fic: the skeleton that left the closet {chuck - casey/sarah}
Title: The Skeleton That Left The Closet
Fandom: Chuck
Characters/Pairings: Sarah | Casey/Sarah.
Rating: R
Word Count: 3,894
Author's Note: For gigglemonster. No idea what happened here.
Summary: Future fic. Amsterdam reads like an exercise in tempting fate. They up the ante surprisingly fast for people who were once so preoccupied with control and carefully measured gestures.
“When did this become what we do?”
His laugh is almost sinister, face cast in shadow, all sharp angles where the light from the street glances off of his skin. It would look like something out of old Hollywood, Hitchcock and the artistry of lighting and contrast, except the light glows almost red and he is no Cary Grant.
He’s no villain either. Not any more than she is.
-
Let’s not kid ourselves here.
Sarah didn’t join the CIA to make the world a better place. She joined because an opportunity was presented to her and she learned early on not to look a gift horse in the mouth.
In the choice between making a decent, if not honest, living, or getting caught up in her father’s mess, she made the only logical one.
-
They separated a week after Monaco, in an airport nearly three thousand miles from the place they’d come to call home.
Her tan had yet to fade and there was a bruise, more purple than black and blue, that spanned the better part of his right shoulder. He wore a suit and she wore dark jeans and when she turned to leave, hard swallow, there was a hand on her arm.
“Stay safe, Walker,” he’d said and it took effort to get her feet moving once more.
In the years to come, she would remember the gravelly quality to his voice as he said it. He sounded old and broken-down, in that moment. She doesn’t know if the sentiment was reflected in his expression.
She never turned around.
-
Amsterdam reads like an exercise in tempting fate.
They say it’s like a lotto. Her number came up and so did his, and then a month or two in the story changes, becomes about how it’s important, for missions like these, that there is an established relationship between the two parties involved and that their prior history and repartee more than fit the bill.
So Sarah Walker becomes Amanda Weissenger, formerly of Toledo, and five months later, thanks to an impulsive target, she becomes the soon-to-be Mrs. Holst. John Casey moves into the apartment downstairs, and his records change to reflect those of a former military man who went on to become a carpenter.
“Explains the tools,” her fiancé says, on the day he moves in. Alexander had shared an elevator with him; they’d gotten acquainted shortly.
The box with the guns is at her feet. She laughs.
-
He is a carpenter, she is an artist, and Alexander is an accountant.
None of those statements are true.
So at least they have that in common.
-
(He stops her with a hand on her arm. The contact makes her skin turn to gooseflesh.
“You got this?”
She lets out a whoosh of air. “I’ve got this.”)
-
They up the ante surprisingly fast for people who were once so preoccupied with control and carefully measured gestures.
She is lonely - perhaps the loneliest she’s been in some time -- lying next to the warm body of a man who will only stay that way as long as she allows him to. The knowledge settles in her bones and keeps her up at night, and there is an hour during one lazy afternoon where she falls asleep sitting up, her legs bent over the arm of the chair in Casey’s living room. There’s coffee on the end table when she wakes up.
It evolves from there.
Alexander works a job that’s only resemblance to your average day job is the hours and she champions Casey as a like minded individual, simple as that. He doesn’t question the time she spends with Casey because she doesn’t question the nature of his work any more than absolutely necessary.
That she goes from his living room to his bedroom in under a month should be of no surprise to anyone involved.
-
It’s his apartment, always.
Everything is rigged and reconfigured, safe and familiar to hands that haven’t held a gun in months.
“Looks like you drew the short straw,” he’ll say, arsenal at his disposal and a cover story that’s at the very least reminiscent of the truth. He doesn’t have to consciously remember to answer to a different name - she hates Amanda like she hates Jenny, one too naïve and the other two calculating, and she thought she found a mix there, for a while, when she was Sarah - and he doesn’t have to fuck a man that she has no interest in loving.
“It isn’t so bad,” she’ll lie and then, invariably, she’ll pull herself out of bed three hours after she first closed her eyes and he’ll notice, a frown and the flutter of his jaw as he pushes back down the urge to call her on it.
She’s not drunk when she kisses him but she still isn’t seeing through clear eyes. He’s coming off of a flight disguised as a business trip with a six hour turnaround time, and his thumb is against her throat, hand curled around her neck, and she keeps thinking about how she can now add desperate to that list of things she doesn’t like about Amanda so she doesn’t have to think about Sarah adding another partner to her resume, standing there with the doorknob pressed into the small of her back and his tongue in her mouth.
