A/N: And so, the end of this story and the end of my Christmas stories. Promise!

A Roman Holiday

Chapter 5: Verum Est, Blue

December 23rd
The office of Metamorphoses Software
Burbank, California

Ellie Bartowski — no, no, Ellie Woodcomb, Chuck reminded himself — blew out a breath and put her booted feet on Chuck's desk. His sister married Devon Woodcomb (finally!) in late August. She was still beaming about it and it made Chuck feel good, even if it also cost him some melancholy.

He had been dreading Christmas, dreading this day, Christmas Eve Eve, and Ellie, intuiting his mood, had taken him out to breakfast. They had stuffed themselves on pancakes and were now sitting in Chuck's office, nursing to-go coffees their waitress had insisted they take. Ellie had a hospital shift coming up, but it was not until later, and she seemed content to spend time with her little brother, the boy she had more-or-less raised after their parents died. Her husband, a cardiac surgeon, was already on-shift at the hospital. He would come home around the time Ellie left. Doctors, crazy hours.

"So, Chuck," Ellie said, "there's this new CNA at the hospital. She's been working with some of my patients for a while. She's nice…cute..."

"Ellie," Chuck said, doing his best not to sound impatient, he knew she meant well, "we've tried this before. I'm not interested in dating. You have great taste, but we've tried this and it doesn't work. I'm just too...busy."

"Chuck," Ellie said, elongating the vowel sound in his name, "I know the problem is not business. The problem was...is...that Roman holiday." Ellie put her feet down and leaned toward Chuck, her serious concern showing on her face. "You've never been the same since you got home, Chuck. Some of the changes I applaud. Canning the Buy More, starting this place, working like crazy to make something of it in less than a year. Getting your own apartment. All good changes, Chuck, and, well, too long in coming. But there's a shadow following you around, a shadow on your heart, and you won't tell me what it is, why it is. But I know it happened in Rome. What did that city do to you, little brother?"

Chuck blew out a breath of his own. He rotated all the way around in his desk chair, just to get a moment away from Ellie's penetrating gaze. She saw too much, his sister. As his chair turned, Chuck looked at the photo on the wall behind his desk, the only photograph in his office. After leaving Sarah, and before leaving Rome, he had gone through Trastevere and taken photographs of the places they had been together. He had been able to go to Antonio's restaurant one morning, before it opened, and take a picture of the table he and Sarah sat at when they had dinner. The photograph had turned out well, the morning sun lighting up the yellow-checked tablecloth, the ochre walls. The chairs were empty.

Chuck had lost a lot of time gazing at the picture since he took the offices and hung the enlarged photograph in July. It was fair to say that a part of him was still at that table, with her, in Rome.

He had done as she asked. He left the hospital and he did not go back. He spent the rest of his holiday in Rome walking aimlessly around the city. A couple of times, he had coffee with Sophia — but only because she insisted. She thought he needed company, and perhaps he did, but he knew he was company of the lousiest sort. He still heard from her once in a while, and she had invited him back to Rome, even offered a room at the Hotel, but he could not face the city. It was, it would always be, the city where he found and lost himself in a day, where he had learned how long a day could be, and how significant.

The ache had lessened but it was not gone and he did not expect it to ever leave. She crossed his mind often. He rarely went to sleep without seeing her in his mind. He did not try to find her. He heard nothing from her, nothing of her.

Nothing.

He rotated all the way back around to face Ellie again. She smirked at him, and he could hear her thinking: Coward. His swivel chair let him run from her while in one place.

He hated dodging Ellie, keeping this from her — but his final memory of Sarah, badly beaten and frightened for him, kept him from sharing any of it. Maybe that made it worse, made it harder to forget Sarah, bottling her and his memories of her up inside him, but it was what he felt he had to do.

He glanced at the small globe he kept on his desk. When he was pensive but not looking at the Trattoria photograph, he would idly spin the globe, wondering where on it she might be, afraid that she might not be. He knew all-too-well how dangerous her life was.

"Chuck," Ellie said, giving the globe he was staring at a spin, "stop ignoring me. Are you ever going to tell me what happened over there?"

"Nothing, Ellie. Nothing happened. Believe me. I just...made some decisions. Decided that I needed to stop living a life and start leading one. As they say, you know, march to the beat of my own drummer."

