A/N: The mission continues.

Enjoy this chapter! :)

"H-Hey, buddy." He moved his mask to his neck so that Manoosh could see his face.

Manoosh just glared at him for a second, and Chuck could see now that he had a gun in his hand.

But then his face cleared and let out a loud breath. "Piranha. I wasn't sure if you were gonna show. I was sitting there at the table, watching them all go down after they finished the dessert course. And I thought about how I wouldn't show up for this if I were you."

"Well, I did show up. I'm here."

"Yeah." Manoosh nodded vigorously. Chuck was careful not to look at Sarah and signal to the other man that there was someone else here with him. "So what's the plan? The server is on the second floor. I can show you—"

"No, no. No, we stick to the original plan. They can't know that you're a part of this. Did you drug the food like I said? The dessert?"

"Yeah. Everyone is resting easy." Well...they were now. "But I can help you with the server."

"I'm Piranha. I don't need help with the server. You did your part. You took out their line of defense. Now let me do my job. Eat the dessert."

"Okay, so say I eat the dessert, I knock myself out… How do I know when I wake up, after everything I did to get you in, after I trusted you, that you won't just disappear with the dough." The gun hand was getting a little tight now, Chuck noticed.

He was nervous. Manoosh was nervous about this now, getting cold feet. Betraying the Ring had sounded awesome when they were two macho hackers sitting in a restaurant, plotting to steal from a high-powered terrorist organization. But a day had passed since then, and he'd had to actually go through with the plan, and he was terrified.

Chuck let himself understand where Manoosh was coming from, and he took a step closer. He could feel Sarah's worried energy even though he wasn't looking at her. "Listen to me, I don't know how much time I'll need for this job, I just know I don't have a lot of it. So I'll make this quick." Manoosh looked at him a bit dubiously. "You can trust me. See this drive?" He pulled it out of his pocket. "This has everything you need to know about me on it. Everything." He swallowed hard, feeling a tightness in his chest. "I'm giving it to you. As leverage you have over me. If I don't follow through with my end of the bargain and contact you to collect your half of our winnings, you get to choose what to do with that."

He wiggled the flashdrive between his fingers. "That work for you?"

"You-You just carry a flashdrive around with all of your info on it?"

"N-Well, yeah. I did tonight. I forgot to give it to you this morning. I don't betray...a brother." It tasted awful sitting on his lips. "Take the drive. Eat your dessert. I'll take care of the rest. And I'll contact you when it's safe for you to run. We'll split the take...shake hands...and maybe we'll cross paths again someday…" He grinned cockily.

Manoosh nodded slowly. "Okay, gimme the drive." He walked up and snatched it from Chuck. "Don't know how long the drug's gonna last. A few hours at least, but I don't know how much of the dose went where in the tart thing so…"

He shoved the drive in his pocket then turned back to Chuck once more and thrust his hand out for Chuck to shake. He did and Manoosh looked him square in his face. "I trust you, Piranha. Thank you for trusting me."

Chuck didn't respond. He couldn't. He just watched Manoosh go back to the dining room. He took a few steps into the hallway to look inside of said dining room and saw people slumped forward, faces buried in tart, some of them slumped onto the floor.

He stayed there, his hand out towards Sarah to stop her from coming closer in case she'd crept out from behind the divider prematurely. And he watched Manoosh take a deep breath and shovel the tart into his mouth. He sat up straight in his chair and waited. It was quick. His eyes rolled to the back of his head and he slumped forward, unconscious.

"Okay," Chuck hissed over his shoulder, and Sarah was there in a moment, her hand on his arm. He felt her squeeze it and wondered if she knew what saying those things had done to his insides.

"Shit, I thought that was going to go south for a second," Zondra said over the comms. "If that had gone south and the NSA had lost their prize nerdboy, we'd never be able to go back to Langley again, Walker. You and I would have to go AWOL and be on the run forever."

