Thursday, September 30, 2010

Chapter 20: Books and Battlegrounds

There is no such thing as a self-made man. You will reach your goals only with the help of others. – George Shinn


Books and Battlegrounds

10 NOVEMBER 2007
OUTSIDE LARKIN HALL
19:43 PST


"What the hell took you two so long?" Casey hopped out of the back of the Dodge Charger sitting not-so-inconspicuously a few blocks from the library. Even if the mission had called for plainclothes, he had evidently taken the black tactical dress uniform to heart: black pants, a black shirt, a black jacket. A black glare of death really completed the ensemble.

Despite the furious look, Chuck opened his mouth to take the blame. It was his fault that they were running so far behind. Even if Sarah had set the pace for their walk across campus, he knew that she'd only done so to cover for him and to give him time to push the whole conversation with Jill back into some corner of his mind where it wouldn't interfere with their mission.

Sarah, however, just elbowed him aside. "I got distracted," she said.

Casey growled. "Bartowski…"

"How? How is that my fault?"

"Oh, lay off him, Casey. I like football." Sarah gave Casey her sunniest smile. "Sorry."

Heh, Chuck thought. Sarah didn't sound the faintest bit apologetic. To spare her Casey-flavored scorn, he forced a laugh. "Casey, is it true that you got shot with a crossbow bolt?"

Casey's growl was only audible to small creatures and Chuck. "Who the hell told you—Walker!"

Sarah affected an innocent look as she climbed up into the van to retrieve the rest of her weapons. "What? He guessed."

"You guessed?" Casey demanded.

"Well, you were limping kind of obviously." Chuck wrestled down the urge to dive behind the nearest large object from the power of Casey's glare alone. "And Sarah told me Magnus's weapon of choice is the crossbow. It wasn't hard to put two and two together. So, where'd you get hit?"

He actually took a step back when Casey's glare shifted to a growl. "Drop it, Bartowski."

"Must've been somewhere bad," Chuck said before his brain could shut his mouth up.

Indeed, Casey looked like he might lunge for Chuck's throat, except that Sarah came out of the van just then. "If you kill him," she told Casey, "he can't tell us where the intel is."

Casey must have really wanted him dead, Chuck realized, as the other man spent nearly thirty seconds—thirty long, interminable seconds—obviously debating if it was worth breaking orders over. In the end, he shut the van door behind Sarah, glared at Chuck, and jerked his head: let's move, team.

"Wait a second," Chuck said as Sarah handed him his tranq gun. He shoved it back in his waistband and followed the other two agents across the street. "Casey, did you get shot in the ass with a crossbow?"

Casey's shoulders stiffened, but mercifully, he didn't turn and strangle Chuck on the spot. Sarah, however, gave him a look of laughing exasperation. "Quiet, you," she said. "It bears repeating: if he kills you, we're never going to find this intel."

She had a fair point.

"And, yes, for the record, Casey did get shot in the ass with a crossbow bolt," Sarah finished.

Casey and Chuck both stared at her. "You realize that it's theoretically possible for Casey to kill you and still get the intel?" Chuck finally asked, as it looked like sheer anger might be paralyzing Casey's vocal cords.

Sarah shrugged. "He can try. Probably bleed to death before he gets five steps."

"Or his heart explodes from your kung fu ways," Chuck muttered. He held his hand up in a gesture of innocence when Casey growled yet again. "We can debate long and hard about who can kill whom first or survive what karate chop to what body part. However, there is still some sort of disk in Bryce's dumpsite in that library. Maybe we should get that first and then two of you can kill each other. All I ask is that you wait until we get back to Burbank, as my sister and her boyfriend will get suspicious if they have to hold conversations with Sarah's corpse on the road trip back."

Though Casey looked intrigued by any situation that might involve Sarah's corpse, he dropped the subject with a final, threatening growl. Chuck wasn't sure if the growl was acquiescence to any part of his suggestion: fighting, killing Sarah, or waiting until they got back to Burbank. Or hell, killing Chuck, as that was always on the menu.

Maybe he shouldn't mention the crossbow thing again for a little while. Just to be safe.

