In case you guys didn't see, I posted an extra chapter last week in celebration of whatever folks celebrate this time of year. It is the immediate aftermath to Chapter Nine, so you'll want to make sure you read that first.

Hope you enjoy the final chapter!

Alex couldn't remember the last time she'd been this amped up. Maybe when Kara had been taken by Cadmus… or when she'd disappeared off-world… okay, clearly she felt like this every time something happened to her sister.

It was the first time she'd felt like this for someone she hadn't grown up with, though. Emotions were warring within her: frustration, anger, and a slightly murderous instinct, which she promptly forced back under lock and key. This all had to be aboveboard. She couldn't do anything brash in Palm View. The Hendersons needed to be cleanly arrested to serve a full sentence for what they'd done to Winn.

For Winn, she could bury these feelings and get the job done.

They were taking the unbranded DEO jet, which was, of course, modified to fly faster than a commercial aircraft. She had never been on it before, but J'onn and the board used it frequently to travel to and from clandestine meetings with other ghost agencies.

The whole trip, Alex kept an eye on the security footage from the gas station and had yet to see the van. Hopefully they were truly going to beat the Hendersons there.

They had to.

After the jet landed on the uneven ground behind the gas station with the stealth shielding up, Alex took a quick scan. Finding nothing out of the ordinary, she motioned for the team to deplane.

They set up around the gas station behind hills or outcroppings and one even squeezed in behind the freezer. Each was responsible for planting a point of the teleportation-blocking shield, a miniaturized version of the one protecting the DEO, in the ground. It would be activated once the Hendersons were in range, effectively trapping them in the vicinity.

Then, they waited.

And waited.

And waited.

"Van inbound," Agent McCarthy finally reported.

In her position behind the propane stand, Alex took two deep breaths and checked her weapon again as a dark blue van slid into the station and parked in the farthest spot from the small convenience store.

"Is it the right van?" she asked.

"Affirmative," Agent Jones replied only a beat later.

"Positive ID on the Hendersons?"

The passenger's side door of the van opened.

"Affirmative," Agent Filben stated. "Both Josh and Marcus."

Alex punched the button to activate the teleportation-blocking shield, as she silently rose to her feet. "Then let's go get 'em."

The next time Winn woke, Maggie was gone and James was slouching beside his bed, tapping away on his phone.

"H'y," Winn slurred around a desert-dry throat.

James startled upright. "You're awake," he said with a softness that belied his surprise. His hands were on the move a split second later, fetching Winn a glass of water, which the agent gratefully accepted. "How are you feeling?"

"I can say with complete certainty that literally everything hurts," Winn was able to say after knocking back half the glass. He paused to down the rest before continuing, "but I'll be fine. Nothing permanent."

James nodded in relief. "Let's keep it that way, okay?"

"You don't have to worry about that. I'm done playing the damsel in distress. It's one of your turns now." As Winn lay back against his pillow, a faint memory floated through his brain. "Was Alex here?"

James nodded again. "She spelled Maggie after Palm View and I—"

Winn shot into a sitting position, causing the machines he was connected to to blare. "Palm View!" he gasped. "What happened? Did they get the guy? Is everyone okay?"

Suddenly, James' shoulder was on his, and the back of the bed was moving up so Winn could lean again it.

"Calm down and we'll talk," James said, his tone laced with concern.

Winn nodded hurriedly as he sucked in a few deep breaths. "You'd better start explaining," he said, once the monitors began to quiet.

"The ambush went fine," James reported. "Both Hendersons are in custody. No one was hurt."

"Did they say why they were after me?"

"The son had some sort of episode while he was being arrested. Copped to his whole involvement in exchange for a shorter sentence for him and his father."

"Episode?"

"Apparently he can see the future. Or parts of it. He saw you delivering the testimony that got his dad, who robbed the bank last Sunday, arrested. So he tried to scare you off: first by moving stuff around in your apartment, then by ambushing you in the alley. He swears though that he didn't mean for the bomb to be quite so powerful. It was only supposed to blow up your microwave."

Winn started to sit up again, but James' hand tightened on his shoulder, keeping him resting against the bed. "But how did he get into my apartment?"

