"Chuck?"
Sam's hushed voice pulled me out of my funk. I'd been staring at a wall in Castle for the past half hour, my mind racing and trying to wrap itself around all the information it had just been presented. This whole thing was bigger than I had expected it to be (not that I had expected Sam to be in the CIA, but when I'd gotten past that, of course), and now, all thanks to a little secret called the Intersect and the fact that I had to pretend to be an fully involved with the government, I was stuck right in the middle of this. I wasn't about to tell anyone, but yeah, I was terrified.
Once he had finished filling us in on all the information he had on Crowley, Sam had asked Sarah and Casey to go and do surveillance on a supposedly abandoned storage lockup he thought a weapons trade was going to go down in sometime soon. The place was twenty minutes out, and as soon as they were given the instruction and had prepped themselves with all the weapons a secret agent could dream of, they left.
Sam, meanwhile, told me he was had to make a phone call and had disappeared from Castle, thus leaving me in my state of 'holy-crap-I-am-way-in-over-my-head'. His return went unnoticed until he was standing right in front of me, leaving me feeling more than relieved that my crisis had all been internal and silent.
I gave him a smile, and it was obvious from the slight frown that appeared on his face that it looked as forced as it felt, but he didn't address it. "I need you to do me a favour."
"What's your brother got to do with this?" I asked as though I'd never heard his request. But seriously, any and all thoughts about Dean Winchester had been driving me crazy ever since the subject had been mentioned and then randomly dropped. I couldn't help but find it suspicious – sure, there were more important things to discuss, but it had seemed as though Dean had been forgotten about a bit too intentionally. Sam obviously didn't want to discuss his family – the fact that he never talked about them while we had been at Stanford showed that – but if Jimmy had thought it was important to mention Dean while taking his last breaths, now was the time to bring it up and get answers for myself.
Sam looked down at his clasped hands that were resting on the table before he shrugged and swallowed thickly. "I dunno. You're still close with your sister, right?"
His question surprised me, but I answered honestly. "Yeah. Still living with her and everything."
The comment didn't lighten the mood. "My mother died when I was six months old," he began bitterly, and I remembered back to the discussion we'd had with Bryce once upon a time at Stanford. This grim fact had come up, but we hadn't really gone into it. "She had been sick for two years, and I guess having me didn't exactly help."
I couldn't help but pick up in the hate in his voice, but it didn't seem to be directed at the illness that took his Mom - it sounded like he blamed himself for being born at such a time. Cause he totally had control over that.
"We stayed in Lawrence until I was five, and the Novaks lived a few doors down from us. Jimmy's five years older than me, a year older than my brother, so they were friends. If Dean had had his way, I wouldn't have been allowed to hang around them, but..." He licked his lips. "But our Dad was never really around."
I frowned from the edge of my seat when he fell silent. Until a week ago, I thought I knew the man sitting in front of me as well as I knew myself. But ever since he'd reappeared in my life, it was obvious that I didn't. "How come?" I prompted. It was probably rude to do so, but I had a feeling that it was important or he would never continue the tale.
He shrugged again; it was becoming a common action for him. "Dad wasn't really home during the day - he worked - and he usually got home so late that Dean and I didn't see him. Mrs Novak would take care of us for nothing, but I heard her confronting Dad once just after I'd started school. She wanted to know what he was doing all this time, why his two sons barely knew him. He just said she had no right to question him, but when she kept pushing, he said he was working. We weren't allowed to go round to the Novak's after that."
"So what, he would just leave a five and nine year old at home?"I asked, unable to hide the disgust from my voice as I put the puzzle together.
"Well...yeah."
"Didn't the Novaks do something?"
"They didn't get a chance. We moved a week later and never really stopped."
I didn't push for an explanation: I knew that he'd give it in his own time. It took a minute for him to gather his words, then Sam began his tale again.
"It took a month of jumping around cheap motels for me to figure out that we weren't going home – heck, I didn't even realise we still legally owned a home until I applied for Stanford," Sam said, the slight chuckle in his voice cancelled out by the bitterness that was fuelling his words. "That was my life for the next decade: we'd arrive in a new state, book out a crappy motel room, I'd be the weird new kid at school, and by the time a few weeks had passed, I was glad to leave the place behind us.
