From this chapter on, the story will be a HP/Chuck crossover, with increasing emphasis on the Chuck side.

Mandatory disclaimers, all rights to the characters, events and environment of the Harry Potter franchise belong to JKR and the media organisations holding the various copyrights. Rights to the characters and environment of the Chuck franchise all belong to the creators of the TV Series Chuck.

Ellie and Chuck's story was depressingly similar to Harry's in many ways (and Hermione's to an extent as well). Their father was born Stefan Johan Bartek, and while he was unable to actively use magic, he was able to access enough of his technomage abilities to be hailed as an engineering prodigy. When he graduated from MIT with several degrees and doctorates and considerable acclaim in the early Seventies the CIA, in the form of the ruthless and aggressively ambitious young Section Chief Langston Graham, stroked his ego and used promises of fame, fortune and an unlimited research budget to lock him into a contract wherein he sold his life and soul to the devil (he wasn't the first one to think that Graham's given name really should have been Lucifer). After he signed his life away, Stephen was moved across the country to California and given a new identity, Stephen Jay Bartowski, Codename Orion, and set up with a home, research facility and handler in Altadena, with access to Caltech's facilities.

Elizabeth Mary Hunter, AKA Mary Elizabeth Gunter and Agent Frost, was at first furious about being taken out of the field and made to babysit a puffed up pain in the ass with delusions of grandeur. She was the CIA's top field agent fafuksake, no-one else could match her, not even her partner Roan Montgomery (most only knew him as Agent Bacchus or Silver Tongue)! Graham only managed to stop the situation going nuclear by promising that he'd temporarily assign other agents to watch Orion often enough for her to maintain her skills and reputation in the field, but it got dicey again when he told her that there wouldn't be much chance of having her work with Bacchus on those missions, because he'd be too busy filling in for her as the CIA's number one field agent. In the end, he managed to calm her down with written promises of at least a month or two of field work a year on significant missions, and she would be partnered with Bacchus if he was available for those missions, but he wheedled the concession out of her to accept having her identity officially changed to Orion's wife, Mary Elizabeth Bartowski, while she was assigned to play his wife and business manager as his handler… Him pointing out that it was actually her degrees in Management Science and Business and Global Affairs from Georgetown that had identified her as their only female agent qualified for this role took the wind out of the sails of her argument, so she gave in and agreed to play the role of Mrs Bartowski in public, but told him that all bets were off if the asshole ever thought that that gave him any rights in the bedroom.

Things progressed fairly well over the next few years, Orion and the team he assembled were delivering enough technological advances to keep the CIA ahead of everyone else in the spy game and Frost got to go back into the field often enough to maintain her reputation as the best in the game… And as Graham kept his promise to team her up with Bacchus whenever he could, he got to keep his balls and Frost got to release the tensions that built up whenever she was being forced to play that asshole Orion's loving wife…

Graham had long term plans that needed Frost to be more receptive to Orion to work though, so in Seventy Six, he started making sure that Bacchus was tied up in high profile missions whenever Frost was assigned field missions and engineered the 'home' situation so that both Frost and Orion would get frustrated enough about what was happening to start commiserating with each other. (He had no problem with being the bad guy in their rants, as long as they were agreeing with each other and getting closer.)

In May Seventy Seven, Graham's plan bore fruit, so to speak. He had been having Frost's contraceptives and morning after pills sabotaged and her and Orion's drinks spiked with concoctions which induced a mild sense of euphoria, reduced control and inhibitions and increased libido and fertility for most of the past year, and that, combined with their pent up frustrations, culminated in an all night sex session that left Frost pregnant. On Graham's orders, the CIA doctors who gave Frost her monthly medicals said nothing to her about being pregnant, so by the time she worked out that she was, it was too late to terminate without risk to her as well as the baby and Eleanor Faye Bartowski was born in February 1978.

Stephen was bright enough to steer clear of 'Mary' outside of what they needed to do to maintain their cover for the next couple of years, but Eleanor Bartowski (AKA Eleonore Mary Hunter, Eleonóra Elisabet Bartek, Eleanore Elsbeth Carmichael and Eleanore Roanne O'Conor, which Bacchus had arranged in secret to be officially established through the CIA as separate 3-6 years older identities, along with getting his own birth identity of Rowan O'Conor reestablished and recorded as Eleonore Hunter, Eleanore Carmichael and Eleanore O'Conor's father, so that he'd be able to legally grab Eleanore and run if anything happened to Frost.) was such an adorable toddler that the ice between him and Frost thawed up until the early Eighty One, because Graham had taken the opportunity to engineer another pregnancy when Frost let her guard down after the 1981 New Years celebrations.

Once again, the CIA doctors hid the pregnancy from Frost until it was too late to safely terminate it, so Charles Irving Bartowski (The office that created identities was full of petty bureaucrats who were angry about not getting the respect they believed they deserved so when they could get away with it, they got their jollies out of giving everyone ridiculous names, even babies.) was born in September 1981… Getting extra Hunter, Bartek, Carmichael and O'Conor identities like Ellie, which all had Elizabeth Hunter listed as his mother, but Rowan O'Conor was listed as Charles Hunter, Carmichael and O'Conor's and Stefan Bartek as Karol Bartek's father.

Needless to say, the ice between Frost and Orion became permanent after Frost found out that she was pregnant for a second time, in fact it was so obvious that they had to modify the 'Bartowskis' cover relationship to indicate that 'Mary' was extremely resentful of Stephen being able to progress his professional career while she was being forced to put aside all of her career aspirations to be a wife and mother (which wasn't hard to portray, because it was basically the truth). Frost did have some maternal affection for her children, but unfortunately the only example she'd had for being a parent was her own parents, so she pushed them to overachieve like she had been. Orion was an even worse parent than Frost, as he largely ignored Eleanor after she showed no interest in technical matters and only paid attention to Charles when he was showing interest in what was important to him. The only one who really showed that they cared about Eleanor and Charles' happiness was their Uncle Rowan, who turned out to be quite good at being the 'fun uncle', as well as wiping away tears, making them feel better and being there for them whenever they needed him.