When they reached the library, Casey pulled something out of his pocket. "Reactivated your ID," he said, handing over the plastic card to Chuck. "Couldn't Photoshop the stupid grin off, though."

Chuck rolled his eyes. "What's the matter, Photoshop too hard for you? Maybe you should just stick with MS Paint."

He couldn't quite hear what Casey muttered in reply, but he didn't figure it was kind to either his sexual practices or his ancestors. Bemused by that, and Sarah's quiet snicker, he glanced down at his old student ID. He immediately regretted it.

"What is it?" Sarah asked when his entire body tensed. She instinctively moved in front of him, eyes sweeping over the library in search of danger.

Chuck shook off the half-migraine. "Uh, wow. My file in the Intersect has every grade for every paper I wrote at Stanford, and all of my IQ testing. It's higher than I remember."

Casey slowly took his hand off of his gun hilt. "You just flashed on yourself?"

Wordlessly, Chuck held up the ID.

"Anything interesting?"

There had been, but now really wasn't the time. Chuck tucked a tiny nugget of information away and mustered up a semi-confident smile for his teammates. "We're good. Let's go rescue Professor Fleming's porn collection."

They made it through the scanners at the front doors easily—Casey had used a picture of himself in a suit for the ID, making Chuck wonder if the government agent actually understood the definition of blending in—and headed straight upstairs to the Scary Stacks on the third floor. The spookiest floor would always be the basement, where the light sensors worked only when they wanted to and the smell of slight decay permeated everything. He wondered if that had changed at all. Probably not.

The rest of the library had changed in small ways, but nothing massive. Chuck drank in the details as they walked. Now that they were actually inside the library, where there might be a mercenary after the intel, the prospect of getting shot with a crossbow suddenly seemed a lot more pressing. As Sarah had pointed out earlier, a crossbow could kill him just as dead as a SIG or a bazooka or a heart attack (all three of which were options in his day-to-day life, Chuck felt).

So he chose to focus on the nostalgia. As a scholarship student, he had clocked so many hours in the library, battling the constant paranoia of losing said scholarship and having to return to Burbank as a failure. Bryce and Jill cracked that maybe he should use his MacGyver skills to convert his study carrel on the fourth floor into a cot or at least a hotel suite of some type. They'd even taken turns bringing him food. Of course, Jill bringing him food usually meant dinner and making out in the stacks. Bryce meant a dinner and a dart-gun battle.

Man, they'd had some epic wars.

He must have made a "heh" noise, for Sarah glanced over at him. "What is it?"

"Oh, nothing to do with the mission. Just thinking about all of the good times I had in here. Traditions and the like."

"Traditions?"

They'd reached the third level. Chuck scanned the area around the stairs, trying to match his memory to his time five years before. With a shrug, he headed left. It wasn't quite a gut feeling, but close enough. "Yeah, we were really big on traditions. You know, the birthday shower tradition—"

"The one time you nerds actually took a shower?" Casey wondered under his breath.

Chuck rolled his eyes. He'd always felt he had exquisite hygiene. "Not quite. Your friends gang up on you on your birthday and throw you in the shower."

"And?" Casey prompted as Chuck led them all around a set of shelves.

"Um, that was pretty much it."

"Exciting." Casey snorted. "Least they could've done was thrown a hooker in there with you."

"Oh, yes, my girlfriend at the time would have loved that." Chuck rolled his eyes. He made the next right turn on instinct. "And for your information, all of our traditions were not totally lame. It was always fun to try and beat campus security so that we could dye the fountains red right before a big game, and there was always—" He turned left in the maze of bookshelves and stopped. "The tradition of having sex in the Scary Stacks. The ones in the basement, not up here. I never got to try that one, actually, and I'm probably always going to be a little disappointed about that."

"I wouldn't mind seeing the Scary Stacks," Sarah muttered, rolling her eyes.

"Thanks for the offer," Chuck said, "but tradition has it that you have to do it in your final semester of your senior year and—who-what?" He shook his head as if to clear water from it. "Did you just—"

Casey snapped his fingers to get their attention. "Keep it in your pants, Walker. Bartowski, why the hell are we just standing here?"

