Turn the light out,

Say goodnight

No thinking for a little while

Let's not try to figure out

Everything at once

"Fake Empire"

The Nationals

July 12, 2012

Bucharest, Romania

The breakdown Chuck was witnessing was something he had never anticipated, especially from a spy who'd been hiding out for 20 years. She bent forward at the waist as if in physical pain, both hands covering her face. The sound of her weeping filled the van. She fell out of her chair onto her knees, hugging the seat as she slipped down, to hold herself up.

"Corrine, are you all right?" Chuck asked, wondering at the cause.

It took several minutes before she could speak again. When she did, what she asked shocked him. "So he's all right?"

"Yes, I think they both are. They both took off together with blank identities, you know, to start over with a new life. She agreed to go with him, even though she really didn't know him, because she wanted to, once she knew he wasn't really Volkoff," he explained slowly.

"That's the only reason, the only thing I was fighting for. There wasn't anyone else who could help him. The CIA gave up." She looked over at him, her eyes shining with admiration. "I should have known your parents wouldn't have given up. Thank you, for whatever you did, to help him, after your father died."

His heart swelling with sympathy, he reached for her hand. "My mother knew how to contact him. He's in Chicago, with Vivian. I think he knows we're here, trying to get you out."

Casey grunted quietly, learning this information for the first time.

He felt her hand trembling within his. Fighting more tears, she said to him, "Do you have any idea what it's like to see the person you love turned into the antithesis of who he was, to have him not know who you are?"

His own voice shaking, Chuck replied to her, "Actually, yes, I do." He felt her, searching his face with her eyes, wondering how he possibly could. "Sarah, my wife, downloaded a defective version of the Intersect, and it erased her memory." He pulled her to her feet and helped her sit back down. "I know what damage the Intersect caused."

"Defective? What do you mean, defective?" she asked him.

"Look, Corrine, we can talk in circles all night, or I can just ask you what I was sent here to find out," Chuck said plainly. "There are nine known Intersects, if you will, 11 if you count all three of mine. The CIA and the NCS believe there was another, unknown download. From the program my father tried to send you to correct the damage in Hartley. They were concerned about memory loss, altered personality, whatever. Can you tell me what I need to know? What they are looking for?"

"The CIA thinks I'm an intersect? Is that what you're telling me?" she asked incredulously.

"They know the file was run, that it disappeared off the computer. They assumed it was you, either by accident, or by force," he said quietly.

"Volkoff did many things to hurt me, but he never believed that the Intersect was real. He knew who Agent X was, just not understanding that it was him, you know, Hartley." Chuck noticed the significance of her using Volkoff's name, as if the persona was in effect an entirely different person. Perhaps it helped her to separate them in that way.

"So where is it then? What happened to it?" he asked.

"It's complicated," she said.

"Of course it is, why would I have expected an answer other than that?" he grumbled to himself. "Remind me to put that on my tombstone," he said sharply to Casey, and got a grunt in return.

"Did you have the pleasure of meeting Volkoff's lawyer, Riley?" she asked.

"As a matter of fact, we did. He's dead, by the way," Chuck added. "Sarah killed him, too."

"I've never met your wife and already she sounds wonderful," she said dryly.

"She's certainly something special," Chuck quipped, smiling, but a sadness in his eyes that she saw only for a moment before it disappeared.

"Riley intercepted the file that Stephen sent to me, the one he wanted me to run, to overwrite the Volkoff program. I tried for years to get it away from him, but Riley knew that there was no Volkoff without the Intersect, and Volkoff made him a very rich man. If Riley had actually been smart, he would have destroyed it. But he could never pass up an opportunity to make more money.

"I found out he had a buyer, Leonid Poshenko, in 1989. Volkoff had already taken Vivian away from me. I stayed there, waiting for an opportunity. On the day I left, I tried to get the program, but Volkoff confronted me first. I had to shoot him, to get away," she said, her voice wavering on the last few words, mirroring the difficulty in the moment. She looked down, shifting her eyes away. "I know if I'd shot to kill, I probably would have saved so many lives, prevented so much suffering. I had him at point blank range, but I couldn't do it." More tears interrupted her conversation. "I looked at him, and I saw Volkoff, but I could still remember my husband, who was trapped inside, and I...I…"

Chuck put a reassuring hand on her shoulder. "I know exactly what you mean," he said in sympathy. So easily he could go back there, with Sarah's gun pointed at his head, telling her she could kill him if she wanted. Even a part of him had wished that she would have, because he knew she was truly gone, in that moment, and his life would be unbearable afterward, without her.

