The beginning of “Chuck vs the In Between” is finally here!
This 90-chapter story is my biggest fanfic undertaking. It’s not going to be AU. Instead, it’s going to be comprehensive for the show. It will have a chapter set “in between” every one of the 91 episodes of Chuck. That’s 90 “in between” chapters, meaning it isn’t going to be posted as quickly as many of my other stories. There will be pauses for several other stories, and "Chuck vs the In Between" will pause when canon had season and logical half-season breaks. Each chapter will start with a recap of what came before. Some chapters will be tags/post-eps/epilogues for the episodes. Some chapters will be setups/prologues for what is to come. Some will simply be “in between.”
The Chuck show was a great combination of Romance, Adventure, Humor, Friendship, Family, Friends, and Drama. The first half of the show and some after that was also Angst, as the show did the WT/WT dance that a lot of TV shows do. That means some of this story may seem like that, but you know where this is going, so hopefully it won’t be too “painful.”
The dates mentioned in the chapters are based on analysis started in 2022, flushing out the possible timeline on the Chuck Fandom wiki. Some things in the Chuck timeline are not possible, as noted in that wiki page, and when that’s the case, these chapters will fit the best they can in a fictional universe.
Chapter 1 of this story was posted about ten years after Chuck ended. The fact that Chuck fanfic is still thriving this many years later is a real credit to the enthusiasm and great atmosphere that the fans have maintained. I hope you enjoy this long trip down memory lane, catching glimpses of the time “in between.”
The idea for this story was inspired by the fantastic Aftershocks series of Rachel500 (rachelfivehundred on Tumblr) in the Stargate:SG-1 and Stargate:Atlantis fanfic categories. Her stories don’t try to “fix” canon. They are complementary stories that fit with canon. When Chuck was still on the air, those stories got me thinking about a similar story for Chuck. At the time of writing this first chapter, Aftershocks has four principle stories, with 154 chapters for the first 161 episodes of Stargate:SG-1. There are two companion stories with one additional chapter each.
Chapter 1, “Don't Freak Out“ is set in between “Chuck vs the Intersect,” 1x01, and “Chuck vs the Helicopter,” 1x02.
Two Songs from Chuck 1x01:
“Into Your Dreams” by Foreign Born
“A Comet Appears” by The Shins
Chuck 1x01 Episode Links:
Chuck This Blog statistics - 5/91
Chuck This Blog series rewatch
Chuck This Blog episode of the week 6/2014