"What? Oh, right. Just need to see where we are." Even while his mind whirled, threatening to show him the images of Sarah that were now permanently locked into his brainfile, Chuck looked around the library. He all but smacked his forehead with his palm when he realized it. "I'm an idiot."

"What'd you do now?" Casey immediately growled.

Chuck simply reached forward, felt for the hidden catch under the bookshelf about chest height. It gave without protest and the data disk tumbled into his palm. "Ta-da."

"That's it?" Casey asked, snatching the disk from Chuck's fingers.

"I know, rather anticlimactic, isn't it?" Chuck stooped so that he could check the rest of the dumpsite, hoping to find something else—anything else. He and Bryce had never used their dumpsites to leave messages for each other, but then again, neither he nor Bryce had ever turned traitor without any explanation whatsoever. There was a first time for everything.

The dumpsite was empty. Not even a dart for old times' sake. Chuck fought back a bitter wash of disappointment.

"Okay, then. If only all of them were this easy." Sarah reached around Chuck to close up the trapdoor under the shelf. "Let's head back to the football game."

"Oh, joy."

They fell into step as they headed back toward the stairs, taking the same convoluted route they'd used to get to the dumpsite. Maybe it was the big game going on across campus, or the fact that it was Saturday night, but the library was almost barren of all signs of life. Of course, Chuck thought, there was probably some solitary geek sitting up in a study carrel on the fourth floor that probably wouldn't leave until the security guard made his final pre-closing rounds.

He wondered if Kevin was still on duty on Saturday nights.

When Sarah grabbed his arm before the final turn to the stairs, he froze on instinct. "What? What is it?"

"Shh." She cocked her head, listening for something he'd never be able to hear. The woman had ears like a bat.

On Chuck's other side, Casey drew his weapon. Chuck didn't reach for the tranq gun—not with Sarah so close by. He'd take his chances with the enemy and being a quick draw during his dart gun wars with Bryce.

"Get low," Sarah ordered, pushing on Chuck's shoulder to ensure that he obeyed. She nodded at Casey; he moved to the end of the aisle, his boots making no noise on the carpet. Chuck crouched, trying to peer through the shelves while above him, Sarah eased books aside to give herself a small window. She swore just loud enough for Chuck to hear.

"What is it?" he hissed.

Sarah ignored him to signal to Casey. After a moment, Chuck dragged out his memory banks and interpreted the signal from his training at Officer Candidate School. Eight men, incoming. Armed. Magnus Ragnhildur with them, of course. Casey rolled his eyes and signaled something back that Chuck couldn't interpret. Something rude, he figured, as the finger Sarah shot back at Casey didn't strike Chuck as being an official tactical signal.

So they were on a level in Green Library with Magnus and seven armed mercenaries. That was just fantastic. Chuck peered through the shelves, moving books to one side as Sarah had. If he squinted, he could make out a set of combat boots guarding the stairs—and their escape route.

He pulled the tranq gun out and offered it to Sarah, gesturing in the guard's direction with his free hand. She shook her head and cupped a hand around her ear. Too loud.

Well, in that case…

Chuck signaled to Casey and tried to sign that he had an idea. Unfortunately, he'd always sucked at charades, a point that was driven home when Casey stalked back and grabbed him by the throat. "Speak, idiot!" he hissed.

"I know a way out," Chuck said, trying to keep his voice down. 'There's an emergency staircase in the back. We can go around the main staircase to the fourth floor—I know how to bypass the alarm on that door."

Sarah and Casey glanced at each other and shrugged. "Lead the way, numb-nuts."

They had to sneak around to the opposite side of the staircase, which unfortunately only led up, but at least Magnus hadn't thought to post a guard there as well. Chuck's heart pounded loud enough to drown out an entire drum corps on speed, but none of Magnus's men seemed to hear them. He focused his attention forward, on getting up the stairs. Sarah and Casey would protect him. They would finish getting up the stairs, Chuck would rig the door just like he used to back in school, and they would simply stroll out of the library as though nothing had happened.

Nice and easy. Simple even.

Too bad the universe hated him.

