fic: chuck vs. the 'f' word {ensemble}
Title: Chuck Vs. The 'F' Word
Fandom: Chuck
Characters/Pairings: Ensemble. Eventually Bryce/Chuck(/Carina) and Casey/Sarah.
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 10,014
Author's Note: Part two of my AU Series, beginning with Chuck vs. Uncle Sam. If you haven't read that, this probably won't make a whole lot of sense. I owe everything to my wonderful followers on Tumblr who don't mock me when I liveblog my writing woes but mostly, as always, to gigglemonster.
Summary: Black and white. Good and bad. Don't kid yourself; society's moral code is more complex than that (or the girl with the gun is telling lies again. maybe there's two girls. maybe they're mixing their lies with truth. maybe that's the dangerous part. here's some truth for you: this whole mess is the dangerous part and safety is a tale best saved for schoolchildren).
She wakes up to the sound of running water.
There was this op in Tenerife a few years back. She remembers the parade down the street from the hotel when she arrived and the broken English the clerk had uttered in her direction at check in, but that’s where her memory stops. There’s this big gap that feels like seconds but she’s been told encompasses two whole days, where everything’s just blank. And then she woke up in the shower in her underwear, the beefy arm of a CIA agent named Robbins around her waist as he held her towards the spray.
Later, they told her a maid found her on the floor by the bed. There were no visible marks on her body, no signs of a struggle, and the room was untouched save for the SIM card missing from her cell phone. The mission was declared a failure and she was given nine sessions with a shrink and another three with a hypnotherapist, but nothing ever came of either. The popular theory was that she had been drugged but by the time they found her there was nothing in her system.
That was the last time she ever went solo.
So when she wakes to running water, her head swimming and her body disoriented by unfamiliar surroundings, she thinks of Tenerife, and for one brief moment of total awareness she holds onto that memory, tries to pull whatever she can out of it, and fails.
Dishes clatter against each other. Her eyes snap open and her body reacts to the sudden noise the way it’s trained to, sending her to her feet with a practiced swiftness. She reaches for a gun she can’t find and then stops when she gets a good look at the man in front of the kitchen sink, a dish towel in hand.
“Morgan?”
“Wow, you really are like a ninja. Should I be - you’re not armed, right?” He scans her form, going so far as to lean to the side, trying to see behind her or something, like he can’t see both of her hands pulled up into fists in front of her.
“No, I - how did you get in here?” It’s not what she really wants to ask. What she wants to ask is how he got past her in the process of getting in here. He had to come in through the front door, although that would mean he had a key. She somehow doubts Casey would ever even consider giving him a key.
“Details,” he makes a dismissive gesture, wrinkling his nose and shaking his head like he wants no part of them. She never would’ve guessed. Then his voice perks up, “Coffee?”
-
The furniture in their hotel room leaves something to be desired.
Namely, another bed.
There’s a king and a pull-out couch in the living area, and they probably could’ve flipped a coin for bed privileges, except they didn’t. Instead, they both fell into bed in a less than graceful manner sometime around two in the morning, left exhausted by a combination of sleep deprivation and jet lag, therefore ensuring that Chuck does a double take in the morning when he wakes up to Bryce’s bare chest.
That first minute or two, while he tries to both process and make sense of the scene in front of him, is pretty touch and go, and Chuck wastes very little time getting out of bed as quietly as possible and locking himself in the bathroom.
It takes him a moment to find said bathroom, on account of the fact that the first door he opens turns out to be a closet, but he manages. He even manages not to cringe at how bright the bathroom lights are and how white and pristine everything is; he feels like there’s a good chance he might go snow blind in here, right now.
He turns everything off except for the one overhead light and takes a shower. A lukewarm, intentionally verging on cold, shower.
-
Morgan hands her a steaming mug of coffee - it’s perfect too, probably because Casey has a tendency to treat him as their errand boy when they don’t want him around - and then goes back to doing the dishes. She’s fairly sure he’s moved on to washing what’s already clean, considering just how little time her and Casey have spent at their respective homes in the past week or two. He’s biding his time for some reason but he doesn’t say a word other than asking how their trip was.
She’s saved from recounting it when Casey collars him.
“Hey, big guy. How you doing?” To his credit he manages a smile to accompany all that enthusiasm in his voice, despite the fact that Casey’s got that look on his face like he could choke him just easily as he could, well, yell at him. There’s no good option here, with a possibly somewhat hung-over agent slash assassin who’s not exactly known for his charming personality on a good day. “Coffee?”
Sarah hides her amusement behind the rim of her mug - Casey would have to answer to his daughter if he injured Morgan and she figures that’s not exactly high on his to-do list, so he’s fairly safe - trying not to think about just how badly she’s going to get her ass chewed out by Beckman in the next few hours.
“How did you get in here?” Casey all but growls it. She was right about him not giving Morgan a key, apparently. At least she was right about something.
“You’re on the ground floor and you don’t lock your windows. Honestly, John.” Casey’s nostrils flare at the use of his first name, Morgan tsk tsk-ing like a mother hen. If there’s one thing for sure, it’s that those windows will never be unlocked again. Morgan takes a step back and Casey, begrudgingly, lets him when he catches Sarah’s raised eyebrow. “Anyhow, I’m on a mission of my own.”
That just sounds scary.
“What kind of mission?”
“We’re - “ Morgan stops himself, course corrects, “Alex is moving into her new place tomorrow and I thought it would be a good idea to enlist you as the muscle of the movement. You know, give you two a chance to bond some more, give me a chance to - “
There’s more to that, probably, but in the absence of tranq darts Casey’s just slapped a hand over Morgan’s mouth, effectively silencing him. “When I let go, you have ten seconds to leave or I start breaking bones.”
He lets go. Morgan doesn’t miss a beat. “The bonding part was too much wasn’t it?”
It’s probably sheer luck that allows Morgan to get out of the way before Casey actually tries to kill him, and he makes it all the way to the door before he says, “You’re welcome to come, Sarah.”
The front door closes and they’re left with nothing but silence and the way Casey keeps half-looking at her like he really wish Morgan wouldn’t have extended that invitation. She beats him to the awkward explanation of why this isn’t a good idea. “I better not. I’ve got to deal with Beckman and we’ve had a little too much together time as it is.”
He grunts his agreement. She takes no offence.
-
Bryce is up with the newspaper and black coffee when Chuck gets out. There’s a room service tray in the table, espresso and orange juice and two silver platters with the lids still on - it has complimentary breakfast written all over it, considering Bryce has left it relatively untouched, sitting there in last night’s jeans and no shirt, with the cordless phone face up next to him.
That last part commands his attention.
“What’s up?”
Bryce looks up long enough to follow his gaze. “Giovanni wants to welcome us back to his country and hopes we enjoyed the 1990 Aldo Conterno Barolo he had sent up last night.”
Chuck frowns. “He really said all that?” Bryce nods, amusement clear on his face. “He couldn’t just say, hey, hope you liked the wine. Had to go into the whole name and - wow, there was wine last night?”
“Apparently.”
“I’m not the only one who has no memory of this, right?” He collapses into the chair across from Bryce, opting to take a long sip out of Bryce’s coffee mug rather than go fiddle with the set up room service left them. The coffee is, thankfully, not as scalding hot as it looks and better than the stuff back in Denver, even if it is black and really, really strong. “Because, being spies and all, I always assumed we were pretty observant but - “
“When I got up to let room service in, I stubbed my toe on the cart in the living room that, for the record, also contained a lovely fruit basket.”
“Oh, so not just me.”
Bryce calmly turns the page and it only occurs to Chuck that he’s reading in Italian when he tries to get context for that picture of the solar system on the back page, if only to make sure that the willful abuse of exclamation points doesn’t mean a meteor is heading their way and they’re all going to die in a matter of days, and finds that he can’t. Bryce speaks something like five languages. Chuck speaks English and enough Spanish to order dinner and rent a car, and mostly he’s just lucky that ninety-nine percent of the people they come in contact with on business either have a working knowledge of the English language or are fine using Bryce as a translator.
He’s just lucky that Bryce doesn’t read it as a flaw, a potential liability, in the way that his first and, as it turns out, only partner had years ago. They hadn’t gotten off on the right foot and, while Chuck had a lot of thoughts and concerns that night he climbed into that black town car with the man across from him, betraying his partner wasn’t one that resonated.
“He wants us to come to dinner tonight. Says Bianca insists.”
“Why don’t I think that’s the only reason?”
“Because you are pretty observant.”
-
Sarah gets halfway home before she has to turn around.
Her phone vibrates in the passenger seat at a red light, registering a message from an unknown number with a 970 area code. The message is nothing but an address in Pentagon City. No name, no greeting, no surprise. It’s protocol, Carina’s way of saying that she wants to talk, and Sarah’s never been this pissed at her in the four years they’ve known each other but she still makes a U-turn the first chance she gets and heads towards Arlington.
The address leads her to a café, the outside dotted with empty tables and chairs, abandoned by the time the first frost rolled in. Carina sits at the table farthest from the door, styrofoam cup in hand and legs crossed one over the other.
She doesn’t mince words. “You fucked me over. Casey thinks I’m an idiot. Beckman’s going to think I blew the op - which I did.”
Carina merely looks at her, unaffected. “Are you going to sit down? There’s a man right by the window who looks very interested in our conversation right now.”
Sarah flicks her eyes to her left, catches a guy with part of a bagel lifted halfway to his mouth, hovering in mid-air until she makes eye contact with him, and then he’s hurrying to look at the wall, at the back of the laptop two tables away from him, at the barista, just anywhere else. Hesitantly, she settles into the seat across from Carina, lips tight and eyes hard.
“You can relax. I came here for information.”
She scoffs; it’s either that or outright laughter.
“You still owe me,” Carina adds.
“No, I don’t. You knew you were giving me bad info.”
“Prove it.”
And that’s the thing. She can’t. All she has is a gut feeling that something about the way Vail went down is…off. That Carina either gave her outdated information and knew about it, or gave her the information and then told Bartowski and Larkin so that they had time to get out of dodge. To what end, she can’t figure out. There’s little chance that this is a DEA set up and they just don’t feel like sharing the details, not when there’s an inter-agency task force in place. Instead, all signs point to this being a one woman operation.
She still has no evidence. No security footage. No paper trail. Just her suspicions and her own failures to serve as a reminder for what not to do next time.
Sarah leans forward. “After last night, I don’t think I’m in a position to ask questions for you. You might want to try someone else.”
“There is no one else. It’s CIA and it’s higher than I can go.”
“Did you just hear me?”
“You dated him,” Carina says and from someone else the words would sound almost accusatory. Coming from Carina, they’re just an unfortunate fact. She's talking about Daniel Shaw and that's not a door Sarah feels like knocking on for just anyone.
She puts her hands up, shaking her head. “No, I’m not doing this.”
It’s here that she decides to leave, gets as far as her feet firm on the ground before Carina’s hand catches around her wrist. The other woman pulls, hard, and Sarah lets herself drop back into her seat, lets her defiance remain confined to her eyes and the cross of her arms when she frees herself, for the time being.
“It was a month and a half, Carina.”
“Did he ever mention Orion?”
“I’m going to guess you’re not talking about the constellation.” Carina cocks her head, an unkind twist to her mouth that Sarah likes to think indicates focus rather than dislike. “What’s Orion?”
“Need to know, Walker,” Carina replies, this dismissive tone that gives Casey’s a run for its money - she can see them, in that moment, she can see what he might have seen in her once, even if just for long enough to fall into bed with her - as she rises, gets up to leave, and Sarah would stop her, she would reach out or she would pin her to the front of the building - fuck the guy in the window - just to get some answers.
