Usual disclaimer for the Land of Litigation, no rights to any characters not created here, thanks Wilf.
Mary and Stephen's sessions with Dr Dreyfus were going well, and in less than a month they'd all agreed that they were seeing real improvement, which led to Mary asking Chuck a question that stopped him cold "What about Laszlo?"
While they were doing the cleanups of the Volkoff facilities, they ran across many of the people that they'd put away over the years (and that, in turn, prompted a thorough review of EVERYONE they'd put away, which brought them to the chilling discovery that nearly all of the dangerous adversaries that they'd put away had officially "died by accident" while they were in prison, including the ones that they re-captured or dealt with in the Volkoff operation), and one of those people was Laszlo Mahnovski. Laszlo was dangerous, because the life that the CIA and others had forced him into from a young age had driven him around the bend, but it wasn't his fault. Laszlo was a true genius (quite possibly even brighter than Chuck or Stephen), and when the CIA had caught sight of him at eleven they'd conned his parents into believing that they would give him what his parents couldn't, so they'd signed him over to the CIA program. He'd graduated college at fourteen, earned his first doctorate at seventeen, and he'd created most of the technological achievements for the CIA since Stephen had disappeared. What they gave him for all of that was that they'd locked him in a bunker like they'd threatened to do to Chuck (but back when Laszlo was still a minor) and cut him off from everything and everyone he knew, the only one he had much contact with was his handler, the bastard who had latched onto him at eleven and instigated taking his life away from him.
Being locked away in a hole in the ground, unable to talk to anyone but the bastard who took his life away as a child and pushed non-stop to create whatever toys or weapons of mass destruction the CIA wanted managed to strip away Laszlo's sanity and humanity and left him broken, was it any wonder that his grip on reality was so weak that he thought it'd be fun to drop a nuke on San Francisco? As soon as he'd finally escaped from the bunker they had him locked up in, he went back to the pier where he used to go as a boy and that was where Chuck found him (locked in a Guitar Shredder battle with that retarded Peter Pan, Morgan Grimes). After he'd had a few run-ins with Chuck and his handlers, Laszlo made an attempt at retaliation against what had been done to his life by trying to use the self destruct mechanism he'd designed into the Nerd Herder to blow up the pier where Chuck found him, but after the usual hiccups that they'd had back in those days, Chuck, Sarah and Casey managed to disarm the bomb and recapture him, after which he'd supposedly gone away somewhere where he couldn't hurt anyone (Chuck hated doing that to him, but he was too much of a danger to innocent people to be allowed to run around doing things like he did). Of course, the CIA and others just wanted to get their hands on him to make him keep creating what he'd been doing for them, so they'd faked his death to get him out of that prison, and then sold him off to the highest bidder, who just happened to be Alexei Volkoff.
When they got Laszlo out of the Volkoff facility, Chuck and the others were faced with the same dilemma that they had been before, Laszlo hadn't really done anything wrong himself, but in his mental state, he was too much of a danger to innocent people to be allowed to run around in public without supervision, so they relocated him to bunkers under the apartments in a suite that had no internal mechanisms that could be subverted, but the key difference was that this time, Chuck sat down and told him the cold, hard truth about why they couldn't release him yet. It wasn't a conversation that Chuck wanted to have, or that Laszlo was ready to listen to at first, but Chuck, Sarah and the rest of the girls (and even Casey) would come and sit (in the observation room at first, but later in the living area of his suite) and talk for a while every day unless they really didn't have a chance. The on-going doses of real human interactions with people who actually cared about him and what happened to him (which was a first for Laszlo) were slowly pulling Laszlo back into the real world, and it didn't take long for him to recognise and acknowledge that he was still a danger to others and therefore he had to be kept away from them just yet. What was key to his recovery, though, was the fact that he trusted that these people who currently had him actually wanted him to get back to "normal" enough to go back into the real world. Of course there was another problem for him (and once again Chuck was brutally honest about this), in that it wasn't safe for Laszlo to be out in the "real world". The government agencies, military corps and umpteen nefarious organisations around the world were desperate to get their hands on Laszlo to make him do for them what he'd been made to do for the CIA and Volkoff, and if he was out in the "real world" without the protection he needed, someone would almost certainly manage to find him and grab him (probably the American government), so he'd be back to where he was with the CIA and Volkoff Industries.