"Hey!" The shout stopped him halfway up the stairs.

Chuck froze. Sarah didn't. She whirled on the spot, a knife suddenly in hand. A flick of her wrist and that same knife sprouted from the guard's shoulder a millisecond later. Chuck didn't get a chance to stare, for Casey hauled on his arm, pulling him up the stairs. He had the choice of going along or being dragged.

He went along.

Footsteps pounded behind them, drowning out the guard's swearing. Chuck got a brief, hysterical flash of some librarian trying to shush a band of mercenaries. At the top of the stairs, he and Casey went left, Sarah headed right. "Sarah!" Chuck cried, trying to turn and follow.

Casey, however, was having none of that. He grabbed Chuck by the scruff of the neck and hauled. "She'll be fine, let's go." They headed deep into the stacks, out of sight of their pursuers. "Which way?"

"Um…" He lost precious seconds looking around and orienting himself. "This way!"

Hopefully, somewhere else in the library, Sarah had developed a mental connection that allowed her to find the door. Or, better yet, evade the bad guys, maybe take out a few, and beat Chuck and Casey to the door. Chuck could hear said bad guys tromping around, looking for him and Casey. But they didn't have his skill with treating this library as a war zone or even Casey's commando abilities. He led Casey up rows of shelves, ducking behind endcaps and—

"You do realize that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, don't you?" Casey grabbed Chuck by the arm. "Door. Now. Go."

Chuck shrugged, turned, and started to sprint.

Started to. He managed a few running steps before one of Magnus's thugs rounded the corner and pointed a gun right at his chest.

Chuck froze on the spot.

If anything, they'd startled the mercenary just as much. He shifted his grip on the gun, his eyes shifting from Chuck to the armed Casey, and opened his mouth, possibly to alert the others.

Chuck felt like some sort of puppet-master had taken hold of the strings jerking him around. Before he realized exactly what he was doing, he lurched forward, swept out his left hand in a blade stroke, knocking the gun away. His right hand swung up with a hard right cross. It caught the guard right on the side of his jaw.

Bad idea.

The guard dropped like a rock.

Chuck's hand exploded at the contact of broken and damaged skin to the guard's face. He sucked in a gasp, ready to let out a scream of pain—

Casey slapped a hand over his mouth. "Keep it inside! You'll give us away!"

It took every bit of willpower Chuck possessed, but he swallowed his scream, a new layer of sweat popping up on his skin from the effort. His hand throbbed. It felt exactly as though somebody had taken a hot iron to it and pressed so hard that he could all but smell the burning flesh. Every heartbeat flooded fresh pain into his knuckles. He gritted his teeth and slowly forced the pain to recede, inch by slippery inch, until his brain could function again.

"Good?" Casey demanded.

When Chuck nodded, the other man removed his hand.

"Good. Now tell me where the hell you learned how to throw a punch like that."

"Mortal Kombat," Chuck whispered, his voice raspy. "Or Army OCS. I forgot how much it hurts!" Especially with torn knuckles.

Before Casey could reply, another thug came around the corner. They blinked at him in shock. He blinked back.

The roundhouse caught them all by surprise, the guard most of all. He was still wearing the shocked look as he fell and landed on his buddy.

Sarah appeared in the space he'd been standing in. She took in Casey, Chuck holding his injured hand, and the first unconscious guard on the carpet. "What the hell?"

"No time. Let's move." Casey grabbed Chuck, pointed him in the direction they'd been traveling earlier, and shoved. Chuck stumbled forward, already running. They were nearing the door, he knew, which was out of the way from the rest of the library, but situated on the perfect corner in relation to his dorm. Without rigging the door, he'd have to walk an extra three blocks back to his dorm.

He thanked his lucky stars he'd been so lazy back in the day.

"We've got company!" Sarah warned, her voice still only loud enough to carry to him and Casey. Indeed, Chuck could see black blurs through the shelves as they ran—Magnus's men running alongside them. They'd be out in the open in less than five seconds. On the other side of the gap, they'd head into the older, wooden shelves that extended far over their heads and provided a better cover.

They just had to get there first. Chuck stretched his legs out just a bit farther.

