The Love Boat

A/N: You’re back? You realize this will be fluff and shenanigans, right? You realize if you get die a betes, it’s because you have ignored the warnings. It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these and I HOPE I still got it.

Disclaimer: I don’t own Chuck

Then, [redacted]

It had been a trap. She was walking down the street, glad she had taken extra precautions. She had created a disguise. Her father rarely used them, telling her, that if you did, it was your gut telling you that you were in a no-win situation.

He had called it The Kobayashi Maru. She had later found out he hadn’t created that name, it was from some TV show about space and stars and journeys or something. It was all a bunch of nonsense. But what she did know was how The Kobayashi Maru was beaten. You didn’t. You had to change the game. She had looked at the meet from every angle she could and decided that if it went south, the only hope was she wasn’t identified.

She knew that high tech cameras could probably work their way through the disguises but she also knew that using those devices could put the users at risk of being found out. She didn’t know the ins and outs of all the tech, but she knew enough. She knew it like she knew TV. She didn’t understand how the satellite worked, but she knew how to turn on the TV and get what she needed to see.

She had on a wig, padded clothing that made her look bigger than she was.. Sunglasses to hide her eyes and a prosthetic mask to change some of her features. And now, she was being corralled. She was catching enough glimpses of the men tracking her to know she was being herded. To the docks. There was one passenger boat at the dock. People were milling about and it seemed like while the boat would be leaving soon, people were going off and on. No one was checking to see who belonged. That was her shot.

She glanced toward the cafe and saw a tall man squatting, picking up a doll a little girl had dropped and offering it to her. His height was useful. His T-shirt said, Obey, gravity, it's the law. That wasn't particularly useful. Neither were the Chuck Taylors on his feet. The child grabbed the doll and threw her arms around the man’s neck. He stood, hugged a woman, who looked to be the mother of the child, and then was grabbed in a bear hug by the man with the woman and the child. Sarah headed toward the cafe. She had to get out of this disguise and then onto that boat. That was her only shot and it wasn’t much of a shot.

His shirt was ridiculous.

His shoes were worse.

He was still her best option.

She knew she couldn’t feel the USB drive burning against her skin, where it hung on a necklace, but somehow she could. She had known the meet was wrong, and she didn’t know what told her to take cover, but she had, as a bullet ended the life of her contact. She had hurried into the open, knowing that they wanted her captured. They could have already ended her.

If they caught her, eventually they would kill her. She had always known that dying was possible, that wasn’t what scared her. What scared her was the part between catching and the dying.

She saw the man head into the cafe and toward the restrooms. She made a calculated decision in a split second that she would spend the rest of her life playing in her mind. The look in the child’s eyes when the man had squatted, picked up her doll, and handed it to her. It was a simple thing.

But it wasn’t.

It was someone who was tall. Someone who knew he was, and bent down to a child’s height. In a day where every calculation was one to stay alive, that…simple action…told her it was her best hope.

He had stopped for a child.

Not because anyone was watching.

Not because there was anything in it for him.

He had simply seen a little girl lose something and decided that fixing the problem mattered.

He was a good man.

She knew that.

She couldn’t tell you how she knew that, but she knew that.

She didn't know how he'd changed the calculus. She only knew that, somewhere in the back of her mind, a quote from The Princess Bride surfaced.

I mean, if we only had a wheelbarrow, that would be something.

He was her wheelbarrow.

It made absolutely no sense.

It made perfect sense.

She followed him into the cafe, her stride lengthening. She had one shot at this, as he rounded the corner to enter the restroom, she saw no one else was in the hallway, and no one could see her. He opened the door, entered and she walked in right behind him.

She saw his eyes go wide. It would have been comical if her life wasn’t in danger.

“I need your help,” she blurted out. “There are men following me.”

He glanced toward the door, suddenly looking alarmed.

“Oh.”

A pause.

“That's probably bad, right?”

Sarah stared at him.

He was her wheelbarrow.

}o{

Now

“You know the biggest regret of us getting married?” Chuck asked. Sarah turned to him, a knowing smile on her face. Langston did too. There was hope there. “And maybe regret is the wrong word, because I have no regrets. Maybe it’s more of a-”

She laid her hand on his leg and simply said, “Chuck.”

He stopped rambling and cleared his throat. “Right. As I was saying, I love the swoop you used when you wrote the “l” in Walker.” Langston stared at Chuck like he was a being from another planet.

“I want to be a Bartowski,” she said simply.

“And I want you to be whatever you want, it’s just…I liked that ‘l’,” Chuck said with a shrug.

“Well, my middle name is Lisa,’ Sarah told him. Langston’s eyes bugged out of his head. She knew that would set him off. Her giving Chuck her real middle name. “I could be Sarah L Bartowski.”

“And while I appreciate you trying to do that for me,” Chuck told her. “A capital ‘L’ and a lowercase ‘l’ just look different in cursive.”

“They do,” Sarah agreed.

“I guess anytime I write anything to you with my name on it, I’ll just have to write love you in lower case letters after it so you can see my ‘l’,” Sarah told him. Chuck looked so happy he could have melted off the chair and puddled into a bucket.

Langston looked from Chuck to Sarah. “HIM?” he asked, pointing at Chuck.

“Yes,” Sarah said, her eyes flashing. “Him. The man I love.”

Langston wondered if this day could get worse.

A/N: Such angst….how will we make it? See you soon.