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"Fascinating."

Vance raised an eye at Special Agent Broyles, who, despite his words, had a very blank expression on his face. The other man stood in the "safe space" with Vance but was eyeing Special Agent John Scott as the man banged on the invisible walls keeping him in a prison in the middle of the room. As soon as Jared had switched on the blacklight and Tess had initiated the lockdown, the protective wards had zeroed in on John Scott and trapped him in a circle big enough for him to sit down comfortably within, and that's about it.

"Magic." Broyles' eyes narrowed. "Are we sure that this isn't just some branch of science we have yet to categorize?"

"Changelings seem scientific to you?" Vance wanted to know, a little shocked the guy was still a skeptic.

"I am not a scientist, but I refuse to believe that messing with certain genomes or something of the sort mightn't bring some sort of similar result."

"You want to explain ghosts scientifically?"

Broyles let out a deep breath, clearly unhappy with ghosts.

"Thought not," Vance muttered as he glanced away. "Don't get me wrong. I don't doubt that your team might've come across some interesting issues with the Pattern you told me about, but Fringe science and Fringe occult are completely different subjects."

"How useful is the girl if she's rendered unconscious with mere contact?" Broyles tilted his head, eyebrow raised.

Vance snorted and shook his head. He wasn't about to divulge the details of Chloe's condition, but given the man's ignorance he could understand the skepticism. "Without that girl this division would not exist."

Broyles eyed him with that damned blank expression, clearly realizing that there was something he wasn't being told, and yet he didn't pry anymore. Instead he clasped his hands behind his back and stood straighter.

Apparently he was going to merely watch from hereon out.

Good.

"Has she woken up yet?" The worried voiced piped up from the monitor.

"Not since the last time you asked." Anne glanced over at the clock on the screen while continuing to type on the keyboard. "Which was less than five minutes ago. Also, I've been at my computer the whole time. I obviously wouldn't know if she'd actually woken up."

"Yeah… but you're, like, a twin," Abby muttered, clearly pouting from her office. "I figured you'd be able to, I don't know, feel when she did."

"Not a real twin," Anne reminded and then grinned when the computer highlighted one of the hex symbols. "Yes! Now, come on baby, find me the other ones!"

"But, you're more than a twin, you're the same person."

Despite raising her gaze to eye the small screen showing Abby at her computer in her office, Anne's fingers continued to enter code into the system, trying to help the computer process the images and database quicker. "Not true. Chloe and I might be, at the core, the same, but in other ways we're completely different. And, considering the other versions of us she's told me about - we're all somehow different. I mean, two versions of us have kids already - that we know of! I can't imagine ever wanting kids!"

"But maybe you'd feel different if you got pregnant," Abby declared.

"Then there's also the whole Tess thing," Anne revealed with a shrug. "You should've seen Chloe when she walked in on us. I thought she'd die right then and there. I honestly feel so bad. I mean, we were on her old bed for crying out loud!"

Abby, who'd been in the know about the unofficial couple, snickered. "I wish I could've seen that." She shook her head. "I feel so bad for feeling amused at that!"

"You should," Anne muttered despite the amusement in her own tone. "But that's what I'm saying. Chloe says there are other versions of us with girlfriends, and I definitely had conflicting feelings for Lana Lang - but she's never had any interest in another girl. There are little differences here and there. Plus, the Winchesters might appear in a lot of our other lives, but not all. Again. There are variations."

Abby slumped back in her seat and flung her head back, staring up at the ceiling as she twirled around on her seat. "Buzzkill."

Anne's smile returned as she continued to type, the code picking up more and more hexes. This was great. The more symbols she managed to identify with the info they had on the system, the less stress Chloe would have to put her own system through. As it were, Chloe was being stupidly persistent.

How many times had Anne tried to convince her to take a vacation until they'd found her a Bonder? And yet, with the Tarot Murders still unsolved, and more cases coming in for them, Chloe refused to even listen to the request anymore. For the first time ever, Anne had understood everyone's annoyance with her in regards to her stubbornness. Chloe, like Anne, was an idiot who put the job before everything else. Now that she'd realized it, Anne swore that once she got back to her own time she'd lay off the intensity.