They split up when they hit the older shelves. Sarah sprinted off to the left, while Casey stayed right on Chuck's heels. He pushed a hand up against Chuck's back to keep him running. "She's going to circle around, take them out. Keep moving!"

They were still outnumbered six to two. Two to one, really, Chuck thought, his brain automatically simplifying the fraction. Well, it was two to one as far as he was concerned. With Sarah and Casey being as supremely powerful as they were, it was more like a one to one ratio.

"Wait a second." Casey held up a hand. Halt. Panting, Chuck did so. "Something's off."

"What? What is it?"

"They've got us surrounded." Casey squinted around, but neither of them could see anything through the shelves. "Get ready to shoot, and get low. This could get ugly quick."

"Or we could go up," Chuck said foggily, craning his neck.

"What?"

"Up!" Without bothering to explain, Chuck scrambled up the nearest bookshelf, kicking books aside in his haste, and still trying to be quiet. It wobbled dangerously, but the weight of the ancient textbooks kept it anchored enough that he could climb to the top. Casey may have started to ask what the hell he was thinking, but they both heard the footsteps approaching. His eyes widened; he scaled the shelf opposite Chuck and crouched, one finger over his mouth—as if Chuck were going to intentionally make noise and give away their position.

Now what? Chuck wondered.

Casey seemed to read his mind. He gestured at his gun and then at Chuck. It took Chuck a couple of seconds to catch on. He fumbled for the tranq gun, glad for the modifications Casey had made to the grip for sweaty hands. He couldn't stop the small, sardonic grin. Still playing dart guns in the library after all of these years.

Only this time, losing meant dying.

Eek.

The footsteps drew nearer. Casey held up a hand: hold still. Neither moved as one of the thugs walked down the aisle, gun out, a mere four feet below them. He peered left and right, as if they could have hidden inside the shelves, but never up. Still, Chuck held his breath until the thug rounded the corner.

One scary situation down. Millions to go.

He turned to Casey to hiss, "Now what do we do?" He never got the chance.

A feminine grunt, possibly of pain or surprise, rang out through the stacks. Chuck jolted to his feet.

"Chuck!" Casey hissed, glaring. "Stay put!"

"It's Sarah!"

"Shut up, and stay there. Walker can handle herself!"

Chuck glared. "She shouldn't have to!" And before Casey could reach across the space and grab him, he took off running down the shelf, his chucks sliding in the dust. He hopped the first set of shelves before he could think to psych himself out. The quiet thump that followed meant that Casey was still right on his heels. Chuck ran for the next gap.

"Hey!"

They'd been spotted. Crap.

Chuck ran faster. Behind him, he heard an ominous thud, but no gunshot. He risked a few seconds to glance back, spotted Casey on the ground standing over the thug that had seen them. "Go, Bartowski!"

Okay, Casey had it handled. Chuck hopped the next shelf, wobbled when he misjudged the landing a little bit, and began sprinting again. He didn't think he'd moved this fast in Green Library since he'd misread the due date on his quarterly final paper his sophomore year. And back then, he wouldn't have dreamed of running across the tops of the shelves like he was right now. He probably would've been expelled.

As if you could expel Chuck Bartowski, model student.

He was pretty sure Sarah was up ahead to the left, but she hadn't made any noise past the first grunt, so all he could do was pray that he had been right. He ran hard. One more shelf to hop…

And there she was, not in any distress or pain, but in constant, fluid motion. A killing machine, almost. It was Sarah Walker versus three of Magnus's thugs, and it was obvious from only a glance which side was the outnumbered one.

Chuck skidded to a halt. Kung fu goddess, he thought, all but gaping. How on earth did she know where to be when? She moved with such ease, dodging, sidestepping, evading, attacking. A short punch to the gut there, a high-kick to the face. It was like a mortal dance to some instinctive, fierce music that nobody but the battle participants could hear.

A roundhouse, beautifully executed. One thug down, two to go.

