Fic: the story goes like this - Chuck, Chuck(/Bryce), PG-13
REVISE
Title: the story goes like this
Author: nevcolleil
Fandom: Chuck
Pairing: Chuck(/Bryce)
Rating: PG-13
Warning(s): shameless butchering of Roman mythology; spoilers for Season 4
Summary: For this prompt at comment_fic. Orion as modern-day Daedalus. What would have happened had Icarus been able to withstand the heat of the sun?
The story goes like this:
There once was a great craftsman named Daedulus. He built the most marvelous, and frightening, curiosities the world had ever seen. Daedulus shared his intellect with the greatest of his creations - his only son, Icarus.
He bartered with the gods. ‘I will build you minotaur,’ quoth Daedalus. ‘Leave my Icarus be.’
This story is incomplete.
“But why can’t-”
“Because you just can’t. That’s why, Eleanor. Now eat your peas.”
Eleven-year-old Ellie Bartowski frowns at the aforementioned vegetables sitting innocently on her plate. She is sullen. In his seat next to her, nine-year-old Chuck Bartowski is happily sculpting something unidentifiable out of his mashed potatoes.
Of course Chuck doesn’t care about the injustice of it all. Of course Chuck has forgotten their father’s peculiar tantrum of only one hour earlier. Never mind that it was Chuck that got fussed at, their father looking alternatively furious and terrified as he clutched Chuck to him like a baby and screamed.
Of course Chuck isn’t going to stand up for himself - for them. But Ellie isn’t really angry at Chuck. Chuck doesn’t have to stand. He’s got Ellie.
Dad sighs. “Ellie… Chuck could have gotten seriously hurt down in my lab. There are dangerous things down there.”
“Looked like just a bunch of dumb computers to me.”
Dad doesn’t soften. “I mean it, Eleanor. You won’t ever let your brother wander into my lab again. Promise me.”
“Fine! Fine! I’m promising!”
“El-”
“I promise we’ll stay out of your stupid lab! Jeez, Dad! What else do you want me to say?”
Ellie stands with a scrape of her chair against worn linoleum and runs out of the kitchen. It isn’t the first time that one of them has stormed out of a room since Mary left. It won’t be the last.
It’s a rare occasion, however, in that Dad doesn’t stand and follow Ellie out. He doesn’t stand by the closed door of her bedroom to soothe or scold or explain through the wood.
He just sits there, as if in a daze, and watches Chuck eat and build cartoon characters out of dinner.
He lets the kids stay home from school the next day, to watch TV and play games, to “make it up to” them.
Eventually he stops shaking.
One day Daedalus came across a young soldier who’d been charged with wresting minotaur from the control of enemy kings. This soldier had done Daedalus a service. Icarus was now a man. The gods had seen his ability to master the beasts built in his father’s workshop, and had gone back on their word to the craftsman that they would stay away. So the soldier had hid Icarus. In thanks, Daedalus built for the soldier a mighty Labyrinth, a tool meant to trap Minotaur and holster their powers.
The soldier was pleased with his gift, but there arose a problem.
The gods wanted the Labyrinth. They stole it and filled it up with monsters the likes of which Daedalus had never dreamed.
‘Steal it back,’ Daedalus told the soldier. ‘Hide it where it will never be found.’
And because his hiding place had worked so well the time before, the soldier took the Labyrinth and hid it with Icarus.
Icarus knew not the monsters housed in the Labyrinth’s shadows. He knew only that his friend, the soldier, had given it to him, so he swallowed the Labyrinth whole. It rested inside of him, in a place of many secrets.
“So this- All of this was just- What? You and my Dad playing some sort of shell game with Orion‘s son? Where‘s the supersecret spy‘s kid this time? With his father? Nope. Father took off. At college? Nope. Best friend got him kicked out.”
“Chuck.”
“It didn’t occur, to either of you, that maybe I deserved to know that the reason I kept getting left or- or pushed away was because the two of you had been hiding me from the CIA?”
“It wasn’t like that, Chuck.” Bryce’s voice is placating - his hands are raised in the age-old gesture of ’Look at me, I come in peace.’