-
Casey shares a wall of his bedroom with his neighbor and, sometimes, she’ll hear the giggle of a young child, the shuffle of feet, her every nerve on edge and hyper aware of her surroundings.
(He never says a word when he comes, never makes it past the low guttural groan that rumbles through his chest, but once, open mouthed against the crook of her neck and his hand curved over her hip, she thinks she heard her name - she thinks she heard him say Sarah, the ghost of a whisper that’s more gentle than he’ll ever be, and she wonders when she began thinking of that as her name - and it sticks in her mind like her voice sticks in her throat.)
-
She gets a job at an art gallery.
They don’t seem to care if she’s short on any real artistic talent, just that’s she pretty and has well-honed people skills.
Alexander still takes her out to dinner, candlelight and expensive bottle of wine, a toast to the future, and she goes pale under her make-up as he tells her about a house that he’s taken an interest in.
“I like my apartment,” she says, her nails clinking against glass, fingers curled to keep from shaking. Her smile is too wide but he is far from well versed in her mannerisms. Their courtship has been the whirlwind that stories are made of; the ending will be closer to that of cautionary tales.
“I can afford so much better,” he says, an understatement from a man who has millions of dollars stored away all over the world. He had wanted no part of her apartment, tiny by his standards, but he had wanted every part of her, and so a compromise had been reached.
At the time.
And who is she to refuse such a generous offer.
-
Five minutes after he leaves for work in the morning, she dashes down the stairs.
Casey’s in the shower but she’s got his spare key and a distinct lack of boundary issues considering all that they’ve done. The bathroom door closes behind her and his silhouette stills.
“Phase two,” is all she says.
“Why?”
“We’re moving.”
For a minute, there’s nothing but the sound of the water as it beats down.
-
She always remembers Chuck with red-rimmed eyes and a split lip, disappearing behind a crowd in another airport in a string of them.
An hour into the flight to Monaco, she lost it completely, sobbing with one hand clasped over her mouth. Casey’s larger one swallowed the other.
It’s been years. She heard the Intersect’s gone and there’s a girl named Katie who fills up the empty space she left behind in his bed and maybe in his heart.
It’s been years and that image is still burned into the back of her eyelids.
-
“Phase two,” she repeats, acclimating herself to the concept, and she has the worst urge to run, to just set eight months of work on fire and bail, but this is the CIA and there is nowhere far enough to be considered a safe haven.
“Okay,” he says, and the water turns off and the sound of her breathing sounds too loud against the walls. He sounds too confident, she notes, and, later, when she has all the pieces in front of her, she’ll understand this as a turning point.
-
There’s a party he describes as a charming little get together between friends. It wouldn’t be a stretch to call it a gala and she’s just this side of out of place in her cocktail dress, cut low and tight.
Her eyes find Casey across the room and her breath catches.
“Didn’t I tell you?” Alexander asks, with an arm slung casual around her waist, “Mr. Casey’s coming to work for Iain.”
She regards him with genuine surprise. “He’s a carpenter,” something which she’s fairly sure Iain is not, she leaves out. The exact nature of Alexander’s friend’s work is unknown to her - listen but don’t ask is the only safe practice here - but of this she is certain.
“He has other skills. Most men do.”
-
She backs him into a wall. Maybe he lets her or maybe anger is as good a fuel as adrenaline, but she plants a hand on his chest and pins him there with her body and her will.
“That was not the plan,” she hisses, and there was a point where she seriously contemplated decking him for this, for turning things around on her and leaving her out of the loop. It’s a precarious position to be in when you’re whole life is a lie and you’re not the only one in on it.
“Neither was picking up and moving across the city,” he spats, unfazed. “You learn to improvise. You used to be good at it, Walker.”
He tries to push past her. She shoves him and the thud when the bulk of him connects with the wall once more is satisfying. “That’s not how this works. We don’t improvise. We have orders and we follow them.”
“Things change,” he tells her and this time when he tries to move she lets him. She lets him go. She lets him cross the room and she lets herself look away.
“Yeah,” she exhales, “I guess they do.”
-
He still fucks her against the kitchen counter, body pushed up on her forearms, and his hands at her hips again.
She bites her bottom lip hard enough to draw blood and Alexander will ask, later, and she will call it a habit, a nervous one at that, and she’ll only be lying about the second part.
This is becoming habit.
-
Once, a woman finds her naked in his bed, legs tangled in plain white sheets, her top half uncovered.