"Feeling chatty, Rizzo?" Sarah breathed, following close in Chuck's footsteps as they crept through the house. Chuck kept his hand on the weapon in his holster, ready to use it if he had to.

"Nah, you two stuck with each other for eternity? You'd murder one another," he said, trying to keep himself calm as they walked past the kitchen. More bodies were draped over the floor, unconscious, the cook with the spoon still in his hand. "Now if we decided to ditch out now, go AWOL the three of us together, I think my addition might ease things between you two. Provide some cushion."

"In your dreams, dweeb."

"I make great road trip mixes. Right, Agent Walker?" Sarah didn't respond and he just barely resisted making an offended face over his shoulder at her.

"Pfft hell no. I'd go off on my own. Walker can deal with your shit all by herself."

"My shit? Wow, thanks so much. No faith in my music tastes. That's fine. Anyway, Agent Walker is an abject professional…" He stayed quiet for a moment as he peeked around the corner and scanned the next room for anyone who might get the jump on them. Nobody was there so he continued. "I highly doubt she would consider abandoning her post, as it were, and I doubt she'd consider taking me along with her."

"I would and I did."

Chuck stopped and felt Sarah bump into him as he slowly turned to look at her, eyes wide. The comms went silent as he just stared. Had she just said...she did? She did? When? Was she teasing? Or was she serious? Oh God, she looked uncomfortable. That was one of Sarah's biggest tells. She was looking away, down at the floor. She hadn't meant to say it. That wasn't a joke. It was the truth. But when?

He reached up and turned off his mic then gestured for her to do the same. She mouthed, "No!" and then "Keep going", pointing ahead of them. But he just grabbed her and pulled her safely into a side room, gesturing again for her to turn off her comms.

She shut her eyes in impatience, but reached up and did it. "What?" she hissed then.

"You said, and I quote, 'I would and I did' when I said you'd never consider going off the grid with me. What does that mean, you did?"

Sarah looked pissed. At herself mainly, he thought. She shook her head. "Chuck, we're on a mission. Now is not the t—"

"Okay, but I need to know now. Right now. You did, you said. You considered going off grid with me. When?"

"Look, it's not that big of a deal," she said, and he had a feeling it was, because she always said something wasn't a big deal when it was a big deal. "Okay, fine. Fine. They were planning on tossing you into a bunker that night. Longshore. They said that was an option, and I knew that was what Longshore was best at. So I had a plan to get you out of Los Angeles and keep you out of a bunker. That's all."

He just stared at the frustration and discomfort in her face for what ended up being way too long most likely. "What?" he breathed. "You were...You were ready to go off grid with me? Risk your career? Risk ending up in prison? Being labeled a traitor?" He opened and closed his mouth a few times, searching for the words. And she seemed to refuse to look at him for the moment. "Just so I didn't have to spend the rest of my life in a bunker?"

"Yep! Can we focus on the mission now? The hostage situation? Rescuing hostages?" she asked, thrusting her hand out, palm up.

Before he could say anything else, Zondra's voice flared to life in Chuck's ear. "Hey, our drone footage is picking up some movement. They're not all unconscious. Two guys moving around in a room on the top floor. I can see it through the window. Do you copy?"

Sarah quickly reached up to turn her mic back on. "Copy. They aren't hostages?"

"No, hostages are in the room across the hall from them. Hold on, let me get them to fly the drone around on the other side of the house…" There was a pause. "We need eyes on the front," she ordered, apparently at the analyst who was controlling the drone. "Good. Okay, I see the one hostage. According to the floor plan of the third floor, if you get to the top of the staircase, turn right. They are in the room Manoosh told us they'd be in. All the way at the end of the hall, last door on your right. Our gun-wielding assholes are in the room right across from that one. Manoosh missed a few."

"Shit," Sarah hissed. "Okay, thanks."

"Be careful. They've got some biiiiiig guns."

