This is following on from Instant Karma.
Usual disclaimer, don't own or hold any rights to the characters.
The day after the Morgan incident, Chuck and Sarah were both still relatively shell shocked, not managing to do much other than making the urgent call to the General, and seeing Alex off.
2 days after the incident Chuck sat Sarah down to discuss something which he was a bit hesitant about, as he had a very strong recollection of the "No secrets, no lies" agreement that they'd made in Volkoff's Moscow headquarters, even if Sarah didn't as yet, and he had to admit that this felt like he'd been keeping a secret from her. The first thing he'd done when the General had unfrozen their accounts was to buy the house he'd found and they'd decided would be their's, by paying the asking price without haggling he'd got possession early, and had been remodelling the house, new kitchen and other things, along the lines that they'd agreed they wanted. So they had the house soon after Sarah came back, but he hadn't mentioned it to her as yet, as he thought being in their apartment, which had many of the past 5 year's of their memories in it, would better help her recover her memories.
That night on the beach, they were both disappointed, though not surprised, that the stupid idea of "one magical kiss" fixing everything didn't work, but the soft, gentle kiss lasted for over 10 minutes, and dispelled any doubts in Sarah that she had deep and inescapable feelings (and, love?) for this wonderful stranger, her husband. They talked for quite a while after the kiss and Chuck made his case for her to move back into the apartment (with no agenda to push her into anything), in hope that being in familiar surroundings would help her recover her memories. Given the fact that being with and talking to Chuck was already doing that, she agreed that it was a good plan and decided to go with it.
When she moved back in a couple of days later after tidying up her affairs, Chuck had moved into the guest room (Ellie and Devon's old room), so she could have their room, and set up the electronics that he couldn't live without in there. Being Chuck, he wanted to give Sarah space to set the pace that she was comfortable with, and take it slow (a phrase that she was sure had come up many times in the past from her, as it resonated so strongly within her). He also raised the question of whether she wanted him to remove all the cameras etc, his hesitation when he asked the question made her ask what his reservation on that was, so he explained that he was thinking if he could see if she was having nightmares or anything, he could try to help her. At that she looked at him, trying to work out how he knew about the nightmares, and she realised that he just knew her so well that he could tell that she was having them. So they agreed to leave the cameras in, but remove any external feeds, so the monitoring was only from within the apartment.
She did have the nightmares, of course, and he'd come in and hold her until they went away, and then go back to the other room, unless she asked him to stay. That arrangement was in place for a few weeks, until she convinced him that she could sleep better if he was in the bed with her, because she felt safe in his arms.
The fact that she knew that she would have to work hard when the time came to convince him that she was ready to have sex, no matter how much she could feel that he wanted to, was just part of that endearing safety bubble that he created. When that time did come, the effort to convince him was well worth it, and the memories of the train trip from Paris to Zurich that came with it were almost worth the price of admission by themselves.
So far, the plan to use the apartment to trigger her memories had worked reasonably well, but with the Morgan incident, those memories were tainted to a degree, so with Ellie, Devon and Clara in Chicago, Casey off looking for Gertrude and Alex living with Kathleen for the moment, it seemed that the time could be right to move on, they had a past there, but their future wasn't, so they agreed to move to the house. The Castle, Buy More and Orange Orange were also part of a past that they'd decided to move on from and had associations to things that they wanted to put behind them, so they arranged to pack up everything in preparation to sell them off as well.
Over the next week, they were pretty busy, meeting with the General to get the remnants of the intersect in Sarah's head properly suppressed, starting to pack up the apartment and Castle, and working out a plan about how to get rid of the properties.
The other task that they had to get to work on was Sarah's plan for changing Carmichael Industries into a Counter Cyber-Terrorism business, when they started packing up Castle, they found the paperwork and files she'd been working on the morning that Quinn took Chuck, and it was the next step once they moved, and got rid of the old premises, as Casey was away at the moment, and there was no work for Carmichael Industries, so it was the right time for out with the old, in with the new.