Her first instinct is not for modesty but instead to reach for the gun she knows is in the drawer of the nightstand. She knows all of his hiding places.
“I was told to come find Mr. Casey,” the woman, maybe ten years younger than she - barely a woman then, and her bare arms carry track marks - tells her in Dutch.
“He’s not here.” She abandons the gun, untouched, pulling the sheet to her chest and sitting up. “Do you know who I am?”
“Yes.”
“Can you forget who I am?”
The woman nods, enthusiastically. Knows danger when she sees it. Sarah wonders who she works for, wonders what they want with Casey that they’d send a messenger.
If Alexander finds out she’s sleeping with their downstairs neighbor she will, at best, end up with a blown mission. At worst, dead. Too much work has gone into this for so many things to be going wrong so quickly.
She lets the woman go anyways.
-
(Two months later, her heel will catch in the stiff fingers of the woman, dead on the concrete floor.
It will have all been for naught.)
-
The next morning, he tells her to get out in no uncertain terms.
“We need to focus on the mission,” he says, like she needs the constant reminder when she lives with it. “You understand that.”
Instead of ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ she gets ‘it’s not you, it’s the mission’, variations on the same theme; it’s all bullshit. She can tell a liar when she sees one.
She gets a hand between the door, stops him from closing it in her face with the last word. He widens the gap, reluctant and stone-faced. Closed up.
“You didn’t think I could do this,” the words smart, even when they’re her own, and he doesn’t nod but the more important thing is he doesn’t deny it.
She pulls the door closed of her own free will.
-
The original plan as follows:
Befriend, infiltrate, bring down.
Casey was only supposed to be her backup and her connection to home base, the safe port in the storm. Not the lead on this mission. It undermines her authority and her competence, and, worse, it does so effectively.
-
They pass each other in the hallway, pass each other information on the stairs and in mail slots. She never sets foot in his apartment. He never says anything to her that isn’t absolutely necessary, keeps his tone even and his eyes empty.
She can turn off emotions too. It’s one of the things they do prepare you for in training, how to lie through your teeth and fake a smile and keep your lip from quivering, your hands from shaking, and your eyes from betraying you. They teach you how to shoot straight and how to become someone else, without the warning that you’ll lose yourself completely in the process.
But then she’s been a little lost for a long time now.
-
He pulls her out of work early on a Thursday, no explanation offered or needed. It’s the abrupt nature of his visit, the uncharacteristic way his hand falls against the small of her back as he guides her out, that makes her go without a fight.
They don’t talk on the tram. She’s surrounded by nothing but chatter, Dutch and English and some German coming from the back, but she doesn’t get anything out of him other than a few glances and overall calm demeanor. It doesn’t stop her from feeling like she just let herself get willingly kidnapped.
“What are we - ” she starts.
He holds up a hand, “Just wait.”
-
There are these little moments with Alexander where she almost feels bad for what she’s doing.
You live with someone for long enough, you get to know them. It’s different from staking out a target at a party and killing them within a single evening. They become part of your life, for better or for worse.
No one is unredeemable.
Alexander is unquestionably a bad man, one who either is, or has connections to, a ring of arms dealer’s - there is a possibility that nuclear could be tacked on in front of the title - but, at times, he is also a kind and adaptable one.
He moved into her apartment initially instead of shepherding her off to some fancy house she knows he either had designs on or already owned. Maybe still does. For all she knows, his plans to move were in fact plans to relocate. He let her set the pace. He bothered to learn that she likes wine better than champagne, silver better than gold, and she always reads the newspaper with her coffee. She never felt like she was a chess piece in his world, even if he was one in hers.
He is a bad man but he’s also a man capable of love.
And that makes him human, if nothing else.
-
When Casey checks them into a hotel on the edge of De Wallen, under the name Alexander Coburn - it’s almost amusing, that he uses his real identity as his alias here, amusing and disconcerting - she knows she’s in trouble.
He tells her everything behind closed doors.
Tells her that it’s Iain they should’ve been worrying about this whole time, Iain with the weapons and the money. Alexander’s merely a lackey of his, a lackey who really is, as it turns out, an accountant with a side job. Tells her that Alexander knows about them, about her infidelity, and that he’s the one who brought Casey up to Iain, out of a desire to keep him away from her. The woman who came looking for him was really supposed to be looking for her, to confirm Alexander’s suspicions; Sarah had scared her into lying. Tells her that he has all the evidence and the cause they need and they’ve got agents who should be here within the next few hours.
“I’m not going back,” she deduces fairly quickly.