Ollie was right, she was going to work herself into an early grave. Chloe was too.

If only she'd—.

Anne gasped and brought her hand to her stomach as a stab of pain throbbed outwards from within.

Abby jolted up so quickly in her chair she nearly fell off. "What was that? Did you get a twin thingy?"

"No." Anne glared at Abby as she pressed harder against the feeling. "It's… it's something else."

"What else?" Abby narrowed her eyes.

Anne peered down at her stomach in confusion. She'd felt this pain before, but where and when?

And then it clicked right as the pain stopped.

Anne's eyes widened in shock. "Abby?"

"Yuh?" Abby asked.

A stuttered breath escaped Anne's lips as her gaze rose to meet Abby's. "I think I'm going to be pulled back into my own timeline… I think I'm going back soon."

"So, you said your team would be meeting us today," Vance announced as he stood just as still and straight as Agent Broyles, arms clasped behind his back as well. "And yet only Agent Scott arrived."

"It's a small division," Agent Broyles replied coolly.

"Ah." Vance nodded as it suddenly made sense. "This is a merger, isn't it?"

Broyles took in a deep breath. "If so, I have not been made aware."

Vance shook his head as he too kept his gaze ahead of him.

What in the world was the Pentagon thinking?

Everything was warm.

Chloe groaned as she opened her eyes to find herself lying on the sofa, Lincoln's jacket wrapped around her. Under the blacklight lighting the whole division she could easily see blood staining the jacket from where she'd continued to bleed after passing out. The idiot had given her his jacket even after she'd destroyed his shirt? Really?

A small smile touched her lips as she curled a little deeper into it, enjoying the warmth. She knew that there was a lot she needed to do - namely handle the hexed guy no doubt trapped in the other room - but the reason she'd been knocked out so easily was because she was run down. Chloe wasn't an idiot, she knew she was running herself ragged, and that with the bond between her and Peter dying she needed to take things easier - and she'd wanted to - but there were just too many responsibilities - too many things only she could do.

But she could take a couple of minutes more right now, so she did so, curled up on the sofa with Lincoln's stained jacket surrounding her in calming warmth.

She owed him a new suit.

A chuckle escaped her lips as she lifted the jacket to cover her face up to right under her eyes. It smelled like Old Spice and blood.

The door opened and Lincoln entered, wearing a different shirt and in the process of finishing up tying and tightening his necktie. Another shirt was flung over his shoulder. Was it the one with blood? If so, the blacklights weren't picking any up.

"You're up!" Lincoln exhaled deeply as he reached down and pressed his cool hand to her forehead. "And have no fever. That's good." He grinned, his teeth showing up brightly under the blacklight. "Now maybe your father won't kill me for denying him access."

"You stood up to my father?" Chloe asked in surprise as she sat up, still clutching the jacket around her.

"Yeah. It was terrifying." He sat down next to her and shook his head as he chuckled. "Here. It was the best I could find considering we're in lockdown." He whipped the shirt off of his shoulder and held it out to her.

It was only when she took it from him and smelt Old Spice that she realized it was one of his shirts. Considering he had another new one on as well… "How many changes of clothes do you have in your office?"

His grin turned sheepish. "I plead the fifth."

Shaking her head, Chloe finally put down his jacket and made her way to the small bathroom in this room. She kept the door ajar so light could seep in, and hid behind it in the darkness as she stripped off her blood-covered shirt. "First I take your kleenex, then your clothes. What's next?"

There was a pause. "Jared would have an answer to that that I'm far too classy to use."

That was not surprising, not knowing Jared and his cheeky, flirty sense of humor.

"I've asked your father to bring Sam and Dean quicker," Lincoln announced after a moment's silence. "Bring them into this investigation. Work with them. Do the test."

Chloe paused in the middle of buttoning the shirt on. She sighed and nodded as she continued to button it up. "Okay."