Ellie frowned. "My little drummer boy." She huffed. "Okay, but Chuck, I'm here. And if you don't meet anyone, that CNA…She's a brunette and she seems sweet."

"No, Ellie. No."

"Okay, I assume you're going to join us for Christmas?"

"Of course, I'm looking forward to it."

"Bring someone, Chuck. — And I don't mean Morgan."

"He's going to be with his mom. They're making up for last year when she was sick."

"That's good news, twice over."

"Oh, c'mon, Ellie. Morgan's like a Labrador — he's loyal."

"Yes, but unlike most Labs, he isn't housebroken."

Chuck dropped his head, shaking it. "He's better now."

"That's what you always say, Chuck, and then he comes to our house…"

"I know, I know."

They both laughed. Ellie grabbed her jacket and swung it on. "I love you, Chuck. Try to find a little of the festive spirit of the season. Don't sit in here, working all day. Take a walk. Do something. Don't brood. You've been brooding for a calendar year. — By the way, what time is it, Chuck?"

Chuck looked at his watch. He squinted.

"Chuck, why do you insist on wearing that watch? I know it runs; you told me. But it's illegible, unreadable. It's such a shame you managed to lose the one I bought you. No one at that hotel in Rome ever found it?"

"Um...No, never did. Maybe I left it somewhere else."

"You could just put a clock on the wall."

"I keep meaning too. It's 10:25, by the way. — Ok, Sis. I'll get out of here, take a walk, something. Promise."

Ellie nodded and left. Chuck sat and watched through the door as she walked away.

Chuck spun his chair again and looked at the photograph. It turned out that Chuck had been missing something after Sarah left his hotel room. His Stanford sweatshirt. She must have taken it, but that she had remained a riddle to Chuck. Why had she taken it but not kept the brooch? He had given her the latter but only lent her the former. He hoped she kept it because she had been lying to him about their holiday meaning nothing to her and about him meaning nothing to her.

She had been lying to him at the end. He believed he knew she was lying. But he did not know why. Maybe she even knew that he knew she was lying.

He made himself stop. He had tied himself in late-night knots of What if she knew that I knew that she knew that I…

She said she would not think of him, but she kept the watch. She took his sweatshirt. It all had meant something to her. Not enough. Not as much as it had meant to him. But — not nothing.

He recalled a moment, back at the end of August, just after Ellie's wedding, when he had seen Sarah. Thought he had seen her. Outside, on the street.

But the woman, tall and lovely with blue eyes, had red hair. She carried herself the wrong way. He had known she was not Sarah because she had actually come into the office and talked with Chuck about his company. The woman worked for an artsy Burbank magazine and had been considering an article on small local businesses.

She had called him a couple of days later, disappointed, to tell him that the magazine had decided against the article. He had not banked on it and so he had not been as disappointed as she was, and not nearly as disappointed as he was when she had gotten to the door of the office and he recognized she was not Sarah.

After that, Chuck had tried to uproot the hope he still had that he might see her again. It was time to move on. It had been time to move on for a long time. Maybe he had given up hope, but he had not moved on.

Ellie was right. He needed to move on. Stop remembering Sarah.

I won't, Ellie.

"I won't, Chuck" — Sarah said when he asked her to remember. She was lying. He was sure.

"I won't remember you, either" — Chuck said. She knew he was lying.

He knew.

ooOoo

Christmas day came.

Chuck had done what Ellie asked. He shut Metamorphoses down at lunchtime on the 23rd. He went to Echo Park Lake and took a walk.

His business was making strides. He had hired a computer science student from UCLA, a girl named Alex McHugh, as a part-timer. A game he had been working on had been picked up by one of the big commercial gaming services, and he had created a couple of phone apps that were making money. It had been enough to allow him to add Alex. She was great and they had become friends. Metamorphoses was not making him rich but it was paying the bills, he had some savings. He had enough.

He had chosen the name because of Sarah, of course. He did not choose the Kafka name but the Ovid name. He rarely said it or wrote it without wondering why it mattered to her, why she had intruded it into the conversation with Sophia that day.

His walk had been good. He had dinner with Morgan at a dumplings place and then he went home. He stayed there all day on Christmas Eve, remembering.

But he shook off the brooding and put on some PJs and a jacket, and drove the short distance to his sister's place. He walked past the fountain and rang the doorbell. Ellie opened the door to him, and he heard Devon's voice from inside: "Chuckster!"