It’s just that she’s tired. She’s tired and the sunlight makes her head hurt and it would be a futile gesture, to even try. Carina does what she wants; no amount of reprimanding and no amount of physical violence will change that, and Sarah doesn’t have the energy to beat her fists against a brick wall and hope something moves before her knuckles bleed.
Carina doesn’t go very far. Turns on her heel, evidently surprised at Sarah’s lack of effort. And it’s ironic that for her indifference, she gets this: “The boys are in a safe place. You’re not going to find them now unless they want to be found.”
The boys. It betrays a level of familiarity and every nerve ending in her body is on fire because she knows now, without a single doubt in her mind, that Carina’s in with them, and she’s in deep.
Carina levels her gaze, like she understands exactly what she’s just done, and there’s a hint of a smile hiding in the corners of her lips. Sarah can’t understand it. She can’t make sense of it.
“Where are they?”
“Somewhere they have friends.”
“You realize how many laws you’re breaking right now by not telling me?”
She laughs, near soundless but her shoulders shake with it. “This taskforce mess has you going soft. You know agencies don’t willingly share information.”
“Friends do.”
“And you’re going to go tell Casey all about the information you just received the minute I drive off right?”
For a moment she thinks Carina’s trying to catch her, trying to call her a hypocrite in the most effective way at her disposal, except if Carina wanted to call her a hypocrite she would. Everything’s deliberate with her, just like her use of the boys to mean their targets. It’s all in the presentation. “What information?”
Carina’s eyes light up. She hit the right keyword. “Think about it.”
Sarah gets halfway home, gets to that same red light, before she realizes that Carina didn’t bring Orion up because she was looking for information. If she was, she wouldn’t have let go of the topic so easily, wouldn’t have left her with nothing but need to know. She was baiting her.
It’s bait she’ll take.
-
“Was the Lamborghini really necessary?”
“The guy sent us a several hundred dollar bottle of wine as a welcome gift,” Bryce takes a sharp turn, presumably at the GPS’ command. Chuck’s been trying to figure out how to get it to switch to English since they left, to no avail. “Somehow I don’t think showing up in a taxi would make the impression we’re going for.”
“I’m just saying they had limo service.”
“And I’m just saying I like the way this car handles.”
Chuck wouldn’t know. There was no discussion about who would drive; there was just Bryce in the driver’s seat and Chuck’s just enough of a sentimental bastard that he climbed into the passenger seat without argument just because he liked the glint in Bryce’s eye and the confident smile that played at his lips. “What do you think he wants?”
“Could just be he wants to let me know that this is his way of repaying old gambling debts.” Bryce shrugs. “Could be that we’re two hitmen in his city and his superiors know to use that to their advantage.”
“You think he wants us to kill someone?” The words come out as an unfortunate mix of surprise and dismay. Sometimes he forgets that their friends aren’t really their friends but instead business associates. Sometimes he likes to let himself forget.
The last friend he had, his best friend, is in Burbank, and by now probably thinks he’s a crappy friend who dumped him without a goodbye. Chuck hasn’t spoken to Morgan in two years, since he went rogue.
But then the same can be said for his sister, so at least Morgan’s in good company.
“I don’t think he invited us because he wants to spend more time watching you bond with Oliver.”
Chuck frowns. “I don’t - it’s not bonding.”
“It’s bonding,” Bryce replies.
“Kids like me. It is not my fault that they happen to be good judges of character.”
“You kill people for a living.” The GPS begins to sound slightly alarmed but the scenery grows more familiar. They’ve been here before, if infrequently. “And you’re better with his son than he is and he resents that for the exact same reason that he’s going to tell us he wants us to kill some guy in Milan, even though he really means his boss wants us to. He has to have all the power. He has to be the top dog or else his ego can’t take it.”
They lapse into silence for the moment, then, “You’ve really thought a lot about this haven’t you?”
“It was quite a long flight.”
“And yet I didn’t spend it thinking up people’s psychological profiles.”
“I’ve known Gio just a little longer than you.” There’s a rather abrupt incline and when Chuck shifts his eyes away from Bryce he finds them in the driveway. They were closer than he thought. “We’re here.”
-
She almost calls Casey. Gets as far as punching in the first three numbers, just to prove Carina wrong, and then finds herself reevaluating the cost of coming to him with another dead end, another red herring.
In the end, she does nothing. Abandons her cell on the desk and tries for a Hail Mary in the form of trying to track down Carina’s burn phone. She’s pretty sure Carina either ditched the thing or turned it off, a pre-emptive strike against just this kind of intrusion, but her trace locks onto a signal without much trouble at all. The little red dot on her screen moves into Langley and Sarah doesn’t need to watch to know she’ll be parking outside of CIA headquarters.
There’s a good forty five minutes where Sarah does nothing but sift through Google search results and force herself to switch from caffeine to just plain water when she downs two aspirin. Putting Orion into a public search engine alternately leads her to NASA, a wide variety of telescopes and, once, someone’s gamer tag. Nothing remotely useful but without government resources it’s her best option, and she isn’t sure openly digging up information on something Carina clearly went out of her way to tell her in the most vague, off the books way possible is such a great idea. She doesn’t know what she’s getting into - if it’s anything at all - but until she does, she’s not sharing.
Carina stays parked for just long enough for Sarah to seriously consider the possibility that she dumped the phone there and went on her way, but then the dot starts moving again. About a mile outside of Dulles International Airport, the signal goes dead. Seconds later it’s back. Gone again. Back but gone quicker this time. The time varies but it rings familiar and she knows why once it repeats.
Dash, dash, dot. Dot, dash, dot, dot.
It spells out GL in Morse code.
Good luck.
The signal doesn’t come back. It won’t.
-
Bianca leaves them after dinner, says she has to make some phone calls about an exhibit opening in the morning at the gallery she co-owns. She takes Oliver with her too, removes him from the spot he’s been occupying since dinnertime conversation moved into the expansive living room. He had sat right at Chuck’s feet, his head level with the bend of Chuck’s knee, and Bryce hadn’t missed the way that gave Giovanni pause.
“I heard about your close call in Vail. It is a shame you were forced to cut your vacation short.” They put a fairly large dent in that bottle of wine that was opened at dinner, with Gio doing most of the work. His words don’t slur though, he just sounds more pompous, more boastful, as if everything he says is undeniable truth no matter how patently false it is. But then, this is a man who hasn’t done an honest day’s work in his life yet lives in an estate that belongs in the movies, who doesn’t own a pair of jeans and instead prefers three-piece suits and solid gold cufflinks. A man who purposely lives beyond his means and makes it a job of convincing people otherwise.
It’s all a show. Bryce has been putting on shows for the last few years; he knows his own craft.
“One would think that your government would have more important things to focus their energy on. It is the terrorist cells they should be concerned about, not people in your chosen profession.”
A killer is a killer, no matter which way you paint it, but Bryce keeps that to himself. It would turn things sour with Gio and, more than that, it would make Chuck frown. Make him skittish.
He’s always been the reluctant one.
“One would hope,” Bryce replies, coolly, sips at his wine long after his taste for it has gone.
The time for easy conversation and smiles has gone too. This is a business meeting and it became one the minute Bianca walked out of the room. Everything else is just lead up to the moment Gio hands them a dossier with a name, a probable location, and a handful of surveillance photos.
Bryce is a charmer so he doesn’t say ‘get to the point’ but he certainly thinks it.
“I trust you’re enjoying your time in my glorious city?” Another sip of wine. Another possessive dropped in there. Chuck catches his eye like what he said in the car is beginning to resonate.
“We haven’t really had a lot of time for sightseeing,” he says and there’s a look, a definite raise of the eyebrows as Gio’s eyes flit between them, and Bryce isn’t blind to how this must look. Two men who are not only partners, quite literally in crime, but who also tend to take extended vacations with each other, occupying the same room and the same limited amount of personal space. They’ve been getting variations on that look for a while now but none quite as plain as Gio’s.
“Jetlag and an eight hour time difference will do that to you,” Chuck adds, with a side of nervous laughter, and the lines in Gio’s forehead smooth out ever so slightly.
“Well then,” Gio continues on, “perhaps you will find the time when you return from Positano.”
-
“Got to love the way he just slipped it right in there. Not even a question.”
“We’re here on his dime; he doesn’t have to ask.”
Bryce takes a right, navigating back to the hotel on his own. The GPS was more confused than they were, as it turned out. Chuck certainly doesn’t miss its alarmed squawking from the car ride over but he does miss the extra light source in the dark. The manila folder sits in his lap and he wants to pore over it but he can’t. He has to wait.
He also can’t see anything remotely recognizable in Bryce’s face, his reactions left up to the imagination. It’s been his experience that nothing ever plays out the same as it does in his head.
“Why did he keep calling him The Man from Kiev? The guy’s name wasn’t even hard to pronounce. Viktor.” He repeats the name but tacks on a bad Russian accent to go with it, forgetting for a moment that any amusement in Bryce’s expression will be lost on him. “It’s right there, on the file.”
“His last name sounded familiar,” Bryce replies.
“You think that’s why?”
“I’d say we should do some digging but Gio wants this guy taken out tomorrow and time isn’t exactly on our side.”
It’s a three and a half hour drive to Positano on the low end and, though they’ve got an address for where he works, there’s still a lot of room for error. “Maybe he just didn’t see the point in us getting too invested in our target. The less you know the better kind of thing.”
“Maybe,” Bryce says, even if neither of them really believes that.
-
Sarah gets there fifteen minutes early and spends the next twenty sitting outside of General Beckman’s office thinking up every possible excuse as to why she’d willingly put a mission on the line because of information from a questionable source.
This is the CIA. Trust no one except yourself and your partner, and even that last part is unreliable.
“We haven’t yet spoken to Colonel Casey,” the ‘we’ in question of course denoting both Beckman and Director Graham, though he isn’t the one she has to win over here; she’s his branch so it’s in his best interests to see her succeed, “since you alerted us to the fact that it was you who acted on faulty intel.”
“All due respect, General Beckman, but I wasn’t aware that the source was questionable at the time. I have had previous dealings with them that had yielded far more positive results and we don’t know for sure that the problem even exists at the source.”
Her pause is met only with a wary “go on.”
It’s her chance to explain herself and she won’t get another one. She knows better than to squander it. “We think it’s possible that the intel was correct at the time but that the targets realized that someone was on to them and fled prior to our arrival.”
“Your source still blew the operation,” Beckman points out.
“Yes but not intentionally. Without the intel we still might not have found them before they caught on to us. We weren’t looking in the right place to begin with.”
The gender neutral pronouns. The omission of names entirely. This whole lie she’s fabricating. One of these days, she’s going to collect on all of the things that Carina owes her for.
Beckman and Graham share a look before he cuts in, “Alright, Agent Walker. We’re going to need to speak to Colonel Casey and we’ll need you to file a report. I don’t suppose you’re willing to let us talk to your source.” She remains completely silent, folded hands and crossed legs. Graham shakes his head. “You’re entitled to that. For now.”
“Is there anything else?” Beckman asks.
There is but nothing she can ask. She wants to run with the tip Carina’s given her, even if that didn’t serve her so well last time. Her gut instinct tells her that she was misled for a reason and, while she’s still pissed, she’s also intrigued by what’s fallen into her lap as a consequence of that. She wants to ask about Orion but she’s in no position to and Carina’s comments have her believing discretion is the key. She can’t just work her way through a rolodex of contacts.
She has to do this on her own.
“No.”
-
Chuck spends the better part of the early morning hours committing every detail from the dossier Gio gave them to memory. Of course, most of those details are a list of frequented addresses and grainy surveillance camera photos that make the ones him and Bryce take look professional. There’s not a lot of background on the guy either.