There was another pause. "That's it? No complaints?"

"I told you I'd comply with your wishes on that front, didn't I?"

"Yeah… but I still expected some bitching." There was a pause. "Then again, this is the Winchester brothers we're talking about. Not much to complain about there."

"Are you coming out to me?"

"If you weren't my superior officer I'd have have some really choice words for you right now."

Laughing, Chloe finished buttoning up the shirt before tying the bottom half up around her hips. "Noted." She emerged from the bathroom and leaned against the door. "So, what's the situation?"

"Vance and Boyles are in the Broom Closet of Protection, which means neither of them are infected otherwise it would've reacted," Lincoln replied immediately as he stood. "Anne is working on identifying as many of the sigils Jared captured as possible, Agent Scott is unhappily detained within the Bitch Trap, and Tess is going through our database to try and figure out who might've hexed him, while Jared is virtually retracing Agent Scott's steps today just in case the hexes were picked up by entering a warded place and not placed on him by a person."

"That's, wow… why am I around again?" Chloe joked, very impressed.

"It might have something to do with you being a walking, talking, encyclopedia of weird?" Lincoln chanced a guess. "One who has immeasurable occult knowledge stored away in her noggin, information which is only accessible to her?"

"You know, that might be it," Chloe admitted.

"Look, I'm not trying to do your job," Lincoln informed her as his smile fell and he took in a very deep breath, looking very tired all of a sudden. "But let me make it that much easier for you, okay? You do too damned much, especially when they're things that can easily be delegated. So you concentrate on being all…" he wiggled his fingers at her, "and in return, trust me to take care of all the background stuff."

"Really?" She wiggled her fingers back at him. "That was the best you could come up with? I'm not a witch. Those are magic fingers."

He snickered. "Stop complaining and just say you'll let me help!"

Chloe eyed him in silence for a couple of seconds before she hugged herself and nodded. "You're the only weirdo who wants more work, but fine."

Lincoln grinned brightly as he pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. "Good! Now. What's next? You order, I do."

"Let me see, hopefully I'm not glitching so much." Chloe flung her hand upwards, the holographic screen jumping up between her and Lincoln as she did so. "Oh, good, while I was out the computations were still going on. I was worried they would've stopped."

"What do you mean 'glitching'?" Lincoln wanted to know as he came closer.

"It was weird, but it's stopped. It might've been because of the hexes or because of Peter's and my bond being worn thin," Chloe admitted as she grimaced. "But things seem to be working so far. I still haven't finished searching for the female witches capable of getting through the wards I put up, but some results have come up. Although, it could be someone who isn't actually in my records."

"How would they be able to stay off the grid so to speak?"

"I'm trying to access the collective knowledge stored in the crystal skulls which were downloaded into mine, but my predecessors might've never come across this witch, or she might be new," Chloe responded. "It would be easier, of course, if every bit of knowledge was easily accessible, or accessible at all, but until I get a permanent bonder that's impossible. Even then, there'll most probably be a nightmare period in which my mind tries to adjust to the changes."

"The sooner we get you to the Permanent Bonder stage the better," he muttered as he began to pace. "You know what I find weird?"

"What?" She asked as she moved the witch search to the side and opened up another window to try and search a separate search on female witches whose last known locations were near or around DC.

"If she's such a strong witch, why are her hexes doing nothing but being there? Or causing you to glitch? I mean, they were on him when he entered the building. He could've caused so much damage, but they only became active when he touched you, and even then, it didn't really do anything to you except maybe make you glitch… a little."

Chloe's eyes widened. "Lincoln, you're a genius."

"Sure." He stopped pacing and turned to face her. "But why?"

Minimizing both previous searches, Chloe's fingers typed on the holographic keyboard only she could see. "Do you have pictures of the hexes themselves on you?"

"No." He grabbed his phone and began texting into it. "But I've just asked Jared to send them to me. What do you think their purpose is? You obviously have a theory."

