A/N: This novella begins in canon and then divagates, becomes canon-ish-ish (there will be some canon call-backs and revisitations).

Beckster1213 got me thinking about this idea (he asked me if I had any S3 plots in mind), although he is blameless for what's on your screen.

I have flirted with first-person narration in various places — e.g., Cables, MisEd. Smatterchoo's Guy — a story I am enjoying — got me thinking about it again, and I have never really done it with Chuck, only with Sarah. So, here we begin a deep dive into Chuck's first-person POV.

It is important to bear in mind that although this is all firmly lodged within Chuck's POV, it reflects his moment-to-moment (mis)understanding of himself and his across-moments attempts to correct or improve that self-(mis)understanding. In other words, although it is first-person, the narration will be nonetheless obscured and shadowed by misunderstandings and self-deceptions and so on. No one, especially not Chuck at this point in canon, is transparent to himself or herself. We are all puzzles to ourselves. Add the Intersect and...

I take Chuck to be smart. But I am not just going to say that and then have him do some unexplained computer stuff (while otherwise acting like a dull-witted teen). I will embody it in his thoughts and in his actions. He'll be doing his grown-up best. So, hang on. It's going to get complicated in his head at times.

Part of what I want to accomplish here is to tell a sub-story — anchored in canon if not canon — about what having the Intersect might actually be like. So, a fair amount of space will be devoted to that sub-story, to Chuck's attempts not only to understand himself but to understand the Intersect — and himself with the Intersect.

This chapter is a prelude. The story proper begins in the next chapter.

Nothing Like A Train

Chapter One: Pity and Love

I am able to slip away from the base where Beckman's been training me. Less than successfully.

No, that's not true. That suggests that I am somewhere on a continuum that has success as one pole, failure as the other. But it isn't true. I've never made it as far as the failure pole. I am not even that much of a success. I am a super flop, not a superspy. I might as well be honest about it.

Failure. My not-so-new friend. She's been sleeping on the floor of my life forever and now she follows me each day to the door. I must be a fucking hoot, a sideshow, making her feel like success by comparison.

Failure. I feel too much — and then the Intersect slows, resists me, like a computer with an overtaxed memory, fatigued RAM. I keep hitting Enter but nothing happens. If I were a Mac, that damn spinning colored beach ball would have been spinning since I got here, to Europe, to Prague. Chuck not responding. Chuck not responding. I need to shut Chuck down, restart him, clear his memory.

But I can't. It's not who I am. And it's also because of her. Her memory has kept me going even as it has tormented me. Sarah. Sarah Walker. My handler. My cover girlfriend. Maybe my real girlfriend. My cover real girlfriend. My real cover girlfriend.

Bryce said she was going to stay, as he lay dying, he admitted that to me. I didn't believe him there, or maybe I did and didn't know it, but I do now.

She asked me to run. She wants me out of this life. When she asked me, it was what I believed I wanted too. Or maybe I didn't and didn't know it. Since coming here, despite the failures, I have some sense of what success could be. I could help. Emerge fully from the safety of the Nerd Herd and make a difference. Like Ellie. Like Sarah.

If I run, I run with her, and I want that so bad it's like a toothache in my entire body. A 6' 4" cavity waiting to be Sarah-filled. It's been that way since she danced with me that first night. Ok, not with me — around me. I can't let myself think about that or I'll never do what I have to do.

I get in a cab to the train station. The Intersect supplies foreign words to the driver. As so often since getting this new Intersect, I feel like I am the dummy and it's the Intersect's lifeless hand on my broomstick, my spinal cord, pulling the control chains, moving my head, my eyes, my mouth. My mouth. The words I speak I understand but they do not seem mine. They belong to something else.

And that's the problem. What's mine. Right now, and for the past seven years, what's mine has been...failure. The employee of the Month at the Buy More: the emblem of my failure. The Buy More. I love Morgan but what the hell was I doing there all these years? I've been a coward and a failure. Honestly.

And I can't be those anymore. Or, if I am, it won't be because I hid in a green and gold box store, hid behind a Nerd Herd desk. I have to give this a real shot. It's too important, the difference I could make is too important.