That was why Ellie called Rowan when they got up one morning in August 1990 to find that their father wasn't making them pancakes for breakfast like he'd promised the night before, he and most of his things were gone! He clearly hadn't just ducked out to get what he needed for breakfast, because he'd packed up and taken all his computer equipment with him, which made it fairly obvious that he wasn't planning on coming back. Unfortunately, the facts of life over the past year or so since Uncle Hartley disappeared had forced twelve year old Ellie to become far more mature than any child should have to be… Things had gotten worse after their Mom disappeared six months later, and she'd been half expecting something like this to happen ever since their Dad decided that as Chuck showed no bad reaction to whatever happened when he kicked off something in Dad's work room a month and a half after her birthday other than passing out for five or ten minutes, whatever it was must be safe… Because he'd proven that it wasn't safe by running it himself a week or so later, and he'd been acting like a crazy man most of the time ever since then.

Uncle Rowan told Ellie to do what she could to get her and Chuck's things packed up and he'd be there as soon as he could to pick them up. He turned up with a few other men with a van about forty minutes later, quickly throwing the kids' clothes and other things in bags and getting them out of there, leaving the other men to pack up and remove everything else in the house. That was when things got really strange, because they were taken down to the Sierra Madre Aerodrome and into one of the perimeter buildings there, then Uncle Rowan led them through a strange doorway to where Auntie Di was waiting for them with a baby in her arms in the basement of a house that they were told was in Seattle. Uncle Rowan and Auntie Di explained that they'd had to get them away from Altadena before their parents' boss Mr Graham and his people worked out that their father had disappeared, because they'd be sure to try to use them as bait to get their father back…

Rowan and Di went on to explain about the extra identities that had been created for the two of them when they were born, and that they would be using them to make them old enough to qualify for the Transition School and Early Entrance Program at the University of Washington… Which was just up the road… Saying that they all knew that they could meet the scholastic requirements standing on their heads, so with a little bit of work ('a little bit' wasn't at all accurate, but Rowan was prepared to do whatever he had to to protect and help his charges, because he truly cared for and about them), they should be starting in the Transition School at the beginning of September. Uncle Rowan also explained that the birth certificates for the Eleanore and Charles O'Conor identities they'd be using while they were in Seattle showed him as their father, and that he'd organised this with their mother so that he could legally enrol them in school like this if anything ever happened to their parents, but Auntie Di was the one who would be staying with and looking after them most of the time because she had to take time off work to look after her baby.

While the glare Auntie Di gave Uncle Rowan at that went straight over Chuck's head, Ellie understood what it meant, that Uncle Rowan was the reason she'd had to take time off work because he was the one who got her pregnant... Auntie Di getting upset and telling her to be careful with boys when she was giving Ellie 'the talk' because she was getting worried about what it meant after she got her first few periods earlier that year (her Mom had already disappeared by then) suddenly made a lot more sense. Uncle Rowan misread the look on her face and hastened to assure her that Stephen Bartowski was their father, but he and their mother had been in the CIA long enough to know how far some people would go to get what they wanted, so they'd set all this up to make it legal for him to take charge of them if there wasn't anyone else around to look after them…

And that his Rowan O'Conor identity would stand up to any and all checks anyone could do, because that had in fact been his real identity up until he got shot down and captured in Vietnam in early 1966, but the CIA had convinced him that no-one would believe that he'd managed to convince the guards at the Prisoner of War camp to let him go, so he'd almost certainly be sent to prison or shot by the Navy for being a traitor… And talked him into getting Naval Aviator and Harvard MBA and Juris Doctor honors graduate Rowan O'Conor written off as Killed In Action by the Navy and starting over as CIA Agent Roan Montgomery… So as he had no family or other ties, as soon as Naval Aviator Lieutenant Junior Grade Rowan O'Conor had been written off as Killed in Action in Vietnam, he officially ceased to exist… All they'd had to do to reestablish his original identity twelve years later when Ellie was born was replace the Navy records showing him as being Killed In Action in '66 with other records showing that he'd been recovered from a Vietnamese POW camp and repatriated to the States to have his injuries treated and be discharged at the end of the war and insert other records to show he'd floated from job to job for a few years until he was recalled to serve in a joint Navy/Marine Corps Group. His birth records, social security number, Harvard records, even his AVROC and Navy service records of his years of service, rank and Naval Aviator qualifications were all still intact, in fact he was promoted to Lieutenant when he was officially recalled to active duty in early '78, then Lieutenant Commander in '83 and Commander in '88.

As expected, Ellie and Chuck had no difficulty getting into the Transition School and Early Entrance Program and they started at the beginning of September, which Chuck especially was rather happy about, because Uncle Rowan and Auntie Di's baby daughter Bella (OK, Isabella) was rather loud and smelly. Even though they were pushing ahead of their course schedules to finish their degrees earlier though, Ellie and Chuck still had plenty of time on their hands because they were finding the work easy, so they started asking about the work that Uncle Rowan, Auntie Di, her big sister Auntie Mary and others in the group were discussing at the house in Laurelhurst where they were living, and the adults were shocked by the quality of the input they were providing. They all knew that having to be the adult in the 'Bartowski' household for the last year or so had made Ellie far more mature than her years, and that both she and Chuck were even more brilliant than their brilliant parents, but the truly shocking and worrying part of this was that Chuck, who was barely nine years old, was somehow providing more insightful input than her (or the adults) half the time. That was explained after they went through what had been recovered from the house in Altadena.

Luckily Stephen hadn't bothered taking his earlier notes with him, so they had the information needed to work out that Chuck had this knowledge as a result of running that program on his father's computer six months ago. The Intersect program that Chuck kicked off was a variation of the MKUltra Project that Stephen and his team had been working on for the CIA since the mid-Seventies. They'd tried to have the project canned several times because all the volunteers it was tested on had ended up either dead or with severe brain damage, but Graham wouldn't let them stop working on it.