"I ran, and instead I went after Poshenko, following the program. I actually was able to intercept it, and I hid it from him. He thinks that I was out for revenge against Volkoff, which I let him believe, for my cover. Meanwhile he was scouring the earth looking for intel about it. I stayed, because I knew if I wasn't keeping a close eye on him, no one else would. I continued to copy it into updated forms, as the disk it was on became obsolete. He did some kind of forensic trace one time I copied it, but I managed to get him to believe that what he saw was the original file, but degraded. He didn't care that it was degraded.

"That was in 2005, when I copied it onto a flash drive. He hired people to rebuild it from the degraded file. Are you familiar with a man named Manoosh Depak?" she asked.

Chuck and Casey almost sat up taller at the mention of the familiar name. "Yes, yes, we do. He had a portable Intersect that he was trying to sell to the highest bidder. He ended up destroying it as a way to preserve his value, I guess. He was taken into protective custody by the CIA."

"Well, at least the CIA did something right, when it comes to this. He came the closest, using the degraded file. The rest of the, what did you call them, defective Intersects?" she asked herself, then continued, "I assume all stemmed from the one Fulcrum tried to build. I think it killed a lot of their agents."

"Bartowski was the only known tolerance for the Fulcrum Intersect," Casey told her.

Her mouth hung open for a moment, as she absorbed what he said. "You had two Intersects in your brain at the same time? The Fulcrum Intersect?"

"He's special," Casey said flatly, Chuck picking up the sarcasm.

"Stephen downloaded a version, did you know that?" she asked.

"Yeah, I did," he said softly.

"It didn't drive him crazy or change his personality. I think he thought testing it on himself would make it safer. He just didn't understand how different his brain was," she explained.

"They proved my brain is different, which is why it works for me. My Dad was probably the next best thing, don't you think?" he asked.

"I'm sure it's a possibility. I guess we'll never be completely certain, now." She left mentioning his death out loud. Changing the subject back, she continued, "Fulcrum paid Poshenko for his ghost version if you will, since they had no idea even where to begin. But Daniel Shaw, who was working for the Ring, and Clyde Decker-"

"Decker!" Casey shouted. "He was legitimate CIA at the time, until Shaw blackmailed him. Was he dealing for an Intersect by himself?"

"He is a complete bastard, I wouldn't be surprised," she said tartly.

"He was," Chuck said. "He's dead too."

"Did your wife kill him as well?" she asked.

"No, his girlfriend did," Chuck said softly, pointing at Casey.

Casey gave a lopsided flash of a small portion of his teeth.

"The suppression devices you described, what were these?" she asked.

"Decker had it. I'm sure that's where Beckman got hers. He was in charge of the CIA at that point. Decker used it on me. It was painful, not like the one my mother used on me. To be honest, that was what Decker used on Hartley, too," Chuck explained.

Corrine appeared agitated at the news. "How many people had it suppressed using that device?" she asked urgently.

"Three of us. Me, Hartley, and Morgan here," he said, gesturing to his friend. Morgan gave a short wave.

"You have an overlay, though, Charles, correct?" she asked.

"You mean, like a new Intersect, yes, I do," he confirmed.

"This," she said emphatically, pulling a small USB drive out from under her shirt on a leather string, "is the only thing that can remove the Intersect."

"What is that?" Chuck asked her intently.

"Your father's program. It has the ability to upload a new identity, or restore an old one. In someone with an Intersect, it overwrites it. In someone without it, it downloads the whole program. It took your father four years to create this. It was absolutely brilliant, the best work that he did. I always assumed he kept a copy for himself, where he was working," she said.

"He, uh, he did. It was on his laptop." He looked over at Casey, remembering the ill-fated Intersect program Bentley had attempted to implement, using his father's computer. "It was destroyed in an explosion, after my father died. It can't be replaced."