“It was my call,” he says. “You needed to know before they gave the order.”
So he wasn’t just trying to undermine her. She can take some cold comfort in that. “They want them dead or alive?”
“Whatever gets our people out safe.”
It’s the former.
-
The sun sets and they wait.
Alexander’s noticed her absence, her cell phone ringing at fifteen minute intervals, and she dumps the SIM card in a half empty glass of water.
“I thought for sure…” she trails off, the sentence and the sentiment going nowhere. She doesn’t know what she thought. The only thing she knows is that a decade and change later, she shouldn’t stumble when someone pulls the rug out from under her. The fall shouldn’t hurt.
He doesn’t expect her to finish. “We’re ending this tomorrow. Flight leaves at midnight, one way or another.”
“Red eye,” she muses, with some degree of longing. Sleep evades her more than it doesn’t; she’d try pills if not for the side effects.
“They’ve got assignments lined up already.”
“Of course.”
He holds her gaze across the room. This time next week she could be in Moscow and he could be in Argentina. They’re not partners anymore; there’s nothing tethering them together.
This might really be it. There’s no guarantee of a next time, not in this business, not when they could both be dead in a month.
He might be, tomorrow.
-
There is no last hurrah, one for the road, biding your time before the end, bullshit.
She doesn’t lay her body out underneath his with the lights off and the open window filtering in the sounds of a city that doesn’t put much stock in a good night’s rest. She doesn’t hook a leg around his waist and pull him in deeper and she doesn’t ride him until the sun comes up.
Instead, she sleeps for eight solid hours.
-
“You know, I’d be out by now.”
“What?”
“All of those things my father did? All of those things that I did? If I’d gone to jail for them, I’d be out by now.”
I’d have a normal life by now, she finishes in her head. It’s probably a lie. She was never cut out for normal, for picket fences and suburban happily ever afters.
He pauses, gun in hand. Safety on.
“I don’t know what made me think of that,” she lies.
-
He leaves with four well trained, green as hell, agents, but not before making her swear she’d be on that flight.
She waits for all of twenty minutes and then follows.
As of today, she’s still his partner. And partners have each other’s backs.
-
Blood never bothered her. Not the stench of it or the tendency for it to cake under her fingernails and stain her clothes. She got her first bloody nose at nine; she didn’t cry and she didn’t scream, and she all but shrugged it off when the back of her hand smeared crimson when she wiped at it. Blood is blood; it’s life and, occasionally, it’s death.
Others would become doctors and nurses. She became a killer.
There’s a pool of it now, red turning to brown and sticky under the heels of her boots, Alexander in the middle of it. He’s not dead, not yet, but his pulse is weak and he took a bullet to the head, and she knows what that means just like she knows that he won’t see the inside of a hospital in the near future.
He dies by her hand, suffocation as a mercy killing, and no one ever knows.
-
She turns a corner and winds up with a gun in her face. It only takes a split-second to return the favor.
Casey opens his mouth, probably to reprimand her, but she’s having none of that. “You can’t tell me to stay in the car.”
It comes out of her mouth before her brain has the chance to process it, and there’s almost a laugh that bubbles up in the back of her throat, one that she has to hide through gritted teeth and considerable practice.
She manages; she always does.
“I could’ve shot you,” he counters.
“Yeah, well, I’m faster.”
“I have better aim.”
“Then we’d both be dead.”
Agent #1 hasn’t lowered his gun yet. Casey looks like he wants to clock the rookie with the butt of his own. She’s too busy tracing the faint trail of footprints she’s left behind, blood on concrete, to catch the snort of derision and the half of a smirk he sends her way.
-
As promised, she makes that red-eye.
Alone.
-
They debrief her for seven hours once she gets back in D.C., at least half of that time spent waiting in an interrogation room. They want to know what she knows, all of it, and give her about half of their knowledge back in return. They want her to see a shrink too, just for the hell of it, just because that’s what they do when you go undercover for nine months and people end up dying, even if that was the plan all along.
She gets sent back to a hotel room for some downtime after all of that, and even then she’s got her orders for reassignment, effective two days from now. Texas, so at least it’s stateside for the time being.
Her flight leaves before Casey and the rest of the cleanup crew get back to town.
-
She goes through three different partners before the man in charge - Beckman long since gone - decides to stick her with the most by the book agent he can find, in hopes of curbing some of her more reckless tendencies.
(Chained down to the same mission for the better part of a year, only able to be passive in the majority of her maneuvers, and she’s itching to stretch her muscles and her limits - and maybe the limits of others -- )
They bring in Casey the next day.