They chased down Casey to get his agreement before they pulled the plug on Castle, and to talk to him about Alex and the Morgan incident, he was furious about what Morgan had done to Alex, and them, and angry that he'd missed all the signs until they pointed out that he wasn't around when most of these things happened, with them or with Alex. Of course, he was on the first plane home to look after his little girl, and his phone call to Morgan, telling him what he was going to do to him, ensured that Morgan had disappeared by the time Casey got back. He could have traced him down easily enough, but Alex convinced him to let it go, so he consoled himself with the knowledge that Morgan would be hiding and looking over his shoulder, probably for the rest of his miserable life. Once he was back, they discussed all their plans and he agreed that it was time for Echo Park, like the Creepy Cousin, to be in the rear view mirrors, so a quick house hunt found a comfortable little place for him and Alex to share, close to the new Casa Bartwoski.
Part of the reason that they had to sit down with Casey before proceeding with the plans was that they called for him to be a partner in Carmichael Industries, not an employee. They were a team through everything, and one thing that was brought into focus by what happened with Sarah was that Casey wasn't a robot that followed orders any more, either. He couldn't go back to what he was before, any more than Sarah could. They'd achieved amazing things as a team over the past 5 years, and they needed the team together to do that, so it was time to make it official. As expected, it was a hard sell to get through to Casey, but they cheated and enlisted Alex's help to win him over. Like most little girls, she could wrap Daddy around her little finger when she wanted, and she could be quite the actress.
The bribe that they offered him in regard to the Creepy Cousin didn't hurt, either. Casey liked blowing things up almost as much as he liked shooting things, and hated the Buy More, so as there was no safe way to sell the Buy More etc off as it was without a lot of questions being asked, he got to engineer the operation to blow up the Creepy Cousin, and everything underneath it. He staged it as a convincing accident at night, leaving them free to collect the insurance and sell off the real estate with the evidence destroyed. So many gas related explosions in Burbank, so many. They had to talk him out of him being there to celebrate when the Buy More went up, though, pointing out that it would be hard to sell as an unexpected accident if one of the key players was standing there with a cigar in one hand and a bottle of whiskey in the other, that would be unprofessional.
With all of them, including Alex, working, it took 3-4 weeks to pack up and move everything in the respective apartments and Castle. Most of the "plant and equipment" went into secure storage, they moved into their respective houses, clean up operation, or rather "accident", went off as planned and Echo Park and the Buy More Crater were sold. Between the insurance payout and what they got for the real estate, they made a significant profit on Buy More etc, and they sold the apartment complex to a developer, so they made more than expected by selling the apartments individually, after taking out the cost of the 2 houses from the proceeds, they still had rather more than they expected to spend on buying and outfitting the new Carmichael Industries headquarters.
So, after a month and a half of frantic work from all of them (as Sarah had told her, Alex was part of the family now, perhaps not one of the three partners in CI, but definitely part of the family), they'd closed out the Echo Park and Buy More segments of their lives, were comfortably settled into their new houses, and were planning the new start for Carmichael Industries and all of them.
Casey held off going back to Gertrude's operations in Europe while they were hunting a property for CI's new headquarters, and until he was sure that Alex was OK, once those items were sorted, he went back to wind things up, on the understanding that he was to be called if he was needed and he'd drop everything and get back ASAP.
As far as the re-fitting of the CI offices went, Chuck handled the technology, Sarah and Chuck handled all the security issues (with Sarah taking the lead), and Sarah, Chuck and Alex collaborated on the décor (which was easier without Casey around, Chuck was primarily raised by Ellie alone, so he didn't have any overt macho issues to get past, and Sarah and Alex were strong, capable women with professional outlooks, which made them a perfect team to work together to create an inviting, professional space that was gender neutral and masked all the high level security and technology that existed in the place, they did "butch up" Casey's office to suit his tastes, but that was the only space in the building that got any special treatment in that respect).
With the offices sorted out while Casey was winding up his affairs in Europe, Chuck and Sarah got things moving on generating business engagements and training (Sarah trained Alex and Chuck in the areas she was best at, and Chuck trained Alex and Sarah in the areas he was best at, Casey would be added to the mix when he returned, and they all knew how much fun that would be.) They would have to add staff when the business started ramping up, but for now they had the core team that they needed for the start-up, baby steps.
They'd settled into the new routines and it felt almost normal, Sarah was drinking her coffee and tidying things up while she waited for Chuck to get ready to leave, as usual (he was always the first up but she ended up waiting for him to get ready to go). She was feeling a little queasy and started to call out to ask Chuck whether he thought whether the pizza that they'd had could have been off when she had a memory float up of a very similar experience and she stopped suddenly, "oh no."