Chloe pressed enter and stood there waiting, her fingers burning and itchy with the desire to do something, so she rubbed her hands against her pants. "I don't want to jinx it… pun intended."

"Your puns are so terrible," Lincoln bemoaned as he made his way across the room and pulled open a drawer. "Think fast!"

"Huh?" She turned towards him and barely managed to catch the thing he'd thrown at her. "What the hell, Lincoln?"

He ignored her as his phone beeped.

Chloe looked down at the slinky in her hands and then looked up at him. "You have the weirdest things stashed all around this Division," she whispered as she began to play with it, the movement occupying her hands and allowing her mind to concentrate on the pictures as they popped up on the holo screen. "Do we have a—?"

"Already on it," Lincoln declared. "Any of these look familiar?"

She peered over her shoulder to find that he'd not only received the pictures of the hexes, but had wiped off the dry eraser board and had already started drawing them on it for her. "You read my mind." Chloe shifted around, and the holographic screen shifted with her, allowing her to begin matching certain hexes. She wasn't able to find and categorize them all, but she saved the ones she didn't recognize for later, and once she had all the ones deciphered that she could find…

"You're right," she whispered in shock as she flung her arms out, removing the holographic screen from around her and allowing her to look clearly at Lincoln and the dry eraser board.

"Sure," Lincoln repeated, accepting the compliment, red marker still in hand. "But how?"

"These hexes aren't hexes, not really, not in the true sense of the word." Chloe shook her head, unable to believe it. "They're glamoured."

"Huh?" Lincoln blinked as he put the cap back on the marker. "You mean someone's faking hexes? Why would they do that?"

"To accomplish this. We're in a quarantine, Lincoln." She turned to him in shock. "This is a distraction meant to keep us all locked up in here while whoever did this does something out there they don't want us knowing or interfering in."

Sam and Dean had gone up against demons and monsters, and yet Special Agent Gibbs was probably one of the most terrifying beings they'd ever had to deal with. The fact that he'd served with their father in the Marines was a little intimidating considering their father respected him, and reluctantly looked up to him, apparently Gibbs had saved his ass more than a couple of times. And other than that, well, the man was scary in and of himself. He was definitely one of those men who would do whatever needed to be done to get something done. Case in point, when Dean had refused to leave the Impala and go with the agents who'd had a plane waiting on them to get the brothers to HQ quicker… Gibbs had shot him full of tranqs.

Two of the agents were now driving the Impala, and Dean was snoring in his seat on the plane. Sam sat opposite Gibbs, who clearly was staring Sam and Dean down, as if trying to see into their soul and ready to kill them with his bare hands if he didn't like what he saw. Sam wasn't scared of flying, but damn it, he was scared right now.

"Do either of you have sexually transmitted diseases?" Gibbs broke the silence to ask the most random question ever.

"Excuse me?" Sam squeaked.

"What about your past relationships?" Gibbs narrowed his eyes as he trained that gaze on Sam like a heat seeking missile. "How did they end? Were they amicable or messy? Was there cheating involved? Did you cheat?"

What in the world was going on here? "Uh, sir, I, uh, I've only really had one girlfriend in my, uh, life." Sam swallowed down his nervousness at this weird topic and sat up straighter in his seat. "I loved her, I was faithful to her, I planned on marrying her." He could feel that thick sadness he'd never fully heal from whenever he thought of Jess. "She was killed by a demon." He met Gibbs' gaze head-on. "It is why I got back into hunting, sir."

Surprising empathy entered Gibbs' eyes before he cleared his throat. "I'm sorry to hear that, son." His gaze shifted to Dean, clearly unimpressed. "What about Sleeping Beauty over there?"

"If I'm being perfectly frank, Sir, he seems to have only had one real girlfriend too, a journalist, and she dumped him when he told her he hunted the supernatural." Sam still couldn't believe Dean had dated Cassie and had been so in love as to break their cardinal rule. "Other than his relationship with her, though, he's been a total manwhore."

Gibbs looked at Dean distastefully. "I see."

Honestly though, what was with these questions? "May I ask why you're asking?"