-
fin.
-
Fandom: Chuck
Characters/Pairings: Sarah | Casey/Sarah.
Rating: R
Word Count: 3,894
Author's Note: For gigglemonster. No idea what happened here.
Summary: Future fic. Amsterdam reads like an exercise in tempting fate. They up the ante surprisingly fast for people who were once so preoccupied with control and carefully measured gestures.
“When did this become what we do?”
His laugh is almost sinister, face cast in shadow, all sharp angles where the light from the street glances off of his skin. It would look like something out of old Hollywood, Hitchcock and the artistry of lighting and contrast, except the light glows almost red and he is no Cary Grant.
He’s no villain either. Not any more than she is.
-
Let’s not kid ourselves here.
Sarah didn’t join the CIA to make the world a better place. She joined because an opportunity was presented to her and she learned early on not to look a gift horse in the mouth.
In the choice between making a decent, if not honest, living, or getting caught up in her father’s mess, she made the only logical one.
-
They separated a week after Monaco, in an airport nearly three thousand miles from the place they’d come to call home.
Her tan had yet to fade and there was a bruise, more purple than black and blue, that spanned the better part of his right shoulder. He wore a suit and she wore dark jeans and when she turned to leave, hard swallow, there was a hand on her arm.
“Stay safe, Walker,” he’d said and it took effort to get her feet moving once more.
In the years to come, she would remember the gravelly quality to his voice as he said it. He sounded old and broken-down, in that moment. She doesn’t know if the sentiment was reflected in his expression.
She never turned around.
-
Amsterdam reads like an exercise in tempting fate.
They say it’s like a lotto. Her number came up and so did his, and then a month or two in the story changes, becomes about how it’s important, for missions like these, that there is an established relationship between the two parties involved and that their prior history and repartee more than fit the bill.
So Sarah Walker becomes Amanda Weissenger, formerly of Toledo, and five months later, thanks to an impulsive target, she becomes the soon-to-be Mrs. Holst. John Casey moves into the apartment downstairs, and his records change to reflect those of a former military man who went on to become a carpenter.
“Explains the tools,” her fiancé says, on the day he moves in. Alexander had shared an elevator with him; they’d gotten acquainted shortly.
The box with the guns is at her feet. She laughs.
-
He is a carpenter, she is an artist, and Alexander is an accountant.
None of those statements are true.
So at least they have that in common.
-
(He stops her with a hand on her arm. The contact makes her skin turn to gooseflesh.
“You got this?”
She lets out a whoosh of air. “I’ve got this.”)
-
They up the ante surprisingly fast for people who were once so preoccupied with control and carefully measured gestures.
She is lonely - perhaps the loneliest she’s been in some time -- lying next to the warm body of a man who will only stay that way as long as she allows him to. The knowledge settles in her bones and keeps her up at night, and there is an hour during one lazy afternoon where she falls asleep sitting up, her legs bent over the arm of the chair in Casey’s living room. There’s coffee on the end table when she wakes up.
It evolves from there.
Alexander works a job that’s only resemblance to your average day job is the hours and she champions Casey as a like minded individual, simple as that. He doesn’t question the time she spends with Casey because she doesn’t question the nature of his work any more than absolutely necessary.
That she goes from his living room to his bedroom in under a month should be of no surprise to anyone involved.
-
It’s his apartment, always.
Everything is rigged and reconfigured, safe and familiar to hands that haven’t held a gun in months.
“Looks like you drew the short straw,” he’ll say, arsenal at his disposal and a cover story that’s at the very least reminiscent of the truth. He doesn’t have to consciously remember to answer to a different name - she hates Amanda like she hates Jenny, one too naïve and the other two calculating, and she thought she found a mix there, for a while, when she was Sarah - and he doesn’t have to fuck a man that she has no interest in loving.
“It isn’t so bad,” she’ll lie and then, invariably, she’ll pull herself out of bed three hours after she first closed her eyes and he’ll notice, a frown and the flutter of his jaw as he pushes back down the urge to call her on it.
She’s not drunk when she kisses him but she still isn’t seeing through clear eyes. He’s coming off of a flight disguised as a business trip with a six hour turnaround time, and his thumb is against her throat, hand curled around her neck, and she keeps thinking about how she can now add desperate to that list of things she doesn’t like about Amanda so she doesn’t have to think about Sarah adding another partner to her resume, standing there with the doorknob pressed into the small of her back and his tongue in her mouth.