Chuck feels nothing like peaceful. He’s just gotten used to the idea of being a secret. It hurts to think that that’s all he’s ever been to Bryce.
“I met Orion after I met you at Stanford. And it was years before he told me how he knew you,” Bryce insists.
“So why’d you do it, then? Why’d you care if the CIA got a hold of me?”
Some things don’t change. Bryce still grinds his teeth when he’s angry. “You know why.”
“No, Bryce, I don’t. I thought I did. But then I thought a lot of th-”
Bryce still knows how to shut Chuck up.
He still tastes like lazy afternoons in the sunshine, lying in the grass out on the quad.
The gods became angry. For his sins, Daedalus had been banished and now his son and the Labyrinth were lost too. The young soldier who‘d helped Daedalus foil the gods’ plans fell beneath their wrath. The gods commanded the minotaur to hunt for Icarus night and day, in every corner of the earth. More soldiers - soldiers more loyal to their gods, or perhaps just less seeing - dogged Icarus‘s steps.
This is just a story. You can tell where the fiction diverges from fact, can’t you?
Everybody knows that Icarus flew.
“I don’t understand why you’re doing this.”
“Don’t you? I want to live, Mr. Bartowski. I need the Governor to do that. Without it, I‘ll be like Chuck within weeks, brain rotting from the inside out.”
Stephen flinches. Apparently the neurological deterioration of one’s offspring makes for a touchy subject. “I- I can make you another Governor. I can give you this one.” Stephen reaches for the thin leather straps of his “watch”.
Shaw stops him and chuckles. “I’m sure that old thing works just fine for your version of the Intersect…” He taps his right temple with a finger. “But it won’t quite do the trick for this one, will it? No… I think we’ll just stick to the plan and wait here for your son.”
Stephen Bartowski and Orion are two distinctly different individuals. Shaw sees the man tied to the chair in front of him shift and wonders if there is a similar disassociative disorder waiting for him in the future. Orion‘s eyes and face are grim. “You don’t have to kill him,” he says, outwardly calm.
“Maybe,” Shaw admits. He smiles. “But I’m gonna.”
The gods found Icarus and thought to cut him open to let out all of his secrets, yet they still needed use of the monsters inside the Labyrinth. So they made with Icarus a bargain, just as they had bargained with Daedalus.
‘Serve us,’ said the gods. ‘And our wrath will not touch the ones you love.’
Icarus agreed. He still knew little of the monsters inside the maze he’d taken into himself.
The gods were surprised to learn that they knew even less.
“You’re special, son,” Chuck’s father always told him.
He’d almost forgotten.
He remembers now. He remembers a lot of things as he is dying. Things he didn’t remember that he’d forgotten. It’s a strange sensation; Chuck would probably find it fascinating if he wasn’t preoccupied with… well. Death. His body won’t move. He isn’t breathing. Chuck is certain that all of his body’s functions will shut down, just like this, one by one. But his brain doesn’t feel like it’s “powering down”, slipping into a long sleep. Oddly? It feels like Chuck is just waking up.
Then he is dead.
And then he isn’t.
‘You are special, son,’ quoth Daedalus, and he smiled at Icarus, the greatest of his creations.
Daedalus bartered with the gods. But he did not trust them.
And he shared his intellect with his son.
Chuck rises to his feet. He shakes out his fingers. He rolls his head, stretching his neck.
Shaw stares. He’s always struck Chuck as so unflappable. For the first time that Chuck can remember, Shaw looks-
“That’s impossible,” he says.
“Sorry,” Chuck tells him. “I just had to reboot.”
Chuck smiles as he says it.
The story actually goes more like this:
There once was a great craftsman named Daedulus. He built the most marvelous, and frightening, curiosities the world had ever seen. He built these wonders for the gods, who were greedy, and forbid his only son - Icarus - from visiting his workshop for fear of this greed.
Icarus disobeyed his father. He looked upon the Labyrinth Daedulus was building and, being his father‘s son, saw immediately its many secrets. He hid these secrets inside of himself, until even he had forgotten what he had seen.
‘Serve us,’ said the gods to Daedalus and his kin.
Daedalus bartered with the gods. ‘I will build you minotaur,’ quoth the craftsman. ‘Leave my Icarus be.’