In the late Eighties, Graham had demanded that they develop something which would imprint an agent with a new identity and all the knowledge they needed to successfully complete a deep cover mission, and in Eighty Nine, he somehow talked Hartley Winterbottom, a British scientist working with Stephen, into loading the incomplete Intersect program. It appeared to work, as far as the reserved British scientist Hartley Winterbottom had been replaced with Alexei Volkoff, an aggressive Russian mob boss and arms dealer, so Graham had him tranqued and flown to Russia to see whether the Alexei Volkoff persona was good enough to fool the real Russian mob bosses and arms dealers.

It was, in fact it worked well enough for Alexei Volkoff to claw his way to the top of the Russian illicit arms culture in a matter of months, but that created another problem, because there didn't appear to be any way of turning off the psychotic arms dealer persona other than putting a bullet in his head. Graham made sure that Bacchus was incommunicado before he ordered Frost to go in and retrieve Agent X by any means necessary, and then tricked her into loading a version of the Intersect program without the Agent X identity. While like Hartley, Frost was one of the rare few who had the mental and memory capacity and brain structure to be able to load the Intersect program without being left a drooling idiot (or corpse) though, she still didn't have what it took to load it without doing herself considerable harm. The program was still a long way from being safe for testing on humans as it just dumped the linked data into the target's brain indiscriminately, so even without the Agent X personality module, it overwrote a lot of her memories and put considerable stress on her mental processes. It wasn't Ellie and Chuck's mother who headed off to Russia to retrieve Agent X, it was Agent Frost, the CIA's number 1 field agent who was delighted to have a chance to get away from the asset she was handling and get back into the field where she belonged. She could read Graham well enough to know that he wouldn't be too upset if she didn't manage to get the target out safely, and in fact he'd probably prefer that she didn't. She didn't know those kids living in the house she was sharing with the asset as his handler were (Perhaps they were Orion's kids?), but as long as they kept out her way she didn't care.

Half of the ones in the house were crying by the time they finished reading that part of the notes, but Orion's notes kept getting worse. Apparently after everything except being Agent Frost was nuked by the program, Graham had sent her to Russia to retrieve Hartley, and Orion just kept fiddling with the Intersect program, trying to find a way to fix it… He was also trying to find some way to remove the implanted data and allow lost memories to be accessed, because even though he knew that Frost didn't want anything to do with him, he was infatuated with her… He'd managed to sort out much of the dodgy code and structure by the time Chuck loaded the program, but it still wasn't 'safe' for most people, because it was basically dumping large databases of technical, scientific, intelligence, cultural and business knowledge into the target's brain and unless the target had the capacity necessary to accept and retain all that information (most didn't), the flood of information could very well overload it. What it came down to was that people who were able to access their magic were apparently wired differently, and that was important because they were the only ones so far who had avoided having their brains wiped out when they loaded the program. By the time Orion loaded it, everyone but Hartley, Frost, Charles and himself who ran the program had died or had their brains fried, and even Hartley, Frost and Orion had been seriously damaged by it. From Orion's notes, it appeared that a candidate needed to be able to accept and retain over ninety percent of the massive information dump in order to successfully load and use the information from the program, but he knew no way of determining whether someone had the necessary capacity, which begged the question of why the hell would he have assumed that it was safe for him to load… Which it obviously wasn't, because from what they'd seen he was as bad as Frost had been, if not worse, he may have retained his memories of who he was but he was obviously badly effected by the download…

Chuck managed to get Ellie and their Aunts and Uncles to agree that as long as he wasn't showing any adverse effects from using the information that had been dumped into his brain, he could help them analyse the information that the group was working on. Auntie Mary had retained the position of Intelligence Commander when the Navy and Marine Corps' Fleet Marine Force Special Operations and Intelligence Group that they'd established in the Vietnam War was expanded into the Joint Services Special Operations and Intelligence Group because they were forced to include the Army and Air Force in the group (with a significant increase in budget and autonomy) after the Goldwater–Nichols Act was passed in late 1986, so she had the necessary authority to recruit who she wanted into the Intelligence Group.

Key people in the upper echelons of the military and intelligence communities were well aware of how much effort and commitment had gone into making the Fleet Marine Force Special Operations and Intelligence Group the most effective intelligence and special warfare group the US had over the last decade and a half… In fact the group was as good or better than any other organisations of its type anywhere in the world, so they were prepared to do whatever they could to stop it being pulled apart by others' political machinations, because if that were to happen, the US would be losing a vital resource…

Given that there was no way to stop the Fleet Marine Force group being made into a Joint Services group, these people started making arrangements to ensure that the existing command structure of the group couldn't be changed without the expenditure a considerable amount of effort and influence. To this end, the Group Commander USMC Brigadier General Joseph Cochrane, Special Operations Commander USMC Colonel James Wolfe, Intelligence Commander USN Captain Mary Beckman and the Navy Captains, Execs and CAGs of the two heavily modified Essex carriers that served as the command ships for their operations were all bumped a grade, to ward off challenges to their positions as the Commanders of the new Joint Services Group when the other services were added. They also changed the reporting structure of the Joint Services Group so that the Commanders of the group reported directly to the Joint Chiefs of Staff rather than through the individual services' chains of command, to stop any of the services taking control of parts of the group.

Mary discussed what she was planning to do with Joe, and he agreed that adding Ellie and Chuck to the Intelligence Group as Direct Commission Officers on the QT was the only way to bring them on-board without too many people discovering just how young they were, so she went ahead with it. Even using their Carmichael identities, which showed them as being 6 years older, Ellie was still officially a few months short of nineteen and Chuck had just turned fifteen, but the structure that they had been forced to implement when they expanded the Fleet Marine Force Special Operations and Intelligence Group into the Joint Services Special Operations and Intelligence Group in early 1987 mandated that everyone making up the elite Intelligence Group would be Officers, so that was the only option available… So that, and the fact that the Special Forces and Intelligence Group was important and successful enough to be exempted from what were hard and fast rules for the rest of the military, was how Ellie and Chuck Carmichael officially became Ensigns in the United States Navy in September 1990, and had been promoted to Lieutenant, Junior Grade, by the time they graduated with honors and returned to Los Angeles in June '93, Lieutenants by the time they met Harry and the girls in February 1995 and Lieutenant Commanders in late 1998, at which point Chuck was made Commander of the Intelligence Group's growing Cyber Security Group.