Chuck shook his head as he turned his own mic back on. "You know what they say about guys who need big guns…"

Zondra choked in his ear and let out a quiet hum of amusement.

"Don't encourage him," Sarah groused as she peeked out of the room. "I'll take point," she said, taking her S&W out and waggling it for Chuck. "I've got one of these."

Little did she know, she wasn't the only one with a weapon this time. And Chuck put his hand over it to make sure it was still there.

"Any movement anywhere else?" Sarah asked then as she made her way to the staircase, climbing smoothly and gracefully even as she looked up and pointed her gun, scanning for threats. Chuck followed and kept his eyes trained on the first floor just in case.

"Not that I can see. Drone isn't picking up on anything through the windows…"

They didn't stop on the second floor where the Ring server apparently was, instead continuing to the third. And Chuck couldn't help thinking that what made Manoosh shovel that tart into his mouth, drug himself, was his trust that Piranha would go straight to the second floor, hack into the server, and transfer funds out of the Ring's accounts.

He willed himself to push that out of his mind, instead following Sarah, focusing on what they came here to do. There was an innocent family downstairs in the basement, and someone deemed more important up in the room on the third floor. By themselves for some reason.

As they stepped into the third floor hallway, Sarah turned right as Zondra advised, but before they could get any closer, the door to the left opened.

Sarah spun and shoved at Chuck's chest to push him into a small reading nook with a chair pushed up against a big picture window. She pinned him to the wall and pushed herself against him, her finger on his lips.

He didn't get why that was necessary. Like he'd say, Oh no, a bad guy! loudly for the Ring agent to hear. She leaned to the right and snuck a peek, then pulled back. Her eyes fidgeted back and forth as her mind went a mile a minute. "Apparently Manoosh didn't drug as many of them as he thought," she breathed.

He shrugged helplessly. "What do we do?" he mouthed when she looked up at him. But then he got an idea and grabbed her by her hips, carefully maneuvering her to the side. He lifted a finger, signaling for her to wait, and then he dug into his pocket. Ah. A penny. Perfect. Yet another reason Ellie was wrong to balk at his habit of shoving change in his pockets and forgetting about it until it was clanging loudly in the laundry machine.

"What are you doing?" she hissed quietly.

Chuck peeked around the corner. The guy was facing in exactly the direction Chuck needed him to. He tossed the penny, aiming so that it clattered onto the wood floor towards the opposite wall.

The guy made a confused sound and spun to look. Chuck popped out from his hiding place and pulled his weapon out of its holster, lifting it and taking his shot.

The Ring agent immediately crumbled to the floor. He holstered his weapon and grabbed the guy by his feet, dragging him back into the room where he'd come from.

Sarah was outside of the room, gaping at him. "What the hell just happened?" she whispered.

He took his tranq gun out again and wiggled it. "Tranq darts. Did you know they made these?"

Zondra's voice came over the comms. "Are you fucking kidding me? You're using a tranq gun? Who ARE you?"

Chuck ignored her, stepping back out into the hallway. "Zondra, I need to know where in the room across from the hostage these guys are standing. Can you see them?"

"Okay. Hold on. Guys, I need you to get that drone closer. See if you can show me the inside of the room…" There was a slight static sound in his ear and he winced. "Closer...closer...good. That's good. Hold it. There are two of them in there. PTR semi-automatics."

All Chuck had to hear was "PTR semi-automatics" and he thrust his tranq gun at Sarah. She looked down at it in confusion, then back up at him. Her blue eyes—the only part of her he could really see with the hood and mask she was wearing—cleared and she nodded, holstering her S&W and taking the tranq gun from him.

"Okay, talk me through where they are, Rizzo."

Chuck shifted so that she could slide past him and be closer to the door behind which two Ring agents with guns awaited their demise. Well...sleepy demise, thanks to his decision to snag a tranq gun from the armory.

He kept his gaze on Sarah as she waited with her back pressed against the wall, poised with his gun up by her shoulder as she shut her eyes and listened, taking deep, calming breaths.