When the Barstow base was built, Laszlo was moved there so he could have more room and freedom. He didn't quite have free run of the base, but that was partly at his own suggestion, because on his good days he recognised where his head was on his bad days. When he wanted to he worked with Stephen on his projects, and two geniuses of their level working together were achieving truly amazing things. The best part of being moved to the Barstow base for Laszlo, though, was Mary, they'd bonded very quickly and deeply because Mary broke down when she saw what had happened to him and she'd thought about how easily that could have happened to Chuck at the same age. Perhaps if Stephen had disappeared earlier the CIA or others may have gotten their hooks into Chuck and sucked him into the system as a child prodigy like they did Laszlo, but while Stephen was there the CIA (well, Graham) wouldn't let anyone near Ellie or Chuck for fear of upsetting Stephen and putting him off his game, because they weren't about to let anything jeopardise the goose that laid the golden eggs.
When Stephen did disappear, the CIA (Graham) was focussed on re-acquiring him, rather than his son, so they kept hanging Ellie and Chuck out there as bait for Stephen rather than steam rollering over Ellie being the protective sister and mother (and the others that they had around them trying to protect them) to take Chuck, but for that though it could have been Chuck where Laszlo was now (well, Graham actually had other plans for Chuck but none of them knew about that at that time), and that realisation hit Mary hard, so she became the mother that Laszlo hadn't had since he was eleven because his parents buckled so easily to the CIA (largely due to the fact that they were having trouble handling having a son who was so far above them that they couldn't relate to him at all). It was Mary who convinced Laszlo to let Ellie run full tests on him to make sure that he was OK (because she knew all too well the sort of things that intelligence agencies did to keep their assets malleable). It was little surprise to anyone when the test results did show damage from the drugs the CIA and Volkoff would have been feeding him for at least ten years to keep him under control most of the time. Chuck and Ellie talked over what the options were when they saw the evidence of damage on Laszlo's brain scans, the best option that they could see for him came down to the BI, but Laszlo was still more than a little unstable at that stage, so the potential risks associated with letting him load it were daunting. With that in mind, Chuck, with Ellie's help, came up with another version of the BI database, with absolutely no skills or knowledge enhancements incorporated into it, all it should do (hopefully) was activate the health and healing mechanisms that they'd found to be enabled by the BI, so it would hopefully get to work on cleaning up the damaged areas of Laszlo's brain and improve his general health and fitness (the brain wasn't the only part of him adversely effected by the drugs they'd been feeding him to control him), but it shouldn't give him any additional skills or intel that would make him inherently more dangerous at that point.
When they'd created the BI-Med (as they'd tagged it) and had tested it enough to be comfortable that it was safe, Ellie (with Chuck to help where needed) sat down with Laszlo to go over the results of the examinations and scans she'd done on him, and to talk about the benefits that they, and in more particular Chuck, Stephen and Jeff, had received from loading the BI, showing him Chuck's, Stephen's and Jeff's scans and pointing out how the areas of damage had been progressively reduced and/or disappeared over time after they'd loaded the BI. Just as with everyone else, they left the decision about loading the BI up to Laszlo, and Ellie made sure she told him about the biggest downside of the BI, that the memories that you've managed to suppress because they were too painful tend to come back and give you nightmares until you can get them under control again. It didn't take Laszlo long to decide to load the BI-Med, as he trusted them, the Bartowskis and their extended family had given him more honesty and support than anyone else had his entire life, and he trusted them to be honestly trying to do the best for him in this. After Laszlo had loaded the BI, he did start getting the nightmares as Ellie had told him, but the damaged areas in his brain and other organs were clearing up fairly quickly, it took a few months for the healing to be largely finished, and Laszlo was much more stable and happy then, but that wasn't enough to heal him completely.
That was why when his mother asked "What about Laszlo?", Chuck couldn't believe that he hadn't considered him when he talked Dr Dreyfus into coming to see his parents, because Laszlo's situation was exactly the same scenario as he'd laid out to the psychiatrist in regard to his father, the physical damage was apparently healed, but he still wasn't quite right, and after the life Laszlo had had, therapy with someone who was capable and who cared about helping him was almost certainly what he needed. He went straight from his mother to Dr Dreyfus and laid out all of Laszlo's history, giving him access to Laszlo's files and asking him if he would see if he could work with Laszlo while he was here, too? It wasn't a hard sell with the psychiatrist, as Laszlo was another extremely interesting case (Sarah hadn't been embellishing when she'd told him that they had the best minds working with them), and he could see Chuck's commitment to helping Laszlo recover fully from what he'd been put through since he was a child, so Dr Dreyfus had another patient at the base, and he still wanted to talk to Chuck to find out what had triggered the changes to turn him into the decisive leader that he was now.