Ellie was in PJs too, a family tradition. Christmas was a comfort day, a feelings day, a family day. Chuck was looking forward to it. Ellie gave him a hug and he came inside. She shut the door. She had not spoken, and Chuck realized she had a guilty look on her face.

"Ellie?..."

"Chuck, don't be mad. I invited the CNA I mentioned, the one from the hospital, to join us. I didn't bill it as any kind of date, though we've talked about you. I asked because she's sweet and she seems lonely. So, no pressure; she's not expecting anything. Just be nice. Be you."

Chuck inhaled and exhaled, shaking his head. Ellie shook hers. "Don't be a drama queen, Chuck. It's not that hard. Her name's Carol. She's in the bathroom, I think. She was helping me make the fresh OJ, and some juice squirted on her glasses."

Ellie gave Chuck a what-can-you-do smirk and shrug and went into the kitchen where Chuck could hear Devon tunelessly humming some Christmas song.

Chuck walked over to the tree to examine it more closely. He had not been over since Ellie put it up. He considered the ornaments one by one, many handmade by himself or Ellie, made back when they could afford no real ornaments.

He was annoyed with Ellie. Mildly. At least it's not a surprise blind date. Still, he had been looking forward to just Ellie and Devon. He had not prepared himself for a stranger. He heard the bathroom door open in the hallway and he sighed. He turned around.

The woman, Carol, had dark — black — short hair. She wore brown, tortoise-shell glasses, a blue blouse.

And she was Sarah.

The apartment started spinning one way, Chuck's head another. Time compressed, stretched. His heart did something that disobeyed the laws of physics and psychology simultaneously.

Sarah...Carol...glanced toward the kitchen. No one was watching. She moved to Chuck. She was waiting for something but he was too far out of his body to react.

Finally, his mouth moved. He whispered: "Sarah?"

She put her finger on his lips. "Carol."

"Carol…?"

She nodded. "Carol Smith." Behind the uncertainty in her dark blue gaze, he detected a hint of self-mockery, humor.

"Smith, of course."

Carol then spoke in a normal tone. "You must be Ellie's brother, Chuck. I'm Carol." She put out her hand and Chuck took it and the counter-directional spinning slowed.

"Yeah, yeah, that's me. Chuck. Merry Christmas, Carol." Chuck stopped, laughed, as Ellie and Devon turned to watch. "You must get that a lot, this time of year."

"Less than you think," Carol said, laughing in return. Carol turned to face Ellie and Devon. "I'd like to look at the fountain. Do you think that would be okay?"

Ellie looked puzzled but she nodded. "Um, sure. Chuck, could you take her out?"

"Sure," Chuck said, feeling the same sudden apprehension he thought he saw in Carol's eyes.

He had not taken off his jacket. Carol picked up hers from the back of the sofa. It was the same black leather jacket she bought in Rome. But beneath her black hair and glasses, it seemed different. She seemed different. It was not just the hair and glasses and a new name. The weariness seemed to be gone. There was a wariness in her, but Chuck felt that in himself too.

He felt so many things; he had no idea how to sort them.

They left the apartment and went to stand beside the fountain. Carol looked at it for a moment, and Chuck stood beside her, waiting. He felt like he had been waiting for a year.

"Sarah...Carol...How? You work at the hospital?"

She nodded without looking at him. "Yes, since October."

"October?"

She glanced at Chuck nervously, nodded once.

"You've been here since October?"

She shook her head, blushing. "No, since...August."

The spinning started again. Chuck sank down onto the edge of the fountain. He put his face in his hands. "Months, Sarah...Carol, months. You've been here for months?"

She crouched down in front of him and he flashed back to Rome. Before she could speak, he went on, the words tumbling out of the long loneliness inside him, the endless missing of her. "Months. You could have come to me at any time. I get it, if you aren't interested in...us; I was never completely sure, but you could have...put me out of my misery."

Carol's eyes were dark, damp. "I couldn't come to you, Chuck."

He braced himself. "Were you hurt?"

"No, Chuck. I had to…"

"What?"

"I had to know whether you still wanted me. And I had to know...I had to know I could be a...real girl. Live a normal life."

Chuck shook his head, trying to quiet the buzzing in it, in his heart. "How could you know I still wanted you?"

She blushed again. He realized she looked younger again, as she had during their day together. "Spy, remember?"