When they met Ellie in late 1994, she and Chuck were nominally living in an old apartment complex in Echo Park while they were doing their graduate degrees at CSULA and Caltech. They were really living and working out of an apartment in the same secure building as the apartment Harry and the girls had up at Sierra Madre, and using portals to get to the Echo Park apartment and head out from there to avoid being associated with the quasi-military Sierra Madre Aerodrome and the organisations affiliated with it… While the apartment complex looked old however, it had been completely rebuilt from below ground level (a secure underground garage level was added in the process of rebuilding) to be as secure and modern as possible while retaining its Nineteen Twenties Spanish Colonial Revival charm and style in the early Nineties.

Harry and the others kept getting called back to Magical Britain to deal with Dumbledore and the others' trials and myriad other obstacles that the 'Traditionalists' generated over the second half of 1995, but the demands had slowed to a trickle by the end of the year, and none of them were at all unhappy about that. The fact that while Dumbledore had lost most of his ill gotten gains, the Traditionalists had voted to allow him to live out his life in relatively comfortable house arrest didn't impress Harry or the family at all, but Harry had the satisfaction of making the old bastard wet himself when he quietly advised him not to breach his house arrest, because he wouldn't like what he'd find waiting for him outside if he did… Adding that he'd learned quite a bit from those illegal blood trackers that had been placed on him when he was dumped on the doorstep of that hell house as a toddler, so he'd know the moment he left the house and he'd always be able to find him.

Over the past year, most of them had been giving serious consideration to what world they wanted to live in, and Harry and the girls were neither surprised nor upset that most of the ones who'd grown up in the Magical world wanted to stay there… As it was all they'd ever known and they weren't really comfortable in the Mundane world. That was effecting Daphne, Astoria and Luna to a degree as well, but visiting friends and family every week or so was enough to keep them happy and the less restrictive culture of the Mundane world gave them a unique opportunity to immerse themselves in fashion and teen culture that delighted the teenaged/early twenties (going by their bodies or their souls) young women. In the end, Harry, the girls and Dora were the only ones who basically chose the Mundane world over the Magical one, but they were fine with that, they still saw their friends, family and associates in one world or the other every week or so and no-one had lost anything important to them.

Harry and the girls were soon made part of the Special Ops and Intelligence Group, with US identities that qualified them to be added as Direct Commission Officers being inserted into the Mundane US Government's official records… And with judicious use of Mind Magics, they all went through Navy SEAL, Marine Force Recon, Navy and Marine Aviator and other specialised and restricted training with Ellie and Chuck… So that they officially received all the relevant training and qualifications for what they did for the Group without anyone noticing or remembering anything about their age or sex.

Things went a little pear shaped in '97 though, because Ellie and Chuck had decided that, no matter how much of a self centred bastard he was for abandoning them without a word when his stupid decision to load the Intersect program backfired on him, their father was still their father and they wanted him back in their lives so that they could help him recover from what he'd done to himself… So they came up with a plan to attract his attention, Eleanor Bartowski would come out of the woodwork and finish Pre-Med at UCLA as a transfer student who had returned to Los Angeles after her adopted parents died in a car accident in San Diego, and Charles Bartowski would be finishing high school at Belmont Senior High (they chose Belmont because it had a serious overcrowding problem, so no-one would notice whether he was actually there or not) as his nineteen year old sister Eleanor had been granted custody of him the previous year... Then they inserted believable cover ups for their making Ellie one year and Chuck three years older, adding a 'k' to their surnames and burying their records when they went into the foster care system in Riverside County in 1990 (believable to those who knew how brilliant they were anyway) into the DMV and CDSS' databases to explain how they'd gotten their Hardship Licenses and started earning money so early and leave a trail of breadcrumbs for their father to follow. Ellie's adoption was covered with the story that she and her foster parents had quickly grown quite attached to each other, but the only way she could stay with them when they had to move to San Diego for work was for them to adopt her. They couldn't afford to support two children, so Chuck had had to stay in foster care in Temecula, and Ellie couldn't get custody of him until she had a permanent residence (which she got by using the money from her adoptive parents' estate to buy the apartment in Echo Park).

They had no trouble finishing at the top of their years and lining up scholarships to cover the next stage of their education (a Navy Health Professions Scholarship at UCLA for Ellie and an academic scholarship for Electrical Engineering and Computer Science degrees, plus a Marine option Navy ROTC scholarship to complete an MBA at Stanford and a part time job to help cover his living expenses for Chuck), and their achievements did attract attention, but unfortunately it wasn't their father's, it was the CIA's, Langston Graham's to be specific.

Graham showed his hand soon after they lined up their scholarships by inserting CIA agents into both Ellie and Chuck's classes at university with orders to get close to them and putting watchers on their apartment in Echo Park and where they were working. (With their backstory of being a couple of ex-foster care scholarship kids, they both needed to be working at least part time to explain where they were getting the money to pay their bills from. Ellie was a certified Critical Care Paramedic who took whatever shifts she could get with the ambulance service of Echo Park Emergency Medical Services (which was based in what had been the Queen of Angels Hospital across the street from their apartment) at night, on weekends and on breaks, while Chuck worked part time at the Buy Mores in Burbank and Mountain View doing tech support, as well as doing freelance tech services work and filling in as an EMT when the Echo Park EMS needed extra EMTs… Because Ellie had made sure that he got his EMT training and certificates as soon as he was officially old enough, using the argument that even if he had no intention of going into medicine like her, with the lives they led, being properly trained as a medic would always be useful…)

What Graham didn't know though was that they were prepared to deal with his games. After going head to head with the blood bigots in Magical Britain for years, Harry and Hermione were more than a little paranoid about people coming after their family, so they made sure that they had identities and histories in place to watch Ellie and Chuck's backs. By using their Fae Shape Shifting (and Doppelganger) abilities, they could play anyone they wanted... So Harry, Hermione, Luna, Daphne, Astoria and Dora all adopted fabricated identities (both male and female) that they'd created believable histories and credentials for to insert themselves into Ellie and Chuck's university and work lives and watch out for them.