"Technically, he didn't—"

"Then how—"

"I'm trying to explain," James groused. He waited for Winn to close his mouth and gesture for him to continue before saying, "I'm sure his explanation will make a lot more sense to you, but apparently he can control waves? He used them to trick your security system into thinking the sensors were unbroken, then used the air to push things around. That's how he got the note into your room at the DEO too... And before you ask how he knew where you were, apparently he can use the waves to sense, so he just followed them around until he found something that resembled you." James shrugged. "It's all on Alex's helmet cam if you want to hear how he phrased it. That's the best I can do."

"Waves." Winn was quiet as his aching brain raced to process that information. He was going to have to find a way to protect against that. A double-blind test of the system itself in a way that would identify this. It was something the DEO—

"Hey." There was a tapping against Winn's shoulder, bringing him back to the present.

"You can worry about all that later," James was saying. "Right now, you just need to focus on getting better, and not making your concussion any worse in the process."

Concussion. Right. He'd forgotten about that. That explained a lot.

"Did Alex say when I could go home?"

"Tomorrow, if everything looks good." Then, James reached back for the small table between the two beds. "Speaking of, I have something for you from your class."

He brought out a folded piece of cardstock with a variety of scrawls across it. Winn took the card and pulled it close to read the multi-colored messages scrawled over it, then moved it further away when his head started to hurt.

"Do you want me to read it to you?" James asked.

As much as Winn wanted to say 'no', he nodded and handed the card back.

James read each individual message out loud, described any drawings accompanying them, and then went into great detail about Saturday's class, and how everyone had seemed to really enjoy getting outside and (mindfully) fighting each other.

When he looked back up again, Winn had fallen asleep again. James, who had pulled out his phone to show Winn a video of the class in action, just exited out of the viewing app. In hindsight, forcing Winn to squint at a small phone screen probably wasn't the best idea, no matter how great the footage was. It would be ready whenever his brain was healed enough to see it.

Epilogue

It had been two long weeks while Winn recovered from both his mugging and getting thrown out of a van. The Hendersons insisted they'd only been going five or so miles an hour, but it had still been almost a week before Winn was able to walk without pain, or use his limbs the way they were supposed to function. It had taken five of those days for his head to stop aching every time the room got a little brighter, or his phone lit up with a message. Now, he still had screen time restrictions, but he was able to work for an hour or two straight before his head demanded a break.

In that time, he had to testify that Josh Henderson's voice was the one that had hissed in his ear in the alley a week and a half ago; and had to go into detail about the note, the van, the threats, his injuries and his recovery. In the end, the trial was decided very quickly and both Hendersons had received long sentences that even Alex and J'onn seemed happy with, considering the number of people they'd put or threatened to put in harm's way, and neither would be paroled anytime soon.

Almost independent of that, the team was still acting like the Hendersons weren't in custody. Someone was always at Winn's apartment in the evening, and despite his protests, throughout the night: Kara, Maggie, James, Alex, J'onn and even once he found Vasquez passed out on his couch when he stumbled into the living room, rubbing sleep from his eyes. If they weren't around (because they all had day jobs), an agent was by his side each time he left his apartment for groceries, PT or various doctors' appointments. Even with all the extra eyes on him, he had no doubt Alex was tracking his cell phone, and made sure to leave his location on but locked down just to her pings to assuage her.

A few days into his sick leave, Kara had presented him with a new watch, this one too with a call button.

"I hope you don't need to use it," she had said as she handed it over. "But if you do, I'll be here."

With words failing him, he had pulled her into a tight hug instead. "I know you will. And thank you."

It was Barry though who surprised Winn the most by asking for his address and coming over a few times a week, after the electronics store closed, to play board games. Apparently, he had quite the collection and was excited to teach Winn some strategy games from his native planet.

"Thank you for what you did," Winn had said the first time Barry had stopped by, as he moved what was most similar to a queen in chess across the game board. "At Al's. Alex told me."

"I was glad to be able to repay your kindness," Barry replied, unhinging his jaw to slide in an entire slice of pizza. "I'd still probably be working on my taxes if you hadn't offered to help."

