Title: Dirty Work series
Fandom: Chuck
Pairing: Chuck Bartowski/John Casey
Categories/Genres: Seduction, Romance (after a fashion), Angst,
Length: Long (3854, 8170, 9353 words per part, 21377 words total)
Warnings: Suggestion of rape (one character implies that he raped another in order to piss off a third character, but all acts are consensual)

Author/Artist on LJ: imkalena
Author/Artist Website: kalena

Summary:

Part 1: CIA won't do her goddamn job. Casey's used to doing the dirty work.

Part 2: The morning after Casey does the Dirty Work.

Part 3: It's the morning after Dirty Work II, and Casey has a change of heart. Or possibly discovers he has a heart. He's not really sure. It's pretty unnerving, all around.

Review:

(This is technically a series, but it reads like three chapters of one work, so I'll be reviewing it as though it's one story.)

John Casey is a man of absolutes: black and white, good and evil, life and death. He's spent much of his life staining his hands with the blood of others for the sake of his country. He's not a man of feeling or sentiment, and when he seduces Chuck Bartowski, purely for the sake of the mission, he is wholly unprepared for the emotional fallout that follows.

That's not to say that Casey has no feelings. With incredible skill, kalena provides the reader with Casey's actions and reactions, creating a sort of negative space for us to fill in his emotions and motivations ourselves. But gradually, as Casey learns to bend where once he would have held himself rigid, he begins to fill in some of that negative space on his own. Things that were black and white gain color and depth. Not a lot, because it is still John Casey, but just enough.

Speaking of color, the whole story is rich with vivid imagery and unconventional comparisons. Casey's military background shines through in those instances, where a moment of breathlessness is compared to being shot, or how having Chuck's desire focused on him is akin to staring down the barrel of a gun. Once loosened from their gel, Chuck's curls are “question marks of hair.”

The writing is a little rough in a few places, (perhaps fittingly so, considering its main narrator), but Dirty Work has been and will remain one of my favorite works.

Dirty Work
Dirty Work II: Wait And See
Dirty Work III: Come And Go With Me