“You know, it doesn’t say anywhere what he did.” He points out, when Bryce gets off of the phone with the car rental place. No way were they driving that Lamborghini seven hours round trip with the risk of it getting shot at. “Not that it usually does, but usually we know.”
Bryce sips at his espresso for a moment too long, hesitant. “You remember our mark the last time we were here?”
“It was that arms’ dealer’s brother, wasn’t it?”
“Jimmy Vahue. Sold them guns that didn’t shoot, and so Gio wanted us to take out the brother.”
He remembers now, more for the moral gray area than the incident itself. The brother had been tangentially connected to Jimmy’s chosen profession and it wasn’t exactly a job they could turn down - none of them were, if they ever wanted to come back here again - but it hadn’t ever quite sat right with him. “What does one thing have to do with the other?”
“This guy’s young and the last name is familiar,” Bryce shrugs, relatively unmoved. “And Gio has a pattern. Or at least his bosses’ do.”
“Right because the best way to hurt someone is kill the people close to them.” The idea makes his skin crawl, makes him glad for his sister’s absence in his life, glad that he’s cut ties with everyone in this world but Bryce. They’re each other’s liability, their weak spot, but at least it keeps the word singular.
“It’s what I’d do,” Bryce replies, and Chuck really, really wishes he hadn’t.
-
“I am so sorry about earlier. Really. Truly, John.”
Casey shifts his end of the television higher, specifically to throw Morgan off balance. It doesn’t knock him over but he wavers, loosens his grip. This is a two man operation solely due to the fact that Morgan’s trying to act manly in front of Alex. Casey isn’t blind or stupid.
“Okay. Not so hot on the first name are we?” Morgan eyes him like he’s trying to stare down a bear whose only reason for not tearing him to shreds is that his hands are currently occupied. Casey grunts in his general direction. Morgan seems to understand this as confirmation. “Seriously, man, you sure you’re alright?”
His concern, annoying as it is, is warranted, he supposes, considering it was Morgan who caused the bottom of the dresser to come down on his foot. He’s beginning to regret not doing anything to coerce Walker into helping out; they would’ve been done in half the time and his foot wouldn’t have been throbbing for the last twenty minutes.
“Ask me that again,” Casey says, in a tone that clearly means the direct opposite. Morgan isn’t stupid either. Then again, he also isn’t smart, otherwise he would’ve run in the other direction the minute he found out what Casey actually did for a living, no matter how good of a catch Alex was.
Morgan’s going to say something though, he can tell, only he gets sidetracked as they dump the television in the back of the moving van and head back, only to find Alex at the door, his cell phone in hand. “It’s for you. Sarah.”
He takes it with a frown, skips formalities altogether. “Yeah.”
“Having fun?”
“The phone call I got an hour ago says more than you.” He’s forced to be intentionally discreet, thanks to Morgan’s obliviousness to the situation as he and Alex just stand there, talking quietly by the door while he makes puppy dog eyes at her and Casey’s forced to fight his gag reflex.
“Beckman?” She doesn’t sound surprised.
“She wants to see me tomorrow.”
“They think I’m lying.” There’s a rush of air, heavy exhale. “And I am. About Carina. I told them I thought it was more badly timed info than intentionally incorrect. That Larkin and Bartowski just got the jump on our source before we could grab them. We’ve got nothing on her anyway.”
“No point in starting something we already know we can’t finish.”
“Exactly.”
There’s a long stretch of silence in which he deduces that she’s in a car from the sound of a horn honking. Alex keeps looking over at him like she’s curious and that’s the last thing he wants, or needs, her to be. “Anything else, Walker?”
“Just stick with the story. And - “ another pause, then, “it’s a gray area when it comes to sharing information between agencies, right?”
He doesn’t like the sound of this at all. “Not in our situation.”
“I’m not talking about us. Say Homeland Security knows something but they don’t want to share it with the FBI ‘cause they think they can handle it. They’re not obligated to.”
“You mind elaborating on this?”
“Just answer the question, Casey. We can’t have this conversation on the phone and I’m guessing Alex is within earshot anyway.”
She has a point on both counts. “No, there’s no hard and fast rule about that.”
“Okay, thanks. Try not to kill Morgan; he’s a good guy, just eager to please.”
Casey gives her what can be classified as reluctant acknowledgement of that fact shortly before she hangs up. He puts his phone back in his pocket, to keep Alex from intercepting any other phone calls. He offers a “sorry about that” that gets Morgan trotting back inside while Alex eyes him, carefully. A little too carefully.
“Is she your girlfriend?” She inquires, finally. “Cause you can tell me if she is.”
“I work with her,” he says, in lieu of balking completely. “That’s all.”
“Alright. She sure calls a lot. And answers your phone a lot.”
“We work together very closely,” he says, something which, unsurprisingly, does very little to help his case where his daughter is concerned.
-
Chuck gets to stay in the car today.
Chuck always gets to stay in the car when they’re doing surveillance. He’s the observant one, so it’s just what makes the most sense, but he hates the separation. Hates not being able to watch Bryce’s back through anything but tinted windows and his own eyes, since binoculars aren’t exactly the most inconspicuous thing to pull out in broad daylight.
It’s sunny out. Not a cloud in the sky and warm too. They’re on the Amalfi Coast, in a town where tourism is the main industry thanks to beaches that stretch on for-freaking-ever, and he gets to stay in the car.
But at least he doesn’t have to be dressed up while doing so.
And he doesn’t have to be alone for some of it.
“That’s him,” Bryce says, as he gets into the car. He’d gone inside the tiny shoe repair shop to get an ID fifteen minutes ago and come back with shiny shoes. The benefit of that is now they don’t have to sit there all day keeping watch for a guy who might not even be inside. The problem with it, however, is Viktor’s already seen Bryce. He knows his face. He’ll notice him if he hangs around for the rest of the day until they can corner him alone.
So that leaves Chuck.
“We should drive around the block. There’s a parking lot, and a coffee shop right there,” he points to the building to their immediate left, “so we won’t be the only car on the street that’s been here since ten this morning. We can walk back and you can sit outside and fiddle with the laptop while keeping an eye on him. It’ll just look like you’re a writer looking for some coffee on a nice day.”
“Good plan,” he says, and it is a good plan, at least theoretically. It’s a plan that gets him out of the car anyway. “And you’ll be.”
“Around.”
Chuck doesn’t like that answer but, then, he doesn’t really have to. He puts the car in drive and heads the way of the parking lot they passed earlier, passing store after store as he does. “We should go to Capri,” he says, absentmindedly. “It’s not so crowded this time of year.”
“The isle of sirens,” Bryce replies, thoughtfully, and Chuck takes his eyes off of the narrow road for a nanosecond to flash a curious kind of smile Bryce’s way. “It’d be a nice vacation when this is over. Away from the - politics.”
“We should go.” It should feel weird on his tongue, the plural, but he’s long since forgotten what it’s like to find it weird to be doing anything with Bryce, even if he just so happens to not have entirely platonic feelings for him. Or maybe everything’s a little weird and that’s just become his new normal, his default setting.
Yeah, that’s probably it.
“I mean I know we just did Vail but we were barely there. And we’re going to be here a while. I mean probably. No reason to leave. Giovanni’s got our backs. We have money and the CIA-NSA-FBI-whatever has no idea where we are.”
“Except for Carina.”
“You don’t -“
“I don’t, but.” He lets the sentence die there; the rest doesn’t need to be said. It’s just one more thing that she has on them. It’s just one more loose end in a slew of them, but Bryce likes some degree of control of the situation and Chuck likes a sense of security that he hasn’t been able to hold onto for very long since Stanford, so it’s enough.
Enough to make Chuck vaguely uncomfortable, his stomach twisting into knots that he can’t afford given the rest of today’s agenda. He grips the steering wheel that much harder and tries to force himself to focus.
“We should go,” Bryce echoes his earlier sentiment, quietly, and it might be the last good thing to come out of the day.
-
“I’m sorry,” Clarice, subject of several Silence of the Lambs jokes among her fellow secretaries ever since she transferred here from the FBI, makes a dismissive little gesture that drains the very last bit of sympathy Sarah might have ever had for the woman, “he’s not here.”
She leans forward, “I parked next to his car.”
“Are you sure it was his car, Agent Walker,” the little red light on the phone blinks at her and Clarice blurts a monotone deputy chief of counterintelligence’s office, please hold into the receiver before pressing a button and hanging it back up again. Sarah’s got an annoyed look in place by the time she looks back up again. She’s been in the damn car before, more than a few times. “Fine. He’s busy.”
“Actually busy?”
Another red light starts blinking. Someone drops a file off on the desk, landing not three inches from Sarah’s elbow as they keep walking. Clarice faces her with an unamused look. “I’m pretty sure I just put the Deputy Director of NCS on hold.”
So that would be a yes.
“Also, your phone is ringing.”
-
“Tilt it to the right.” Chuck does as he’s told, recentering the laptop on the small table he’s claimed outside of the café. “There.”
“How does this thing do for battery life again?”
“We won’t get to find out. It’s almost five. He’s got to leave sometime.”
Chuck’s been there for a good hour and a half, surfing the internet and pretending to be productive. He’s hit the ‘random article’ button on Wikipedia more times than he cares to admit. There’s not a whole lot to do but sit and wait. There’s a small camera on the outside of the laptop and the video gets transmitted back to Bryce’s laptop while he, presumably, sits in the parking lot that Chuck left him in, watching on his own laptop, albeit with a zoom feature. Chuck’s got Bluetooth though, and Bryce on the other end of the line to keep him company for the duration.
He might have also looked up hotels in Capri. You know, since there was nothing else to do.
“This might be a little late but what, exactly, is the plan for when he does leave?” There’s no one around but he still keeps his voice down, just for the sake of it. He’s paranoid but that’s healthy in their line of work. Encouraged even.
“We’ll get him in the car and take him some place where we can ditch the body.”
Chuck pauses. Squints against the sun. “So there’s just one problem with that plan.”
“What’s that?”
He doesn’t think Bryce is looking at his screen right now. “You’re five minutes away and Viktor’s - “ he pauses, waits for it, and he can hear the exhaled fuck on the other end of the line that lets him know Bryce is seeing what he’s seeing, “just walking out the door.”
“You’re going to have to take him out. He could be gone by the time I get there,” Bryce tells him, even though he can hear the shuffling, the start of the car’s engine that tells him Bryce is damn well going to try anyway.
Chuck checks for his gun instinctively, finds it, cool and heavy, and it’s not nearly as comforting as he wants it to be. He watches Viktor start down the street as he shoves his laptop into his bag haphazardly, abandoning his half-finished second cup of coffee as he follows him. He doesn’t know what he’s going to do exactly when he catches up to him but he was taught to think on his feet by the best of them and this is hardly the first time he’s been thrown for a loop by a target.
“I’m on my way,” Bryce says into his ear, and Chuck tries to focus on the now steady confidence behind his partner’s voice.
Confidence that they pull this off without a hitch. That Chuck can pull this off.
He finds comfort in other places these days, if not the weight of a gun in his hand.
-
Casey’s phone goes straight to voicemail on both the first and second try, and by the time he picks up on the third she’s halfway down the street.
“Walker?”
“I’m outside,” she says, as she pulls up a few spaces behind the moving van outside of the apartment building. “Our snitch came through for us. Yuri has a deal going down in an hour and Beckman wants us on it.”
If there’s any reply at all, she misses it, the tap of knuckles against her window drawing her attention. She rolls down her window, bringing her face to face with Morgan.
“Hey, Sarah. I didn’t know you were coming - “ he starts, almost immediately. He’s got a cardboard box half his size in his arms but he’s managing, probably thanks to several years working at that Buy More back in Burbank.