Graham had an agent by the name of Bryce Larkin inserted as Chuck's roommate at Stanford, with Larkin being tasked with becoming Chuck's best friend and confidant, as well as organising for a female agent, Jill Roberts, to get close enough to Chuck to seduce him and become his girlfriend. It was pathetically easy to spot what Larkin and Roberts were, because quite aside from the fact that no-one in their right mind would find Larkin believable as an engineer, or Roberts as a scientist, they were too pumped up with their own importance to cover up the fact that they thought they were better than everyone else, which was confirmed by using a little mind magic on them. Looking into their thoughts and memories, especially Larkin's, had left them looking for brain bleach, and trying to find a way to get them arrested and convicted for what they had done and were still doing. Both Larkin and Roberts were five or six years older than they were claiming to be, and Larkin had a taste for young girls and boys, so putting something like him in a position to prey on young university students was criminal. They'd seen far too many instances of rape by drugging and seduction and outright violent rape, torture and degradation and murder (both as an agent and for pleasure) in his memories with no intention of stopping to be willing to let him go unpunished… And Roberts was pretty much the same, without the violent rapes, but with even more instances of seducing men and women and taking everything they had from them.

To give Chuck a buffer zone, Harry created and adopted the identity of Michael 'Skip' Johnson, a San Jose State student in a similar situation to Chuck, in that he was on a partial scholarship and therefore had to use an ROTC scholarship and night and weekend jobs at the same store as Chuck to make ends meet. 'Skip' was supposedly sharing a house in Santa Clara near the store and SJSU with two other tech support guys from their store to save money, Jeffrey Barnes and Lester Patel (Luna and Astoria playing guys), and Chuck supposedly crashed on their couch (he actually had his own room there which he used for catching up on his work for Auntie Di, who had been promoted to Brigadier General to take over as the Group's Intelligence Commander when Auntie Mary was promoted to Vice Admiral and Head of the NSA, CSS and Cyber Command in late '96, and getting a decent night's sleep) when he worked late shifts or had early morning ROTC sessions at SJSU, which gave him four or five nights free of Larkin and Roberts most weeks. Larkin and Roberts monopolised his time whenever he was staying at the dorm, but that gave him an excuse to spend more time at 'the share house' so that he could study and get his assignments done.

Meanwhile, Hermione, Daphne and Dora adopted identities as Ellie's class and workmates to ensure that she was covered too and keep the CIA at bay in LA. While it was a relief to be spared the level of attention that Chuck was getting, Ellie couldn't help feeling a little insulted that the only one Graham had bothered assigning to entice and monitor her was a bombastic idiot going by the name of Devon Woodcomb. Like Larkin and Roberts, 'Woodcomb' was five years older than he was claiming to be, and only idiots could ever accept him as a doctor, let alone the top cardiac surgeon that he kept telling everyone he was going to be. Graham had actually picked him for this role because he had already flunked out of medical school once, as Graham was banking on that giving him enough prior knowledge to make it through this time. Woodcomb had a taste for young girls like Larkin (not so much boys), and poking through the cesspool in his head had showed a similar history of drugging, rape, torture, degradation and murder (to cover up his crimes), so they were working on a way to get justice for his victims too. At least Ellie didn't have to find somewhere else to sleep like Chuck did, as she was officially living off campus, and it was relatively easy to beg off requests for dates with having to work at night and on weekends to make ends meet, and study and meeting the requirements of the Health Professions Scholarship covered other times... Besides which, Larkin, Roberts and Woodcomb obviously believed that they were masters of seduction after getting trained to do it at the Farm... But Ellie amd Chuck had grown up getting personal one on one instruction from someone who was so famous for his seduction skills that it was a mark of extreme favour to be allowed to attend one of the rare secuction classes that he was taken out of the field every three or four years to teach, Agent Bacchus, AKA Uncle Rowan... So the idea of ordinary agents with nothing more than the standard seduction training from the Farm (which covered little more than how to get your mark into bed as quick as possible) being able to seduce either Ellie or Chuck was ludicrous.

Money being tight was accepted as the reason for Ellie loaning her '95 Plymouth Colt Vista Wagon to Chuck to give him something more practical and cheaper to run to take to Stanford than their Mom's old Baja Brasilia (Frost reacted badly to being ordered to get rid of the imported 1600 GS powered race spec VW SP2 Roan had had built for her because it 'wasn't a suitable car for the wife of an Amercian research scientist to be driving' in early '74, but Roan managed to get her down from Defcon 1 by giving her a 3 door Brasilia that he'd had all the running gear, dash, front seats etc from a wrecked 1600 GS powered Porsche 912 rally car swapped into. The Brasilia was a neat but ordinary looking little hatchback that could outrun and outhandle most 911s, which was good enough to get her to agree to have the SP2 put in storage and drive the Brasilia, leaving the idiots at Langley with no grounds to complain. Then when she found out that she was pregnant in '77 and started going nuclear again, Roan upgraded her to a 5 door Brasilia he'd had built up with the mechanicals etc of another 2000 GS powered 912 rally car to defuse the situation again. The 3 door was then raised a little and modified to take bigger tyres to provide additional escape options.), which he'd been driving since he was issued his Hardship License on his supposed 14th birthday in late '92, when she upgraded from the Vista Wagon to one of the new 2nd Generation Mitsubishi Space Runners that a family friend in San Diego imported from Mexico for her at the end of August '97, because they couldn't afford to buy anything else for him… That was what the DMV and IRS records showed anyway, but it was actually part of ensuring that there were handy, unobtrusive and practical machines available to get them away from any trouble that may arise, because the forty odd fast but nondescript imported cars, wagons, vans and pickups and what they were passing off as twenty odd ratty old customised Harley Davidsons that Ellie, Chuck, Dora, Harry and his girls had between them at the various places they were living (officially Ellie and Chuck only had the Vista Wagon and Space Runner, plus their Mom's old Brasilia that they hung onto for sentimental reasons, but they had ten other machines stashed away under different names for getaway machines) were all hiding numerous Mundane and Magical enhancements, including powerful motor in wheel electric AWD and upgraded brakes and suspension. Ellie and Chuck had fun passing on their 'Uncles and Aunts' teachings on how drive or ride just about anything well enough to escape pursuers in any conditions as well as flying just about anything with wings or rotors to Dora, Harry and the girls over the next few years.