Under the concept of Yin and Yang, though, the universe needed something to balance out Laszlo's turn from a supposed evil genius into someone who was a force on the side of right, and that something was Langston Graham, most of the original Council members (and some of the younger ones) still had trouble accepting (or more to the point, admitting) that the former head of the CIA, who'd formed and guided many of their careers and many people in the intelligence community had looked up to, had in fact been working a dark game and playing all of them for fools all along. Sarah and Carina, of course, had no trouble accepting that the bastard was evil incarnate after what he'd put them through at his instigation when they were vulnerable teenagers (and in later years), and nor could Chuck after what had happened to both of them, but for the rest it wasn't anywhere near so personal and they mainly saw him as doing what everyone else in the game was doing if they had a chance. The questions about whether Chuck and Sarah were pushing the hunt for Graham for personal reasons rather than the war that they were engaged in led to a violent argument in the Council meeting that ended with the 2" thick conference table being split in two when Chuck pounded his fist into it and reams of paperwork being thrown across the room as he shouted "Yes, it's fucking personal, what he put my wife and my sister-in-law and god knows how many other women, girls, through makes me want to rip the bastard apart, but as you obviously don't care about that, this (throwing the paperwork under discussion at the General and others questioning him) should be quite enough evidence to convince even you that he is the one behind the organisation that YOU forced me to risk everything to bring me into this to fight. I've had it with arguing, either you're behind me on the matter of putting all our efforts into cutting the head off the snake and going after Graham, or you'll fight your fight without me!" With that he turned and walked from the room with Sarah at his side and Carina only a few steps behind them. Ellie looked at the others and said that she was with Chuck before standing and leaving, Casey and Zondra stood and said the same before she'd managed to leave the room, and Emma looked long and hard at her longest and dearest friends before saying "I stand with my son-in-law and daughter." and standing and leaving herself. When she'd left, Bry looked at the remaining council members at the table with an expression that indicated that he didn't want to have any part of them, let alone be in the room with them, and called for the vote on supporting Chuck's plan, immediately following that with "I vote Yea!" With tears streaming down her face, Mary choked out "Yea", as did Stephen. Bryan looked at the last two and said in a hard voice that the motion was carried ten to two, but Roan put up his hand to stop him before forcing out "No, eleven, I vote Yea." The General sat there shaking her head, and whispered "Unanimous, Yea." before collapsing onto the table in tears.
That meeting almost destroyed the Council, because Chuck and Sarah were already packing to leave by the time that Ellie and the others got upstairs to talk to them. They were going to take their children and get in Chuck's van to head off to the cabin that Casey gave them as a wedding present, well away from all this shit. It was less than a minute before Emma arrived to throw her arms around Sarah and Chuck and cry, and less than five minutes later when Bry arrived to tell Chuck "They've all agreed to follow your plan." Chuck nodded, his face hard, but it softened a little as he read the look on Bry's face tried to tell him that he'd always been on their side, and he nodded again, saying "I know, thank you." quietly.
It was about ten minutes after that that two very distraught women came upstairs and asked if Chuck would listen to them? He wasn't at all inclined to do so until Sarah forced him to, and the rest left the four of them to talk, but not before Chuck made a point of hugging Emma with love and then turned back to the woman who bore him and his godmother with a stony face. Mary started to speak but Diane stopped her, saying that this situation was her fault and she needed to rectify what had happened. She stood in front of Chuck like a sacrificial lamb before a rabid wolf, looking every bit as small and old as she was, but she looked him in the eye and began.
"As you know I have been in this business for over thirty five years, I was proud and inflexible when I started and I've done nothing but get worse as time went by. I love both of you (looking from Chuck to Sarah before returning her gaze to Chuck), and I was the one who pushed the rest of the Council into forcing you two to take on the mantle of leadership of the Council because you are the ones who understand what the real issues are and what needs to be done to succeed. With all of that, and the fact that I wanted to throw your mother off the Council for questioning your leadership, I have now done the same thing, only worse because I questioned your motives out of spite. The entire time I've, we've, been in this game, we've had it pounded into us that the existing protocols MUST be followed no matter what, and even though the rule books that are made up of those protocols were written by the other side to force everyone's hands in their favour, we (glancing at Mary) still salivate and bark when that buzzer goes off. On top of that, for as long as you've been in this business, you've been under my command, and my stupid pride arcs up whenever you don't defer to me, especially when you show me that you're right and I'm wrong. I'm not the spy that you are, either of you, but I am good enough to have managed to get to know all of your key triggers over the past seven years. That's why, when you were presenting the intel which showed that that bastard had been playing me and the rest of them for a fool for decades and that he's obviously behind what we're up against now, and it cut me to the core for being so stupid for the last twenty five years at least that I've had dealings with him, I came back with a stupid, petty and WRONG attack at the two of you that I knew would strike home, questioning your motives and professionalism, not that that's ever worried YOU (looking Chuck in the eye), because I could see that you were right and I felt so incredibly stupid, so I felt the need to hit out at you. What you've told us and your plan of action goes against every protocol that has been ingrained into us, and if anything that's all the more proof that you're right and those of us who are stuck in the past following the ways we were taught are wrong. Given that, I think that this shows us that we are, as I said to Mary last time, a major threat to the Council and it achieving the results that it needs to, for the sake of the world, and therefore I, at least, think that I need to leave before I endanger things any more. I know that Roan wishes to speak with you after this, and I believe that he will be saying something similar to you."