“I’m not. I just need Casey,” she tells him, leaving out the specifics. There’s a fine line between what they do and don’t tell Morgan. Unless he’s needed for the technical side of an OP, which happens more and more often these days, they like to keep him mostly in the dark. It’s for his own safety, really. And the less he knows, the less he has to hide from Alex, at least that was what Casey told her when they were assigned to each other.
Morgan was NSA first, a few months before the taskforce was put together, presumably when Casey had a moment of clarity and realized that Morgan’s loyalty and determination to win him over was actually useful. He was less of an employee and more of a specialist, someone they contracted out for in an unofficial capacity; he still made payroll. So he came with Casey when they were partnered up - no one else really knew what to do with him - despite the fact that it presented a huge conflict of interest.
Somewhere there’s a file linking Morgan to Bartowski. Childhood best friends, graduated high school the same year, worked the same crappy summer job at the Buy More. There are phone records that stop in April of 2007; it’s the same time Bartowski went rogue and hooked up with Larkin. Morgan never talks about him but, then, as far as he knows, there’s no reason it would be of any interest to them.
It’s just another person she has to lie to on a daily basis.
“Mission?” He pries.
“Yuri,” she offers that small detail and he nods, recognizing the name. They’ve been trying to bust the guy for three weeks now, ever since he touched down in Dulles and went local. “You guys almost done?”
“Getting there,” he tells her, and then Casey’s coming out the door with Alex on his heels. “I’m going to go - “ he motions in his girlfriend’s general direction “but good luck.”
Alex stops on her own, by the door, and Morgan starts talking, placating, as soon as he gets within twenty feet of her, telling lies that fit with Casey’s own. They both cover for each other and it works fine for the time being but there’s a part of Sarah that doesn’t envy her at all, doesn’t envy the fact that one day she’s going to have her world turned upside down when she realizes the two people closest to her aren’t who they say they are.
Casey passes by her open window just long enough to say “we’re taking my car”. She doesn’t ask questions, just puts hers in park, pockets the keys, and follows him.
They’re five minutes away before he bothers to tell her it’s because he’s got a trunk full of weapons.
-
It goes like this:
Trying to get out of the parking lot is a feat in and of itself. Parking spaces on the street are few and far between so he’s left with too many cars in one place and there are bound to be at least half a dozen trying to get out of the same small place at the same time. Add to that the way he can hear Chuck’s breathing speed up and become just this side of erratic, can hear the people passing him by and the sounds of his shoes against the pavement. He’s trying to catch up with the guy without being noticeable about it, trying to come up with a plan of action impossibly fast, and it all makes Bryce want to get out of the car and just run for him.
It would be faster.
He hears the first “hey” when he’s pulling onto the main street and the sounds of a struggle directly after that. The sound of a door opening and closing in short order. Then nothing.
It takes Bryce a moment to realize Chuck’s Bluetooth headset must have gotten knocked off, crushed maybe, killing their sole connection. He hits the gas that much harder and almost runs down a pedestrian in his hurry, but his mind is making up stories of ambushes and kidnappings, blood pools and dead partners. He’s always been the calmer of the two but then they’ve always been able to communicate if they weren’t together, and without that lifeline he finds himself surprisingly at a loss for how not to worry.
He finds Chuck outside of an old barbershop on the corner, two streets up from where he last left him. The sign is still there but faded by too many years of exposure to the elements, the building empty and abandoned, a for rent sign on the window, and a side door facing into a narrow alleyway. He’s got a split lip but he’s still standing.
Viktor’s nowhere to be seen and Chuck’s thousand yard stare tells him all he needs to know about why.
-
Chuck spends a good portion of the car ride back to Rome rationalizing his actions after the fact.
Namely, the guy swung at him. He wasn’t on his knees, begging. Chuck pulled him in the side door of that beaten down corner shop and the next thing he knew there was a fist connecting with his jaw. Knocked him clear off of his feet and there was maybe a second and a half of reaction time before Chuck put three in his chest.
But he had been standing and Chuck had been on the ground and from that angle it looks like self-defense. If you push away the knowledge that Viktor was a walking dead man since nine o’clock the night before, it looks like his actions were justified. A necessary reaction to circumstances gone awry.
He kills people all the time it’s just, usually, he knows why.
There’s no part of him that feels bad when he nails a murderer or an arms dealer, once a guy who dabbled in human trafficking, another time a money launderer who doubled as a drug dealer. In a black and white world, they’re black hats.
But, then, so is he. He can paint with as much white as he wants to offset it but it’s still going to end up a confusing mess of charcoal flecked with ivory and he’s never going to get it to blend right and he’s never going to be able to look at it in the mirror without thinking it’s all wrong.
That it’s not what he intended when he started out.
“This is all a means to an end, right? This is what we have to do,” he says, searching for reassurance in any form he can get it. It’s the first thing he’s said since they left Positano, the first thing anyone’s said, and his voice sounds louder than he thinks it ought to, with the windows down and the cool breeze filtering in.
Bryce doesn’t say anything, just lets his hand slip from the gearshift to cover Chuck’s own, thumb against wristbone, just like the airport, just like every time because this is how their hands fit.
This is how they fit.
-
She basks in the afterglow the whole ride back.
Between Beckman, Carina, and the runaround at CIA HQ, she needed a win. She needed something to prove that she wasn’t losing her touch entirely. Turns out getting to kick Yuri’s ass in the process of taking him in, along with a few of his cronies and the right hand man of the Reynosa drug cartel, was that win. And then some.
Casey had dropped the irritable grizzly bear act sometime after the green agent from Langley had shoved Yuri in the back of a van and drove away, going from begrudgingly polite to almost friendly, so she’s pretty sure he needed it too.
“What was that on the phone earlier?”
There’s really no point in playing dumb here. She’d tipped her hand in a moment of weakness and things like trust me, I know what I’m doing don’t work with Casey, not when they’re this new to each other and maybe not ever.
She still has to lie. It’s been a day and a half now, long enough that the simple act of sitting on the information looks suspicious. Sarah doesn’t need any more suspicion cast her way and things right now, with them, they’re good. She doesn’t want to screw that up even if it doesn’t last.
“I was trying to figure out why Carina would’ve sought us out,” she tells him, which isn’t a total lie, it just happens to be unrelated to her query. She thinks she has it figured out though. Before shit went down it looked like Carina’s usual attempts at trying to keep as many people in her back pocket as possible but now, now that Carina’s all but admitted to giving bad info on purpose, she thinks it was a diversionary tactic. Get Bartowski and Larkin gone while appearing to help her and Casey. In theory, it keeps both sides happy. In practice, it just left Sarah with a lot of theories and nothing in the way of proof while Carina got off scot-free.
He nods, doesn’t so much as look at her funny, and she thinks there’s a chance she might have gotten away with this one.
She adds, “I didn’t tell Beckman about her. I just told her we had a source.”
“They didn’t ask you who it was?”
“Graham did. I didn’t tell him.” He looks her way and she thinks that’s surprise she sees in his expression. “I think they wanted to talk to you before they pushed any further with me, see if you spill anything.”
“I’ll back you up,” he says, without qualifying the statement. There’s no if and there’s no but; it’s that simple.
She bites back a smile.
His phone lights up in the cup holder, flashes a text message notification that he both notices and does nothing about. She thought she heard it ring earlier.
“You going to answer that?”
“Probably just Alex wondering if I’m going to be back in time to help her lug all that shit into the new apartment.”
“How achingly domestic of you.”
“Grimes dropped the dresser on my foot,” he tells her and she can’t quite get her hand up to her mouth in time to muffle the laughter that brings about. She can only imagine the thirty minutes Morgan probably spent apologizing for it afterwards. “That’s not an experience I feel like reliving.”
“You should’ve just dragged some agents over on the condition that you don’t terrorize them for the rest of the week.”
“No, I should’ve just asked you to come. The one good idea Morgan’s had in the last two days.” It catches her off guard, the almost warm way he says it. Hell, it even seems to catch him off guard from the way he seems to frown at his own reflection in the rearview mirror.
She’s tempted to ask if this much together time has actually endeared her to him, actually made him miss her on their days off, but these aren’t conversations Casey has with people -- at least not ones he has well -- and she figures he’s had more than enough awkward bonding time between his daughter and Morgan, so she just says, “You know, I could still come. I’m kind of wired and it’s still early. I mean, if you want me to.”
“You won’t injure me,” he replies, Casey-speak for that would be nice.
“At least not accidentally,” she says and, this time, fails at hiding her smile.
-
Giovanni is, predictably, overjoyed. More than enough for all three of them.
There is more wine, of course, and Chuck drinks just enough to take the edge off, to bring himself back to some semblance of normalcy. Gio can’t stop talking about how pleased his associates - read: bosses - will be in the morning and how this is cause for celebration, as if Gio has ever needed a reason. How only consummate professionals such as themselves could get the job done right in such a small window of time.
It gets to the point where Gio’s bragging about their accomplishments as if they’re his own, simply because he was the one who gave the order.
Under different circumstances, Chuck would find it amusing. Instead he finds laughing through his teeth exhausting, counts the minutes until they can leave and he can hit the sack and maybe, just maybe, they can get on a ferry to Capri and actively not deal with the events of this afternoon.
“Frank would like to meet you tomorrow, to thank you personally of course,” Gio tells them. Frank Padovesi is one of the aforementioned bosses, best they’ve been able to piece together. The name is familiar, thanks to any number of tall tales Gio has told once he’s had a few too many, but they’ve never actually met the guy. Until tomorrow, apparently.
“What did he do to Frank?” Bryce asks, and there’s no question that he’s doing it for Chuck’s benefit, a loosely veiled attempt to put his mind at ease.
“Unpaid gambling debts,” Gio offers, refilling his glass like it’s of no consequence to him.
Chuck feels every muscle in his body tense up.
“Having a guy killed over gambling debts is a little extreme, isn’t it?” It’s a good thing Gio’s drunk again, otherwise he probably wouldn’t take too kindly to Bryce pressing the subject.
“That is why you did not kill him.” Gio says and that - that is where Chuck has the sudden urge to leave the room. Excuse himself to the bathroom and lock himself inside for a good half hour until he can get his head on straight. “You killed his nephew, Viktor. It’s a shame. Such a promising young man.”
Bryce looks away at that, regret clear on his face, and Chuck doesn’t look at anything at all. Stares at the one white wall that isn’t adorned with some fabulous painting. The one blank spot in the entire room and he sees that man’s face, that man who probably swung at him in self-defense, that man who probably did nothing wrong other than be related to a man that gambled with people who solved gambling debts with murder.
They got here because Gio owed them. A card game Bryce had won big at. He pulled some strings, got them to clear customs, and that was it. Debt paid. This was a bonus, a favor disguised as an order. The fundamental difference between the way people like them, like him and Bryce and perhaps even Gio deal with things, and the way people like Frank Padovesi do is striking.
The doorbell saves him from running his mouth but he thinks, right there, that he might have. He might have gotten himself in trouble here but Bianca is upstairs putting Oliver to bed and so the door is left to Gio. Bryce looks at him through concerned eyes from across the room and Chuck tries to put on a brave face that falters too easily.
And then they hear it.
Hear the laughter and the informal exchange of greetings in perfect Italian. Chuck looks at Bryce and Bryce looks at Chuck and Giovanni’s voice booms when he says “Gentleman, there is someone I would like you to meet”, something which is wholly unnecessary on account of introductions already having been made a long time ago.
Carina smiles at them from the doorway.
-
part three // back to index
-
Author's Note: Thank you to everyone who just stuck with me through 10k of plottiness and angst. If something is unclear, it's most likely because I did that on purpose to set myself up for future parts, not because I enjoy glaring plotholes. Any actual glaring plotholes are the result of writing the last 6K of this over the last three days, after midnight. I promise those of you looking for action of a different kind will find it in part 3 ;)
Fandom: Chuck
Characters/Pairings: Ensemble. Eventually Bryce/Chuck(/Carina) and Casey/Sarah.