"No, S— Carol, I don't. You never actually said, remember?"

"Yes, Chuck, I do. You're right. You said. When you gave me this." She pulled back the sleeve of her jacket, her blue blouse, and on her arm was the Glycine watch he had given her. It was scuffed and battered but still intact, perfectly legible. "It's been on me almost continuously since you gave it to me. It is reliable like you said."

Chuck smirked bitterly. "Takes a licking and keeps on ticking..."

She responded automatically, clearly without reflecting, smirking without bitterness. "Licking?"

Chuck gave his head a shake. "So, how did you know...I still wanted...want...you?"

"An old colleague of mine, a friend, Carina, she paid you a visit."

"Wait, tall, red hair?"

"Yes."

"So, she wasn't a magazine writer."

Carol laughed softly. "Hardly. She works undercover for the DEA. We worked together when I was still CIA. She came to town to help me...settle. I sent her to check on you, your business. She described your office, the photograph above your desk…"

"Oh."

"And, I was there, at Ellie's wedding, on the beach."

"You were? Where? I would have seen you." Chuck could not seem to catch up.

"No, I wasn't there...not that way. I was off in the distance. Binoculars. But I saw. I was happy for her, for you. I could tell how happy you were for her. But I could also see that you were...sad. I was sad too."

Chuck huffed, he stood up. He walked away from her a few paces. "Sarah…"

"Carol…"

"Help me understand. You were CIA?"

She nodded. "And you want me?"

Chuck put up his hand. "We will get to that. Start here. LA. Why did you come to LA?"

"After I quit the CIA, after my final missions, I changed identities. I didn't want to be...that woman anymore. Didn't want that name, to be that woman. I dropped out of sight for a few weeks while I re-established my identity. I was in Barcelona for a while, in Nice," — she laughed — "it made me think of you, Nice, but everything did. Once I was sure that Sarah Walker had...vanished...Carol Smith appeared. I came here for me...and for you. I got settled with Carina's help. I had money, that wasn't a problem. Spies...manage their own retirement funds. And I sold my car. But I needed work, meaningful work, work that I could do," she glanced at her hands, "clean work, helpful work." She walked to him and put her hands in his.

"Not long after I got here, I saw a sign at a community center near my apartment. The Red Cross was running a course for Certified Nursing Assistants. I enrolled. I excelled."

Chuck gave her hands a squeeze. "No surprise."

She looked at him — surprised, navy eyes. "Really?"

"One thing I do not doubt...Carol. Is your competence." He let go of her hands. "And so you got the job at the hospital. Did you know Ellie worked there?"

"Yes, but I applied to lots of places. I just got the best offer there. And I didn't go looking for Ellie; she found me. I was helping with one of her patients and she saw my watch. She mentioned that she gave her brother one, but that he lost it in Rome. — It was a strange moment. We started chatting after that, and she started telling me about you, about how changed you've been since Rome, about Metamorphoses. She's been torn, so proud of you and so worried about you, you know."

"Yeah, I've felt sort of the same way about me."

She looked at him. "So…"

"So, Rome." Chuck said. "What about Rome? Tell me about what happened, Carol."

Carol turned away. Chuck saw her shoulders sink. Then, he saw her brace herself. She turned to him and he could see the tenseness in her. The wracked look from Rome had revisited her.

She sighed. "In for a dime, in for a dollar, as they say." She gave him a brief, effort-filled smile. "Rome was all a fake, Chuck."

Chuck took a step backward.

"No, not all fake, Chuck, but mostly...Shit."

"Just tell me, Carol. Sarah. Ann. Just tell me."

"It started before you came to Rome, for me — and for you. I had a partner three years ago or so, a CIA partner. Shaw, that was his name. Dan Shaw. He was a good spy. We eventually became more than partners." She glanced at Chuck. "That didn't last for very long. He started acting strange, erratic. Then he vanished. My superiors first thought he had gone rogue, joined an international terrorist organization called Fulcrum. Well-funded, very professional. After a while, they thought he was dead. I did not know what to think. My feelings for him were not what I thought they were. I went on working, alone. But then, last October, he made contact with me. Brief, furtive contact, but enough for me to know he was still alive. We met. I guess he thought we would pick up where we left off, but I told him that was not possible. You see, by then, I had grown tired of it all, Chuck, a deep-in-the-bones exhaustion that I could not shake. And it was like...like the job had rotted all around me, from the inside; I didn't want to do it anymore. But I thought I was...a lifer. Too far in, too far gone, to get back out. I thought I was dead — inside. That I was just waiting for the outside to catch up to the inside, for me to rot from the inside, like my job."