With that, she went quiet and Chuck looked at his mother, Mary drew a breath before starting. "Diane's right, I should know better than anyone what a monster Graham was, is, because I've been played by him for the longest, the evidence that your father and Jeff found seems to indicate that you and Eleanor were just a breeding experiment to try and create the perfect spy, so apparently I was being pimped out to your father as a brood mare, whereas my pride had been telling me that I was being selected to protect the CIA's top asset because I was the best." She looked Chuck in the eye before continuing. "Make no mistake, I was, and am, in love with your father, and I truly love you and Eleanor, but I was placed with your father primarily as a breeding experiment, and when I heard that it pretty much invalidated everything I thought I was. The fact that he took a technological genius that the CIA almost bankrupted itself to get control of and put him together with the top female agent that they had at that time purely as a breeding experiment shows that he's closer to being like Josef Mengele than anyone we thought he was. What he did to Sarah and Carina and god knows how many others to try and break them to do what he wanted just further shows how morally bereft he is. For all of that, just like Diane, I've still been salivating and barking whenever the agency's protocol buzzer has gone off, even though I know that you're right and they're wrong. The sessions with Dr Dreyfus are going well, but I still haven't let go of everything from Volkoff's world, either. Because of that, like Diane, I think that I need to get out of the way before I do more damage."
Chuck was looking frustrated and angry, he looked at Sarah for one of their wordless communications, and she nodded and leant in to kiss him, after that he pulled out his phone and sent a text to everyone saying "Downstairs NOW!" he looked at his mother and godmother and told them that they'd meet them downstairs, the first words he'd spoken since they'd come upstairs to talk to him.
Everyone else was in the common area waiting for them when Chuck and Sarah arrived with Jaqueline and Levi, putting them down in a quiet corner before moving to the group. When they were in front of the group Chuck turned to Roan and asked whether the discussion that he wanted to have was to apologise and tender his resign from the Council? "Well, yes, that's basically it Charles but.." "Denied" He looked at Diane "Denied", and looked at his mother "Denied" he looked at the group in general and said "I propose the motion that none of the Council be allowed to resign until we have that bastard Graham's head and have eradicated his organisation, all in favour?" He got eight "Yea"s in rapid succession, and he looked back at the three old spies, saying "Motion carried nine to three, you will stay and fight with us until we've taken that bastard and everyone associated with him down!" Diane and Roan looked a little stunned, but Mary was looking at her baby boy with pride, and softly said "Yes sir!" with a smile.
