Chapter Text
After Chuck opened the email and passed out in a whirl of hideous images, he woke up, wobbling along on autopilot, pretending everything was fine, until he stopped at Bob's Burgers on the way to work and thought to himself, what am I doing?
His hands looked normal enough. The cars looked fine. He just didn't feel right, as if something was in the air. Bryce Larkin had sent not hundreds, but perhaps hundreds of thousands of images into his brain. And he'd absorbed them all. He could bet that, as with Dad's little experiment, the email was now empty of all but a Session Terminated message. Or some sort of success marker.
He'd had a weird reaction anyway to Morgan wanting to play Tic-Tac-Toe on a piece of card dropped by a customer. The thick black lines reminded him of something. Some TV show? Then he'd had a dream and woken up in the early hours, remembering. He was special. It had to have been a dream he'd had as a child. So special that Dad just walked out.
And the overheard conversation.
"Honey, I love you. I think Chuck is great. I'm just wondering... when do you get to stop worrying about Chuck and live your own life? Maybe have kids of your own? He's twenty-five, shouldn't he have grown up and left the house by now? I know you love him, but... maybe you're holding him back. I mean what if he feels he has to stay stuck as your kid because it makes you comfortable?"
"But it does make me comfortable, Devon! He's my brother and I love him."
"Babe, what happens when he's thirty? Forty? Fifty? He has no reason to ever change and... to be honest, without some kind of push he never will. It's been four years. He's not sick, he's just unmotivated. You need to cut the thread or you'll just be his Mom and I want so much more for you than that."
"Just make sure he never hears you talk that way, okay?"
"I won't. He's asleep until nine and then he'll eat cereal you set out for him... It's not that he's a bad person, it's just this isn't healthy for either of you."
"If he moves out of here you know he's going to move in with Morgan."
"Yeah... I don't see how that would change things a whole lot," Devon said. "They'd just both be at their place instead of here."
"Well, he won't grow there either."
"Give him a chance, El. Maybe he'll surprise you. At least he won't reach retirement age living with his sister. Because that would suck."
A sigh and a movement and Chuck had leapt back into bed.
Then the birthday and an action figure from Morgan, and Chuck felt the weight of years and years and years. A birthday party full of people his own age who had made something of their lives. He had looked at the box and thought to himself, would he really be sixty years old, doing this? Yes, apparently, because he hadn't thought about what was good for Ellie. Not what she wanted, she was clear about that, but what was good for her.
He'd done his best at the party, and helped clear up after, and ended up staring at the Tron poster, tuning Morgan out.
"Time to go," he told Morgan, who amiably saw himself out.
Then he got into Bryce's email, and suddenly he had a whole lot more things to worry about. Of course, of course he tried to just... pretend things were normal. More therapy wasn't going to help. Just... he felt bad.
His head was full of weirdness. Heavy, heavy weirdness, like sloshing water that would spill out if he tilted his head, only he did and it didn't.
He called in sick with a migraine headache.
"I know you've been partying too hard, Bartowski. I'll let you get away with it this once. You're a good worker. But you'd better be in on time tomorrow."
Chuck had protested to a slammed down phone. He had the day off, and the Nerd Herder car... He filled up and went for a drive around, nearly crashing his car at sudden imagery, and turning it to follow the Serbian before he realised what he was doing.
It was how he ended up in a hotel defusing a bomb. How did he fry this thing?
Morgan's phone call gave Chuck all the inspiration he needed, and before anyone grabbed him, the machine was dead of porn star virus. A lot, a lot of angry people were heading his way. He klutzed, but sheer terror helped him levitate, especially when pistols came out, so that running over chairs and tables seemed easy. Back out of the hotel. No chance to get to the car, but he managed to scramble onto a bus, and end up, eventually, under the Santa Monica pier arcade, wondering what to do with his life.
He suddenly, in a very, very real way knew why Dad had gone missing. He was going missing too. He had to leave. He had to be as far away as he could get to, because scary people with guns were going to come looking for him. Maybe they thought he was the bomber and he'd had a change of heart. How could he explain what he'd seen and done?
He turned his phone off and went to an ATM to take out enough cash to get by for a few days, then got on the next Greyhound bus going to Phoenix, since he didn't have a passport on him.
Phoenix was hot, ridiculously hot, but Chuck managed to beg and even steal enough for another bus ticket, water, food. He had a nice white baseball cap, it helped, and shades, those helped too. Alberquerque next. Then Columbus, Ohio. He was constantly, constantly terrified, looking over his shoulder, his brain making mad, mad connections with the news. He felt crazy, the same way his dad was crazy. Only his dad had been messing around with something small and black and white, that was in Chuck's brain, larger and in full colour. The information that came up from reading in the library was a very good indicator of how much trouble Chuck was now in.
If he never talked to Ellie again, he'd keep her safe. She'd be very sad... or scared or confused... but she had Devon now. No more being a Mom.
No more being Chuck Bartowski, but what was he going to do with his life?
A poster in English and Spanish told him, "Help for Undocumented People," and it seemed as good a start as any. Start life over as someone else.