Things went OK for most of the next four years, they were all doing well in their degrees, careers and everything else and they managed to keep the CIA away from Chuck and Ellie for the most part… Though the fact that Graham used the CIA's influence to get any and all investigations into Larkin, Roberts and Woodcomb quashed and all charges dropped was aggravating, as was the fact that his agents never stopped trying to get into Chuck and Ellie's lives… But at least they were too scared of Graham to ever admit that they weren't getting anywhere with them, so he was working on the misapprehension that he had Chuck and Ellie where he wanted them. Roberts and Larkin even spread the story that Chuck was marrying her after they graduated, which Chuck had to admit was rather clever for those two… Because there was a good chance that it would filter back to the CIA from people at Stanford hearing the story, which would reinforce the myth that things were going well... And while Roberts being supposedly engaged probably wouldn't deter the jocks and other guys from going after her, it probably would dissuade girls from going after Chuck (Not that that was much of an issue anyway, because he was perceived as being a poor antisocial workaholic. It was common knowledge, again thanks to Larkin and Roberts, that he was a scholarship student who was working nights and weekends to make ends meet and the only time anyone saw him was in lectures or the library. Most students didn't have access to see what others' standing was, so as he never boasted about how he was doing, very few people knew that he was leading in nearly every subject, they just presumed that he was putting in extra effort to maintain the grades he needed to keep his scholarship.), which would help leave the playing field clear for Roberts.

But just before they took their final exams and graduated in 2001, Larkin got wind of a very important and secret project that the CIA's illicit recruiter at Stanford, George Fleming, was working on for Graham… And he decided that this Omaha project could give him a way to avoid the inevitable fallout when they finished at Stanford and Graham found out that they'd been lying all along about how well things were going with Bartowski… So he started setting things in place to generate evidence that Roberts had been lying to cover up her failure to snare Bartowski, and that she'd convinced him to help her sever ties with Bartowski by making a sex tape with her and spreading it and a believable backstory for why they did it aound on the Internet. The other part of the plan was to convince Graham that Roberts had claimed that she had received orders for both of them to sever ties with Bartowski before they left Stanford, and making a sex tape together and making sure everyone saw it would the easiest and most definite way to do that, so he'd started pulling away from Bartowski while they were getting ready to make the tape.

Luckily, he had plenty of blackmail material on Fleming, because he'd been giving the old perv the juniors he decided weren't worth his time and the rest of his cast offs when he was done with them over the past four years, and keeping audio and video records of what Fleming did with them. Showing him a few of the more incriminating clips was enough to get Flemings' complete cooperation when Bryce 'suggested' that they swap his and Bartowski's names on the results of the subliminal imaging tests that Fleming was running for Graham, and then frame Bartowski for cheating, get him kicked out and spread the word about him being expelled for cheating before he had a chance to start raising a stink about it. Between them, he and Fleming had enough material on the Dean and the others needed to quickly push through Bartowski's expulsion for cheating to ensure their cooperation, so Chuck was expelled from Stanford within 48 hours, and it only took another day and a half for his 'best friend and fiance's sex tape and all the stories about him being a loser who was expelled for cheating etc to be spread right across the web and attracting a lot of attention... And to add insult to injury, Stanford's official representatives actually confirmed what was being spread across the web when they were contacted for comment.

Larkin got his wish, as he was no longer one of the faceless drones who made up the majority of the CIA's field operations after he was selected to be one of the prime candidates for the Omaha project and sent to the Omaha facility to start getting prepared for it (the fact that it was actually Bartowski's results that got him selected as the best candidate was something that Larkin dismissed as unimportant)… And he thought things were really starting to look up when he met the other candidates for the Omaha project, because one of them was Graham's teenage protege, who was currently going by the name of Sarah Walker. At nineteen, Walker was a little older than Bryce preferred, but she was absolutely stunning and had apparently set records right, left and centre when she was going through training at the Farm… Word was that she'd even broken a lot of the records set by the legendary Agent Frost which had stood for nearly twenty years, so hitching his wagon to her star was bound to take him far further than he could get by his own efforts, especially if this Omaha project worked out as well as everyone was saying it should.

Their preparations at the Omaha facility were interrupted by 9/11 a few months after they got there, because that immediately became the CIA's top priority and as they were supposedly the best the CIA had, the Omaha candidates were all assigned to the teams chasing down who had been behind the attack... And unfortunately by the time they were finally released to return to the Omaha project eighteen months later, America's intelligence landscape had been changed by the creation of the position of the National Intelligence Director who would be in control of all US intelligence activities, and when some Navy bitch who'd been the Director of the NSA got the job, she started sticking her nose into everyone's business so the Omaha project had to be put on ice to keep it hidden from her. Finding out that Walker had been assigned to work with an all female joint agency team rather than with him infuriated Larkin, so he decided to put on a show to convince the ones in charge that no other agents were good enough to be his partner and get her reassigned… If some of the agents he was lumped with in the meantime had to die to prove that he needed to have the best working with him, so be it.

Unfortunately for Fleming and the rest of Larkin's accomplices though, the family had ensured that Chuck had plenty of evidence to prove that he'd been framed, and by whom. He also had the support of a scarily successful legal team and a number of prominent state and federal law enforcement agencies, so Stanford University and its faculty members who were officially given leave to railroad and defame Chuck without any proof or even real evidence that he'd cheated or any chance to defend himself were going down!