The gods did so for many years. Content with the father’s service, they filled the world with his monsters and allowed Icarus to become a man outside of their reach.
But the gods were not to be trusted. Daedalus knew this and shared his intellect with his son.
He shared it through the Labyrinth, which he presented to a friend - a soldier - who had served Daedalus and who loved Icarus. He knew that one day the soldier would give the Labyrinth to his son and that Icarus would hide the Labyrinth in his place of secrets.
The gods became angry. They commanded the minotaur to hunt for Icarus - and the Labyrinth - night and day, in every corner of the earth. They knew not that Icarus was more than Daedalus’s offspring; that the Labyrinth was more than a tool for trapping monsters.
‘You are special son,’ quoth Daedalus and he smiled at Icarus, the greatest of his creations, because the things he hid had not made him less than a man.
And because soon… Soon. Icarus would be ready to travel the Labyrinth in the way that only he could.
And his travels would bring him power that would raise him up among the gods.
“Are you sure you want to do this, Chuck?”
Chuck is, but he makes himself think about this. There was a time when all he wanted was to be free of the Intersect. Free of secrets… of higher powers squabbling over the right to control his life, over friends who look like enemies and enemies who pretend to be friends…
But that time is so long gone now. Chuck has gone through so much - has changed so much.
When Chuck thinks about his options he thinks about Bryce - dying to protect the Intersect. Dying to protect Chuck.
He thinks about his father, about Orion. About the sacrifices he made, the steps he took to protect his only son.
Chuck looks down at the computer his father left to Ellie. He can’t help feeling that it was always meant to be his. Like the Intersect, from the beginning, was always meant to be his.
And- And he doesn’t know why, but- This Intersect… This Intersect, in particular, feels like it was made just for Chuck.
“I’m sure,” he tells Sarah and Casey.
The screen in fronting him is blinking its question. 1 or 11 ?
Chuck types ‘Aces, Charles’.
…soon. Soon. Icarus would be ready to travel the Labyrinth in the way only he could…
He only needed someone to open the gate.
Chuck presses ‘Enter.’
[End.]
Title: the story goes like this
Author: nevcolleil
Fandom: Chuck
Pairing: Chuck(/Bryce)
Rating: PG-13
Warning(s): shameless butchering of Roman mythology; spoilers for Season 4
Summary: For this prompt at comment_fic. Orion as modern-day Daedalus. What would have happened had Icarus been able to withstand the heat of the sun?
The story goes like this:
There once was a great craftsman named Daedulus. He built the most marvelous, and frightening, curiosities the world had ever seen. Daedulus shared his intellect with the greatest of his creations - his only son, Icarus.
He bartered with the gods. ‘I will build you minotaur,’ quoth Daedalus. ‘Leave my Icarus be.’
This story is incomplete.
“But why can’t-”
“Because you just can’t. That’s why, Eleanor. Now eat your peas.”
Eleven-year-old Ellie Bartowski frowns at the aforementioned vegetables sitting innocently on her plate. She is sullen. In his seat next to her, nine-year-old Chuck Bartowski is happily sculpting something unidentifiable out of his mashed potatoes.
Of course Chuck doesn’t care about the injustice of it all. Of course Chuck has forgotten their father’s peculiar tantrum of only one hour earlier. Never mind that it was Chuck that got fussed at, their father looking alternatively furious and terrified as he clutched Chuck to him like a baby and screamed.
Of course Chuck isn’t going to stand up for himself - for them. But Ellie isn’t really angry at Chuck. Chuck doesn’t have to stand. He’s got Ellie.
Dad sighs. “Ellie… Chuck could have gotten seriously hurt down in my lab. There are dangerous things down there.”
“Looked like just a bunch of dumb computers to me.”
Dad doesn’t soften. “I mean it, Eleanor. You won’t ever let your brother wander into my lab again. Promise me.”
“Fine! Fine! I’m promising!”
“El-”
“I promise we’ll stay out of your stupid lab! Jeez, Dad! What else do you want me to say?”
Ellie stands with a scrape of her chair against worn linoleum and runs out of the kitchen. It isn’t the first time that one of them has stormed out of a room since Mary left. It won’t be the last.