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 10,014
Author's Note: Part two of my AU Series, beginning with Chuck vs. Uncle Sam. If you haven't read that, this probably won't make a whole lot of sense. I owe everything to my wonderful followers on Tumblr who don't mock me when I liveblog my writing woes but mostly, as always, to gigglemonster.
Summary: Black and white. Good and bad. Don't kid yourself; society's moral code is more complex than that (or the girl with the gun is telling lies again. maybe there's two girls. maybe they're mixing their lies with truth. maybe that's the dangerous part. here's some truth for you: this whole mess is the dangerous part and safety is a tale best saved for schoolchildren).
She wakes up to the sound of running water.
There was this op in Tenerife a few years back. She remembers the parade down the street from the hotel when she arrived and the broken English the clerk had uttered in her direction at check in, but that’s where her memory stops. There’s this big gap that feels like seconds but she’s been told encompasses two whole days, where everything’s just blank. And then she woke up in the shower in her underwear, the beefy arm of a CIA agent named Robbins around her waist as he held her towards the spray.
Later, they told her a maid found her on the floor by the bed. There were no visible marks on her body, no signs of a struggle, and the room was untouched save for the SIM card missing from her cell phone. The mission was declared a failure and she was given nine sessions with a shrink and another three with a hypnotherapist, but nothing ever came of either. The popular theory was that she had been drugged but by the time they found her there was nothing in her system.
That was the last time she ever went solo.
So when she wakes to running water, her head swimming and her body disoriented by unfamiliar surroundings, she thinks of Tenerife, and for one brief moment of total awareness she holds onto that memory, tries to pull whatever she can out of it, and fails.
Dishes clatter against each other. Her eyes snap open and her body reacts to the sudden noise the way it’s trained to, sending her to her feet with a practiced swiftness. She reaches for a gun she can’t find and then stops when she gets a good look at the man in front of the kitchen sink, a dish towel in hand.
“Morgan?”
“Wow, you really are like a ninja. Should I be - you’re not armed, right?” He scans her form, going so far as to lean to the side, trying to see behind her or something, like he can’t see both of her hands pulled up into fists in front of her.
“No, I - how did you get in here?” It’s not what she really wants to ask. What she wants to ask is how he got past her in the process of getting in here. He had to come in through the front door, although that would mean he had a key. She somehow doubts Casey would ever even consider giving him a key.
“Details,” he makes a dismissive gesture, wrinkling his nose and shaking his head like he wants no part of them. She never would’ve guessed. Then his voice perks up, “Coffee?”
-
The furniture in their hotel room leaves something to be desired.
Namely, another bed.
There’s a king and a pull-out couch in the living area, and they probably could’ve flipped a coin for bed privileges, except they didn’t. Instead, they both fell into bed in a less than graceful manner sometime around two in the morning, left exhausted by a combination of sleep deprivation and jet lag, therefore ensuring that Chuck does a double take in the morning when he wakes up to Bryce’s bare chest.
That first minute or two, while he tries to both process and make sense of the scene in front of him, is pretty touch and go, and Chuck wastes very little time getting out of bed as quietly as possible and locking himself in the bathroom.
It takes him a moment to find said bathroom, on account of the fact that the first door he opens turns out to be a closet, but he manages. He even manages not to cringe at how bright the bathroom lights are and how white and pristine everything is; he feels like there’s a good chance he might go snow blind in here, right now.
He turns everything off except for the one overhead light and takes a shower. A lukewarm, intentionally verging on cold, shower.
-
Morgan hands her a steaming mug of coffee - it’s perfect too, probably because Casey has a tendency to treat him as their errand boy when they don’t want him around - and then goes back to doing the dishes. She’s fairly sure he’s moved on to washing what’s already clean, considering just how little time her and Casey have spent at their respective homes in the past week or two. He’s biding his time for some reason but he doesn’t say a word other than asking how their trip was.
She’s saved from recounting it when Casey collars him.
“Hey, big guy. How you doing?” To his credit he manages a smile to accompany all that enthusiasm in his voice, despite the fact that Casey’s got that look on his face like he could choke him just easily as he could, well, yell at him. There’s no good option here, with a possibly somewhat hung-over agent slash assassin who’s not exactly known for his charming personality on a good day. “Coffee?”
Sarah hides her amusement behind the rim of her mug - Casey would have to answer to his daughter if he injured Morgan and she figures that’s not exactly high on his to-do list, so he’s fairly safe - trying not to think about just how badly she’s going to get her ass chewed out by Beckman in the next few hours.
“How did you get in here?” Casey all but growls it. She was right about him not giving Morgan a key, apparently. At least she was right about something.
“You’re on the ground floor and you don’t lock your windows. Honestly, John.” Casey’s nostrils flare at the use of his first name, Morgan tsk tsk-ing like a mother hen. If there’s one thing for sure, it’s that those windows will never be unlocked again. Morgan takes a step back and Casey, begrudgingly, lets him when he catches Sarah’s raised eyebrow. “Anyhow, I’m on a mission of my own.”
That just sounds scary.
“What kind of mission?”
“We’re - “ Morgan stops himself, course corrects, “Alex is moving into her new place tomorrow and I thought it would be a good idea to enlist you as the muscle of the movement. You know, give you two a chance to bond some more, give me a chance to - “
There’s more to that, probably, but in the absence of tranq darts Casey’s just slapped a hand over Morgan’s mouth, effectively silencing him. “When I let go, you have ten seconds to leave or I start breaking bones.”
He lets go. Morgan doesn’t miss a beat. “The bonding part was too much wasn’t it?”
It’s probably sheer luck that allows Morgan to get out of the way before Casey actually tries to kill him, and he makes it all the way to the door before he says, “You’re welcome to come, Sarah.”
The front door closes and they’re left with nothing but silence and the way Casey keeps half-looking at her like he really wish Morgan wouldn’t have extended that invitation. She beats him to the awkward explanation of why this isn’t a good idea. “I better not. I’ve got to deal with Beckman and we’ve had a little too much together time as it is.”
He grunts his agreement. She takes no offence.
-
Bryce is up with the newspaper and black coffee when Chuck gets out. There’s a room service tray in the table, espresso and orange juice and two silver platters with the lids still on - it has complimentary breakfast written all over it, considering Bryce has left it relatively untouched, sitting there in last night’s jeans and no shirt, with the cordless phone face up next to him.
That last part commands his attention.
“What’s up?”
Bryce looks up long enough to follow his gaze. “Giovanni wants to welcome us back to his country and hopes we enjoyed the 1990 Aldo Conterno Barolo he had sent up last night.”
Chuck frowns. “He really said all that?” Bryce nods, amusement clear on his face. “He couldn’t just say, hey, hope you liked the wine. Had to go into the whole name and - wow, there was wine last night?”
“Apparently.”
“I’m not the only one who has no memory of this, right?” He collapses into the chair across from Bryce, opting to take a long sip out of Bryce’s coffee mug rather than go fiddle with the set up room service left them. The coffee is, thankfully, not as scalding hot as it looks and better than the stuff back in Denver, even if it is black and really, really strong. “Because, being spies and all, I always assumed we were pretty observant but - “
“When I got up to let room service in, I stubbed my toe on the cart in the living room that, for the record, also contained a lovely fruit basket.”
“Oh, so not just me.”
Bryce calmly turns the page and it only occurs to Chuck that he’s reading in Italian when he tries to get context for that picture of the solar system on the back page, if only to make sure that the willful abuse of exclamation points doesn’t mean a meteor is heading their way and they’re all going to die in a matter of days, and finds that he can’t. Bryce speaks something like five languages. Chuck speaks English and enough Spanish to order dinner and rent a car, and mostly he’s just lucky that ninety-nine percent of the people they come in contact with on business either have a working knowledge of the English language or are fine using Bryce as a translator.
He’s just lucky that Bryce doesn’t read it as a flaw, a potential liability, in the way that his first and, as it turns out, only partner had years ago. They hadn’t gotten off on the right foot and, while Chuck had a lot of thoughts and concerns that night he climbed into that black town car with the man across from him, betraying his partner wasn’t one that resonated.
“He wants us to come to dinner tonight. Says Bianca insists.”
“Why don’t I think that’s the only reason?”
“Because you are pretty observant.”
-
Sarah gets halfway home before she has to turn around.
Her phone vibrates in the passenger seat at a red light, registering a message from an unknown number with a 970 area code. The message is nothing but an address in Pentagon City. No name, no greeting, no surprise. It’s protocol, Carina’s way of saying that she wants to talk, and Sarah’s never been this pissed at her in the four years they’ve known each other but she still makes a U-turn the first chance she gets and heads towards Arlington.
The address leads her to a café, the outside dotted with empty tables and chairs, abandoned by the time the first frost rolled in. Carina sits at the table farthest from the door, styrofoam cup in hand and legs crossed one over the other.
She doesn’t mince words. “You fucked me over. Casey thinks I’m an idiot. Beckman’s going to think I blew the op - which I did.”
Carina merely looks at her, unaffected. “Are you going to sit down? There’s a man right by the window who looks very interested in our conversation right now.”
Sarah flicks her eyes to her left, catches a guy with part of a bagel lifted halfway to his mouth, hovering in mid-air until she makes eye contact with him, and then he’s hurrying to look at the wall, at the back of the laptop two tables away from him, at the barista, just anywhere else. Hesitantly, she settles into the seat across from Carina, lips tight and eyes hard.
“You can relax. I came here for information.”
She scoffs; it’s either that or outright laughter.
“You still owe me,” Carina adds.
“No, I don’t. You knew you were giving me bad info.”
“Prove it.”
And that’s the thing. She can’t. All she has is a gut feeling that something about the way Vail went down is…off. That Carina either gave her outdated information and knew about it, or gave her the information and then told Bartowski and Larkin so that they had time to get out of dodge. To what end, she can’t figure out. There’s little chance that this is a DEA set up and they just don’t feel like sharing the details, not when there’s an inter-agency task force in place. Instead, all signs point to this being a one woman operation.
She still has no evidence. No security footage. No paper trail. Just her suspicions and her own failures to serve as a reminder for what not to do next time.
Sarah leans forward. “After last night, I don’t think I’m in a position to ask questions for you. You might want to try someone else.”
“There is no one else. It’s CIA and it’s higher than I can go.”
“Did you just hear me?”
“You dated him,” Carina says and from someone else the words would sound almost accusatory. Coming from Carina, they’re just an unfortunate fact. She's talking about Daniel Shaw and that's not a door Sarah feels like knocking on for just anyone.
She puts her hands up, shaking her head. “No, I’m not doing this.”
It’s here that she decides to leave, gets as far as her feet firm on the ground before Carina’s hand catches around her wrist. The other woman pulls, hard, and Sarah lets herself drop back into her seat, lets her defiance remain confined to her eyes and the cross of her arms when she frees herself, for the time being.
“It was a month and a half, Carina.”
“Did he ever mention Orion?”
“I’m going to guess you’re not talking about the constellation.” Carina cocks her head, an unkind twist to her mouth that Sarah likes to think indicates focus rather than dislike. “What’s Orion?”
“Need to know, Walker,” Carina replies, this dismissive tone that gives Casey’s a run for its money - she can see them, in that moment, she can see what he might have seen in her once, even if just for long enough to fall into bed with her - as she rises, gets up to leave, and Sarah would stop her, she would reach out or she would pin her to the front of the building - fuck the guy in the window - just to get some answers.