She looked troubled, her mind racing. She said, " The device you had before, the one you said your mother used on you, where is that?"

"It blew up in another explosion," he said, intentionally leaving out that it was Volkoff who had blown it up. "Wait, wait, wait a minute. What does that mean? For Hartley and Morgan?" he asked worriedly.

"They aren't safe from further deterioration. It's a defective program. It's missing important data. Didn't you say your wife had significant memory loss?" she asked.

"She, uh, she still has her Intersect. It's dormant right now, we're not sure why," he said softly.

She looked on, concern apparent on her face. "The last person who tried to get information from Poshenko was Nicholas Quinn, about nine months ago. The man was a psychopath. Apparently he had had dealings with Manoosh before the CIA got their hands on him as well. Manoosh double-crossed him, as far as I know. He did devise some sort of way to induce flashes based on some sort of three dimensional math problem, although it never made any sense because he never had a working version."

Chuck's skin was stark white against his black jacket as he paled. "He, uh, he used those to torture my wife." Chuck heard both Casey and Morgan suck in their breath, knowing this would be the first they had heard this.

Sympathy and understanding radiated from her. "I'm sure however she killed him, he got off easy." Casey grunted again, very adamantly.

"Roger that," Casey said softly.

"If you have the file on you, why are you still here, with him?" Chuck asked.

"He still has the original file. And he's never stopped trying to rebuild it. To be honest, my only goal was to get my husband back. I never thought that was even possible, and now you tell me it's already been done." She half-smiled, shaking her head back and forth. "He needs this, and so does your friend. So does your wife," she said, pulling on the USB again. "But we have to destroy the original file. I never had access to his computer in the way that I would need to."

"If it has to do with breaking into a computer, you came to the right place. Chuck can do it, I guarantee. The guy's hacked into the CIA mainframe more than once," Morgan said proudly.

"Could you do it?" she asked.

"I could create a virus, you know, to destroy the file. But I would have to have access to the actual computer," Chuck said.

"Looks like we have another leg of this mission," Casey said quietly.

July 12, 2012

Oak Park, Illinois

"This will take a bit of time for me to configure the new program. I want to be 100% certain that it's safe and it'll work, with the least amount of stress on your brain as possible. From what I could gather, the first time Chuck downloaded it, it took almost eight hours to complete. Subsequent suppression or downloads were much faster, but from what I read, they left Chuck incapacitated, sometimes for a significant period of time. We have time to perfect this. I just want that to be clear," Ellie said.

Sarah listened, but she was distracted. She felt like she could at last see everything, like before she had been viewing life at the surface of a crystal clear pool, not certain what was real and what was reflection. The water was drained away, and everything was discernible. She felt like she had been holding her breath, suffocating, and now her lungs were full of air.

"You still haven't heard anything from Chuck?" Sarah asked her.

"I haven't. But there's a significant time difference where they are. I wouldn't worry yet. I'm sure everything is fine," Ellie said.

"I just wish he was here, Ellie. I've never felt like this in my life. I feel like my heart is beating inside my throat. I can't wait, after all this time," she said softly.

She misses him, Ellie thought. Such a simple thing. She missed Devon sometimes, even when he was just at work. But this was different, so different. Parts of him had been cleaved out of her mind, creating a longing that now only seeing him, holding him, would relieve, now that she had those pieces back. She needed him here, in a way Ellie knew herself she would never understand.

"He'll be back soon, Sarah. Don't worry."

"Ellie," she began cautiously, wringing her hands in her lap. "Can you tell me what happened, I mean, really happened, after I left? He told me just a little bit, but I think he was holding a lot inside. I don't think he would ever tell me everything, because he knows it would hurt me. But I have to know. After everything that I did, please. Tell me," she begged.

The sadness softened Ellie's face, but she still smiled, understanding the reason why Sarah was asking. "When you left the first time, you know, after you told him you knew he was telling the truth, he fell apart. We all kept checking on him. He would sleep sometimes until almost noon, leave his sink full of dishes. I think I cleaned your apartment twice, because he just didn't care. He was like that for probably two weeks. That was when you came back, to ask him for help."