-
Casey shares a wall of his bedroom with his neighbor and, sometimes, she’ll hear the giggle of a young child, the shuffle of feet, her every nerve on edge and hyper aware of her surroundings.
(He never says a word when he comes, never makes it past the low guttural groan that rumbles through his chest, but once, open mouthed against the crook of her neck and his hand curved over her hip, she thinks she heard her name - she thinks she heard him say Sarah, the ghost of a whisper that’s more gentle than he’ll ever be, and she wonders when she began thinking of that as her name - and it sticks in her mind like her voice sticks in her throat.)
-
She gets a job at an art gallery.
They don’t seem to care if she’s short on any real artistic talent, just that’s she pretty and has well-honed people skills.
Alexander still takes her out to dinner, candlelight and expensive bottle of wine, a toast to the future, and she goes pale under her make-up as he tells her about a house that he’s taken an interest in.
“I like my apartment,” she says, her nails clinking against glass, fingers curled to keep from shaking. Her smile is too wide but he is far from well versed in her mannerisms. Their courtship has been the whirlwind that stories are made of; the ending will be closer to that of cautionary tales.
“I can afford so much better,” he says, an understatement from a man who has millions of dollars stored away all over the world. He had wanted no part of her apartment, tiny by his standards, but he had wanted every part of her, and so a compromise had been reached.
At the time.
And who is she to refuse such a generous offer.
-
Five minutes after he leaves for work in the morning, she dashes down the stairs.
Casey’s in the shower but she’s got his spare key and a distinct lack of boundary issues considering all that they’ve done. The bathroom door closes behind her and his silhouette stills.
“Phase two,” is all she says.
“Why?”
“We’re moving.”
For a minute, there’s nothing but the sound of the water as it beats down.
-
She always remembers Chuck with red-rimmed eyes and a split lip, disappearing behind a crowd in another airport in a string of them.
An hour into the flight to Monaco, she lost it completely, sobbing with one hand clasped over her mouth. Casey’s larger one swallowed the other.
It’s been years. She heard the Intersect’s gone and there’s a girl named Katie who fills up the empty space she left behind in his bed and maybe in his heart.
It’s been years and that image is still burned into the back of her eyelids.
-
“Phase two,” she repeats, acclimating herself to the concept, and she has the worst urge to run, to just set eight months of work on fire and bail, but this is the CIA and there is nowhere far enough to be considered a safe haven.
“Okay,” he says, and the water turns off and the sound of her breathing sounds too loud against the walls. He sounds too confident, she notes, and, later, when she has all the pieces in front of her, she’ll understand this as a turning point.
-
There’s a party he describes as a charming little get together between friends. It wouldn’t be a stretch to call it a gala and she’s just this side of out of place in her cocktail dress, cut low and tight.
Her eyes find Casey across the room and her breath catches.
“Didn’t I tell you?” Alexander asks, with an arm slung casual around her waist, “Mr. Casey’s coming to work for Iain.”
She regards him with genuine surprise. “He’s a carpenter,” something which she’s fairly sure Iain is not, she leaves out. The exact nature of Alexander’s friend’s work is unknown to her - listen but don’t ask is the only safe practice here - but of this she is certain.
“He has other skills. Most men do.”
-
She backs him into a wall. Maybe he lets her or maybe anger is as good a fuel as adrenaline, but she plants a hand on his chest and pins him there with her body and her will.
“That was not the plan,” she hisses, and there was a point where she seriously contemplated decking him for this, for turning things around on her and leaving her out of the loop. It’s a precarious position to be in when you’re whole life is a lie and you’re not the only one in on it.
“Neither was picking up and moving across the city,” he spats, unfazed. “You learn to improvise. You used to be good at it, Walker.”
He tries to push past her. She shoves him and the thud when the bulk of him connects with the wall once more is satisfying. “That’s not how this works. We don’t improvise. We have orders and we follow them.”
“Things change,” he tells her and this time when he tries to move she lets him. She lets him go. She lets him cross the room and she lets herself look away.
“Yeah,” she exhales, “I guess they do.”
-
He still fucks her against the kitchen counter, body pushed up on her forearms, and his hands at her hips again.
She bites her bottom lip hard enough to draw blood and Alexander will ask, later, and she will call it a habit, a nervous one at that, and she’ll only be lying about the second part.
This is becoming habit.
-
Once, a woman finds her naked in his bed, legs tangled in plain white sheets, her top half uncovered.
Her first instinct is not for modesty but instead to reach for the gun she knows is in the drawer of the nightstand. She knows all of his hiding places.
