I am still alive.

[thrillingdetectivetales]

I started re-watching Chuck the other day. If you're not familiar, it's a delightfully zany spy comedy from the mid-aughts starring the incredibly dreamy Zachary Levi (featured in icon) as Chuck Bartowski, an employee at a big-box consumer electronics store (like a Best Buy) who accidentally downloads a computer full of government secrets into his brain through hand-wavey fake science. Some of the comedy is mildly insensitive ten years or so into future but altogether it's a fun watch with some really sweet romantic moments, exciting fight scenes, and varied shipping potential. (I may also have a weird nostalgic connection because my first real job was working customer service in a big box electronics store and, spy shenanigans aside, it's honestly kind of Like That.)

All of which to say, I'm about 13,000 words into several unconnected fic because a) I got mad about off-screen character development/timeline inconsistencies and b) I have an illness that is exacerbated by extended exposure to Mr. Levi's long, bovine eyelashes, so I thought I'd share some of my favorite bits here, in case anyone is interested.


From a follow up to this utterly lovely fic by Rivka T on the Archive, wherein Casey (a stoic, conservative, NSA agent) moves in with Chuck and Sarah for various reasons, and Chuck and Sarah decide they might want to try polyamory with him:

“Casey isn’t going anywhere,” [Sarah] promises, quiet and certain. “Not unless he has to. You know that.”

“I want to believe that,” Chuck sighs. “Really, but - ”

“Chuck,” Sarah says. “Listen to me. Casey got busted back to civilian and he still wouldn’t leave. Fielding a sincere proposition from one nerdy twink, regardless of how he responds, isn’t going to send him running scared.”

“I know,” Chuck nods. “Logically, I know that, but - hey.” He frowns across the table, squeezing Sarah’s fingers where they’re threaded through his own. “Did you just call me a twink?”

She shrugs but doesn’t let go. “If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck and has delicate features like a duck.”

From the perspective of Casey's daughter, which neither of them find out about until she's in her twenties on account of Casey faking his death to join the NSA back in the day, following the reveal of her parentage and her journey to embracing Casey as her father, with a detour into her stumbling across her dad's big gay romance with a spy fourteen years his junior:

“Y’know,” the assistant manager says, while Alex is standing there in a stupor with $40,000 in shrink-wrapped bills cradled in her arms alongside four issues of Guns & Ammo and a kelly green polo shirt in desperate need of a wash, “I gotta say, I’m really glad you’re Casey’s secret daughter and not Casey’s secret lover.”

He grins at her like she’s in on some joke and Alex reflects it weakly back because she’s not sure what else to do. Her heart is still pounding, stomach twisting and folding in on itself, skin clammy with sweat; all perfectly normal stress responses, given the events of the last twenty-four hours, but Alex would prefer not to be experiencing them, all the same. It probably doesn’t help that she hasn’t slept at all since Mr. Casey released her late last night—or early this morning, depending on your perspective.

The assistant manager—Alex flicks her gaze to the name embroidered over his breast and belatedly remembers that he’d introduced himself as Morgan Grimes—raises his eyebrows and waves a hand back and forth between them.

“For a second there I thought we were gonna have a situation on our hands,” he explains. “I mean, it’s nothing personal, just - it’s my sworn duty to throw down if my best friend’s man is stepping out, y’know? Not that I think he would!” Morgan holds both his hands up, placating, which isn’t very helpful considering that Alex has no idea what he’s talking about. “I mean, Casey likes ‘em young, if his dip in the ol’ Bartowski pond is anything to go by, but he doesn’t really strike me as the cheating type. Not to mention that his current tastes trend toward a more butch model.” He flashes Alex a nervous, almost guilty look, eyes skimming down her frame then back up, and tacks on, “Uh, no offense.”

Alex just stares at him.

Great, she thinks to herself, while Morgan stuffs his hands into his pockets and darts his gaze awkwardly around the room. So not only is the man claiming to be her dead father either an actual, real live secret agent or caught in the midst of a sophisticated paranoid delusion—which he may or not have dragged the unwitting assistant manager of the Burbank Buy More into right along with him—but he has a taste for younger women and tomboys. That’s just fantastic. Definitely the information Alex needed to make this day less weird.

Anyway, it's really nice to be experiencing actual inspiration again for the first time in months and months.