She turned and watched the water in the fountain for a moment, hugging herself. Chuck fought down his immediate urge to hold her.

She turned back around. "I'm sorry, Chuck. Speeches aren't my thing. Not story-telling either." She rubbed her hands on her crossed arms. "So, I met with Shaw. By that time, he had been labeled 'Rogue', so meeting with him was dangerous in all sorts of ways, but I felt so little, so numb, but I guess I had a certain...loyalty...if nothing else...to him. I kept the meeting off-the-books."

"Shaw claimed he was running an elaborate triple-cross. He had stolen a computer from a Fulcrum lab. It had some kind of special AI program on it, and the computer itself was special. Unique. The program could only be stored, run, on that particular computer. But the program was a way of moving vast quantities of data, like the accumulated data of the CIA and the NSA, the intelligence data of the US, into a human mind. But the...transfer...required a mind as unique...as the computer.

"Shaw had also managed to access old CIA files, files in which were stored the results of tests run on college campuses across the country, back when the CIA made an — it turns out, quixotic — run on the same technology. They could never get it to work and so they buried the results, turned their attention to new projects. But Shaw realized they had been testing for what he needed. It turned out that what he needed was you, Chuck. You took the test in a psych course at Stanford and you scored higher on it that anyone across the country who took it, a lot higher."

Chuck shook his head. "Wait, I remember taking that test…I never understood why. I almost reported it to the Stanford Institutional Review Board. It felt like I was part of some experiment, but never told that I was…"

"Your instincts were right."

Chuck shook his head again. "So, wait, you knew about me before Rome?"

She nodded but with no conviction. "I had been told about you before Rome."

"So…?"

"So, Shaw explained the basics of all this to me and convinced me — God, I was such an idiot and in such a dark place — he convinced me that his ticket back into the CIA's good graces was you. You, augmented with that program. So, he blackmailed a Buy More Corporate officer into a sham contest for a Rome trip. He wanted you out of the country, away from friends and family, isolated, — and he made sure your store 'won'. — By the way, I guess your store really did win, but you'd have gotten the trip even if it hadn't. And he manipulated the details to make sure you came alone.

"He talked me into running an off-the-books 'seduction'. I was to meet you, make you fall for me, and then take you to him. You see, along with the computer he stole from Fulcrum, he also stole a notebook, one that belonged to the scientist who designed the program. I have no idea how Fulcrum got them. The scientist had been convinced that there was no one who could successfully 'house' the program. But he had stressed that the program was unlikely to work in anyone unless it was...downloaded willingly. My job was that 'willingly'; I was to see to it that you would be willing. That's why I met you the way I did, why I more-or-less told you what I was early on, to begin to...acclimate...you."

Chuck began to feel sick, angry. He turned from her. "'Seduction'? So you were going to sleep with me to make me...willing...to be this Shaw's...guinea pig?"

"I didn't intend to sleep with you. I actually already had a room reserved at the Hotel but under an alias. I intended to make you want to sleep with me, to make you want that...a lot."

"And this was, like, a normal part of your spy life. Using...yourself to make men...willing, promising sex, enticing them?"

She did not speak but she nodded.

"So, that's all Rome was, a seduction?" Chuck could hear the finality in his voice and he saw it register in Carol's eyes. He could see her reel, see her eyes cycle through shades of blue before darkening again.

"Yes — and no."

"I don't understand." Chuck looked at her.

"I didn't either," Carol admitted with a bitter grin. "Shaw had access to extensive psych reports on you, many gathered in that same psych class in which you were given the CIA test. He thought the best way to seduce you was not any obvious come-on, but by making you feel needed. That's why we staged the Piazza as we did."

"Staged?" Chuck hissed. "You didn't stage that cut, that wound, that blood."

"No, and yes. The cut was surely real. But Shaw did it to me. I let him. He cut and tore the jacket"

"Jesus Christ…Sarah..."