Once the final exams had finished and the students had left for the summer (or for good), Chuck and his supporting cast arrived at the Stanford President's office with all the evidence to prove that he'd been framed and expelled without any investigation into the matter or an any opportunity for him to provide evidence of his innocence or any other defence. The President refused to see them at first, but hearing that senior representatives of the FBI, California Highway Patrol (well, State Police, but they were all part of the Highway Patrol nowadays) and a number of other powerful agencies were saying that they would be sorting this out that day, and he could choose whether they did so relatively quietly in his office, or they very publicly dragged him and everyone else involved down to the FBI's San Francisco Station in handcuffs to do it there made him change his tune very quickly. Fleming and the others involved didn't escape the shame of being dragged across the university campus to the President's office in handcuffs, but as long as he managed to avoid the experience, he didn't care.

It only took a few hours to disprove every element of the case made against Chuck, have his expulsion overturned and have things organised for him to sit his exams privately over the next week. The university were all too eager to have his two joint graduate degrees (They'd been shocked to discover that Chuck had managed to leverage the MBA he'd started and the associate degrees in Applied Mathematics and Criminal Justice that he'd somehow completed before he came to Stanford to transfer from his undergraduate degrees to the Master of Science in Electrical Engineering / Master of Business Administration and Master of Science in Computer Science / Juris Doctor joint graduate degrees in his Junior year.) issued in the name of Charles Hunter in return for him signing a contract guaranteeing absolute secrecy about what had happened… Especially after several senior members of faculty were arrested on the spot, charged with serious crimes and taken out in handcuffs… But they went ballistic when Chuck's legal team started talking dollars for the damages payout the university was being hit with, because the figure they mentioned was well over ten million dollars.

Given that the state and federal authorities were involved in the guarantee that Charles Hunter would sit his exams, be fairly graded and graduate in time to progress with his career, Stanford didn't interfere with any of that, but they fought the civil case for damages due to his being forced to change his identity to escape the ridicule and vilification that Charles Bartowski was being subjected to right around the world… Mind you, they would have been far better off paying the specified sum up front instead of fighting it, because by the time the court case was concluded, the damages payout had increased by well over fifty percent...

And having to fight them to get them to pay up wasn't the only thing that was aggravating Chuck, because while the CIA's interest in Charles Bartowski had reduced considerably after the debacle at Stanford, he and Ellie still had people watching their apartment and following them to work.

Luckily for Ellie, the family had bought all the facilities of the closed Queen of Angels Hospital down the street (along with the remaining houses in the street) back in the early Nineties and had it refurbished, restaffed and repurposed into what was now primarily a medical research, emergency medical services and training centre. The Echo Park Emergency Medical Centre provided emergency medical services and trauma care and training, but it had a commitment to medical research.

Chuck (and by extension Harry and the others who were supporting and protecting him) wasn't that lucky, because starting over with a proper business would have raised questions about where they'd gotten the money to establish a business and had the CIA watching him too closely for him to do anything he wanted, so they had to go back to the Burbank Buy More… But they weren't willing to go back to the way things had been in the past, so they made a proposal (more like an ultimatum) to Buy More Corporate… They could reorganise the Burbank store so that Mike Tucker was downgraded to the Sales Manager and the Nerd Herd was split off into a separate business operating out of the same premises with Chuck as the Technical Manager, so he'd be in charge of all business matters for the Nerd Herd and they'd be free from taking orders from anyone on the sales side, but he'd be responsible for the profitability of the Nerd Herd operation… or Chuck, Skip, Anna, Jeff and Lester would all quit and start their own business, which would probably be taking over all the serious technical work that the Nerd Herd did from Buy More because their regular customers were bound to track them down when they found out that they'd left. It wasn't too hard a decision for Corporate, because Chuck was talking about everyone competent in the Burbank store leaving to start their own business, and almost certainly taking all of the store's big technical services customers with them. If that happened, the Burbank store would be forced to close down in six months or less (probably a lot less), because it would be losing money hand over fist without the Nerd Herd to keep it afloat.

They haggled over the details of how the arrangement would work for a while, but it was a foregone conclusion that Buy More would agree to their…. Ah…. Proposal, because they couldn't afford to lose the most profitable part of of the business, in that location anyway... There were some stores where the sales side made the most profit, but they didn't generally have much of a technical team. Once they agreed on how they were going to do this, Mike Tucker was called in to be advised of his demotion and how the Burbank store was going to be operating from now on.

Tucker just about shat himself when he walked into the conference room and saw Bartowski, Johnson and Wu sitting with the future head of Buy More on the other side of the table. At first he thought he was going to be fired, but by the time they finished telling him about all the changes that were going to be occurring he was wondering whether getting fired would have been better. He couldn't see how the sales team at Burbank could make a profit without all the money coming in from the technical services and the nerds carrying the load of fixing everything the customers and Green Shirts broke. Now they'd have to pay to get things fixed, get the nerds to help them with anything, or any of the other thousand and one jobs that he'd always dumped on them because they could get them done. Hell, he'd probably have half of the Green Shirts quitting within a week, because they'd be having to work at least two or three times harder to do their jobs, even worse, he'd have to work harder than he'd had to since he started working for Buy More… Dammit, this wasn't right! It was a time honoured tradition, the Green Shirts stand around and talk while the nerds get everything done, they couldn't do this! He proved that he was as dumb as Chuck thought he was by saying exactly that.

"No! You can't do this! The sales side of the store can't make a profit without the Nerd Herd's contribution… I suppose I could give them a bit more leeway but the store needs to stay the way it's always been."

Chuck looked at 'Skip' and 'Anna', then turned to Corporate Manager. "Well Mister Finkelstein, what's it going to be? Are you going to honour our agreement, or hire a new Nerd Herd team for the Burbank store?"

