A/N A bit late, according to my own preferred schedule, but my company had its Christmas party last night. This was a strangely difficult chapter to write, too. Aiming for a slightly fluffier tone than I usually attempt.


"Somebody lived."

"Use it or lose it."

"This is a horrible idea."

"Now it's Chuck's turn to hide."


"Alright, we're airborne now, Bartowski," said Casey. "You happy?"

"I'll be happy when that bitch's head is on a spike!" snapped Sarah. She reached out and touched Chuck's chin, crooning, "Look what she did to his face."

"I'm looking," said Carina, swabbing gently at the bloody lines on Chuck's cheek. "Between her nails and the truck she really did a number on him. Much worse than you."

Sarah reached up a hand to cover her own cheek. "You noticed?" Not even Chuck saw those lines, his mother had made them invisible.

Chuck reached out and moved her hand down, but still saw nothing. Casey took a squint too, he appreciated a good scar (sign of prowess and all that), but he also saw nothing. Chuck found that oddly comforting.

"Nothing marks you that I don't notice," said Carina calmly. "Especially on the inside. It just took me a while to understand what I was seeing."

Casey understood what he was seeing, and worse, hearing, all too well. "Greta, get me a barf bag."

Sarah and Carina smiled together. Same old Casey. When Greta actually brought Casey his barf bag they burst out laughing. Even Chuck started to smile but winced when the expression pulled on his wounds. Greta looked at them like they were crazy and went back to getting the blood out of her clothes.


"Don't worry about your appearance, Chuck," said General Beckman at the briefing. "We have excellent plastic surgeons on call. We can't allow an agent of your caliber to be so distinctively scarred."

"It's not the marks but the marking that matters, General," said Casey. "Vivian has his DNA now. She can wipe him out any time she wants."

Carina whacked him on the arm. "Geez, Casey, why not say it in front of the sister, too?"

"Are you nuts? She's ready to blow."

"Good of you to notice, Colonel," said the General. "I'll try to find a way to bring her up to speed a little more tactfully after this meeting, when she gets back from her doctor. Sarah, we'll do everything we can to keep Chuck safe. Let me hear Greta's report, and then we'll review the recordings while we still can, see if there's a reason Vivian hasn't followed through with her bizarre vendetta."

Greta's report of her experience in the meeting room was cold, emotionless, precise, until the gunplay started. Her report of her attack on the hapless cleanup crew showed considerably more…enthusiasm.

"Thank you, Agent…Greta," said Beckman, as soon as she could get a word in edgewise. "You are dismissed."

"Sorry, General," said Casey as she left.

Now he's sorry. "Don't be, Colonel, she fit the profile. I knew what I was signing up for."

"I don't know," said Chuck carefully. "Maybe if she just thought of her marks as victims she hasn't gutted yet, she'd do better in Roan's course."

"Don't hold your breath, Bartowski," said Casey. "I think she likes the reputation."

"I'll certainly suggest it to him," said Beckman. "She creeps him out. Let's review the footage, shall we?"

The recordings matched Greta's account remarkably well. "See, General, how far back from the table this guy Riley is standing? Holding the device straight out?"

"He's displaying the weapon."

"I don't think so, General," said Carina, the most experienced shopper. "He would be moving side-to-side, to let each buyer see it at the best angle."

"Instead it's like he's got his field of fire mapped out," said Casey. "He knows they're all in the kill zone. Only his head is moving."

'If we assume Riley is standing as close as he can," said Chuck, "That gives us the maximum angle of dispersion." He drew a line from the victim on the left, to the Norseman, and then to the victim on the right. "Notice how there are no chairs closer to that end of the table? Anyone sitting there would have forced him to stand back here somewhere to get them in the field, and that would have looked too suspicious."

"A shotgun, rather than a rifle," muttered Casey. "That's good. A dispersed field means a reduced range. So Chuck should be safe up here."

"Unless the device can be focused, a beam rather than a cloud."

"Ever heard of 'scatter', Bartowski?" asked Casey, watching the men in the room die. "That sound isn't enough to be killing them."

"At least not without their DNA," said Sarah, sounding doubtful.

"It's not killing them with sound, but they're acting as if they hear it," mused Chuck. "Whatever the Norseman does, their bodies experience it like a sound. A vibration."

