Chuck Bartowski, super spy.

Chuck looked down at the tumbler of Johnnie Walker Black on the table, full for a third time now, and bumped it gently with the side of his hand. The scotch looked like it was burning the air; it certainly burned going down, and he was waiting for it to work some kind of magic, to make the tape stop playing.

He knew he'd done the right thing, but the right thing shouldn't feel so totally and utterly like crap.

He kept thinking, But what if Manoosh was telling the truth, what if the minute he'd walked out of there—

And that made him think of Jill swearing to him that she would just walk away, and locking her in the Nerd Herder, instead of letting her walk away with the diamond.

Everything had been very straightforward in Prague. If he wanted to be a real spy, if he wanted to have any measure of the life he had once seen for himself, this was what he had to do: train until he was limp with exhaustion, commit himself to putting the good of the nation ahead of his own, bury his own instincts, and make the Intersect work. It was creepy enough, doing things he'd only seen in movies, but feeling his muscles move without him, that was like some odd cross between a fantasy and a nightmare.

And he'd had to leave Sarah behind.

When he answered a soft knock at the door, he wasn't entirely surprised to see her standing there.

"Mind if I come in?"

Chuck stepped back, extending his arm, and Sarah stepped into the apartment, her thumb still tucked under the strap of her purse. He didn't know what the expression on her face meant, only that it was tightening his stomach.

"So, that Johnnie Walker Black? Pretty powerful stuff."

Sarah nodded and still didn't meet his eyes. "Yeah. It is. Uh, Jeff and Lester are watching your apartment from across the street. Thought you might like to know."

"Did they follow you here?"

Sarah's mouth turned up slightly and she shook her head. "They were here when I got here. And I found a few very sophisticated third-party bugs in your room."

Chuck raised his eyebrows.

Sarah shrugged and fidgeted with her hair. "Um, there was also this very interesting loop technique already in place that displays you, with slightly longer sideburns, playing videogames and getting ready for bed, not quite sure what that was doing there, but that's what they'll be watching."

Jill again. Chuck had put that loop in place when he'd wanted some time away from prying eyes. Chuck shook that off with a little shake of his shoulders and walked back over to the table, downing the rest of his drink in one long, stinging gulp. When he touched the bottle again, Sarah's hand stopped his.

"Look, why don't you take me out for some rocky road?"

Chuck gave her a watery smile. "Is that what you do instead of scotch, Agent Walker? Even though you work in a frozen yogurt shop?"

"Probably even less than you work at the Buy More, Agent Bartowski," Sarah replied. "And, yeah. Sometimes. I'll drive." She prodded at his arm.

"And maybe get some nachos?" Chuck's smile faltered. "I guess it's just being around them so much."

"Come on, Chuck," Sarah said, almost impatiently. "Morgan will be home any minute and there's nothing I hate more than, well, explaining what the hell we're doing, to Morgan."

Chuck shrugged, leaving the glass on the table next to the bottle of scotch, and grabbing his coat.

They didn't talk in the car. Chuck talked, because he couldn't stop. Surely Casey hadn't planned for that when he'd recommended getting drunk.

"I know... I keep telling myself, if I'd let him go, he just would have built another one and tried to sell it and it would have gone to bad people, right?"

Sarah pressed her lips together and pushed back her bangs, checking her blind spots before she swerved into another lane, and Chuck nodded like she'd said something.

"But what if he wouldn't have? What if he was scared straight? What if we get close to the Ring and it's just layer after layer of all these otherwise harmless people who just happened to get the wrong assignment at work that day? I... how do I do that?"

Sarah smacked the wheel impatiently. "You have to never start thinking about that, Chuck."

"It's all I can think about. I have this great girl, she's amazing, I give her my card and like a day later she's walking into the Buy More, and the last time I—"

"You can say it," Sarah said, and he glanced at her face and remembered her with the bo in her hand, saying you can't hurt me.

"The last time a girl that pretty walked into the Buy More, smiling at me like that, well... she was you."

Sarah maneuvered into a parking spot a bit faster than she needed, and Chuck looked around in confusion; they were sitting in the parking lot at her building. "What? Why are we—"

Sarah zipped up her jacket. "Mind taking a walk?"