Sarah nodded, looking down at her lap. "I was so hard on him during that mission. I remember it like I'm remembering a dream, but it was real."

"So you still remember your interactions with him, when you didn't remember him?" Ellie asked curiously.

"It's like I have someone else's memories. It's the strangest sensation. I can't describe it any other way. I think about what I said and what I did and I feel sick. I literally would have killed anyone who hurt him the way I did. But I was the one doing it," she said, breathing more heavily as she tried to calm herself.

"He knows that, Sarah. He never blamed you for any of it. For god's sake, he took a bullet for you while you were trying to kill him. He had a vest on, sure, but I don't think in that split second, his body armor was on his mind. I think you were. It really wouldn't have made any difference. That was a gut reaction, instinct, something he didn't have to think about. Protecting you is part of him, and it has been for a long time," she finished.

Sarah looked away, a single tear from each eye streaming down her cheek. Ellie watched the effort it took for her to keep her voice steady. "I bent down to check him, but he grabbed my hand, he wouldn't let me. He just told me to run." She wiped the tears with her index finger, then added, "You were right, you know. In the car. What you said. You probably saved both of our lives doing what you did."

Ellie smiled, but her eyes were moist. She blinked several times to clear them. "If I had known you were pregnant at the time, Sarah-"

"I didn't, how could you have? Please, Ellie, none of that matters now. As long as you forgive me," she said softly.

Ellie reached over and grabbed Sarah's hand. "You're family. We will do anything for family, you know that," she said, and smiled.

Seeing that Sarah still seemed remorseful, Ellie began, "The two of you always brought out the best in each other, from day one. You changed him, and he changed you. Not in the way that people always complain about, you know, but the best possible kind. You made each other better. You made my underachieving little brother into the man who is currently in Romania extracting someone for the CIA. I never knew you before you met him, and while you were pretending, I still didn't really know the real you. I have a feeling the Sarah from before you met Chuck was something like the woman who I crashed my car to stop. Is that a fair assessment?" Ellie asked.

"More than you know," Sarah said quietly.

"But you aren't that person anymore. As good as you were, before, living that life, it had to have been lonely. Missing so much. I'm glad that you could find that with my brother. You're a wife and a soon-to-be mother now, because of him."

"Ellie, I still don't know if you completely understand. It was Chuck that kept me grounded. Without him, I could be that person again, almost in an instant. It almost scares me, how much I need him," she said in a rush of words.

"I do understand, Sarah. I saw Chuck come apart after you left," she said quietly.

Sarah put her hand against her chest as she said, "I feel it now, how much I missed him, even though at the time it didn't feel this bad. He felt like this, only worse, for so long, because I left."

"You did need space, Sarah. The work you and I were doing was difficult, and I know deep down if you'd been close by he couldn't have stayed away. The baby complicated things, but the need to get away is nothing you should be ashamed of."

"Ellie, once you left L.A., what happened to him?" she asked with dread, having seen only a glimpse of it.

Ellie's cheeks burned, after all this time, still feeling ashamed that she had left him. "He got worse. I think I told Devon every other day I just wanted to go back. It was really hard, you know? He went to a very dark place. If you need to know, really know, I think you should talk to Morgan. He was there, every minute of it. He got Chuck through that, almost single-handedly."

Sarah knew Morgan's importance in Chuck's life, and had known it almost as long as she'd known Chuck. She nodded, understanding what Ellie meant. "I hope Morgan knows how much he means to Chuck," she said softly.

"I think he does," Ellie said with a knowing smile.

"What am I supposed to do with this...this...guilt that I feel?" Sarah asked her.

"For now, try focusing on repairing the relationships that you can. The best that you can. I know it's not easy, but in the end, it's the only thing that will make it go away," Ellie offered.

"What about Chuck? I hurt him the most," she said, covering her eyes with a palm.

"Love him more. None of it matters to him at all, so long as he has you back. You were always the most important thing to him. Always. That's why I'm here, working for the CIA, after all the trouble I gave him for all that he did all those years. He needs you just as much. And I was the only one who could get you back to him."

Sarah let out a gush of her breath, tears spilling from her eyes, but a smile on her lips. "And you did, Ellie. You did."