"Ring One is sitting on the chair in the corner. It's on your left when you get through the door. Ten o'clock. The chair's a bit lower to the ground so aim down a bit. Ring Two is in the front corner of the room. Your three o'clock when you get in. He's standing up and pouring himself a drink. A, uh, big drink and it doesn't seem like it's his first, so you might be in luck."

Sarah reached out blindly and rounded his wrist with her fingers, squeezing just a bit.

Just like that, she turned and kicked her boot at the door so that it blasted open. He heard a "Hey!" and then a quick thwip thwip before the sound of two bodies thumping heavily to the ground. Chuck almost followed her in just to check and make sure she wasn't one of the thumps.

But then he heard footsteps in the room across the hall. He realized quickly that there was a guard with whomever was important enough to be kept hostage alone, away from the others. He lunged across the hallway and pressed his back against the wall right next to the door.

The moment he heard the door ripped open, Sarah showed up in the doorway, looking a bit ruffled, her mask down around her neck and her hood off, the tranq gun down by her hip. Her eyes widened and she took a step back, but Chuck acted fast, swinging himself around with his fist up, slamming it straight into their face.

He shook his hand out as he looked down at the unconscious figure on the floor, wincing in pain. "That was not proper form. At all. Ow."

"Hey, thanks," she panted, pressing her hand against her chest, relief all over her face. She reached down and yanked the PTR away from the Ring agent he'd just flattened. "Maybe it wasn't proper form but it got the job done."

She handed him the rifle then fixed her bandana over her face again, pulling her hood up, leading him into the room with her hand on his arm.

A woman sat on the ground in the corner of the threadbare room, unfurnished except for the one chair the guy Chuck had just knocked out must have been sitting in. The woman was maybe in her fifties or so, her dark hair dirty and pulled messily back from her tear stained face. She looked at them in fear, cowering.

"What do you want?" she whimpered. "I don't have anything… Please!"

"We're here to take you to safety," Sarah rushed out, her voice calming. She handed Chuck his tranq gun and closed the distance, kneeling down and gently lifting the woman's bound hands. "How long have they had you here?"

"I don't know. I lost track of time." She sniffled. "A month, maybe. Who are you?"

Sarah didn't answer that and he took her lead, not saying a word. She reached into her boot and pulled a knife out, slicing the ropes binding the older woman's wrists together. "Can you stand?"

"I-I think so."

Chuck hurried over, slinging the rifle's strap across his chest and helping the woman stand, pulling her arm over his shoulders and walking her out of the room. She leaned heavily on him and smelled liked they'd kept her in that room with not much to wash herself with. It filled him with anger and hatred.

"Who are you?" the woman asked again.

He didn't answer as he and Sarah helped her down the two flights of stairs. "To the door," Sarah instructed, letting Chuck take her the rest of the way to the back door. "I'm going to find the entrance to the basement."

"The kitchen," the exhausted woman leaning on Chuck said. "There's a trap door that leads down into the basement. I don't know where it is in the kitchen, but my-my husband and daughter were being kept there."

Were?

He exchanged a look with Sarah. And then he opened up the door and pointed across the backyard towards the clumping of trees. "There's a hill there. It leads down to a small dirt road. There's a van on that road. That's ours. Tell that woman who you are. She'll take care of you."

"What? What van? A woman?"

"Just do as I say. Trust us."

"Who—Who sent you?" And then her eyes welled up. "Hannah. It was Hannah. My daughter."

Oh God. He nodded jerkily and then pointed towards the trees. "Go. We'll get your husband and daughter."

She went, stumbling down the porch steps and running as fast as she could towards the line of trees.

Chuck ducked back into the house and made his way to the kitchen. Sarah was in the dining room as he passed by. He halted and looked at her with his brow furrowed. She was taking pictures of each of the people sitting around the table.