Shaking his head, Chuck followed her. They took a zigzag path he recognized from a few of his spy fill-in-the-blank courses; she was losing any tails they might be carrying.

"Sarah, I really doubt Jeff and Lester tracked us from the apartment—"

For just a second their gazes met, as she twirled to glance at him, her blonde hair caught in the wind. "Do you really think it's Jeff and Lester I'm worried about?"

That shut Chuck up. For half a block, anyway.

Through the back of a Chinese restaurant, up the stairs, over a few rooftops, down a fire escape. This was the part he liked, the part that didn't involve calling on the Intersect 2.0 to disarm henchmen or send him into whirling kicks that might or might not end with him standing on his own two feet, on the ground. With a brush of their palms they split up around a street fair and met at the other side, a ballcap over Chuck's curly hair and his coat draped over his arm, Sarah's hair tucked under a wide floral scarf and her lips a becoming shade of red. She slid her arm through his and despite himself, Chuck's skin tingled a bit from the contact.

They ducked into a convenience store and, five minutes later, emerged with a plastic tray of corn chips topped with thickly orange cheese and jalapenos, two scoops of rocky road for Sarah, and a scoop of mint chocolate chip for Chuck. They juggled it, out to a bench near the pier, looking out over the water.

"So..."

Sarah thoughtfully licked a bit of rocky road off her spoon before she folded her hands in her lap. "You really like Hannah, huh."

"It's odd, you know?" Chuck scooped up another chip and didn't think about how weird it was to be talking to Sarah about it, when, ever since they'd agreed to be friends, she couldn't have acted less like one without holding him at gunpoint. "We were on that plane together for, God, ten hours or something? It was like five dates rolled into one. And I got a dose of big-boy sour-apple poison, and I was up there by myself, and it was like I... could see that guy, the smooth continental guy who was totally laid back about flying into Paris. But she was interested in me."

"And all you had on the plane was the Intersect and your nunchucks..."

"And a spy pen full of tranquilizer."

"A pen?" Sarah snorted. "On a plane?"

"Yeah. That part was tricky."

"More like suicide. And Shaw should've known better."

Sarah stole one of his chips, and Chuck scooped up a bit of melted ice cream and licked the chocolate fragments off the spoon, looking out at the water. It felt surreal. It all felt surreal, and his head was aching a little from the lack of scotch.

Sarah cleared her throat, softly. She sounded almost reluctant. "He's been bringing me coffee in the mornings."

"Must be nice. Morgan keeps asking me to taste-test his," Chuck replied, dipping another chip.

"He has answers for everything," Sarah said, bitterly. "He keeps asking me about you, and he's..."

"Flirting with you?"

Chuck bumped her shoulder and their gazes met, and he swallowed, quickly. Whatever had happened, or not happened in Prague, whatever reluctance she felt, whatever remorse he felt, this wasn't over. He knew it every time he looked at her.

"He told me his wife was killed by the Ring and then he starts bringing me coffee." Sarah untied the scarf and gathered her hair, then let it fall. "It doesn't quite fit."

"And a hot girl I meet on a mission is suddenly in my life, hanging on every word I say."

They looked at each other again.

"What would you have done, Sarah? If you hadn't told me right away that you were CIA?"

"Seduced you," she said immediately.

"And then what?"

She shrugged. "The mission was just trying to find the Intersect data. Destroying the drives, making sure you hadn't seen it. What do you mean?"

Chuck wrinkled his nose at the remains of the nachos and pushed them to the side. "Hmm. Would've been weird, huh, if your mission hadn't changed so quickly."

"Yeah," Sarah murmured. "And Shaw gives you a tranq pen for a mission on a plane."

Chuck snorted. "You don't— you can't really think General Beckman sent us a Ring agent."

"Or that there was a third Ring agent on the plane during your mission," Sarah said slowly.

Chuck sighed. "There is no normal life, huh."

Sarah shook her head. "That's what I've been trying to tell you. Practically since we met. And you still walked away—"

Chuck put his ice cream down and turned to face her. "Look, I was a total ass to walk away like that. I was. And I, have regretted, walking away from you like that, every single day. Every day. But I couldn't— do that, Sarah. You have seen me so weak, you have seen me at the lowest possible point in my life, when I had nothing, and the Intersect, it brought you to me. It brought you, and all this, into my life. And if this is what it takes, if this is the successful person I can be, then this is what I'll do. And as much as I love you, as much as I will always love you, just being with you, as incredible as it would be, isn't enough, for either of us. And I think you know that."