Gibbs' gaze turned on him, his face expressionless. "No." And with that he peered down at his watch and then out the window.

Sighing, Sam got more comfortable in his seat.

This short flight was going to be a long one.

"Do I really need to have this?" Agent Scott asked as he eyed the pendant hanging around his neck.

"They mightn't be real hexes, but they've made me glitch, so yes." Chloe slapped his hand when it reached for the pendant. "Don't touch it. Until you're decontaminated you should try not to overload it with everything." She turned to Agent Broyles, who was outside of the Broom Closet of Protection now that the quarantine had been lifted. "I'm going to call my father to let him know that I'm okay and he can dial down his no doubt monumental scariness. Once I'm done doing that, you need to tell me about this case you came to share with us. Because whatever it is, I have a feeling it's connected to this breach."

Anne had been left with Jared trying to narrow down the search as to who could've done this. Agent Scott had reluctantly given up the name of his paramour, and had then been very disconcerted to find that there was no actual record of her. Whoever Serinda Dove was, that was definitely not her real name, which meant that nothing he knew about her was actually true either. It definitely hurt his ego to realize that he'd been used, and he'd been huffy ever since then. Anne was relived that he and Broyles were gone with Chloe, Lincoln and Tess to see this mysterious airplane.

She didn't like Agent Scott, not at all. Why in the world had Peter picked him as a candidate? Because, honestly, there was no chemistry at all there.

Her phone beeped, and she glanced down at Abby's message. "Apparently Tony and McGee have started a bet."

"About what?" Jared groaned as he twirled his seat to face her.

"John Scott. They recognized him when he came in." Anne made a face. "Apparently neither like him and are betting what part of him Chloe will break next."

"They have no imagination," Jared bemoaned. "Chloe's gonna be on her best behavior with him unless he messes up, and if he messes up again Linc will get him. With how worn out she is right now he's going to be overprotective."

"He's really got this whole mama bear thing going," Anne chuckled as she returned her attention to the computer.

"You have no idea."

Chloe didn't know who was being more overprotective right now, Lincoln or Tess. It was in completely different ways and for different reasons, but the two of them did not think her going into the airplane was a good idea (hazmat suit or not) and they were fighting her on it teeth and nails. Tess was in charge of her protection and kept reminding her over and over again that she'd been threatened with all sorts of horrible punishments should anything happen to Chloe because she was "damnably stubborn". Lincoln kept acting as if her failing bond with Peter was some sort of autoimmune disease (which, to be fair, it kind of was) and he did not like her chances of going on that plane and 'catching her death'.

But as Chloe stood in First Class, staring down upon the passengers, her team and their disapproval were the last things on her mind. "How long have they been like this?"

"We don't actually know," John Scott sounded pissed to admit that as he eyed the passengers as well. "We know that it landed on autopilot 0800, but we have no clue at what point of the flight this happened. And, as you can see, we can't exactly ask them."

"Have you tried removing them from their cocoons?" Chloe asked what she knew was a stupid question.

Instead of answering, John led her towards the bathrooms and opened one of the stalls to show a man in his forties, clearly dead, his body a horribly purple color. "Asphyxiation. It happened as soon as we breached through that gelatinous shit surrounding them. We couldn't save him."

"What have your analysis of his samples come back saying?" She wanted to know, her gaze on the dead man's agonized expression.

"We're unable to remove samples from this plane, it's all highly contaminated, as I'm sure you figured from the multiple levels of quarantine and decontamination chambers we had to get to the plane itself." John made a face. "Thing is, there are ways of checking for contaminants, and yet the ones we've tried have come up saying there's nothing wrong. We've also tested the water, the food, hell, we even tried the air in the emergency masks… and yet everything's come back clean. Which, obviously, can't be right. I mean, look at the Pod People here!"

That was something Tony would've said, and made her like John a little more, but only a very teensy tiny bit.

"If you're so sure it's not the air, then why are we wearing these?" She motioned to her hazmat suit.

He flinched. "We might be missing something, and sugar, I ain't risking turning Pod Person."