She looked up at him, took another picture, and pocketed her phone. "I feel like Beckman and her analysts will put these pictures to good use, don't you?"

"Good idea." His gaze fell on Manoosh and he gulped, before he gestured for Sarah to hurry so that they could make their way to the kitchen. "Trap door, she said…"

Sarah thumped her boot down on the floor tiles. "Where?"

Chuck thought back to the look in her eyes when he'd questioned her a few minutes earlier. And how she'd called it not a big deal that she'd been willing to throw everything away to protect him from a bunker that night when Longshore tried to take him away. She hadn't known about the NSA's plan to recruit him. She hadn't known about Chuck's other option. And she'd been willing to do that.

His chest ached as he stopped in the middle of the kitchen, putting his hand down on the butcher block and picking it up again, making a face as he realized it wasn't exactly clean. "Hey, uh...Sarah…"

"You find the trap door?" she asked distractedly, down on her knees as she tried to feel for a crack or something that might indicate a door was beneath it.

"No." He spun and looked around, then moved to help her look. He turned off his mic again and eyed her for a moment. "Sarah. Mic," he whispered.

She turned to give him a confused look and he mimicked turning off his mic. She sighed and did so. "What?"

"Why?" She gave him a confused look again. "Longshore."

Shutting her eyes and sighing, she pinched the bridge of her nose. "Chuck, we already discussed this."

"I wanna discuss it more. You planned to go off the grid with me because you didn't know NSA had offered to train me to be a spy. You didn't know we had another card we were gonna play." He paused. "You thought it was either the bunker for me...or you taking me out of there."

She shrugged, looking away, then going back to looking for the trap door. "Yeah."

"Fuccckkkkkk," he groused, crawling down to sit on the ground against the cabinets. "Because I didn't tell you the NSA was offering to make me a spy. That whole time Casey and I had a way out and you didn't know...so you were getting ready to leave...your whole existence behind, your career, your life in the CIA, risking prison…"

Sarah turned and pushed up onto her haunches, giving him a pointed look that clearly red, "YEP." He thought "YOU ASS" was also implied in the look. "Anyway, it doesn't matter now. What matters is getting the Lius—"

"It does matter! Sarah! I'm such a jerk. You were going to risk everything—everything—and I couldn't even work up the freaking guts to just tell you the truth, that the NSA was recruiting me, that I was going to join. I was all up in my freaking head and thinking I couldn't take it if you didn't think I could shake being a spy."

"Yeah. If I'd known, I wouldn't have had a plan to get you out of Los Angeles. I wouldn't have had to. Would've been nice. But that isn't what happened, so it doesn't help us now to dwell on it." She hit her fist against the cabinet. "Damn it! Where's this stupid fucking trap door?"

"Hey, I've got Mrs. Liu here," Zondra's voice said. "Standing by for you to come down with the others."

Chuck turned his mic back on quickly as Sarah turned to watch him. "Hey. Great. That's great. We'll be right out. Just give us...a sec." He turned it back off and then gestured wildly for Sarah to keep hers off when she reached up to switch it on again.

She growled in frustration and did as he requested. "Help me find this trap door."

"Okay, okay. But I just need you to know that it does help, Sarah. It helps me a lot to know this. You were—You almost gave up a lot for me. And I'm just—God, I'm never doing that again. Okay? I'm not. We have to be on the same page."

"Like finding the trap door?"

Just then, he spotted a pepper grinder hanging in a weird spot on the wall, next to the kitchen window. Huh… Climbing to his feet, he walked over to it. "Like being on the same page, Sarah. With this. Us. But also everything. Because this is going to be hard. This relationship is gonna be hard, and it's only gonna get harder as we go on." He grabbed the pepper grinder and pulled on it.

And just like that one of the tall cupboards at the end of the kitchen popped open, revealing a staircase down.

Sarah slowly rose to her feet and turned wide eyes on him, before looking at the pepper grinder. "Wow. Random, but...good work."