Sarah's mouth trembled. "But I want it to be," she said, through clenched teeth, like she had to pull the words, one by one, from her throat. "No one has called me by my real name since I was seventeen and this is what you want? This life is what you want?"

Chuck shook his head. "I don't know," he said, miserably. "Because I did what you and Casey told me to do, but I feel like a horrible person. And it's just gonna keep getting worse, isn't it."

Sarah nodded. "It gets worse or you cut off a part of yourself to keep going, and mostly it doesn't grow back. Or you drink until it goes away. Like Casey. Who has obviously chased it so far away that it's not coming back."

Chuck scrubbed his face with his hands. "I don't know what to do."

"I think... working together would be a start."

"To do what?"

Sarah took another scoop of rocky road. "You sure you're ready, Agent Bartowski?"

"Bring it on, Agent Walker."

Sarah swallowed the bite and turned to him. "We have to let this happen. And maybe Shaw just likes putting people at risk and swooping in to save them at the last possible second, and maybe Hannah did just pick up and move here to be with you. Maybe."

The way Sarah looked at him, when she said that, told him that maybe she understood how that could be remotely possible.

"But there will be some signs, if it isn't. And we have to be very, very careful what we do, if we're going to figure out what their game is."

"So, a lot more meetings like this?"

Chuck was smiling, a little, but the expression on Sarah's face was almost painfully severe. "This is serious, Chuck. If either of them is really a Ring agent... the damage they could do..."

Chuck nodded. "And if they aren't?"

Sarah looked away. "We'll cross that bridge when we come to it."

--

There was a time, when Hannah's lips first touched his, that Chuck wondered how much of his soul he was losing for this. Because Hannah was eager and bright and sweet and he could fall for her, he really could. If he wasn't already in love.

She'll try to get close to you, Sarah had said. She'll try to earn your trust, but make it all feel like it's your idea. And she's a woman, so she's going to try to seduce you. And when she does, you have to go along with it, and wait for her to say what it is she's really after.

Just like Shaw?

Yeah. Just like Shaw.

But there had been nothing, just her admission that she had followed him to Burbank, and he already knew that. He wanted to believe it was true, but it was too perfect. Just like when Sarah had come into the Buy More, asking why he hadn't called her. He had never been sure just how much of what had made him fall for her, had been a lie.

It was better, though, when Hannah caught Sarah on the surveillance cameras and he had to go out, in her view, and join Sarah on the mission. Because if Hannah really was innocent in all this, it would be better to break her heart now.

Chuck's own heart had been broken early, and often, and he'd just kept coming back.

If she forgives this, Chuck... you'll know she's not who she says she is.

Sarah hadn't forgiven him, yet. Chuck knew that. But she might have been an inch closer.

(When he saw Shaw kiss Sarah's neck, Chuck wanted to kill him, in every way the Intersect knew.)

And, during their very public acknowledgement that they would be seeing other people, for the benefit of whoever might have been watching, Chuck knew that the person he was becoming, the person he'd always thought Sarah would admire, might not be the person he should be anymore.

But Shaw was.

When Chuck kissed Hannah that night, in the Buy More home theater room, he kept thinking this is not real, this is not real, even though it felt too real, and for the first time he started to see it, that tug to a normal life, an ordinary life, the kind of life everything in him had hated and wanted to leave behind. Except that it meant leaving behind Ellie and Morgan and this, the dream of a neat sunny house on a suburban corner with the station wagon in the driveway.

And he wondered if Sarah, in Castle with Shaw, letting him get close to her, trying to draw him out, was remembering everything that brought her into this life in the first place.

Maybe one day we'll meet in the middle.

And he gave himself up to it, knowing that if he was wrong, it would be a thousand, a million times worse than Manoosh, worse than a thousand bottles of Johnnie Walker Black could fix.

"Wow, Chuck. You're really good at this," Hannah said breathlessly, tucking a lock of hair behind her ear as she bent to him again.

And Chuck was glad he could feel it, then. Glad it still hurt, that it stung, that the little voice in his head still twinged.

"You too," he whispered, just before their mouths touched again.