Joseph Finkelstein, the founder's grandson, shook his head in disbelief at Tucker. "We're not going to go back on our agreement Mister Bartowski, in fact my grandfather is quite interested in keeping an eye on this little experiment of yours and seeing how it works out... But I'm starting to think that we may need to get a whole new Sales team for Burbank, starting with the Sales Manager… If he can sit there and tell me that he can't make a profit by just selling product, his whole sales team must be useless."

He watched Chuck trying to find a politically correct way to respond to that, then give up and look around the room. Joseph raised an eyebrow at that and 'Anna' snorted. He looked a question at her and this time she openly sniggered. "Chuck was raised to hold to 'if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything', so he can't answer you Sir, but I can! Useless doesn't even begin to describe most of the Green Shorts at Burbank… A few of them are okay, but most of them are useless, lazy, thieving idiots and that fat pig there is the worst of the lot! By the way, what do I have to do to lodge formal sexual harassment complaints against him, Harry Tang and a few of the other Green Shirts? They keep trying to see me getting changed at work and him and Tang have also tried to grab my ass."

Joseph glared at Tucker as he answered her. "I'll have the necessary forms supplied to you Miss Wu, but while we can fire the casual sales staff at will, unfortunately I can't fire Tucker and Tang without going through the formal disciplinary and cautioning process first… Which Mister Tucker can consider started for him... We actually have a business recovery team whose job it is to determine whether a store can be recovered or closing it down is the only way to stop losing money, and from what I've heard here, I think the recovery team is needed in Burbank to reeducate everyone on the sales team, and apparently teach them how to sell product… This week will be a good time to start that because the store will already be getting disrupted by the workmen coming in to move the Nerd Herd counter to the back of the store and start building the office, repair centre, facilities etc in your new secure space out the back."

He looked around the table. "So is everyone happy that we know where we're going with this?"

Tucker went to speak, but we was cut off. "The only response I want to hear from you Mister Tucker is 'Yes, Mister Finkelstein', is that clear?"

Tucker gulped and said "Yes, Mister Finkelstein."

Chuck, 'Skip' and 'Anna' smirked and parroted his words, which Joseph had a laugh about, though Tucker didn't.

With that, they went back to Burbank. Tucker tried to pressure them into calling Corporate and telling them that they'd changed their minds, so nothing changed, but he clammed up when Chuck made it obvious that he was recording him. While 'Skip' and 'Anna' filled 'Jeff' and 'Lester' in on how the meeting went and what the outcomes were, Chuck called Ellie's 'Uncle Jorge' down in San Diego (it was really their Uncle Sharptooth over at Sierra Madre, where Gringotts' LA facility was located) to get him to make arrangements to bring ten new Mitsubishi Space Runners in from Mexico, with five painted in Nerd Herder colours with their usual magical and mundane enhancements and the other five being set up to look and sound the same, but remain 'normal' cars, because one of the concessions they'd gotten from Joe Finkelstein was the budget to replace the four mismatched old broken down hatchbacks that the Nerd Herd was currently using for service calls with a full fleet of new machines, then he told Chuck to buy whatever else he thought they'd need to do the job properly.

Once he'd organised their new Nerd Herders, Chuck got to work on ordering new laptop and tablet computers, phones, spare parts and tool cases and the rest of the equipment to be issued to each of the Nerd Herders to help them do their jobs more easily and efficiently. He looked up when 'Anna' cleared her throat and she nodded to where Tucker and Tang were whispering furiously at each other in a corner of the store, and Tang kept switching between looking furious and horrified as Tucker told him about the coming changes. Chuck snorted and quickly set up a video camera to record what was about to happen when Tang stormed over to the Nerd Herd counter with Tucker huffing and puffing (because he was so much out of shape) after him.

Chuck smirked as Tang started frothing at the mouth and shouting at him, because the big boss Joseph 'call me Joe' Finkelstein was coming up behind Tang and Tucker with what was obviously part of the Business Recovery team. His smirk turned a tad evil as he said.

"Hey Joe, good to see you again, I take it these guys are from the Recovery team?"

Joe's smirk was as evil as Chuck's as he replied. "Hi Chuck. Yeah, the rest of the team will be coming in from tomorrow, but from what I heard in that meeting this morning, I thought it would be better to get them started here as soon as possible, and from what I just saw, I was right… Harold Tang! For the disgusting display of unprofessional behaviour I was unfortunate to witness just now, you are hereby entering the formal disciplinary and cautioning process that Michael Tucker began earlier today. You are obviously unsuited for holding any position of authority over others so you are being temporarily, for now at least, demoted to an entry level sales position and pay in hope that learning a little humility will teach you how to comport yourself properly while you are representing Buy More… Jim Bob, see if you can teach Hank here a little humility, will you?"

The man he addressed had an evil smile on his face as he drawled. "No problem Mister Finkelstein…" But he suddenly switched to a drill sergeant as he barked "Tang! This store is a pig sty, and you aren't going home tonight until it's acceptable by my standards, so move it!" and Tang leapt to it in an attempt to escape his wrath.

By that point, Chuck and the rest of the Nerd Herd team were grinning at each other, because they were bound to be having a llot of fun watching 'Jim Bob' putting Tang, Tucker and the rest of the store in their place.

A/N: Just in case anyone hasn't worked this out, both parts of this crossover will be AU.

I decided to make use of the TV series' mix up where Wendy Makkena was General Mary Beckman, the National Intelligence Director (which is obviously the equivalent of the Director of National Intelligence in the Chuckverse, so that's the title we'll use here) in the pilot, but Bonita Friedericy was General Diane Beckman, Casey's boss, through the rest of the series, so they're staying as two separate people in this, but I've changed Mary into USN Admiral this time... I'm keeping Wendy Makkena as Mary and Bonita Friedericy as Diane if anyone wants a mental image of them.

I'm also rehashing another common theme of mine, Roan got Diane knocked up in their drunken celebrations after the Berlin Wall came down, if anyone wants an image of their daughter Isabella as teenager, I'm thinking Bella Thorne.

gancanagh