I know this time, I love him. I've never felt before the way I feel about him. Nor have I ever before felt the way thinking about him makes me feel.
It seems like a dream. But, sadly, it's actually a nightmare.
That nightmarish quality exists because the CIA ordered me to kill him. Assassination is my specialty. He is my target.
I've studied him for years, sight unseen. I am an expert on his life, his existence. That type of in depth examination wasn't always necessary for an assassination, I would almost never need to do that. Only when I need to tie loose ends, ensuring that the death the government has ordered ends the trail of whatever information needs to be contained. Most frequently, I am not told a reason either. My job is not to ask, not to think, just do.
But I know why his elimination was ordered, at least in general. He knows too much. He somehow uncovered things that implicate my boss. My boss doesn't know that I know, that I even suspect it, which is the only reason I am still breathing.
Chuck is a computer hacker extraordinaire. Expert level, no security system on earth can stop him. He is untraceable, unstoppable. It is on a level unattainable by anyone else we have ever encountered. He is the Piranha.
He started hacking top level government installations with impunity when he was only 15 years old. Everything he did was still illegal of course, but never intended to be of nefarious intent. He had no history of stealing or threatening, no attempts to extract ransom money for data. Only incursions, albeit impossible and untraceable incursions, that alerted the hacked as to how to beef up security to stop him from re-hacking them.
I don't know what he found, only that his knowing it was damning enough that the Director of the CIA wanted him dead.
Graham sent me because I was the best. Even so, Chuck was a ghost. He was always five steps ahead of me. He was a master when it came to masking digital information.
I studied him for almost two years before he finally surfaced.
He was invisible, hiding in plain sight. I had given up hope that I could find him, thinking that I was doomed to follow dead trails and phony leads until Graham got impatient and had me eliminated before the director tried again with a different agent.
Chuck's sister, Ellie, his only remaining family, was almost killed in a car accident. I knew everyone from his past, all of his associations. For her, and almost no one else, he would risk detection. And he did.
I didn't cause the accident. I could have, let's make that clear. Using vulnerabilities, manipulating the situation was a common tactic. It certainly would have speeded things up had I done something similar earlier, but I didn't. I couldn't. And that is the distinction—I couldn't.
The thought of hurting his sister was unbearable, the knowledge of the pain it would cause him weighing me down. It was a new thought, a new sensation. I had used similar tactics in the past, with little regard for people as human beings, only as a means to an end. But now, it opened a fissure in my mind.
I was reluctant to do harm to Chuck's sister. And then it grew; I slowly became reluctant to find him at all, to complete my mission. And it left me wondering why, what had changed.
I found out why when I first laid eyes on him in the flesh, weeping at his sister's side as she struggled for her life. It took all my strength to stay put and not go to him. I ached to hold him in my arms, even while I was aware he wouldn't know me, that I was sent to kill him, not comfort him. I loved him.
The photographs I had seen of him were from when he was younger. His dark hair was shorter and his features were more deeply etched on his face. He was attractive; acknowledging physical beauty, in a target, had never occurred to me, not once.
What tunneled its way to the heart of me was his gentleness. The most feared hacker the world had ever seen…and he was tenderness embodied. He was a living contradiction, so much more than what he seemed on paper.
I fell for him—the idea of him—on paper. I fell completely in love with him after I saw him interact with his world. When I saw how deeply and openly he loved his sister.
Over time, I would witness more than just how he was with his sister. He was just as kind to strangers as he was to his family. It was a rare quality.
He was a dream, a unique existence, a rare jewel that I would never come across again in my life.
It had to have been love at first sight. I didn't understand it then, but I can only trace it back to that point. I lost my will, lost my purpose, all sense of myself as a ruthless assassin.
How could I destroy something so rare, so beautiful? It was like picking the last flower of its kind growing on the earth.
Following him became an obsession, one I could internally and externally attribute to my job. After another year of following him in secret, I had to admit to myself it wasn't just because of my job any longer.
It was because I had fallen in love with him. Impossible to believe, but definitely real.
A schizoid existence slowly began to destroy me. I couldn't kill him. But admitting I couldn't kill him to my superiors meant my own death. I would have let them kill me, if it meant he was safe. But Graham would kill me and then send someone else after Chuck. He needed a warning…but I had no idea how to deliver it in a way that made sense, that he would believe or understand.
So I was stalling, on both ends. Treading water, hoping I could think of a way to get him to safety before Graham came after me.
He became more important than my own life. What happened to me once everything was said and done didn't matter.
But today, for the first time in my life, I'm paralyzed. Unable to act, unable to even think. I have descended to the lowest point in my life.
I tracked Chuck here, to this seaside home in Bar Harbor, Maine. It had taken a year, but I finally followed him to a place where he still was after I arrived. This was where he had lived for years. It took cunning to track him—for he had myriad layers of online security shielding him. I was the only one who knew where he was—because I had been stalking him in person for a full year.
I had no more excuses, no more ability to stall. The next time Graham was due to check in with me, he would know where I was, why I was here. I have two options and neither of them are acceptable.
I either tell Graham I found Chuck and then refuse to carry out my order, or lie and tell Graham I still didn't know where Chuck was. Either way—Graham sends another agent to kill him, and then eliminate me as a precaution.
Completing the mission as ordered was impossible.
So now I sit on the shore, Chuck's elaborate home behind me, seagulls skittering along the shoreline in front of me. For the first time in a long time, I'm crying.
It started as individual tears, but now my eyes flood. I choke and cough and gulp for air, helplessness overwhelming me. I wish I could walk into the sea and let it swallow me. It would solve so many problems.
But it would leave Chuck unprotected. I was to be his killer, but I was the only thing left protecting him. If I wasn't crying, I would laugh at the irony.
My head is bowed into my hands and my body shakes.
What interrupts me is a tongue—wet, warm, and soft on my salty cheeks. I open my eyes to see a dog, a black lab, licking the salt from my face.
His tail is wagging furiously, though tucked downward through his legs. His floppy ears are pulled back in submission. He's sweet and lovable, though why he sought me out, I don't know. I am radiating misery.
"Barney!"
The dog senses its owner's presence before the voice registers with me. Barney, my furry friend's name, as I've just learned, turns and runs, his excitement palpable.
I turn, and my heart stops.
Chuck Bartowski is right behind me, moving slowly towards me.