"Dad continued to play the absent parent card, so Dean was left to raise me." He paused a moment to shake his head, eyes glued to the table. "Jeez, I can't imagine how hard that must've been – losing your mother and practically your father, only to be stuck raising your snot-nosed brother. Dad made it clear that I was Dean's top priority: imagine that, being nine years-old and having to learn how to cook and do the washing and comfort a five year-old every time he fell over and grazed his knee, and make sure the doors were locked every night because your deadbeat Dad wasn't around to take care of you."
I clenched my jaw, deciding not to mention that I could relate – this was Sam's time to talk, not mine. My Mom had left in fifth grade, then Dad a few short years later, leaving Ellie to raise me. It was just another thing me and Sam could add to the list of screwed up things no one should really have in common, but hey presto. At least we hadn't moved around every couple of weeks: that would have well and truly sucked.
"I kept going though, with school and trying to have as normal a life as possible, but as soon as I hit eighteen, I was done. I was an adult, I could take 'legally' care of myself, and I damn sure let my father know how suffocated I'd felt the past thirteen years. So I left, applied for Stanford, was miraculously was allowed to start as soon as possible and...well, you know how the rest of the story goes."
I nodded in agreement: I had been part of a majority of the story, after all. Silence filled the air for half a minute before I spoke again. "And you had – have – no idea why?" I questioned in a hushed tone, my mouth gaping slightly in disbelief.
Sam chewed his bottom lip as he pondered over the question for a moment. "Before Jimmy turned up, I had half a dozen theories, but now I-" He came to a sudden stop as the door to Castle opened, revealing two dirty and rather sweaty agents.
Casey made no effort to lighten his footsteps as he stomped down the stairs, Sarah following close behind. Sam and I stood suddenly, and my mind went nuts as I processed the graze on Sarah's head and the grave expressions they both wore.
"What happened?!" I blurted out even though the look Casey gave me told me it wasn't my place to do so. He glanced over at Sarah, and her lips pursed together to show she had clearly received the silent message he passed on, then the Major left the room without a single word.
"Walker, what happened?" Sam demanded, repeating my question in a more authoritative tone as he paced over to her.
"The trade was going down like you said, but there were more guards that we anticipated. We had to...improvise," she replied as she placed a bag on the table and blew some loose hair away from her face. She took a breath and I waited in anticipation for her to continue as she turned to me. "Chuck, leave," she ordered, her voice strained as she looked me in the eye.
"What? But I have a right to –"
"Now, Chuck."
It wasn't often Sarah had to use that tone with me, so getting the message loud and clear, my shoulders slumped as I followed Casey to the next room.
"What happened out there?" I asked him, not surprised to see him undergoing his favourite 'blowing off steam' activity: aggressively (if you could actually do the action aggressively...) cleaning his hand gun, while the other weapons he'd taken on the mission laid out on the table waited for the same fate.
Casey growled under his breath as he dropped the cloth and brought the gun to eye level, loading it in a manner that suggested he wasn't afraid to use it...namely on me. "Things got messy," he replied calmly
"You don't say," I shot back, crossing my arms tightly. "Do I get specifics, or is that it?"
"You'll have to ask your boy friend if you want any more detail than that – this is his mission, not ours, remember, moron?"
I nodded, suppressing a sigh. I'd gotten so used to being in on missions that I suddenly felt as naive and left out of things as I had when I'd first gotten the Intersect...
Muffled raised voices sounded from the next room, and I glanced nervously over my shoulder before looking to Casey for an explanation. He just shrugged, clearly unoblivious to what was going on, and continued cleaning. A few seconds later, there was silence, and if anything, that worried me more than the shouting had.
It took a minute for the doors to open again, but only Sarah walked through them, her lips pursed even tighter than before. I rushed over to her, grabbing her arm to stop her from disappearing – her expression told me it had been a bad idea, but it was too late to go back now. "Where's Sam? What happened? Why were you-"
"Novak was right, Chuck, that's all you need to know."
"Right about what?"
Sarah clenched her jaw, not meeting my eye as she spoke in a straight tone. "The CIA's been tracking everyone that's been working for Crowley for the past two years and why they're involved. Beckman informed me that we thought he was involved, but there was never any record of a deal or a reason as to why he would be, so we never had any proof that he actually was... Until now."
"Wait a minute, so you're saying that someone's working for Crowley just for the sake of working for a bad guy? Who?"
"Dean Winchester is Crowley's right hand man, Chuck, and has been for the past seven years, but it's only now that Sam has found out about his involvement."