It’s just that she’s tired. She’s tired and the sunlight makes her head hurt and it would be a futile gesture, to even try. Carina does what she wants; no amount of reprimanding and no amount of physical violence will change that, and Sarah doesn’t have the energy to beat her fists against a brick wall and hope something moves before her knuckles bleed.
Carina doesn’t go very far. Turns on her heel, evidently surprised at Sarah’s lack of effort. And it’s ironic that for her indifference, she gets this: “The boys are in a safe place. You’re not going to find them now unless they want to be found.”
The boys. It betrays a level of familiarity and every nerve ending in her body is on fire because she knows now, without a single doubt in her mind, that Carina’s in with them, and she’s in deep.
Carina levels her gaze, like she understands exactly what she’s just done, and there’s a hint of a smile hiding in the corners of her lips. Sarah can’t understand it. She can’t make sense of it.
“Where are they?”
“Somewhere they have friends.”
“You realize how many laws you’re breaking right now by not telling me?”
She laughs, near soundless but her shoulders shake with it. “This taskforce mess has you going soft. You know agencies don’t willingly share information.”
“Friends do.”
“And you’re going to go tell Casey all about the information you just received the minute I drive off right?”
For a moment she thinks Carina’s trying to catch her, trying to call her a hypocrite in the most effective way at her disposal, except if Carina wanted to call her a hypocrite she would. Everything’s deliberate with her, just like her use of the boys to mean their targets. It’s all in the presentation. “What information?”
Carina’s eyes light up. She hit the right keyword. “Think about it.”
Sarah gets halfway home, gets to that same red light, before she realizes that Carina didn’t bring Orion up because she was looking for information. If she was, she wouldn’t have let go of the topic so easily, wouldn’t have left her with nothing but need to know. She was baiting her.
It’s bait she’ll take.
-
“Was the Lamborghini really necessary?”
“The guy sent us a several hundred dollar bottle of wine as a welcome gift,” Bryce takes a sharp turn, presumably at the GPS’ command. Chuck’s been trying to figure out how to get it to switch to English since they left, to no avail. “Somehow I don’t think showing up in a taxi would make the impression we’re going for.”
“I’m just saying they had limo service.”
“And I’m just saying I like the way this car handles.”
Chuck wouldn’t know. There was no discussion about who would drive; there was just Bryce in the driver’s seat and Chuck’s just enough of a sentimental bastard that he climbed into the passenger seat without argument just because he liked the glint in Bryce’s eye and the confident smile that played at his lips. “What do you think he wants?”
“Could just be he wants to let me know that this is his way of repaying old gambling debts.” Bryce shrugs. “Could be that we’re two hitmen in his city and his superiors know to use that to their advantage.”
“You think he wants us to kill someone?” The words come out as an unfortunate mix of surprise and dismay. Sometimes he forgets that their friends aren’t really their friends but instead business associates. Sometimes he likes to let himself forget.
The last friend he had, his best friend, is in Burbank, and by now probably thinks he’s a crappy friend who dumped him without a goodbye. Chuck hasn’t spoken to Morgan in two years, since he went rogue.
But then the same can be said for his sister, so at least Morgan’s in good company.
“I don’t think he invited us because he wants to spend more time watching you bond with Oliver.”
Chuck frowns. “I don’t - it’s not bonding.”
“It’s bonding,” Bryce replies.
“Kids like me. It is not my fault that they happen to be good judges of character.”
“You kill people for a living.” The GPS begins to sound slightly alarmed but the scenery grows more familiar. They’ve been here before, if infrequently. “And you’re better with his son than he is and he resents that for the exact same reason that he’s going to tell us he wants us to kill some guy in Milan, even though he really means his boss wants us to. He has to have all the power. He has to be the top dog or else his ego can’t take it.”
They lapse into silence for the moment, then, “You’ve really thought a lot about this haven’t you?”
“It was quite a long flight.”
“And yet I didn’t spend it thinking up people’s psychological profiles.”
“I’ve known Gio just a little longer than you.” There’s a rather abrupt incline and when Chuck shifts his eyes away from Bryce he finds them in the driveway. They were closer than he thought. “We’re here.”
-
She almost calls Casey. Gets as far as punching in the first three numbers, just to prove Carina wrong, and then finds herself reevaluating the cost of coming to him with another dead end, another red herring.
In the end, she does nothing. Abandons her cell on the desk and tries for a Hail Mary in the form of trying to track down Carina’s burn phone. She’s pretty sure Carina either ditched the thing or turned it off, a pre-emptive strike against just this kind of intrusion, but her trace locks onto a signal without much trouble at all. The little red dot on her screen moves into Langley and Sarah doesn’t need to watch to know she’ll be parking outside of CIA headquarters.
There’s a good forty five minutes where Sarah does nothing but sift through Google search results and force herself to switch from caffeine to just plain water when she downs two aspirin. Putting Orion into a public search engine alternately leads her to NASA, a wide variety of telescopes and, once, someone’s gamer tag. Nothing remotely useful but without government resources it’s her best option, and she isn’t sure openly digging up information on something Carina clearly went out of her way to tell her in the most vague, off the books way possible is such a great idea. She doesn’t know what she’s getting into - if it’s anything at all - but until she does, she’s not sharing.
Carina stays parked for just long enough for Sarah to seriously consider the possibility that she dumped the phone there and went on her way, but then the dot starts moving again. About a mile outside of Dulles International Airport, the signal goes dead. Seconds later it’s back. Gone again. Back but gone quicker this time. The time varies but it rings familiar and she knows why once it repeats.
Dash, dash, dot. Dot, dash, dot, dot.
It spells out GL in Morse code.
Good luck.
The signal doesn’t come back. It won’t.
-
Bianca leaves them after dinner, says she has to make some phone calls about an exhibit opening in the morning at the gallery she co-owns. She takes Oliver with her too, removes him from the spot he’s been occupying since dinnertime conversation moved into the expansive living room. He had sat right at Chuck’s feet, his head level with the bend of Chuck’s knee, and Bryce hadn’t missed the way that gave Giovanni pause.
“I heard about your close call in Vail. It is a shame you were forced to cut your vacation short.” They put a fairly large dent in that bottle of wine that was opened at dinner, with Gio doing most of the work. His words don’t slur though, he just sounds more pompous, more boastful, as if everything he says is undeniable truth no matter how patently false it is. But then, this is a man who hasn’t done an honest day’s work in his life yet lives in an estate that belongs in the movies, who doesn’t own a pair of jeans and instead prefers three-piece suits and solid gold cufflinks. A man who purposely lives beyond his means and makes it a job of convincing people otherwise.
It’s all a show. Bryce has been putting on shows for the last few years; he knows his own craft.
“One would think that your government would have more important things to focus their energy on. It is the terrorist cells they should be concerned about, not people in your chosen profession.”
A killer is a killer, no matter which way you paint it, but Bryce keeps that to himself. It would turn things sour with Gio and, more than that, it would make Chuck frown. Make him skittish.
He’s always been the reluctant one.
“One would hope,” Bryce replies, coolly, sips at his wine long after his taste for it has gone.
The time for easy conversation and smiles has gone too. This is a business meeting and it became one the minute Bianca walked out of the room. Everything else is just lead up to the moment Gio hands them a dossier with a name, a probable location, and a handful of surveillance photos.
Bryce is a charmer so he doesn’t say ‘get to the point’ but he certainly thinks it.
“I trust you’re enjoying your time in my glorious city?” Another sip of wine. Another possessive dropped in there. Chuck catches his eye like what he said in the car is beginning to resonate.
“We haven’t really had a lot of time for sightseeing,” he says and there’s a look, a definite raise of the eyebrows as Gio’s eyes flit between them, and Bryce isn’t blind to how this must look. Two men who are not only partners, quite literally in crime, but who also tend to take extended vacations with each other, occupying the same room and the same limited amount of personal space. They’ve been getting variations on that look for a while now but none quite as plain as Gio’s.
“Jetlag and an eight hour time difference will do that to you,” Chuck adds, with a side of nervous laughter, and the lines in Gio’s forehead smooth out ever so slightly.
“Well then,” Gio continues on, “perhaps you will find the time when you return from Positano.”
-
“Got to love the way he just slipped it right in there. Not even a question.”
“We’re here on his dime; he doesn’t have to ask.”
Bryce takes a right, navigating back to the hotel on his own. The GPS was more confused than they were, as it turned out. Chuck certainly doesn’t miss its alarmed squawking from the car ride over but he does miss the extra light source in the dark. The manila folder sits in his lap and he wants to pore over it but he can’t. He has to wait.
He also can’t see anything remotely recognizable in Bryce’s face, his reactions left up to the imagination. It’s been his experience that nothing ever plays out the same as it does in his head.
“Why did he keep calling him The Man from Kiev? The guy’s name wasn’t even hard to pronounce. Viktor.” He repeats the name but tacks on a bad Russian accent to go with it, forgetting for a moment that any amusement in Bryce’s expression will be lost on him. “It’s right there, on the file.”
“His last name sounded familiar,” Bryce replies.
“You think that’s why?”
“I’d say we should do some digging but Gio wants this guy taken out tomorrow and time isn’t exactly on our side.”
It’s a three and a half hour drive to Positano on the low end and, though they’ve got an address for where he works, there’s still a lot of room for error. “Maybe he just didn’t see the point in us getting too invested in our target. The less you know the better kind of thing.”
“Maybe,” Bryce says, even if neither of them really believes that.
-
Sarah gets there fifteen minutes early and spends the next twenty sitting outside of General Beckman’s office thinking up every possible excuse as to why she’d willingly put a mission on the line because of information from a questionable source.
This is the CIA. Trust no one except yourself and your partner, and even that last part is unreliable.
“We haven’t yet spoken to Colonel Casey,” the ‘we’ in question of course denoting both Beckman and Director Graham, though he isn’t the one she has to win over here; she’s his branch so it’s in his best interests to see her succeed, “since you alerted us to the fact that it was you who acted on faulty intel.”
“All due respect, General Beckman, but I wasn’t aware that the source was questionable at the time. I have had previous dealings with them that had yielded far more positive results and we don’t know for sure that the problem even exists at the source.”
Her pause is met only with a wary “go on.”
It’s her chance to explain herself and she won’t get another one. She knows better than to squander it. “We think it’s possible that the intel was correct at the time but that the targets realized that someone was on to them and fled prior to our arrival.”
“Your source still blew the operation,” Beckman points out.
“Yes but not intentionally. Without the intel we still might not have found them before they caught on to us. We weren’t looking in the right place to begin with.”
The gender neutral pronouns. The omission of names entirely. This whole lie she’s fabricating. One of these days, she’s going to collect on all of the things that Carina owes her for.
Beckman and Graham share a look before he cuts in, “Alright, Agent Walker. We’re going to need to speak to Colonel Casey and we’ll need you to file a report. I don’t suppose you’re willing to let us talk to your source.” She remains completely silent, folded hands and crossed legs. Graham shakes his head. “You’re entitled to that. For now.”
“Is there anything else?” Beckman asks.
There is but nothing she can ask. She wants to run with the tip Carina’s given her, even if that didn’t serve her so well last time. Her gut instinct tells her that she was misled for a reason and, while she’s still pissed, she’s also intrigued by what’s fallen into her lap as a consequence of that. She wants to ask about Orion but she’s in no position to and Carina’s comments have her believing discretion is the key. She can’t just work her way through a rolodex of contacts.
She has to do this on her own.
“No.”
-
Chuck spends the better part of the early morning hours committing every detail from the dossier Gio gave them to memory. Of course, most of those details are a list of frequented addresses and grainy surveillance camera photos that make the ones him and Bryce take look professional. There’s not a lot of background on the guy either.
“You know, it doesn’t say anywhere what he did.” He points out, when Bryce gets off of the phone with the car rental place. No way were they driving that Lamborghini seven hours round trip with the risk of it getting shot at. “Not that it usually does, but usually we know.”