It was obvious after just a few seconds that the thugs weren't the masters of the martial arts. Street fighters, Chuck would have called them, minus the weird hair-dos and, oh, the Asian influence. They fought dirty, mean. One got in what Chuck decided was a lucky hit. Sarah's head snapped back—she stumbled back, apparently temporarily stunned—

Something nearby Chuck growled. An actual animal noise of fury. It took him a second to realize that the noise was coming from him.

He launched himself from the top of the shelf, arcing through the air, intending only to take out the one who had hurt Sarah, vengeance burning hot.

He missed completely. Maybe the thug saw him coming, maybe it was just bad luck. Either way, the thug side-stepped. Chuck landed on his feet, tripped forward, and went down to his hands and knees.

The thugs stared.

Sarah didn't. She let out some kind of high-pitched kung fu yell and whirled into yet another textbook roundhouse kick. Thug One fell. A left cross and Thug Two joined his pal on the ground.

In an instant, Sarah was crouched next to Chuck, helping pull him to his feet. "Oh, my God, are you okay? What on earth were you thinking? You could have broken your leg!"

"Or your fool neck," Casey added as he came around the corner, limping slightly.

"Only thing hurt is my pride," Chuck assured them both, though his hand was still killing him from the punch. "I was trying to help."

"Next time, you should stay put. I can handle this sort of thing." Sarah smiled apologetically at him, just a flicker, and turned her attention to the unconscious bodies on the ground. "Okay, that makes five that I took out, and the one that Chuck did."

"I got one, too," Casey said, looking put out that he and Chuck had managed to neutralize the same number.

"So you didn't take out Magnus?" Sarah asked him.

"No, I—"

"Get down!" A glint in the corner of his eye was all that Chuck needed. He fell forward more than dove, taking Sarah with him. They landed with a gust of air and a tangle of limbs.

The crossbow bolt thudded into the shelf where Sarah's head had been nanoseconds before.

They both stared at it.

Sarah recovered first, shoving Chuck off of her. She hauled him away from the target zone, using her body to cover his from any further fire. He would have protested, but she had already dragged him out of danger by the time his brain connected the dots. He could only be grateful that the crossbow took so long to reload. Though it did bring up an important question.

"Which country on the planet would send their spies out armed with a crossbow? Florin?" Chuck demanded once he, Sarah, and Casey were all safe behind a shelf. Sarah and Casey were both on one knee, guns out and trained on both possible exits from their barricade.

"Iceland," Sarah said.

Chuck blinked. "We're up against an Icelandic spy?"

"Well, officially, Iceland is unaware of Magnus's activities." Casey rolled his eyes, not at Chuck but at the unseen Magnus. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the disk, pushing it at Chuck. "Take that. Walker, make sure he gets to the door and then come back and help me with scene clean-up. I'm going to go take out Magnus."

Chuck stuffed the data disk in his pocket. When Sarah jerked her head, indicating that he should follow her, he went without question. Sarah and Casey had once again risen to save the day. Casey waited until they were at the opposite end of the aisle before he crouched low and sneaked around the corner, out of sight.

He'd be okay, Chuck thought. It would take a hell of a lot more than a crossbow to stop an angry John Casey. And no way was he letting Magnus Ragnhildur get away when doing so meant that he only took out as many bad guys as pathetic Chuck Bartowski.

"Which way?" Sarah whispered.

Chuck edged by her to lead the way. She had her gun holstered, not that it mattered. Anybody on the fourth floor would have heard all of the running and fighting, which was louder than it always seemed on TV. One thing was certain: the CIA and the NSA would definitely have to confiscate all of the security camera footage from the library if they wanted to hide the identities of two of their top agents and their Intersect. It was probably a useless idea. If he knew the students on duty, the library techs would all be watching right now with popcorn. And later, they'd try to sell it on the Internet.

Tuition didn't come cheap these days, after all.

He led Sarah to the door without any further trouble. She stood guard as he knelt by the door, rigging it not to set off the fire alarm. It took him less than a minute to remember the proper sequence. He looked up at her with a grin, but she simply nodded and pulled him to his feet. "Go," she whispered. "Head back to the football game, stay with Ellie and the others. You'll be okay." Her expression told him she expected nothing less. He straightened a little bit. "I'll be there as soon as the scene is wrapped."