"Carol..." She shrugged. "Dead inside, remember. I should never have gone along with it all but I just felt like nothing mattered anymore. Doing what Shaw wanted, as twisted as it was, seemed like helping him...I don't know. I don't know what I was thinking, what I believed. Maybe that was the problem, maybe I didn't believe anything anymore."

She kicked at a pebble on the sidewalk, somehow making it hop off the edge of the fountain and plunk in the water. Chuck shook his head in disbelief.

"Yes — and No?" Chuck finally asked.

"Shaw gave me until the day after Christmas to run the 'seduction'. He was confident, I was confident, that would be enough time. And then I actually met you, and you let me lean on you and you talked to me, and I knew that Shaw had not told me about the real you, but about some version of you he'd concocted in his head, staring at your files. He claimed you were a dud, a lemon, 'once-promising, now embarrassing'. That you were...nothing...in and of yourself, that you were just a strangely receptive and retentive brain…"

"Wow, talk about a weird form of objectification…"

Carol grimaced. "I know. And I believed it until you touched me, until you bandaged me. And, suddenly, I was feeling things. I hadn't felt anything, good or bad, in forever, but your hand on my side, it...reanimated me, from the outside-in."

"So, it wasn't a 'seduction'?"

"No — and Yes. I decided to let later wait for later, to decide what I would do, and I decided to spend Christmas with you for real."

"For real, while you were on a seduction mission? — Wait, and that's why you had the guilty looks, why you kept harping on Ovid, Ars Amatoria. 'Seduction'."

"Yes, things kept happening that would not let me do what I wanted to do, just forget why I was there and enjoy a few days with a good man, a holiday with a good man. To feel good myself."

Chuck walked right up to her. "But if it wasn't...exactly...a seduction, why the lilac lingerie?"

Carol's face burned. "That, Chuck, was a purely personal matter between you and me. It had nothing to do with my profession, or with Shaw. I wanted to sleep with you. I wanted you to want me, and I wanted to want you back — and I did — just as Chuck and Carol...Sarah. That lingerie was just for the two of us."

"But you were still in effect going through with Shaw's plan. Whatever your motives...I would still have ended up Shaw's guinea pig, but even more fully under your control. Shaw would have been delighted."

She looked down, unable to hold his gaze. "I know. I kept going back and forth, torn, feeling so much, and wanting to feel more, but dreading the passage of time, the inevitable end…"

"Shit, Carol. How is there any way back from this for us? What you did, what you were willing to do to me?"

She raised her eyes again, her chin set, defiant. "But Chuck, you have to understand, maybe not forgive, but understand. I was so confused. I kept telling myself that what was happening to me was temporary. That I wouldn't keep feeling that way. That I wouldn't keep feeling at all. That I would revert to...me, the old me...from the woman with you, the new me."

"Is that supposed to make it okay...Carol?"

She blew out a breath, closed her eyes. "No, Chuck. Nothing is supposed to make it okay. I'm here hoping for understanding, forgiveness, not exculpation. I was what I was; I did what I did."

"So, what did you do? Why didn't you sleep with me? Why shoot me, tranquilize me?"

Carol took off her glasses. "At the club, I saw two men watching us, no watching you. When I am dancing, it is...unusual for men to be focused on the man I am dancing with."

Chuck laughed in spite of his anger. "I get that."

She went on. "I became sure they were Fulcrum. I approached them and they gave themselves away. I...dealt with them in the confusion of the dance floor."

Dealt. "Okay…"

"I got you away safely. And I realized how terrified for you I was. Genuinely terrified. And I knew that I couldn't give you up. I thought we still had a couple of days to figure it out, to find a way for us to run. And, I wanted to be with you so much by then. I had wanted you since you touched my side. I was burning for you on the dance floor. Crazy burning." She had a far-away look in her eyes, but spoke with no self-consciousness.

"I was going to sleep with you, started to sleep with you, when I suddenly remembered...one of the men from the club; I had seen him before. At the time, I had taken him for a generic Fulcrum operative, unconnected to Shaw. But I recalled that I had seen him a couple of years before, talking to Shaw, not long before Shaw vanished. And then I suddenly knew. Shaw was playing me. He had stolen the computer, the program, the notebook from Fulcrum, but he was going to use you as his power play in Fulcrum, to assume its leadership. You were his secret. No one else knew. My gut told me it was true. He was using me, a CIA agent, to create Fulcrum's ultimate weapon, you. I'm not sure how he was going to use you exactly. Maybe he had a plan for getting to the US intelligence data, who knows, but that was what he was going to do. The main thing was to rise in Fulcrum."