Then Chuck turned on his father, demanding to see the evidence of the breeding experiment that his mother had been talking about, that made the others turn and stare at him, but his tone had his father grabbing a keyboard to bring up the files that Chuck was asking for on screen as fast as he could. They were all asking what this was about but Chuck just held up his hand to shut them up as he scanned everything up on the screens, Sarah was doing the same thing and when they'd finished they turned to each other with expressions of dread and holding each other tightly. After standing there silently in each other's arms for five minutes, Chuck kissed Sarah on the top of her head and pulled back to wipe her tears away and they shared another silent communication before she nodded and he kissed her. With one arm around Sarah as she snuggled into his side, Chuck waved his free hand at the screens and said "This was the missing information which gives us the motivation for what's been happening (sparing a second to glare at his father), there was something that didn't make sense until now about why they put so much effort that mission to create the evidence they needed to force me and Sarah apart and why they kept insisting that Sarah take her babies when she ran." Ellie clicked onto what he was saying and grabbed a keyboard as he was talking. "They wanted Sarah, yes, because she's the best, but even more so Graham wanted our babies, Ellie and I were the first generation of Graham's breeding experiment, Jaqui and Levi are the second generation." At that point, Ellie managed to throw up Mary and Stephen's genetic test results, with Emma's and "Jack Burton"s beside them, the next row showed her's, Chuck's, and Sarah's results, and the third row showed Jaqui and Levi's. Once they were up there, Ellie quickly went through them, highlighting the areas that showed the progression from grandparents, to parents, to children of the key markers, and Carina's simple exclamation of "Fuck!" summed up what they were all thinking, Graham had not only put Mary and Stephen together for his breeding experiment, he had put Sarah and Chuck together as well, he'd just managed to luck out with Sarah being a natural pairing of exactly what he was looking for. If they weren't all struck dumb by what was in front of them, they wouldn't have heard Sarah's soft, cold voice as she said "That bastard will be dead before he ever gets anywhere near my children!" or Chuck's response "Our children, and yes, I'll make very sure of that!" Carina asked how the assassin fitted into that, as Graham wouldn't have gotten the babies if they died with Sarah. The look Chuck sent her was more contemplative than angry (a welcome change) as he mused that he wasn't sure, it could have been a knee jerk reaction to the Intersect Team being closed off to outside groups, and so possibly the reaction may have been of the nature of "If we can't get Walker and the children, we'll make sure that no-one can!", but the effects of the contents of that syringe pointed to something more personal and vindictive than that, so it was more probable for it to have been Goodman trying to get back at them by torturing Sarah to death." Chuck looked at Casey, saying "If that's the case Graham will be doing a clean-up on Goodman sooner rather than later, pick him up straight away so we can get what we can out of him." Casey nodded, asking "What about Decker?" Chuck shook his head, saying that there was no indication that they knew that Decker had been made by them yet, and he wasn't likely to be part of the purge on Goodman, so they'd be better off leaving him in place in hope to get something from his contacts, Casey nodded and went to a nearby workstation to set things in motion to grab Goodman. With that, Sarah buried her face in Chuck's chest and cried. The look that Chuck was sending his father's way over Sarah's head said that they would be having some VERY serious talks soon!
Chuck took Sarah under his arm and went to gather up the babies' bassinet and head upstairs, turning his head to look at Diane and tell her to get the table replaced, as it was a result of her fit of pique that got it broken, she timidly nodded and said that she would do it as soon as possible, Roan started to say something but the look that came his way when he did chilled his blood and stilled his tongue. Few of them had ever seen Chuck enraged before, this was the first time for most of them, and there was still enough rage left in him to let them see that "The Wolf" was, in fact, a very apt name for this normally very affable and caring man when he was pushed, and his family was threatened.
Chuck put Sarah to bed upstairs and laid down with her, for the first time in a while they had the twins in their room with them, as with this new piece frightening news, they weren't about to let them out of their sight. Sarah had cried herself to sleep on Chuck's chest, but when she woke alone a couple of hours later she'd panicked, and went looking for him. She'd found him in the study, and the way things were flashing all over the screens reminded her all too much of the way he was when he was in the burnout loop after the building blew up during Kate's rescue. Chuck turned his head distractedly to look at her when he heard her tentative "Chuck?", but the look of fear in her eyes cut through the borderline information overload haze and he jumped up to go to her, assuring her that he was here, he hadn't gone off again. Sarah collapsed briefly into his chest with relief before pushing herself back to look at the screens and ask what this was? Chuck waved at the various screens as he explained that he was reviewing all the other intel that they'd decided wasn't important in case there were any other bombshells there that they didn't know about that they needed to worry about, as well as searching the intelligence databases for any mention of Graham's breeding experiments, updating and expanding all the data and image searches for any hint of Graham or his known associates, and starting data and image searches for all the supposedly dead, but presumably working for the other side, ones that were no longer in prison one way or the other. Sarah looked at the screens wide eyed for a minute or so then looked back up at him and asked whether the searches would continue to run without him? At his questioning, drawn out "Yeah?", she said "Then come back to bed, I need you with me and so do our children." He apologised and quickly set everything up to run unattended before shutting down the screens and leading her back to their bedroom, as she wasn't shifting until she knew he was coming with her.
While Chuck was helping Sarah get some much needed rest, Casey, Carina, Zondra and a Council strike team were taking out what they needed to of the small army of CIA SAD teams and agents who were posted around the CIA Director's home so that they could extract him for questioning, leaving "We're coming for you!" scrolling across the screen on the workstation in his office when they left (after cloning the computer and laptop drives, his phone and every portable drive and USB stick they could find around the house and in the safe and copying every document they found). Most of the people who saw the message wouldn't have a clue who it was meant for, but they knew word of it would get to Langston Graham, and he was quite bright enough to understand that it was meant for him, they hadn't missed him by that much in Chicago when they started from over 2000 miles away, and he knew that they were after him now that they knew he was alive.