Bryce sips at his espresso for a moment too long, hesitant. “You remember our mark the last time we were here?”
“It was that arms’ dealer’s brother, wasn’t it?”
“Jimmy Vahue. Sold them guns that didn’t shoot, and so Gio wanted us to take out the brother.”
He remembers now, more for the moral gray area than the incident itself. The brother had been tangentially connected to Jimmy’s chosen profession and it wasn’t exactly a job they could turn down - none of them were, if they ever wanted to come back here again - but it hadn’t ever quite sat right with him. “What does one thing have to do with the other?”
“This guy’s young and the last name is familiar,” Bryce shrugs, relatively unmoved. “And Gio has a pattern. Or at least his bosses’ do.”
“Right because the best way to hurt someone is kill the people close to them.” The idea makes his skin crawl, makes him glad for his sister’s absence in his life, glad that he’s cut ties with everyone in this world but Bryce. They’re each other’s liability, their weak spot, but at least it keeps the word singular.
“It’s what I’d do,” Bryce replies, and Chuck really, really wishes he hadn’t.
-
“I am so sorry about earlier. Really. Truly, John.”
Casey shifts his end of the television higher, specifically to throw Morgan off balance. It doesn’t knock him over but he wavers, loosens his grip. This is a two man operation solely due to the fact that Morgan’s trying to act manly in front of Alex. Casey isn’t blind or stupid.
“Okay. Not so hot on the first name are we?” Morgan eyes him like he’s trying to stare down a bear whose only reason for not tearing him to shreds is that his hands are currently occupied. Casey grunts in his general direction. Morgan seems to understand this as confirmation. “Seriously, man, you sure you’re alright?”
His concern, annoying as it is, is warranted, he supposes, considering it was Morgan who caused the bottom of the dresser to come down on his foot. He’s beginning to regret not doing anything to coerce Walker into helping out; they would’ve been done in half the time and his foot wouldn’t have been throbbing for the last twenty minutes.
“Ask me that again,” Casey says, in a tone that clearly means the direct opposite. Morgan isn’t stupid either. Then again, he also isn’t smart, otherwise he would’ve run in the other direction the minute he found out what Casey actually did for a living, no matter how good of a catch Alex was.
Morgan’s going to say something though, he can tell, only he gets sidetracked as they dump the television in the back of the moving van and head back, only to find Alex at the door, his cell phone in hand. “It’s for you. Sarah.”
He takes it with a frown, skips formalities altogether. “Yeah.”
“Having fun?”
“The phone call I got an hour ago says more than you.” He’s forced to be intentionally discreet, thanks to Morgan’s obliviousness to the situation as he and Alex just stand there, talking quietly by the door while he makes puppy dog eyes at her and Casey’s forced to fight his gag reflex.
“Beckman?” She doesn’t sound surprised.
“She wants to see me tomorrow.”
“They think I’m lying.” There’s a rush of air, heavy exhale. “And I am. About Carina. I told them I thought it was more badly timed info than intentionally incorrect. That Larkin and Bartowski just got the jump on our source before we could grab them. We’ve got nothing on her anyway.”
“No point in starting something we already know we can’t finish.”
“Exactly.”
There’s a long stretch of silence in which he deduces that she’s in a car from the sound of a horn honking. Alex keeps looking over at him like she’s curious and that’s the last thing he wants, or needs, her to be. “Anything else, Walker?”
“Just stick with the story. And - “ another pause, then, “it’s a gray area when it comes to sharing information between agencies, right?”
He doesn’t like the sound of this at all. “Not in our situation.”
“I’m not talking about us. Say Homeland Security knows something but they don’t want to share it with the FBI ‘cause they think they can handle it. They’re not obligated to.”
“You mind elaborating on this?”
“Just answer the question, Casey. We can’t have this conversation on the phone and I’m guessing Alex is within earshot anyway.”
She has a point on both counts. “No, there’s no hard and fast rule about that.”
“Okay, thanks. Try not to kill Morgan; he’s a good guy, just eager to please.”
Casey gives her what can be classified as reluctant acknowledgement of that fact shortly before she hangs up. He puts his phone back in his pocket, to keep Alex from intercepting any other phone calls. He offers a “sorry about that” that gets Morgan trotting back inside while Alex eyes him, carefully. A little too carefully.
“Is she your girlfriend?” She inquires, finally. “Cause you can tell me if she is.”
“I work with her,” he says, in lieu of balking completely. “That’s all.”
“Alright. She sure calls a lot. And answers your phone a lot.”
“We work together very closely,” he says, something which, unsurprisingly, does very little to help his case where his daughter is concerned.
-
Chuck gets to stay in the car today.
Chuck always gets to stay in the car when they’re doing surveillance. He’s the observant one, so it’s just what makes the most sense, but he hates the separation. Hates not being able to watch Bryce’s back through anything but tinted windows and his own eyes, since binoculars aren’t exactly the most inconspicuous thing to pull out in broad daylight.
It’s sunny out. Not a cloud in the sky and warm too. They’re on the Amalfi Coast, in a town where tourism is the main industry thanks to beaches that stretch on for-freaking-ever, and he gets to stay in the car.
But at least he doesn’t have to be dressed up while doing so.
And he doesn’t have to be alone for some of it.
“That’s him,” Bryce says, as he gets into the car. He’d gone inside the tiny shoe repair shop to get an ID fifteen minutes ago and come back with shiny shoes. The benefit of that is now they don’t have to sit there all day keeping watch for a guy who might not even be inside. The problem with it, however, is Viktor’s already seen Bryce. He knows his face. He’ll notice him if he hangs around for the rest of the day until they can corner him alone.
So that leaves Chuck.
“We should drive around the block. There’s a parking lot, and a coffee shop right there,” he points to the building to their immediate left, “so we won’t be the only car on the street that’s been here since ten this morning. We can walk back and you can sit outside and fiddle with the laptop while keeping an eye on him. It’ll just look like you’re a writer looking for some coffee on a nice day.”
“Good plan,” he says, and it is a good plan, at least theoretically. It’s a plan that gets him out of the car anyway. “And you’ll be.”
“Around.”
Chuck doesn’t like that answer but, then, he doesn’t really have to. He puts the car in drive and heads the way of the parking lot they passed earlier, passing store after store as he does. “We should go to Capri,” he says, absentmindedly. “It’s not so crowded this time of year.”
“The isle of sirens,” Bryce replies, thoughtfully, and Chuck takes his eyes off of the narrow road for a nanosecond to flash a curious kind of smile Bryce’s way. “It’d be a nice vacation when this is over. Away from the - politics.”
“We should go.” It should feel weird on his tongue, the plural, but he’s long since forgotten what it’s like to find it weird to be doing anything with Bryce, even if he just so happens to not have entirely platonic feelings for him. Or maybe everything’s a little weird and that’s just become his new normal, his default setting.
Yeah, that’s probably it.
“I mean I know we just did Vail but we were barely there. And we’re going to be here a while. I mean probably. No reason to leave. Giovanni’s got our backs. We have money and the CIA-NSA-FBI-whatever has no idea where we are.”
“Except for Carina.”
“You don’t -“
“I don’t, but.” He lets the sentence die there; the rest doesn’t need to be said. It’s just one more thing that she has on them. It’s just one more loose end in a slew of them, but Bryce likes some degree of control of the situation and Chuck likes a sense of security that he hasn’t been able to hold onto for very long since Stanford, so it’s enough.
Enough to make Chuck vaguely uncomfortable, his stomach twisting into knots that he can’t afford given the rest of today’s agenda. He grips the steering wheel that much harder and tries to force himself to focus.
“We should go,” Bryce echoes his earlier sentiment, quietly, and it might be the last good thing to come out of the day.
-
“I’m sorry,” Clarice, subject of several Silence of the Lambs jokes among her fellow secretaries ever since she transferred here from the FBI, makes a dismissive little gesture that drains the very last bit of sympathy Sarah might have ever had for the woman, “he’s not here.”
She leans forward, “I parked next to his car.”
“Are you sure it was his car, Agent Walker,” the little red light on the phone blinks at her and Clarice blurts a monotone deputy chief of counterintelligence’s office, please hold into the receiver before pressing a button and hanging it back up again. Sarah’s got an annoyed look in place by the time she looks back up again. She’s been in the damn car before, more than a few times. “Fine. He’s busy.”
“Actually busy?”
Another red light starts blinking. Someone drops a file off on the desk, landing not three inches from Sarah’s elbow as they keep walking. Clarice faces her with an unamused look. “I’m pretty sure I just put the Deputy Director of NCS on hold.”
So that would be a yes.
“Also, your phone is ringing.”
-
“Tilt it to the right.” Chuck does as he’s told, recentering the laptop on the small table he’s claimed outside of the café. “There.”
“How does this thing do for battery life again?”
“We won’t get to find out. It’s almost five. He’s got to leave sometime.”
Chuck’s been there for a good hour and a half, surfing the internet and pretending to be productive. He’s hit the ‘random article’ button on Wikipedia more times than he cares to admit. There’s not a whole lot to do but sit and wait. There’s a small camera on the outside of the laptop and the video gets transmitted back to Bryce’s laptop while he, presumably, sits in the parking lot that Chuck left him in, watching on his own laptop, albeit with a zoom feature. Chuck’s got Bluetooth though, and Bryce on the other end of the line to keep him company for the duration.
He might have also looked up hotels in Capri. You know, since there was nothing else to do.
“This might be a little late but what, exactly, is the plan for when he does leave?” There’s no one around but he still keeps his voice down, just for the sake of it. He’s paranoid but that’s healthy in their line of work. Encouraged even.
“We’ll get him in the car and take him some place where we can ditch the body.”
Chuck pauses. Squints against the sun. “So there’s just one problem with that plan.”
“What’s that?”
He doesn’t think Bryce is looking at his screen right now. “You’re five minutes away and Viktor’s - “ he pauses, waits for it, and he can hear the exhaled fuck on the other end of the line that lets him know Bryce is seeing what he’s seeing, “just walking out the door.”
“You’re going to have to take him out. He could be gone by the time I get there,” Bryce tells him, even though he can hear the shuffling, the start of the car’s engine that tells him Bryce is damn well going to try anyway.
Chuck checks for his gun instinctively, finds it, cool and heavy, and it’s not nearly as comforting as he wants it to be. He watches Viktor start down the street as he shoves his laptop into his bag haphazardly, abandoning his half-finished second cup of coffee as he follows him. He doesn’t know what he’s going to do exactly when he catches up to him but he was taught to think on his feet by the best of them and this is hardly the first time he’s been thrown for a loop by a target.
“I’m on my way,” Bryce says into his ear, and Chuck tries to focus on the now steady confidence behind his partner’s voice.
Confidence that they pull this off without a hitch. That Chuck can pull this off.
He finds comfort in other places these days, if not the weight of a gun in his hand.
-
Casey’s phone goes straight to voicemail on both the first and second try, and by the time he picks up on the third she’s halfway down the street.
“Walker?”
“I’m outside,” she says, as she pulls up a few spaces behind the moving van outside of the apartment building. “Our snitch came through for us. Yuri has a deal going down in an hour and Beckman wants us on it.”
If there’s any reply at all, she misses it, the tap of knuckles against her window drawing her attention. She rolls down her window, bringing her face to face with Morgan.
“Hey, Sarah. I didn’t know you were coming - “ he starts, almost immediately. He’s got a cardboard box half his size in his arms but he’s managing, probably thanks to several years working at that Buy More back in Burbank.