"Maybe next year I'll write a program for you. Asks you the fields and then it fills the form out itself. Like those tax programs you see on the billboards, but easier to understand. And free." Winn looked up at Barry as his brain churned through a few designs. "Maybe there's something to that."

Barry nodded. "But not until your concussion scan comes back clean."

Winn pulled a face. "Who told you? Alex? Maggie? James? He doesn't seem like the type but—"

"No one told me," Barry interrupted. "I can sense it. Your brain activity isn't quite like it usually is." With that, he pushed the pizza box toward Winn. "Eat up. Alex will kill me if you have less than a thousand calories tonight."

Winn just smiled and did as he'd been instructed.

As grateful as he was for all the visits, as his head stopped aching and his body started healing, Winn found himself bored. The DEO was hardly a standard 9-5 and he had more free time now than he knew what to do with.

Despite the fact that he wasn't allowed within 100 feet of the DEO for his mandatory two weeks of sick leave—on pain of J'onn extending his sick leave by one day for each offense—Winn had heard a comprehensive list of Josh's abilities presented in court and been unable to shake the designs for improvements to their alarm system that kept popping into his head. Finally, he couldn't take it anymore and sketched out a solution, which he then sent to Vasquez to build for the DEO.

While that technically wasn't in violation of J'onn's mandate, almost instantly, he'd received a message back from Alex reminding him that his fourteen days weren't up yet.

My head doesn't hurt anymore, he'd texted back, I can do a little bit.

Do you want your sick leave extended?

No.

Then read a book, pick up a hobby, get caught up on all your shows. Then a beat later, Just please don't do anything Winn-ish. I don't know if my heart can take it.

I know you mean that with love, but I take offense to my name being used as an adjective. He saw her typing and quickly added, But don't worry, I'll fine something safe and boring to do. Then he closed his phone and looked around his apartment for inspiration.

He kept it pretty clean normally, but post-explosion, someone had gone through and really made it shine. He scanned his Netfilms queue but didn't see anything jump out at him. He flipped through a book lying on the coffee table, but couldn't get into that either. James was covering his BBBS class tomorrow again, just in case someone tangentially related to the Hendersons wanted revenge for locking them up, which meant he didn't have to create a lesson plan. Barry had refused his help in the store, and his muscles were sore from PT this morning, so any sort of real exercise was out.

Finally, while staring at the wall and praying for an idea, the bright, shiny microwave and oven, which he hadn't purchased but had been delivered two days ago while he was at physical therapy, stared back at him.

"How hard can baking be?" he asked as he leveraged himself off the couch. It was just chemistry after all.

Suffice it to say, James was less than impressed when he opened the door to find smoke billowing out of the oven and Winn racing across the living room, fire extinguisher in hand, yelling, "Burnt the cookies. It's fine. Everything's fine. How are you?"

Alex's face was set similarly the next night as she poked at the bubbling sludge Winn had pulled from the oven. She wasn't sure how he'd managed it, but it resembled something off the set of a sci-fi B-movie.

"Did you follow the recipe?" she asked as she poked it with a fork and watched it pull away.

"Yeah."

"Exactly?"

"Well, I could only find a cup, so I eyeballed the smaller measurements."

Alex rolled her eyes as she set the fork aside. "Do you eyeball things in chemistry?"

"No." Grabbing an oven mitt, Winn popped open the trash can lid with his foot and dumped the sludge in. "But I was hoping the batter would be more forgiving."

The third night, Kara found herself staring at a plate of perfectly-circular cookies.

"Oh, c'mon," Winn groaned, taking a cookie off the pile and bending it in half to show her the insides. "It's fully cooked, and it tastes pretty decent if I say so myself."

Kara took the top cookie off the pile, examined it, then bit down gingerly. Almost immediately, her expression brightened. "These are really good!" she exclaimed, inhaling the rest of it and diving for more.

"See?" Winn said, taking a bite of the cookie he'd broken. "It's just chemistry."

With elementary baking mastered, he'd tried to ward off boredom by building a vertical Pringles ring, without the help of YouTube. It had posed a decent challenge, but still Winn had it mastered it in under an hour. With that out of the way and his other options still looking equally uninteresting, he'd run across a Reddit article detailing instructions for making plasma in the microwave with grapes. He'd almost tried it, before remembering his promise to Alex—potentially ruining his new microwave for science definitely fell under the 'Winn-ish' category—so he dropped onto the couch to catch up on his shows.