"Watched a lot of Scooby-Doo growing up."

She snorted and headed for the door, but he lunged after her and grabbed her hand, holding her back. "Chuck, we—"

"I know. But we're about to be crammed in a van with a bunch of people, and then with Zondra, and then rushed into a plane with Zondra, and I don't know when I can say this. I need to say it now, Sarah. Just really quick." He licked his lips as she peered up at him, eyes wide. "I'm crazy about you. Which is how we got into this whole mess in the first place. All of it. And now that we're...together, really together, I'm gonna want to kiss you a lot of the time. All the time. I know that because it's barely been forty-eight hours since that night in your apartment." Her eyelids fluttered a bit as she let out a rough breath. At least he wasn't the only one, he supposed. "And I know all those rules are going to help, but I know what my face does and it's going to be really difficult not to kiss you, and even harder not to let it show on my face that I want to kiss you. Nobody can know about this, about us, and that's on top of my training and the missions and everything else." He stepped in closer and her hand fell to his chest. "We need to be honest with each other now. Full honesty."

"No secrets, no lies," she said softly, meeting his gaze warmly.

"No secrets, no lies," he repeated, covering her hand with his. "We can't afford to not be on the same page every step of the way if we're gonna be successful with this. And there is nothing in the world I want more than to be successful at this." He tilted his head. "And I guess that means I'd prefer being a good boyfriend to being a good spy."

"Well, I'm here to make sure that you're both." She gave his jacket a bit of a tug. "Which means reminding you that there are people down there waiting for us to rescue them."

He blinked. "There are. Right. Mics back on."

She gave him a look. "Mics back on." And when she turned her mic back on. "There's a trap door that leads down into the basement. The nerd here found it."

"Like, thanks, Scoob," he said in a quiet Shaggy voice. All she had to do was send him a serious glare and he pressed his lips together, his tranq gun in hand as he followed her down the dark steps.

There was one dim light on, hanging down from the basement ceiling, swaying just slightly. Chuck followed Sarah's lead, pressing himself against the wall as he carefully stepped down the way she did.

He couldn't see anyone at first. But then he spotted the two figures sitting back to back in chairs, rope wound around them, tying them together, their ankles bound to the chair legs as well. Hoods had been dropped over both of their heads. They were eerily quiet and limp. It sent a chill through him.

And just as he was thinking he wasn't ready to discover more dead bodies, a figure swung out from the shadows under the staircase and kicked at Sarah's wrist, sending her gun flying out of her hand and across the basement.

She caught his fist as he swung it towards her face and twisted, but as he cried out in pain and went down to his knees, he kicked out a leg and slammed it into her knee.

Sarah yelled and crashed down the last few stairs, hitting her shoulder hard on a workbench against the wall.

Chuck didn't think twice as the Ring agent made to finish Sarah off, pulling a knife from his boot and stepping towards her as she winced in pain and tried to pull one of her throwing knives. Chuck leapt down the rest of the stairs and wrapped his arms around the bastard, tackling him to the ground hard.

"Careful! He has a—"

Gun! He found the barrel of it pointed at his nose but grabbed the agent's hand and shoved at it, struggling against the other man's strength as he pinned him. The agent squeezed the trigger and the bullet missed by a few inches but Chuck's ear would be ringing for a while.

Adrenaline coursed through him as he got a better grip on the agent's hand and repeatedly slammed it down hard, smashing his fingers between the gun and the wood floor, until his fingers went limp and the gun slipped out of his grip.

A fist cracked against his jaw and he rolled onto his back, holding his face. But before he could do anything else, Sarah leapt over him and the heel of her boot pulverized the other guy's nose, sending him to the floor in an unconscious heap.

She let out a rough and frustrated breath, then moved to pick the Ring agent's gun, slipping it down the back of her pants before clambering in the dark for her own gun.