Her eyes flashed and he could feel anger in her. "I had the tranq gun as a failsafe for the seduction. I was sloppy about that gun, I know. You felt it in my jacket pocket.

"I should have realized then that I was...a goner. That's a mistake that Sarah — that she did not make. I shot you to protect you, to make sure I had time to stop Shaw, to make sure you wouldn't get involved. — You see, to clear a path for running, I had called Shaw from the room while you were in the shower. He was at the safe house. I told him that you were asleep and that all was going to plan. So, I knew where he was."

"I had a regular gun stashed near the Hotel, and some other items. I gathered them and headed to Trullo." She looked at Chuck. "My plan was to kill him. Shaw. It was the only way to protect you. If he didn't get you in Rome, he'd have kept coming, come to Burbank, used Ellie or Devon or Morgan against you."

"But Shaw suspected me. I was sneaking toward a window of the safehouse when a guard found me, got the jump on me. Again, I was sloppy. I had never been...motivated like I was then, the job had never been...personal. He took me inside. I broke his grip on me and I fought with him and Shaw."

"Hold on. It was just you against two men, professional spies."

She gave him a sneaky grin. "It wasn't fair — to them. But it was closer than I expected. I...killed the guard, but Shaw knocked me out. When I came to, he started demanding that I tell him about you, what had happened. It was clear he was going to kill me. He kept choking me, taking me almost to the point of blacking out, then releasing me, demanding answers. I worked the knot in the rope free and sprang on him. We fought. I managed to get to one of my knives and I stabbed him. I got up, I took the computer and I smashed it and smashed it and smashed it, then I burned the notebook. I was close to losing consciousness. I managed to get a few blocks away before I passed out."

"My God, Carol, you did all that to protect me?"

She nodded. "When I pretend, Chuck, I really pretend." She gave him a guilty smile.

"Yes, Miss Smith, you do. Or is it Ms. or Mrs. Smith?"

She gave him that deep grin she had given him in Rome, the one as deep as she was. "Oh, it's 'Miss', and 'Smith' is really just a place-holder."

Chuck matched her grin with a surprised grin of his own.

The apartment door opened. "Are you two going to be out here all morning?" Ellie asked, her exasperation largely faked. She was wearing a happy smile at finding them talking so seriously.

"No, we'll be in soon. Carol was just telling me...some of her life story."

Ellie waved her hand. "It can be reheated. Breakfast. Talk as long as you want." She went back inside, smiling proudly.

"But if you did all that for me, then why not tell me? Why do to me what you did at the hospital?" Chuck asked, immediately shifting his whole focus back to Carol.

"Because — although I believed Shaw's project was unknown to Fulcrum and to the CIA, I couldn't be sure. I was connected to him. I had to let you go, make you go. I didn't want you connected to him through me. For all I knew, it was possible there were other Fulcrum agents in Rome, like the ones at Rabbit Hole Club, who might have seen you with me. I couldn't risk it, couldn't risk you. After you left the hospital, I left too. I couldn't stay, not with the fake IDs I had used. I got a room, bought some painkillers, some make-up, and I made sure that no one was watching you, tailing you."

"Except you."

She shrugged. "Our day, Chuck, Rome, it didn't mean nothing to me. So help me God, it meant everything. I couldn't, I still haven't recovered. Not one bit."

Chuck stole a glance at Ellie's. No one was looking out the window. He put his hands on Carol's shoulders and leaned into her gaze, the endless, dark blue of her eyes, and he kissed her softly. "Me, either. — It's good to know you, Carol Smith."

"And you too, Chuck Bartowski of the Burbank Bartowskis."

"Speaking of," Chuck said, removing his hands from Carol's shoulders, "we'll have to take this slow. It's already going to be a problem…"

Carol gave him a look. "Can't keep your lips off me?" They were walking to Ellie's door.

"That, and living with Ellie's self-satisfaction in being right about you. She said you were nice and cute and sweet."

"The middling Trinity?" Sarah asked, stopping, raising one eyebrow and putting on her glasses.

"No," Chuck answered, taking her hand and kissing it, "The Transcendentals."

She gripped his arm with her other hand. "You're wearing my watch!"

"Takes a licking and keeps on ticking."

"It still works?"