Too much speculation, not enough hard data. "Do we have anything on the other spectra?" asked Beckman.

Casey flipped through the different frequencies they had recorded, just the basics. They didn't have the equipment on hand to dig for more. "Infrared shows them getting a bit hotter."

"Could they be, uh, cooked, somehow, like a microwave?" asked Carina.

"Doubt it," said Casey, used to waiting for minutes for his Hot Pockets. "Too small, and it worked too fast."

"There would be traces, if it was microwaves," said Chuck. "Greta brought back some tissue samples, didn't she?" She had something in a bag that was all icky at the bottom.

"She cut off fingers so we could ID everybody," said Casey, "But I suppose you could call them that too."

"This discussion is going nowhere," said Beckman. "We need more data, and we need it fast. Chuck, you will go into lockdown in the lab the second you get back. It's the most insulated room on the planet, hopefully that will mean something. The recordings and the tissue samples will go for analysis. I'll have Vivian, Riley, and this third person put on watchlists at every point of entry, in case they need to get closer than the other side of the world."

"What do we do, General?" asked Casey.

"Are you a praying man, Colonel?"

"Not usually." He'd always been more a 'God helps those who help themselves' kind of guy.

"Then nothing, for now. Dismissed."


Team B walked into…Fairyland?

"What's all this" asked Chuck.

"Don't ask me," said Manoosh, as he walked by with another strand of lights. "I'm just the harried underling."

"Manoosh!" bellowed Ellie. "They're not twinkling!"

"Cover me." Manoosh ducked behind them as Ellie stormed out of her office, as big as a house and twice as hormonal.

"Where'd he go?"

"Um," said Chuck, as the rest of his team blocked the view as best they could. "Who?"

Ellie reached down and picked up a strand of lights, pulling her assistant out of his cover. "Manoosh. These lights have to twinkle."

"Yes, ma'am."

"This place has to be magical."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Magical, Manoosh!"

"El," said Chuck hesitantly, distracting her, and Manoosh scurried gratefully away, "You're scaring Casey."

Uh-oh. Not distracted, so much as…redirected. Ellie took a step forward, and the entire team took a step back.

Ellie grabbed Chuck's chin, forcing his head firmly to one side, careful not to stretch the skin. She looked at his wounds, but found little to complain about with Carina's first aid. "Why aren't you in the lab, Chuck?"

"On my way." He slid past his sister and escaped. Halfway down the hall a moment of courage overtook him…

"Move it along."

…but it passed, and he sealed himself away from his sister with only a slight pang of regret for the rest of his team. No twinkle lights in here, at least.

Out in the hall, Ellie turned back to the rest of the them, slowly walking backwards. "And where are you three going?"

Sarah looked surprised. "Oh."

Carina looked confused. "Um…"

Casey pointed back down the hall. "Mission…"

"I didn't think so," said Ellie. "I have guests coming and this place has to be perfecter than perfect."

Sarah had a sudden, horrible thought. "It's not the Very Awesomes, is it?"

"The Ve–? Ha. Ha! We'll show you awesome," Ellie threatened as she swept majestically away.

Casey jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the exit so near...

"Now!" said Ellie.

…Yet so far.


Ellie was missing one of her people. Casey was an artist with the scrub-brush and even Carina was pulling her weight, but she needed someone to get the break room in order, and especially cover up that damned soda machine. Manoosh was still dragging his feet writing a program to manipulate current flow to her non-twinkling twinkle lights. That left Sarah.

Carina suggested she check the bathrooms, but Ellie saw through that little ploy. She went to her booth instead. The sensors there would tell her…crap, apparently. Garbage numbers that fit no known profile, and the waves were all wrong, even she could tell that much. She checked the thermal imaging.

Uh-huh. That was not a Chuck-shaped blob radiating all that heat.

Ellie didn't really need to track Sarah's signals, but the only way to tell the first set to ignore her was to bring up a second set. Ellie shrugged. It was good as an exercise, and some baseline metrics on Sarah might come in handy someday. For fun Ellie started comparing Chuck with Sarah, allowing for the usual gender differences. Chuck's stats had gone down a lot from his training, but he still ran a little hotter than her, in most ways.