"Find it?" he asked, still on his back, that rifle she'd handed him ten minutes earlier digging into his spleen.

"Got it. You okay?"

She was there, standing over him, reaching down with her hand outstretched towards him. The hand that wasn't holding her gun. Chuck nodded, smiling a little, and letting her help him up. She winced and rolled her shoulder, then wiped at his jaw, their masks officially off after the scuffle. "Quite a bruise you're gonna have."

"You too," he said, gesturing to her shoulder.

"Yeah." She frowned and hobbled over to the hostages.

They were moving now, though, lifting their hooded heads. The larger of the two—the man, Hannah's father he figured—spoke up, fear cascading through his tone. "Who's that? Who are you? What's going on…?"

"Dad? Dad, you okay?" the groggy, concerned, younger female voice asked.

Sarah was limping a bit, Chuck saw, as she went to kneel and cut at Mr. Lius bindings around his ankles. "We're getting you out of here."

"What?" the man asked, breathless. "Who are you?"

"Never mind that," Chuck spoke up, tugging at his ringing ear and grabbing the knife he'd knocked out of the Ring agent's grip when he'd tackled him. "We have to be quick so just trust us and do as we say." He gave Sarah a look that said How'd I do? and she gave him a minute head shake. Going back to cutting Hannah's sister free, he cleared his throat.

"What are you going to do with us?" the father whimpered.

"We're going to get you to safety," Sarah said, standing up and whipping the hood off of his head, before reaching over and taking the woman's off as well.

Chuck peered up at her and felt like he'd been kicked in the gut. She looked like Hannah Liu but younger, maybe in her teens. Sixteen or seventeen. Tears streaked down her face. He stood up and worked on the rope that held them to the chairs. "We have your mom, too. Don't worry. She's safe."

The father and daughter clung to one another and Sarah took the lead, Chuck bringing up the rear, with the Lius between them as they led them back up through the trap door into the kitchen.

Hannah's sister gasped and her father covered her eyes, guiding her through the kitchen littered with bodies.

"We drugged them," Chuck explained quickly, earning a dubious look from Hannah's father over his shoulder even as he tried to protect his daughter from the sight. "They're just drugged."

Sarah sent Chuck a look, but kept moving forward, finally leading them out the back door.

"We're out, with the Lius in tow, and—"

"Wait!" Chuck spun on his heel. "Manoosh," he said, looking at the house. He turned to look at Sarah. "He passed all of that food out to everybody. Do we really think they're not gonna know it was an inside job? That it was him? He's gonna be murdered for it. We can't let that happen."

"Carmichael, we need to get going. Now. We have to bring the Lius to the extraction point and get the hell out of this country," Zondra said in his ear.

Chuck ignored her and went back inside, even as Sarah called after him. He made his way back into the dining room and rushed to Manoosh. "Please be as light as you look," he muttered, grabbing the other man by his arm and pulling him to the side to sling his torso over his upper shoulders. He hefted him up in a fireman's carry and stumbled a bit, but staggered out of the dining room, down the hallway to the back door again.

Right as he got to the door, it was ripped open. Sarah shook her head at him and held the door for him to go through.

"Thanks," he said tightly. Oh God, he had such a long way to go like this. Help!

"Where are the Lius?" he asked as they rushed across the back lawn to the line of trees.

"I sent them ahead the way we did with Mrs. Liu. Zondra, look out for them. They're about a minute to two minutes ahead of us. You'll see them before we catch up. Chuck's got...a bit of a load, here." She sent him a flat look.

"I couldn't just leave 'im there," he said.

She didn't say anything, her mouth just making a thin, grim line. One hand on his back, she guided him into the trees. With the way the ground sloped down, he nearly fell a few times, his boot slipping on loose leaves and roots.

Chuck also noticed, even with his misery of carrying Manoosh down an insane slope for a ten minute trek, Sarah was holding her shoulder, wincing. She'd hit the workbench hard. He stored it in his mind for later.