Thankfully, once he got started, they were far more riveting than he'd been hoping for. With not much else to do, he'd flown through them, and was on the fifth season of Silicon Valley, when he realized he'd deciphered the binary plastered behind the presenter in the current episode without thinking.

I've officially reached the end of Netfilms, he'd texted Alex. Please give me something to do. I'll walk dogs, fetch coffee, build firewalls, but please, give me something. Anything! I'm officially going section eight here.

After sending the message, he decided to roll the dice and call her instead.

"I don't even have to be in the DEO," he began as soon as she picked up. "I can do some research gathering here—"

"When you're cleared by Dr. Kirby, you can come in again," she interjected.

"Alex, please." He must have been unable to keep the desperation out of his voice, since she didn't hang up on him, and made a noncommittal sound for him to continue. "I'm about to start proving P v. NP for fun. Please give me something small—microscopic even—to do."

Alex let out a long sigh and then cursed under her breath. "Fine. I have some journals that need to be reviewed. By hand. But before I send them over, I need your word you aren't going to access the DEO server, or spend a bunch of time staring at a screen while your fancy programs do all the work."

He was staring at a screen almost all week anyway, making his way through his Netflims queue, but he didn't feel the need to point it out. If it meant doing something useful, he'd read the damn books by candlelight if he had to.

"I promise," he said.

"Good. I'll bring them by tonight then. With some Chinese?"

"Thank you," Winn breathed in relief. "And yeah, that sounds great. My treat—no arguing, you bought last time."

The journals were rather elementarily written, so it didn't take Winn long to draw a few connections between them, and create an ordering of the most viable leads. However, it did last him until his (hopefully-final) appointment with Dr. Kirby on Friday, where he was cleared for a return to work on Monday.

They'd all celebrated at Al's that night, and for the first time in two weeks, none of his friends made motion to follow him back to his apartment for the night. He did though run into Johnson outside Al's.

"How long does Alex have you staying with me?" Winn asked as they walked back to his apartment.

"A week."

"I'll see if I can get it down to less," Winn promised. He had been expecting something like this though, and when Johnson went to retrieve his folding chair, Winn opened the package he'd ordered online and handed over a seat cushion.

"You're more than welcome to use my couch," he said as Johnson examined the cushion carefully. "But if you're going to sit out here, you should at least be semi-comfortable."

"I'm fine out here," Johnson said, dropping the cushion onto his chair and sitting down. "Good night, Agent Schott."

"Good night, Agent Johnson."

As weird as it was to not have his friends sleeping over, especially now that Winn had gotten used to the extra bodies around his apartment, their absence also signaled a return to normal.

Which was how he felt Monday morning, wearing a plaid shirt and chinos, as the elevator lifted him to the DEO command center.

As the door opened, Winn heard a single clap. Then another. Then another, but faster. The claps sped up until they were almost indistinguishable from each other, and a round of cheers broke out.

He smiled widely at his team, who were assembled in the landing and leading the slow clap.

"God I missed you guys," he said as they swarmed around him, clapping him on the shoulder and vocalizing their joy that he was back. He hadn't known he was this popular—though from the general sense of relief emanating from his team, he suspected some of it might be joy that they had an extra set of hands splitting the workload again again—but he was too happy to be back to let such trivialities ruin his day.

Vasquez was the last one to approach, waiting until the rest of the crowd had dispersed before planting herself in front of him. Winn held out his hand uncertainly, but to his surprise, she pulled him into a hug.

"If you ever do something like that again," she whispered into his ear, tightening her hold ever so slightly, "not even Alex will be able to find your body."

Then she released him, her smile back to full wattage.

"I missed you too, Bri," Winn replied, making a heart out of his hands.

Her smile now genuine, she batted away his hands and headed back to the command center.

"C'mon, Schott," she said, motioning for him to follow. "We've got a big day ahead of us."

And that's a wrap on Scare Tactics!

Thank you all for your wonderful support throughout this fic! I appreciate each and every one of the notes, alerts, and shares.

Happy New Year!