Outtake #1 - Back in the Bunker

The following is an outtake from "What Fates Impose," the fanfic I have going on up at ff.net. This is from the second chapter, titled Go Fish. The chapter already contains one flashback in the form of Chuck and Sarah have drinks and play cards in the bunker, and I had included this scene just to kind of show the Chuck of then just how hardcore the life of the spy was. It ended up dragging down the chapter, and even though I love this characterization of Chuck and Bryce being friends, the other flashback was much, much more important.

17 NOVEMBER 2005
BUNKER 77142135
16:42 OMST

Sarah didn’t emerge from the bunk room at all the afternoon she and Bryce arrived. Chuck really couldn’t say that he was surprised. It didn’t matter that Bryce had good tactical reasons for wanting his partner to meet their new tech support—promising a girl Cabo and delivering Siberia was just something even the incomparable Bryce Larkin couldn’t pull off.

“Give her time,” Bryce said at one point while he and Chuck faced off in Mortal Kombat, a game Chuck had rewired for his system. “She got winged on this last mission and—”

“She got shot?! Why isn’t she in the hospital?” Chuck half-rose as if to go drag her there himself.

Bryce, however, waved his hands in a frantic plea that Chuck shut up before he bodily hauled Chuck back into his seat. “Shh, for Pete’s sake—geez. She’ll hear.”

“What the hell is she doing here? Geez, Bryce, she should be in an ER or something.”

“I said she got winged. It grazed her. She’s been shot worse.”

“Either way.” This time Chuck did rise.

“Where are you going?”

“To go put the medical kit in an even more obvious position, just in case, duh.”

When Chuck returned from leaving the medkit in the middle of the table, Bryce hadn’t moved from the desk chair. He’d somehow even managed to prop his feet up on the desk, something Chuck’s height wouldn’t allow him to do in the confined space.

“Still the same old Chuck, huh?”

Chuck tucked a leg under himself as he returned to his own seat—and to Sub-Zero, his waiting fighter. “Don’t know what you mean.”

“Sure you do. Make me a promise—tell me they’ll never take that away from you.”

“This chair?” Chuck said, deliberately doing his best Eastwood. “Sure. They want this chair, they have to pry it from my cold, dead fingers.”

Bryce laughed, and Chuck sensed an underlying edge of tension he didn’t trust.



But yeah, I also cut this because Sarah probably shouldn't be drinking with a gunshot wound, even a minor one.