It’s a rare occasion, however, in that Dad doesn’t stand and follow Ellie out. He doesn’t stand by the closed door of her bedroom to soothe or scold or explain through the wood.
He just sits there, as if in a daze, and watches Chuck eat and build cartoon characters out of dinner.
He lets the kids stay home from school the next day, to watch TV and play games, to “make it up to” them.
Eventually he stops shaking.
One day Daedalus came across a young soldier who’d been charged with wresting minotaur from the control of enemy kings. This soldier had done Daedalus a service. Icarus was now a man. The gods had seen his ability to master the beasts built in his father’s workshop, and had gone back on their word to the craftsman that they would stay away. So the soldier had hid Icarus. In thanks, Daedalus built for the soldier a mighty Labyrinth, a tool meant to trap Minotaur and holster their powers.
The soldier was pleased with his gift, but there arose a problem.
The gods wanted the Labyrinth. They stole it and filled it up with monsters the likes of which Daedalus had never dreamed.
‘Steal it back,’ Daedalus told the soldier. ‘Hide it where it will never be found.’
And because his hiding place had worked so well the time before, the soldier took the Labyrinth and hid it with Icarus.
Icarus knew not the monsters housed in the Labyrinth’s shadows. He knew only that his friend, the soldier, had given it to him, so he swallowed the Labyrinth whole. It rested inside of him, in a place of many secrets.
“So this- All of this was just- What? You and my Dad playing some sort of shell game with Orion‘s son? Where‘s the supersecret spy‘s kid this time? With his father? Nope. Father took off. At college? Nope. Best friend got him kicked out.”
“Chuck.”
“It didn’t occur, to either of you, that maybe I deserved to know that the reason I kept getting left or- or pushed away was because the two of you had been hiding me from the CIA?”
“It wasn’t like that, Chuck.” Bryce’s voice is placating - his hands are raised in the age-old gesture of ’Look at me, I come in peace.’
Chuck feels nothing like peaceful. He’s just gotten used to the idea of being a secret. It hurts to think that that’s all he’s ever been to Bryce.
“I met Orion after I met you at Stanford. And it was years before he told me how he knew you,” Bryce insists.
“So why’d you do it, then? Why’d you care if the CIA got a hold of me?”
Some things don’t change. Bryce still grinds his teeth when he’s angry. “You know why.”
“No, Bryce, I don’t. I thought I did. But then I thought a lot of th-”
Bryce still knows how to shut Chuck up.
He still tastes like lazy afternoons in the sunshine, lying in the grass out on the quad.
The gods became angry. For his sins, Daedalus had been banished and now his son and the Labyrinth were lost too. The young soldier who‘d helped Daedalus foil the gods’ plans fell beneath their wrath. The gods commanded the minotaur to hunt for Icarus night and day, in every corner of the earth. More soldiers - soldiers more loyal to their gods, or perhaps just less seeing - dogged Icarus‘s steps.
This is just a story. You can tell where the fiction diverges from fact, can’t you?
Everybody knows that Icarus flew.
“I don’t understand why you’re doing this.”
“Don’t you? I want to live, Mr. Bartowski. I need the Governor to do that. Without it, I‘ll be like Chuck within weeks, brain rotting from the inside out.”
Stephen flinches. Apparently the neurological deterioration of one’s offspring makes for a touchy subject. “I- I can make you another Governor. I can give you this one.” Stephen reaches for the thin leather straps of his “watch”.
Shaw stops him and chuckles. “I’m sure that old thing works just fine for your version of the Intersect…” He taps his right temple with a finger. “But it won’t quite do the trick for this one, will it? No… I think we’ll just stick to the plan and wait here for your son.”
Stephen Bartowski and Orion are two distinctly different individuals. Shaw sees the man tied to the chair in front of him shift and wonders if there is a similar disassociative disorder waiting for him in the future. Orion‘s eyes and face are grim. “You don’t have to kill him,” he says, outwardly calm.
“Maybe,” Shaw admits. He smiles. “But I’m gonna.”