'Did he just call her 'sugar'?' Tess could be heard gasping in horror in her ear, the redhead and the others able to see and hear everything via the cameras and microphones on the suits.

"Don't call me that," Chloe muttered, disliking him a little bit more. "Why haven't you started a makeshift lab somewhere here? Move the passengers all to Business and Economy, and leave First Class as the testing site."

"We don't know what's causing this, bringing in dangerous chemicals could cause a reaction which could only make things worse."

'Chloe,' Lincoln spoke in her ear. 'I think Scott's girlfriend was spotted by the east gate. She tried to get in with his credentials but managed to get away before security could arrest her.'

Chloe turned a glance in Agent Scott's direction to see a muscle ticking in his cheek. Obviously his ego was incredibly bruised and he wasn't sure how to handle being used. "At least we know she hasn't managed to get on board yet and get whatever she's after."

'Tess is getting CCTV footage and is going to send it to Jared and Anne so they can try and run facial recognition,' Linc informed her. 'Maybe if we can figure out who she truly is, we can figure out what's going on in there and how to stop it.'

"And how she's connected to it all," Chloe agreed as she turned and noticed one of the passengers. Her expression scrunched up as she moved closer towards the visibly pregnant woman. "The quandary currently discombobulating me, and which should be of greatest preeminence, is whether the metamorphic transmutation can be terminated, suspended, or, in the best case scenario, reversed."

The silence was deafening, both in the plane and in the intercom.

Chloe gulped, nausea and mortification beginning to hit as realization settled over her. She was doing it. She'd been doing so much better lately, and yet here she was, descending into the horrifying Chloespeak she hated and no one else other than Peter understood. And yet Peter wasn't here, and the look John was giving her proved she seemed to be talking a foreign language.

A holographic window only she could see popped up with what she'd said. It was visibly, desperately, trying to run diagnostics on the sentence to find a more fitting translation and yet all the answers were coming back encrypted and unreadable.

Don't lose yourself in the data, concentrate, dumb it down. You can do it.

"Alchemically, if we're able to decipher the variables responsible for the unremitting mutagen currently transmuting the passengers, I might be able to create an algorithm which might generate permutations on not only how the pathogen was introduced to the environment, but how to cease its effects, or at least keep it from spreading."

Silence.

More goddamned silence.

She fought a panic attack, almost scared to look at John Scott, and when she did she definitely wished she hadn't. He wasn't looking at her as if she was speaking a different language, he was looking at her as if she was insane and he was scared she'd turn feral on him.

Mortification and despair filled her as she forced herself to focus on her breathing.

Windows of information popped up desperately, beginning to fill her vision again, all running simulations and diagnostics, all flashing with error and warning signs. Somewhere, an alarm was wailing loudly, almost deafeningly.

'What do you need to do that?' A voice asked in her ear so softly she was surprised she not only heard it, but understood it so clearly.

She let out a heavy, shocked breath, her own voice shaky and squeaked when she asked: "What?"

'What do you need to create and run your algorithm, or algorithms, because just one can't possibly determine all that, can it?' Lincoln asked in confusion before he paused. 'Chloe, why's your breathing labored? Your vitals are showing as elevated. The stress markers spiked ridiculously, too. What's going on?'

The alarm was getting louder, painfully loud.

"Jesus Christ, she's infected!" John Scott yelled as he stumbled back away from her. "She's bleeding out her ears and eyes!"

Or at least that's what she thought he said. It was really hard to make out any noise over the overwhelming wail of the alarm.

The band around her finger emitted a shocking spike of pain.

No.

This wasn't what was on the plane.

This was the bond.

Her chest hurt.

It tightened.

She couldn't breathe.

I can't breathe!

Desperately she fought with her helmet before finally yanking it off, breathing in deep gulps of air.

I can breathe.

She closed her eyes and leaned hard against the bathroom door's wall.

The fact that she might've just inhaled lungfuls of deadly pathogen didn't cross her mind until two seconds later.

TBC