Ellie frowned. That can't be right.

She tightened her focus on Sarah.


The elevator hummed to a stop. The door opened, and a tall, older man with long shaggy hair got out, courteously holding the door open for the woman following him. He looked around, taking in the hall, the break area. The soda machine. "He wasn't kidding…"

"If only the nation had that kind of security," said the woman. "I wonder how I missed that the first time around."

"Dad!"

Stephen J. Bartowski turned, pretending to search the hall. "That's my daughter's voice, and my daughter's belly, so she's gotta be here somewhere…"

"Very funny, Dad." Ellie hugged her father, nodding at her mother over his shoulder. "I see it didn't take you long to find him."

"Long?" said Mary, amazed by the relative warmth of her son's substitute-mother's welcome. She would have held a grudge much longer. "When I got to the rental agency, they had a car waiting for me with his coordinates in the GPS."

Ellie rolled her eyes. "Way to be subtle, Dad."

"Hey, it was twenty years for me, too, you know."

Hands flew to ears. "I'm not listening, I'm not listening, la-la-la-la." Ellie fled up the hall, and her parents followed.

"Who's not listening?" asked Carina, coming out of the office with a towel over her shoulder and her hair in her eyes.

"Agent Miller!" said Stephen. "Happy to finally meet you."

"Orion?" said Carina, recognizing the voice. She brushed the hair from her eyes, an automatic response in the presence of a male.

"In the flesh."

Carina looked him over, smiling. "You look like you sound. I like it."

Mary cleared her throat loudly.

"Relax, Frost, she's not that girl anymore," said Casey, coming through the doorway. He pulled off his rubber gloves before offering to shake hands. "Orion."

"Stephen, please," said the older man, shaking Casey's hand. "This is a family thing."

"In a secure government facility."

"We were asked to come here," said Mary.

"And it's not like I don't know more about this complex than you and Manoosh combined," added Stephen. "Speaking of whom…?"

"Orion!" said Manoosh, coming behind them all and pushing his way through. "I am so glad to see you. Really, really glad. You just have no idea…"

"You're glad, we get it," said Mary. She looked around for the nerd she'd come all the way back to see. "Where's Chuck?"


Sarah sat on her husband's lap in the Intersect room, listening. His every heartbeat was precious to her.

"Sarah, you have to go." Had to escape. This was the first place Ellie would look.

Sarah tightened her grip, pressing her head against his chest, hooking her legs over the arm of the chair. "I'm not leaving, Chuck," she said firmly. "I'm not going to be locked outside a room, waiting while some loonie with an ultimate weapon is out to kill my husband."

"You can't protect me from an ultimate weapon, Sarah, that's sort of the definition of 'ultimate'."

Where's Carina when I need her? Sarah imagined herself hitting Chuck on the arm, she was too comfortable to do it for real. "You and Casey are a pair, you know that? First he tells me Vivian can kill you at any time, and now you tell me I can't stop her." She started to cry, getting his shirt wet. "I know I can't protect you, even if I jumped in front of the beam!"

"I'm sorry, Sarah."

"Then stop trying to send me away. Agent Sarah might do some good out there, but Wife Sarah really needs to be here with you."

The CIA had a lot of agents, but he had only one wife. Dying was horror enough, but dying alone was worse. Chuck hated to be alone. He couldn't lie or keep a secret to save his life, so he'd even managed to make sharing into an offensive technique. "Then stay with me for the rest of my life."

That got a bit of a smile out of her. "HIja."

Chuck frowned down at her awkwardly, not really able to move his head since her head was right below his chin. "Sarah? When did you learn to speak Klingon?"

She pulled away from his chest to answer him. "For Comic-Con. It was supposed to be a surprise."

He smiled. "Well, color me surprised."

The door unsealed, the Dreaded Ellie framed by it. "Chuck? Sarah?" Chuck spun the chair around. "We've got company."


They had to bring in more chairs. When Manoosh had made the original call Chuck hadn't been in lockdown.

"So this is all your fault, then?" asked Carina.

Manoosh ducked behind Casey, a large but not a particularly safe choice. "Hey, I called them because Chuck wanted to show them his project. It wasn't my idea to get the General involved."