The gods found Icarus and thought to cut him open to let out all of his secrets, yet they still needed use of the monsters inside the Labyrinth. So they made with Icarus a bargain, just as they had bargained with Daedalus.
‘Serve us,’ said the gods. ‘And our wrath will not touch the ones you love.’
Icarus agreed. He still knew little of the monsters inside the maze he’d taken into himself.
The gods were surprised to learn that they knew even less.
“You’re special, son,” Chuck’s father always told him.
He’d almost forgotten.
He remembers now. He remembers a lot of things as he is dying. Things he didn’t remember that he’d forgotten. It’s a strange sensation; Chuck would probably find it fascinating if he wasn’t preoccupied with… well. Death. His body won’t move. He isn’t breathing. Chuck is certain that all of his body’s functions will shut down, just like this, one by one. But his brain doesn’t feel like it’s “powering down”, slipping into a long sleep. Oddly? It feels like Chuck is just waking up.
Then he is dead.
And then he isn’t.
‘You are special, son,’ quoth Daedalus, and he smiled at Icarus, the greatest of his creations.
Daedalus bartered with the gods. But he did not trust them.
And he shared his intellect with his son.
Chuck rises to his feet. He shakes out his fingers. He rolls his head, stretching his neck.
Shaw stares. He’s always struck Chuck as so unflappable. For the first time that Chuck can remember, Shaw looks-
“That’s impossible,” he says.
“Sorry,” Chuck tells him. “I just had to reboot.”
Chuck smiles as he says it.
The story actually goes more like this:
There once was a great craftsman named Daedulus. He built the most marvelous, and frightening, curiosities the world had ever seen. He built these wonders for the gods, who were greedy, and forbid his only son - Icarus - from visiting his workshop for fear of this greed.
Icarus disobeyed his father. He looked upon the Labyrinth Daedulus was building and, being his father‘s son, saw immediately its many secrets. He hid these secrets inside of himself, until even he had forgotten what he had seen.
‘Serve us,’ said the gods to Daedalus and his kin.
Daedalus bartered with the gods. ‘I will build you minotaur,’ quoth the craftsman. ‘Leave my Icarus be.’
The gods did so for many years. Content with the father’s service, they filled the world with his monsters and allowed Icarus to become a man outside of their reach.
But the gods were not to be trusted. Daedalus knew this and shared his intellect with his son.
He shared it through the Labyrinth, which he presented to a friend - a soldier - who had served Daedalus and who loved Icarus. He knew that one day the soldier would give the Labyrinth to his son and that Icarus would hide the Labyrinth in his place of secrets.
The gods became angry. They commanded the minotaur to hunt for Icarus - and the Labyrinth - night and day, in every corner of the earth. They knew not that Icarus was more than Daedalus’s offspring; that the Labyrinth was more than a tool for trapping monsters.
‘You are special son,’ quoth Daedalus and he smiled at Icarus, the greatest of his creations, because the things he hid had not made him less than a man.
And because soon… Soon. Icarus would be ready to travel the Labyrinth in the way that only he could.
And his travels would bring him power that would raise him up among the gods.
“Are you sure you want to do this, Chuck?”
Chuck is, but he makes himself think about this. There was a time when all he wanted was to be free of the Intersect. Free of secrets… of higher powers squabbling over the right to control his life, over friends who look like enemies and enemies who pretend to be friends…
But that time is so long gone now. Chuck has gone through so much - has changed so much.
When Chuck thinks about his options he thinks about Bryce - dying to protect the Intersect. Dying to protect Chuck.
He thinks about his father, about Orion. About the sacrifices he made, the steps he took to protect his only son.
Chuck looks down at the computer his father left to Ellie. He can’t help feeling that it was always meant to be his. Like the Intersect, from the beginning, was always meant to be his.
And- And he doesn’t know why, but- This Intersect… This Intersect, in particular, feels like it was made just for Chuck.
“I’m sure,” he tells Sarah and Casey.
The screen in fronting him is blinking its question. 1 or 11 ?
Chuck types ‘Aces, Charles’.
…soon. Soon. Icarus would be ready to travel the Labyrinth in the way only he could…
He only needed someone to open the gate.
Chuck presses ‘Enter.’
[End.]