"Sarah, Magnus is—"

"Casey and I will be fine," Sarah said.

"Okay." When she put it like that, he had no choice but to believe her.

"If you run into any trouble, anything at all, I want you to press the panic button on your watch and immediately head for the most public area you can find, okay? I will find you." Sarah met his eyes and waited until he nodded back to show that he understood what she wasn't saying. "Go."

"Yes, ma'am." Chuck pushed the door open. Halfway through it, he stopped and glanced over his shoulder. "Stay safe."

"You too."

She waited until he was in the stairwell and safe from Magnus. As he headed downstairs, he glanced back and saw her take off, hurrying to back up her partner, the Intersect and the mission objective now out of danger.

10 NOVEMBER 2007
AUXILIARY LIBRARY
20:49 PST


He knew that he should listen to Sarah and go right back to the football game. In fact, he'd stood outside of the stadium with every intent and purpose of obeying for what felt like a good half hour. But somewhere inside that stadium was Jill Roberts, ex-girlfriend, and just one of thousands of people. Thousands of people, Chuck knew, that he could embarrass himself in front of. Thousands of people that he was just too tired to face.

So he'd gone to the nearest safe haven—well, safe haven that wasn't Sarah Walker. He was under no illusions there. Because she wasn't right next to him, he could admit it. His panic attacks were less severe or, really, nonexistent whenever she was around. She'd saved him, after all, from fading into obscurity in a frozen bunker five hundred miles south of nowhere. She'd been his only source of strength for one very terrifying week on the run, and she continued to be a sort of beautiful, blonde crutch to lean on. He should return the favor by heeding her orders and pretending to be a good little Stanford fan in a game they were probably losing anyway.

Instead, he swiped his ID at the door of Auxiliary Library (though it was just a useless gesture; the sole library worker on duty didn't even look up from her magazine) and headed into the stacks. This was where all of the unloved, unnecessary books lived. Overflow library, auxiliary library. Superfluous. Whatever the word for it was, Chuck had always felt kind of at home here.

Plus, it was empty, and quiet. The shelves were crammed close together, giving it a cramped feeling. He could finally breathe again.

When his pocket buzzed, he braced himself, expecting that Sarah had made it back to the game and was now furious that he hadn't listened to her.

It was Ellie's face on the view-screen.

"Hey, sis," he said, keeping his voice low only because it was a library. It wasn't like anybody was around to hear him, but some habits died hard. "What's up?"

Football game noise flooded in when she answered. "Where are you?"

"Uh…"

"Are you coming back to the game?" Ellie went on, ignoring his non-answer.

"I…" Chuck trailed off. He didn't want to lie to his sister, but he couldn't really say whether or not he would physically be able to go back into the stadium, and he had no idea how long it would take for Casey and Sarah to finish cleaning up in the library so that Sarah could make him. "I don't know."

"Why not?" Ellie sounded suspicious, which wasn't an abnormal setting for her these days. "Is Sarah with you?"

Now he would have to lie, or else confess that his "office manager" was currently cable-tying unconscious thugs in the library across campus. "Uh, she ran into some old friends from Harvard and they went for coffee. I told her I'd make the excuses for you."

"Okay, so if Sarah's not with you, where are you, then?"

Chuck looked around at the tall, crowded shelves around him, lit only dimly because the Auxiliary Library always had terrible lighting. "I'm…in the library," he finally confessed. "I'm kind of hiding out."

"Which one?"

"What?"

"Which library are you in? I'll come hang out with you." The noise level on Ellie's end of the line grew—somebody had either scored a touch down or a first down, apparently. "I'm kind of footballed out, it'd be a nice break."

Chuck squinted at the shelf in front of him, as though he could see his sister through some magical scrying pool located there. Had she somehow picked up on the fact that he couldn't go back to the game? She'd always been the savior type, whether it was taking the blame for the time Chuck disassembled the vacuum cleaner or taking over the parenting duties when their father had vanished. Was she rescuing him again?

Probably. He was too tired to mind.