“I was told to come find Mr. Casey,” the woman, maybe ten years younger than she - barely a woman then, and her bare arms carry track marks - tells her in Dutch.
“He’s not here.” She abandons the gun, untouched, pulling the sheet to her chest and sitting up. “Do you know who I am?”
“Yes.”
“Can you forget who I am?”
The woman nods, enthusiastically. Knows danger when she sees it. Sarah wonders who she works for, wonders what they want with Casey that they’d send a messenger.
If Alexander finds out she’s sleeping with their downstairs neighbor she will, at best, end up with a blown mission. At worst, dead. Too much work has gone into this for so many things to be going wrong so quickly.
She lets the woman go anyways.
-
(Two months later, her heel will catch in the stiff fingers of the woman, dead on the concrete floor.
It will have all been for naught.)
-
The next morning, he tells her to get out in no uncertain terms.
“We need to focus on the mission,” he says, like she needs the constant reminder when she lives with it. “You understand that.”
Instead of ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ she gets ‘it’s not you, it’s the mission’, variations on the same theme; it’s all bullshit. She can tell a liar when she sees one.
She gets a hand between the door, stops him from closing it in her face with the last word. He widens the gap, reluctant and stone-faced. Closed up.
“You didn’t think I could do this,” the words smart, even when they’re her own, and he doesn’t nod but the more important thing is he doesn’t deny it.
She pulls the door closed of her own free will.
-
The original plan as follows:
Befriend, infiltrate, bring down.
Casey was only supposed to be her backup and her connection to home base, the safe port in the storm. Not the lead on this mission. It undermines her authority and her competence, and, worse, it does so effectively.
-
They pass each other in the hallway, pass each other information on the stairs and in mail slots. She never sets foot in his apartment. He never says anything to her that isn’t absolutely necessary, keeps his tone even and his eyes empty.
She can turn off emotions too. It’s one of the things they do prepare you for in training, how to lie through your teeth and fake a smile and keep your lip from quivering, your hands from shaking, and your eyes from betraying you. They teach you how to shoot straight and how to become someone else, without the warning that you’ll lose yourself completely in the process.
But then she’s been a little lost for a long time now.
-
He pulls her out of work early on a Thursday, no explanation offered or needed. It’s the abrupt nature of his visit, the uncharacteristic way his hand falls against the small of her back as he guides her out, that makes her go without a fight.
They don’t talk on the tram. She’s surrounded by nothing but chatter, Dutch and English and some German coming from the back, but she doesn’t get anything out of him other than a few glances and overall calm demeanor. It doesn’t stop her from feeling like she just let herself get willingly kidnapped.
“What are we - ” she starts.
He holds up a hand, “Just wait.”
-
There are these little moments with Alexander where she almost feels bad for what she’s doing.
You live with someone for long enough, you get to know them. It’s different from staking out a target at a party and killing them within a single evening. They become part of your life, for better or for worse.
No one is unredeemable.
Alexander is unquestionably a bad man, one who either is, or has connections to, a ring of arms dealer’s - there is a possibility that nuclear could be tacked on in front of the title - but, at times, he is also a kind and adaptable one.
He moved into her apartment initially instead of shepherding her off to some fancy house she knows he either had designs on or already owned. Maybe still does. For all she knows, his plans to move were in fact plans to relocate. He let her set the pace. He bothered to learn that she likes wine better than champagne, silver better than gold, and she always reads the newspaper with her coffee. She never felt like she was a chess piece in his world, even if he was one in hers.
He is a bad man but he’s also a man capable of love.
And that makes him human, if nothing else.
-
When Casey checks them into a hotel on the edge of De Wallen, under the name Alexander Coburn - it’s almost amusing, that he uses his real identity as his alias here, amusing and disconcerting - she knows she’s in trouble.
He tells her everything behind closed doors.
Tells her that it’s Iain they should’ve been worrying about this whole time, Iain with the weapons and the money. Alexander’s merely a lackey of his, a lackey who really is, as it turns out, an accountant with a side job. Tells her that Alexander knows about them, about her infidelity, and that he’s the one who brought Casey up to Iain, out of a desire to keep him away from her. The woman who came looking for him was really supposed to be looking for her, to confirm Alexander’s suspicions; Sarah had scared her into lying. Tells her that he has all the evidence and the cause they need and they’ve got agents who should be here within the next few hours.
“I’m not going back,” she deduces fairly quickly.
“It was my call,” he says. “You needed to know before they gave the order.”