Chuck nodded. "It kept me company while I was waiting."

She gave him an amazing smile, her eyes darkening almost to black. "Licking?"

Carol stood looking at the Christmas tree. Their tree, hers and Chuck's. In their new apartment. Theirs.

She ran her hand down the front of her sweatshirt, over the Stanford S, over the slight bump of her still-early pregnancy.

On that awful day in the hospital, in Rome, she had told Chuck to find a real girl and marry her and have kids. She had no idea then that she was foretelling her own future.

The first few months with Chuck had been magical, but also, at times, touch and go. They had a lot to learn about each other, and much that she had to teach Chuck about herself was not pleasant for either of them. But he never wavered, never faltered, never failed her, even through the painful times. Those were rarer now. Their days were almost all good.

She loved her job and felt like she was giving back, helping. Doing real good for real people. She and Chuck eloped late in August. She had found out she was pregnant early in October. Ellie knew soon after, and therefore, so did Devon. But she had not made it public at work yet, and neither had Chuck.

They would do that after the holidays.

At the moment, Sarah was enjoying it as the family's secret. It was the only kind of secret she was interested in keeping now. Her past remained a secret, still, to protect her husband.

It had taken her time to build Chuck's trust in her. Despite the speed and intensity of their reunion — she smiled and flushed thinking about last Christmas, after they left Ellie's and met again at Chuck's — it had taken time for him to believe that she was really there, was really staying, that Rome had meant as much to her as it had to him, twelve hours or not.

That was her one other secret. She had tried to tell it, but she lacked the words. Rome, she knew, meant more to her than Chuck. It meant everything to them both, but it had taken her from less than nothing to everything; it had restored the world to her, restored her to herself. It somehow meant more than everything to her.

And now she was carrying life, a life half hers, half Chuck's. Chuck had met a woman dead inside and made her a vessel of life. She did not know how to tell him, to fully explain it, that but she tried daily to show him. To make sure it was in her eyes on the infrequent times she could manage to tell him how much she loved him. And, God, how I love him!

She brushed the brooch pinned to the sweatshirt. Chuck had kept it for her. Keeping it herself, keeping it in Rome, had felt like too intimate a betrayal. She made do with her thieved sweatshirt.

She had plans for that precious mistletoe. She was going to go upstairs and enact those plans soon, waking her husband for a Christmas Eve Eve party-for-two there in their bedroom.

Ellie still did not know about Carol's past. As a result, Ellie was always talking about how much Carol had changed Chuck, ended his brooding, secured all the advances he had made since Rome, and chased away the shadows. Someday, she would have to tell Ellie, tell Ellie that the shadows Carol chased away were shadows Carol created, and shadows her husband had forgiven her for creating.

She still had a slight scar on her side, a slight scar on her cheek. The life she had led had marked her but it did not own her. Not any more. She was her own. A caregiver. A wife. In a few months, a mother.

All because she had tried to make a holiday out of a mission, and had succeeded — a cock-eyed, unpredictable kind of success.

Chuck carried the holiday in his eye. She was carrying his child, their child.

Holiday. Holy day. A new life. A new life. Christmas.

She went upstairs to the bedroom, to Chuck. She stopped in the bathroom at the top of the stairs, fluffling her hair as she looked in the mirror, making sure that she was as she wanted to be for the party she was planning.

She stopped, struck for a moment by her own eyes. They were so blue, so deeply blue.

True blue.

She left the bathroom and opened the bedroom door. She picked up her phone and turned on Sia's Underneath the Mistletoe. As the music began Carol climbed on the bed. "Chuuuck! Wake up. Time to unwrap your early present…"

I've got a crush, la lala la la la
Like a schoolgirl
And I wanna rush, la lala la la la
Like a fool would
So step on the gas, la lala la la la
Come on over
'Cause baby it's Christmas, la lala la la la
I wanna know ya...

The End

A Roman Holiday

A/N: Merry Christmas!

Give that Sia tune a listen. The words are great — and particularly in this context. I was tinkering with it on guitar as I wrote this chapter.

I am fascinated by this story structure, a story that recontextualizes itself as it ends. (It's common, on one of its uses, in heist films.) I've flirted with the structure here and there in other stories but this is the first time I used it quite as I have here. Love to hear your final thoughts!

Thanks to Beckster1213 and David Carner for some pre-reading.