“I’m not. I just need Casey,” she tells him, leaving out the specifics. There’s a fine line between what they do and don’t tell Morgan. Unless he’s needed for the technical side of an OP, which happens more and more often these days, they like to keep him mostly in the dark. It’s for his own safety, really. And the less he knows, the less he has to hide from Alex, at least that was what Casey told her when they were assigned to each other.
Morgan was NSA first, a few months before the taskforce was put together, presumably when Casey had a moment of clarity and realized that Morgan’s loyalty and determination to win him over was actually useful. He was less of an employee and more of a specialist, someone they contracted out for in an unofficial capacity; he still made payroll. So he came with Casey when they were partnered up - no one else really knew what to do with him - despite the fact that it presented a huge conflict of interest.
Somewhere there’s a file linking Morgan to Bartowski. Childhood best friends, graduated high school the same year, worked the same crappy summer job at the Buy More. There are phone records that stop in April of 2007; it’s the same time Bartowski went rogue and hooked up with Larkin. Morgan never talks about him but, then, as far as he knows, there’s no reason it would be of any interest to them.
It’s just another person she has to lie to on a daily basis.
“Mission?” He pries.
“Yuri,” she offers that small detail and he nods, recognizing the name. They’ve been trying to bust the guy for three weeks now, ever since he touched down in Dulles and went local. “You guys almost done?”
“Getting there,” he tells her, and then Casey’s coming out the door with Alex on his heels. “I’m going to go - “ he motions in his girlfriend’s general direction “but good luck.”
Alex stops on her own, by the door, and Morgan starts talking, placating, as soon as he gets within twenty feet of her, telling lies that fit with Casey’s own. They both cover for each other and it works fine for the time being but there’s a part of Sarah that doesn’t envy her at all, doesn’t envy the fact that one day she’s going to have her world turned upside down when she realizes the two people closest to her aren’t who they say they are.
Casey passes by her open window just long enough to say “we’re taking my car”. She doesn’t ask questions, just puts hers in park, pockets the keys, and follows him.
They’re five minutes away before he bothers to tell her it’s because he’s got a trunk full of weapons.
-
It goes like this:
Trying to get out of the parking lot is a feat in and of itself. Parking spaces on the street are few and far between so he’s left with too many cars in one place and there are bound to be at least half a dozen trying to get out of the same small place at the same time. Add to that the way he can hear Chuck’s breathing speed up and become just this side of erratic, can hear the people passing him by and the sounds of his shoes against the pavement. He’s trying to catch up with the guy without being noticeable about it, trying to come up with a plan of action impossibly fast, and it all makes Bryce want to get out of the car and just run for him.
It would be faster.
He hears the first “hey” when he’s pulling onto the main street and the sounds of a struggle directly after that. The sound of a door opening and closing in short order. Then nothing.
It takes Bryce a moment to realize Chuck’s Bluetooth headset must have gotten knocked off, crushed maybe, killing their sole connection. He hits the gas that much harder and almost runs down a pedestrian in his hurry, but his mind is making up stories of ambushes and kidnappings, blood pools and dead partners. He’s always been the calmer of the two but then they’ve always been able to communicate if they weren’t together, and without that lifeline he finds himself surprisingly at a loss for how not to worry.
He finds Chuck outside of an old barbershop on the corner, two streets up from where he last left him. The sign is still there but faded by too many years of exposure to the elements, the building empty and abandoned, a for rent sign on the window, and a side door facing into a narrow alleyway. He’s got a split lip but he’s still standing.
Viktor’s nowhere to be seen and Chuck’s thousand yard stare tells him all he needs to know about why.
-
Chuck spends a good portion of the car ride back to Rome rationalizing his actions after the fact.
Namely, the guy swung at him. He wasn’t on his knees, begging. Chuck pulled him in the side door of that beaten down corner shop and the next thing he knew there was a fist connecting with his jaw. Knocked him clear off of his feet and there was maybe a second and a half of reaction time before Chuck put three in his chest.
But he had been standing and Chuck had been on the ground and from that angle it looks like self-defense. If you push away the knowledge that Viktor was a walking dead man since nine o’clock the night before, it looks like his actions were justified. A necessary reaction to circumstances gone awry.
He kills people all the time it’s just, usually, he knows why.
There’s no part of him that feels bad when he nails a murderer or an arms dealer, once a guy who dabbled in human trafficking, another time a money launderer who doubled as a drug dealer. In a black and white world, they’re black hats.
But, then, so is he. He can paint with as much white as he wants to offset it but it’s still going to end up a confusing mess of charcoal flecked with ivory and he’s never going to get it to blend right and he’s never going to be able to look at it in the mirror without thinking it’s all wrong.
That it’s not what he intended when he started out.
“This is all a means to an end, right? This is what we have to do,” he says, searching for reassurance in any form he can get it. It’s the first thing he’s said since they left Positano, the first thing anyone’s said, and his voice sounds louder than he thinks it ought to, with the windows down and the cool breeze filtering in.
Bryce doesn’t say anything, just lets his hand slip from the gearshift to cover Chuck’s own, thumb against wristbone, just like the airport, just like every time because this is how their hands fit.
This is how they fit.
-
She basks in the afterglow the whole ride back.
Between Beckman, Carina, and the runaround at CIA HQ, she needed a win. She needed something to prove that she wasn’t losing her touch entirely. Turns out getting to kick Yuri’s ass in the process of taking him in, along with a few of his cronies and the right hand man of the Reynosa drug cartel, was that win. And then some.
Casey had dropped the irritable grizzly bear act sometime after the green agent from Langley had shoved Yuri in the back of a van and drove away, going from begrudgingly polite to almost friendly, so she’s pretty sure he needed it too.
“What was that on the phone earlier?”
There’s really no point in playing dumb here. She’d tipped her hand in a moment of weakness and things like trust me, I know what I’m doing don’t work with Casey, not when they’re this new to each other and maybe not ever.
She still has to lie. It’s been a day and a half now, long enough that the simple act of sitting on the information looks suspicious. Sarah doesn’t need any more suspicion cast her way and things right now, with them, they’re good. She doesn’t want to screw that up even if it doesn’t last.
“I was trying to figure out why Carina would’ve sought us out,” she tells him, which isn’t a total lie, it just happens to be unrelated to her query. She thinks she has it figured out though. Before shit went down it looked like Carina’s usual attempts at trying to keep as many people in her back pocket as possible but now, now that Carina’s all but admitted to giving bad info on purpose, she thinks it was a diversionary tactic. Get Bartowski and Larkin gone while appearing to help her and Casey. In theory, it keeps both sides happy. In practice, it just left Sarah with a lot of theories and nothing in the way of proof while Carina got off scot-free.
He nods, doesn’t so much as look at her funny, and she thinks there’s a chance she might have gotten away with this one.
She adds, “I didn’t tell Beckman about her. I just told her we had a source.”
“They didn’t ask you who it was?”
“Graham did. I didn’t tell him.” He looks her way and she thinks that’s surprise she sees in his expression. “I think they wanted to talk to you before they pushed any further with me, see if you spill anything.”
“I’ll back you up,” he says, without qualifying the statement. There’s no if and there’s no but; it’s that simple.
She bites back a smile.
His phone lights up in the cup holder, flashes a text message notification that he both notices and does nothing about. She thought she heard it ring earlier.
“You going to answer that?”
“Probably just Alex wondering if I’m going to be back in time to help her lug all that shit into the new apartment.”
“How achingly domestic of you.”
“Grimes dropped the dresser on my foot,” he tells her and she can’t quite get her hand up to her mouth in time to muffle the laughter that brings about. She can only imagine the thirty minutes Morgan probably spent apologizing for it afterwards. “That’s not an experience I feel like reliving.”
“You should’ve just dragged some agents over on the condition that you don’t terrorize them for the rest of the week.”
“No, I should’ve just asked you to come. The one good idea Morgan’s had in the last two days.” It catches her off guard, the almost warm way he says it. Hell, it even seems to catch him off guard from the way he seems to frown at his own reflection in the rearview mirror.
She’s tempted to ask if this much together time has actually endeared her to him, actually made him miss her on their days off, but these aren’t conversations Casey has with people -- at least not ones he has well -- and she figures he’s had more than enough awkward bonding time between his daughter and Morgan, so she just says, “You know, I could still come. I’m kind of wired and it’s still early. I mean, if you want me to.”
“You won’t injure me,” he replies, Casey-speak for that would be nice.
“At least not accidentally,” she says and, this time, fails at hiding her smile.
-
Giovanni is, predictably, overjoyed. More than enough for all three of them.
There is more wine, of course, and Chuck drinks just enough to take the edge off, to bring himself back to some semblance of normalcy. Gio can’t stop talking about how pleased his associates - read: bosses - will be in the morning and how this is cause for celebration, as if Gio has ever needed a reason. How only consummate professionals such as themselves could get the job done right in such a small window of time.
It gets to the point where Gio’s bragging about their accomplishments as if they’re his own, simply because he was the one who gave the order.
Under different circumstances, Chuck would find it amusing. Instead he finds laughing through his teeth exhausting, counts the minutes until they can leave and he can hit the sack and maybe, just maybe, they can get on a ferry to Capri and actively not deal with the events of this afternoon.
“Frank would like to meet you tomorrow, to thank you personally of course,” Gio tells them. Frank Padovesi is one of the aforementioned bosses, best they’ve been able to piece together. The name is familiar, thanks to any number of tall tales Gio has told once he’s had a few too many, but they’ve never actually met the guy. Until tomorrow, apparently.
“What did he do to Frank?” Bryce asks, and there’s no question that he’s doing it for Chuck’s benefit, a loosely veiled attempt to put his mind at ease.
“Unpaid gambling debts,” Gio offers, refilling his glass like it’s of no consequence to him.
Chuck feels every muscle in his body tense up.
“Having a guy killed over gambling debts is a little extreme, isn’t it?” It’s a good thing Gio’s drunk again, otherwise he probably wouldn’t take too kindly to Bryce pressing the subject.
“That is why you did not kill him.” Gio says and that - that is where Chuck has the sudden urge to leave the room. Excuse himself to the bathroom and lock himself inside for a good half hour until he can get his head on straight. “You killed his nephew, Viktor. It’s a shame. Such a promising young man.”
Bryce looks away at that, regret clear on his face, and Chuck doesn’t look at anything at all. Stares at the one white wall that isn’t adorned with some fabulous painting. The one blank spot in the entire room and he sees that man’s face, that man who probably swung at him in self-defense, that man who probably did nothing wrong other than be related to a man that gambled with people who solved gambling debts with murder.
They got here because Gio owed them. A card game Bryce had won big at. He pulled some strings, got them to clear customs, and that was it. Debt paid. This was a bonus, a favor disguised as an order. The fundamental difference between the way people like them, like him and Bryce and perhaps even Gio deal with things, and the way people like Frank Padovesi do is striking.
The doorbell saves him from running his mouth but he thinks, right there, that he might have. He might have gotten himself in trouble here but Bianca is upstairs putting Oliver to bed and so the door is left to Gio. Bryce looks at him through concerned eyes from across the room and Chuck tries to put on a brave face that falters too easily.
And then they hear it.
Hear the laughter and the informal exchange of greetings in perfect Italian. Chuck looks at Bryce and Bryce looks at Chuck and Giovanni’s voice booms when he says “Gentleman, there is someone I would like you to meet”, something which is wholly unnecessary on account of introductions already having been made a long time ago.
Carina smiles at them from the doorway.
-
part three // back to index
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Author's Note: Thank you to everyone who just stuck with me through 10k of plottiness and angst. If something is unclear, it's most likely because I did that on purpose to set myself up for future parts, not because I enjoy glaring plotholes. Any actual glaring plotholes are the result of writing the last 6K of this over the last three days, after midnight. I promise those of you looking for action of a different kind will find it in part 3 ;)