So he wasn’t just trying to undermine her. She can take some cold comfort in that. “They want them dead or alive?”
“Whatever gets our people out safe.”
It’s the former.
-
The sun sets and they wait.
Alexander’s noticed her absence, her cell phone ringing at fifteen minute intervals, and she dumps the SIM card in a half empty glass of water.
“I thought for sure…” she trails off, the sentence and the sentiment going nowhere. She doesn’t know what she thought. The only thing she knows is that a decade and change later, she shouldn’t stumble when someone pulls the rug out from under her. The fall shouldn’t hurt.
He doesn’t expect her to finish. “We’re ending this tomorrow. Flight leaves at midnight, one way or another.”
“Red eye,” she muses, with some degree of longing. Sleep evades her more than it doesn’t; she’d try pills if not for the side effects.
“They’ve got assignments lined up already.”
“Of course.”
He holds her gaze across the room. This time next week she could be in Moscow and he could be in Argentina. They’re not partners anymore; there’s nothing tethering them together.
This might really be it. There’s no guarantee of a next time, not in this business, not when they could both be dead in a month.
He might be, tomorrow.
-
There is no last hurrah, one for the road, biding your time before the end, bullshit.
She doesn’t lay her body out underneath his with the lights off and the open window filtering in the sounds of a city that doesn’t put much stock in a good night’s rest. She doesn’t hook a leg around his waist and pull him in deeper and she doesn’t ride him until the sun comes up.
Instead, she sleeps for eight solid hours.
-
“You know, I’d be out by now.”
“What?”
“All of those things my father did? All of those things that I did? If I’d gone to jail for them, I’d be out by now.”
I’d have a normal life by now, she finishes in her head. It’s probably a lie. She was never cut out for normal, for picket fences and suburban happily ever afters.
He pauses, gun in hand. Safety on.
“I don’t know what made me think of that,” she lies.
-
He leaves with four well trained, green as hell, agents, but not before making her swear she’d be on that flight.
She waits for all of twenty minutes and then follows.
As of today, she’s still his partner. And partners have each other’s backs.
-
Blood never bothered her. Not the stench of it or the tendency for it to cake under her fingernails and stain her clothes. She got her first bloody nose at nine; she didn’t cry and she didn’t scream, and she all but shrugged it off when the back of her hand smeared crimson when she wiped at it. Blood is blood; it’s life and, occasionally, it’s death.
Others would become doctors and nurses. She became a killer.
There’s a pool of it now, red turning to brown and sticky under the heels of her boots, Alexander in the middle of it. He’s not dead, not yet, but his pulse is weak and he took a bullet to the head, and she knows what that means just like she knows that he won’t see the inside of a hospital in the near future.
He dies by her hand, suffocation as a mercy killing, and no one ever knows.
-
She turns a corner and winds up with a gun in her face. It only takes a split-second to return the favor.
Casey opens his mouth, probably to reprimand her, but she’s having none of that. “You can’t tell me to stay in the car.”
It comes out of her mouth before her brain has the chance to process it, and there’s almost a laugh that bubbles up in the back of her throat, one that she has to hide through gritted teeth and considerable practice.
She manages; she always does.
“I could’ve shot you,” he counters.
“Yeah, well, I’m faster.”
“I have better aim.”
“Then we’d both be dead.”
Agent #1 hasn’t lowered his gun yet. Casey looks like he wants to clock the rookie with the butt of his own. She’s too busy tracing the faint trail of footprints she’s left behind, blood on concrete, to catch the snort of derision and the half of a smirk he sends her way.
-
As promised, she makes that red-eye.
Alone.
-
They debrief her for seven hours once she gets back in D.C., at least half of that time spent waiting in an interrogation room. They want to know what she knows, all of it, and give her about half of their knowledge back in return. They want her to see a shrink too, just for the hell of it, just because that’s what they do when you go undercover for nine months and people end up dying, even if that was the plan all along.
She gets sent back to a hotel room for some downtime after all of that, and even then she’s got her orders for reassignment, effective two days from now. Texas, so at least it’s stateside for the time being.
Her flight leaves before Casey and the rest of the cleanup crew get back to town.
-
She goes through three different partners before the man in charge - Beckman long since gone - decides to stick her with the most by the book agent he can find, in hopes of curbing some of her more reckless tendencies.
(Chained down to the same mission for the better part of a year, only able to be passive in the majority of her maneuvers, and she’s itching to stretch her muscles and her limits - and maybe the limits of others -- )
They bring in Casey the next day.
-
fin.
-