But she's so deep inside me. And I want her so much. But each failure here has made me more sure that I can't let myself have her. I have to let her go. I can't get on that train with her.

I can't saddle her with a failure. She's carried me for two years. If I go, with the Intersect in my head and unable to make it work, she will eventually understand what I am and may always be where she is concerned: dead weight. She said I could have everything I want, she's said that a couple of times. She included herself, I'm pretty sure she included herself and meant me to know it. But I can't have her as a prize for participation. I want to win her. Win her. But I can't tell her all that. It would be an adult replay of sickening junior high moments, where I tried to get the girl I liked to like me by trying to get her to pity me. How stupid can a kid be? I can do induction, could do it, even then, and it never worked once. But I kept at it, digging a hole when I thought I was building a tower.

Pity and love don't mix, not the kind of love I want from Sarah. I want her to want me, the way I want her, the way she wanted me in Barstow, when she kissed me in Burbank. She says I'm a hero — but maybe I've just been lucky, propped up by her and by Casey. How can a hero be rotted through with codependency? I'm a hero who never stood on his own two feet. I'm a Buy More Quixote to Sarah's beautified CIA Panza. Or maybe Casey is Panza, not beautified, but taller?

The cab moves slowly in Prague traffic, almost as slowly as my thoughts move in my head. Ever since the new Intersect, each of my thoughts seems sticky, gluey, as if it wanted to just stay affixed, lodged in the forefront of my consciousness. My thoughts don't seem to come at my beck and call anymore. And my emotions confuse me: I have them, feel them, and yet they feel wrong somehow, inappropriate no matter which emotion I feel or when I feel it. I sometimes feel like I am having someone else's emotions and he...or she...is having mine. Like a weird body-switch movie. I used to be able to talk about my emotions and feel them at the same time. In fact, talking about them helped me to feel them more clearly, understand them. But I've been finding it harder and harder to talk about my feelings. It's like I've lost a crucial part of my vocabulary, as if words are missing and all I have is the raw feeling, felt but unrecognized, unthought. I used to think what I felt and feel what I thought. But the Intersect it seems is...distancing me from me, dissociating my sensibility. — Huh, never thought I'd have a use for that T. S. Eliot line.

I don't know why that Stanford poetry class keeps coming back to me so often.

Maybe because I miss Sarah the way an amputee misses the amputated limb.

But that's the problem, right? Codependency. Maybe it would be okay if we were codependent together, but that's not going to be the way it works. Sarah is never going to be codependent on anyone. She's Sarah Walker. She doesn't work that way. She doesn't need me to hold her up. She's fine without me. I'm a failure without her. So far.

Pity and love don't mix.

If I go, she'll eventually pity me. I'm broken and I don't know how to fix myself. That I'm broken isn't exactly my fault but that doesn't fix the brokenness. Maybe Beckman can fix me, maybe this training can fix me. Straighten up my thoughts and feelings, make the Intersect mine to command. I want this for the right reasons. I do.

I do.

But I want her more than I want my next breath. And knowing I was going to have to make this choice — that's part of the reason I keep failing, I think. The thought of giving her up when she is, at last, giving herself to me, that has made me nauseated and kept me from sleeping. I can't eat and I can't sleep and I can't make the Intersect work.

I have to make it work. Make me work. I have to make a difference.

Failure. Too much damn failure for too long. Sarah deserves a man who is a success, the way she is a success.

I love you, Sarah Walker, even if the feeling seems distant, I know I do, and I'm going to say no to you, goodbye to you. I will perform my own final amputation: only a fool has himself for a surgeon. I hand myself the scalpel.

The cab stops at the station. I pay and step out, a stiff, cold breeze blowing in my face as I look for the right platform. I want to see her and I dread seeing her.

This is the hardest thing I have ever done. I can't fail at it. No more failure, even if it kills me.

I feel...something, so much of something, but I don't know what to call it. I hear the announcements on the loudspeaker, and the Intersect understands.

A/N: We now begin the first arc of the novella: Arrivals, Departures, and Arrivals.