So he gave her directions. They hung up, Ellie promising she would be there within fifteen minutes. Chuck pocketed his phone and headed up to the second level, where there weren't any cameras. He moved by instinct toward the back right-hand corner. There'd been a sagging comfortable chair there back when he was a student, excellent for napping between classes.

It was still there. Chuck felt a little spurt of happiness.

He bypassed the chair, heading instead for the shelf to its right. He could only hope they hadn't rearranged the shelves in the past five years…

They hadn't. The catch was still there. Chuck twisted it, glanced around to make sure he was truly alone, and knocked his elbow covertly against the shelf, just once. The trapdoor opened easily.

He'd modeled his dumpsite just like Bryce's, a little drawer that could hold quite a bit when it needed to, virtually undetectable. One just had to know exactly where it was. He hoped that Professor Fleming hadn't messed with it.

The two things he'd left inside had been untouched by everything except dust. Reverently, he pulled out the first item. His back-up deck for Magic: The Gathering, perfectly aligned to fight any foe, large or small. He'd spent hours selecting just the right mix. It even felt familiar as he paged through, smiling as each card brought on memories of some of the epic tournaments he and Bryce had participated in.

The second item was a lot smaller and held ten times the emotional punch. He pulled it out and squinted, rubbing the dust off on the hem of his shirt. It was smaller than he remembered, just a little twist of metal. He'd intended to use it five years before, before he'd shipped off to OCS, but the right situation had never come up.

And now, Chuck thought, it never would.

He tucked the ring in his pocket when he heard footsteps, double-checking to make sure the trapdoor was closed. Ellie came around the corner to find him sprawled over the chair.

"Should have known I'd find my little brother hanging out in the library on a Saturday night with a deck of cards," she said, smiling a little.

Chuck shifted his legs so that she could sit on the arm of the chair. "I just love the smell of dusty books. And magic." He waggled the cards.

"Good to know some things never change."

"Who's winning?" Chuck asked, flipping to the next card.

"Stanford."

Chuck blinked. "What? That can't be right."

"Yeah, Devon's a little put out by it." Ellie ruffled his hair. She and Sarah were probably the only ones on the planet that could get away with that without him flinching. "But your alma mater is on fire today, so there's not much he can do about it."

"I'll have to buy him a beer," Chuck mused. "And rub it in his face."

Ellie let that go with a smile. "Chuck…"

Chuck glanced up. That was his sister's serious voice, the one she'd used to break the news to him first that their mother had left, then their father. She had something on her mind.

"What's up?" he asked, purposely keeping his voice casual. Inwardly, he tensed.

"You didn't leave the football game because you wanted to show Sarah around campus, did you?"

Ellie kept her eyes level on his, making it impossible to look away. Chuck stared back, frantically hoping that his poker face was coming along. He'd out-bluffed the government in Athens with that code and video file, but the government had nothing on Ellie Bartowski. There was no way in hell he could tell her that he had been running a mission to retrieve intel stupidly left around by his old CIA recruiter. So once again, he would have to lie to his sister. "El…"

"You left," Ellie said, her gaze steady, "because you were having a panic attack and Sarah noticed it."

It hadn't been a panic attack so much as his entire body threatening to shut down on him. But Chuck stared at his sister. He thought he'd hidden it pretty well. Who had he been kidding? Ellie and Awesome were doctors, trained to notice details about reactions in case their patients couldn't or wouldn't talk to them. Even the most unobservant person could see the nice coat of sweat he put on to go outside.

"Look, I know you can't tell me anything about what you do now, or what the government did to you to give you PTSD. There are days where I'm just so happy to have you back that I don't care that I can't know. But there is one thing I do feel like you owe me to stop lying about."

Oh, God. She knew. She somehow knew that Chuck had faced down a crossbow-toting Icelandic spy in the library. And now she was going to kill him for going near anything dangerous.

"About Sarah," Ellie went on.

Chuck blinked. "What?"

Ellie regarded him steadily. This Ellie would not accept a lie, a half-truth, or an evasion. This was an Ellie that Chuck remembered well. This was also an Ellie that Chuck was powerless against.

"So," she said, "which government agency does Sarah work for, Chuck?"

Oh, crap.

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