By the time they arrived at the road where Zondra had parked the van, Chuck was covered in sweat and dirt, his jaw still smarting. The van door slid open and Zondra appeared, popping her comms out of her ear.

"You little shit, you ignored me implicitly."

"Yeah, I kinda did."

"Well, I guess we can use him, come to think of it," she said, climbing out of the van to help Chuck ease him off of his shoulders. Chuck didn't notice the zip ties until Zondra was binding the unconscious hacker's wrists together in front of him. She did the same to his ankles. "There's a lot this little asshole can tell us."

Chuck gaped. "W-What?"

Sarah gave him a meaningful look, then climbed into the van where the Lius were already drinking from ice cold water bottles, blankets around their shoulders. Chuck and Zondra handled Manoosh's body up into the van as well, lying him down on the floor at the Lius' feet.

"If he wakes up, don't answer any of his questions," Zondra said, hopping out of the van and pointing at Chuck in particular. "The brass has plans for him." She went around the front of the vehicle to go to the driver's side.

"Plans? What do you mean by 'plans'? Zondra? ...Agent Riz...Rizzo...she's ignoring me."

Sarah reached out of the van and pulled him into it. "Come on. We need to get going."

He finally got into the van and slid the door shut behind him, finally swinging the rifle off of his shoulders and putting it down on the floor. Sarah looked at him for a moment and reached down to pick it up off the floor, popping the magazine out and sticking it in her jacket pocket.

"Oh. Right. Sorry. I—"

"It's okay," she said earnestly, watching him closely he noticed.

He turned and looked at the Lius. When Hannah's mother met his gaze, he smiled comfortingly. "You're gonna be all right. We'll get you back home."

"Thank you," Mr. Liu said, reaching over towards Chuck. The NSA agent leaned in and took his hand, shaking it warmly. "Thank you both."

Chuck smiled and nodded, sitting back against the wall of the van again, and he waited for Sarah's eyes to swing over to his before he leaned across Manoosh's body and asked quietly so that nobody else could hear, "This is the end of the line for this kid, isn't it?" Sarah leaned her elbows on her knees and nibbled her lip a bit. She didn't say anything though. "He's being arrested."

"Yeah," she said finally.

All he could do was nod and sit back. What did he think would happen to someone who'd been working with the Ring all this time? Someone who didn't even seem to have any remorse about the fact that he'd been working with a terrorist organization...whether he ended up helping Chuck or not. He'd done so under the impression that Chuck was a criminal hacker too. He'd had no idea he was working with federal agents from U.S. Intelligence.

And still…

Chuck turned to look towards the front of the van, reaching over and snagging the first aid kit that was there. Then he moved and knelt down in front of the family, letting them rummage through it and helping them with some of their own wounds, which were minor thankfully. Then he took an ice pack out of the bottom, cracked it, and scooted back over to where Sarah was watching it all unfold in that quiet way of hers.

He stopped when he was in front of her, kneeling on the floor of the van at her feet, and he reached up to gently unzip her jacket. He pushed it to the side and held it against her shoulder. "Keep that there," he muttered so that only she heard it above the motor of the van humming in the back. "My sister's a doctor, I know what I'm doing," he said with a faux seriousness, a glint in his eye.

She smiled down at him and nodded, slipping her fingers over his and holding them there for a long moment before she let him slip his hand out from under his. He could see in her face that she wanted more than just that chaste touch, and he'd give anything to give her what she wanted, because he wanted it too. He needed it.

But instead, he pulled back and moved to sit on his seat again, rocking along with the van, staring down at his lap, waiting as patiently as he could to get to the extraction point. Then he would let himself slump over in a heap. He would allow the overwhelming events of the last hour and the dwindling of his adrenaline overtake him. Just a little.

As much as he dared.

A/N: Hopefully getting the next one up much sooner than this one! We're working on it! And please review. It really helps us out.

Thanks!

SC and DC