Orion twitched. "Diane–?"

"Me, Dad," said Ellie quickly. "Manoosh told me he'd called you, and then I saw all the lights going up, and I thought about how this was our first holiday back together and if I had to spend it stuck in a hole in the ground I didn't want it to feel like I was stuck in a hole in the ground and I'm afraid I may have gone a little bit overboard…"

"A little?" said Manoosh, Carina, and Casey together.

"So, Chuck, you have a project you wanted to show us?" asked Ellie.

"Yeah, real smooth, El, but okay." Sarah slid off his lap and Chuck stood, walking over to his console. "Mom and Dad, um…this isn't supposed to be a Christmas present, since I had no idea when I'd get a chance to show it to you, and really, given the audience Christmas would have been a seasonally inappropriate choice anyway–"

"Just play the damn thing, Bartowski!" barked Casey. "Motormouths, the lot of you."

Mary frowned. Not all of us. Did her children take so little after her?

"Okay, jeez," said Chuck, twitching his finger on the mouse.

Music flowed from the speakers, as baby photos appeared on the screens, flickering from one to another in time to the music. Stephen and Mary joined hands unconsciously, as the parade of family photos from happier days surrounded them all. Casey and Carina recognized Frost and Orion, and deduced who the children were, since they looked so little like their adult selves. Sarah and Manoosh recognized the photos of Ellie sleeping in the old car. Family photos, some staged but others taken by passing helpful strangers at various vacation spots.

Mary remembered them so well, remembered ducking her head, or moving suddenly, to blur the image of her face. She wondered if it was as obvious to the others as it was to her, how she was promoting her family just to shield herself. Hiding in Volkoff's shadow had been second nature.

As Ellie grew into a young woman, trophies and awards appeared. Physical as well as academic excellence, and Mary smiled proudly. They didn't take completely after their father.

The music turned somber as all the images with Mary in them started falling like rain to the lowest screens, where they vanished altogether. The images of Ellie followed, leaves settling to the forest floor, and tears filled her mother's eyes that so much potential was wasted, lost.

Stephen stopped appearing, too, most likely because he was the one taking the pictures. A young Morgan appeared, and Chuck started to smile again. School photos became most common, but Ellie's awards stopped, as she no longer had the time for the kind of activities that would get her awards.


Ellie stopped watching the parade, having no desire to remember those days. She moved closer to Sarah. "We need to talk later," she said quietly. "I have something important to tell you."

Sarah nodded, still rapt in her new family's life on the screen. She knew the photos, most of them, from the many albums on the shelves, but the music and the motion made them seem alive somehow, a story being told. She had no photos, no past like this. She had solitude, and pain. In these images she could see the echoes of that pain, but where she had been lost to it Chuck and Ellie had somehow kept each other afloat. "Where have I heard this music before?"

"Probably in the lab sometime," said Ellie. "Manoosh has been fiddling with it for weeks. I hear it all the time now."


The awards and trophies returned, but this time held by Chuck, earned by Chuck. Yet for every image of his smiling, proud face, there were others of Ellie, also smiling, also proud, always behind him, always supporting him. There he was in a Stanford sweatshirt, Ellie holding him proudly. The awards may have been a recognition of his achievements, but he was her work, her achievement, unrecognized.

Mary sat there, covered in shame, and wondered what the point of this exercise was. Ellie really had done the opposite of everything that she had taught her as a mother. Surely Chuck of all people hadn't intended to humiliate her publicly like this. He was always about the positive.

Then she realized she was doing it again. This wasn't about her, this was about them. The trials, the suffering, were there, but this wasn't about them either. This was a story of triumph, and what was triumph without trial. Ellie may have rejected her lessons but she had to learn them first. Mary wondered for a moment what her life would have been like if she had learned Ellie's lessons instead. Could she live that life, become that kind of mother?

The first image of Devon appeared.

Or grandmother?


"Chuck, your phone is ringing," said Ellie.

"My what?" Chuck pulled the phone from his pocket, but even if it had had any bars down here, the only people who would have called him were already in the room. "It's not my phone, Ellie."

"Then what's that noise?" said Ellie, clapping her hands to her ears.


A/N2 Hmm. Looks like the Norseman…missed.