A/N For the benefit of those who don't know, there's a Facebook group for Chuck Fanfiction, and we'd love to have some new members.

'Meltdown' came into my head when I was thinking about how to play this scene, thanks to Fezzywhigg, but then I thought the image in my head was perhaps a bit extreme. I spoke to a couple of other people and figured out a way to tone it down a bit. The power of good comments, and good commenters.

"This could take a while."

"Water under the bridge."

"You do good work."

"Whatever."

Verbanski Corp., holodeck level...

One after another, the ladies in the office looked up, as if scenting something dangerous in the breeze, except there was no breeze. That there was danger they were sure, it was their job to know. Slowly they all turned to look into the room, at the desk farthest from the door.

Alex McHugh sat at that desk, its surface neat and organized as always, reading through a folder. She seemed perfectly at ease. Scan. Flip. Scan. Flip. The metronomic regularity of the sound was...well, had any of them been asked what trait most succinctly described Alex, it would not have been that.

The other ladies looked at each other. They were all on friendly terms with the their newest and youngest member, but none more than any other. That left rank. And seniority. That unfortunate person cleared her throat. "Uh, Alex?"

Eyebrows went up, but nothing else. Scan. "Mm?"

"Is something the matter?"

Flip. "Not for me."

This was not reassuring. "Then for-?"

Alex' phone alarm went off. She closed the folder and carefully placed it on the stack before she stroked the screen, quieting the alarm. "Excuse me. I have class." She stood up, pocketed the phone, and walked to the door, her every step a smooth, controlled glide.

Once she was gone the ranking officer went to her desk and snatched up the folder. She didn't open it. "Call the boss," she ordered the room in general as she headed to the door. "Tell her I'm on my way."

On a secure conference call...

"It's incomplete," said A, and Clyde Decker imagined him somewhat miffed about that, "But the functionality we need is the functionality it has. No one outside of us and the builders are aware of this. The ones who are left-" The ones he'd determined to be not responsible for the slow-down in the first place "-are continuing with the more advanced functions. We should be ready on schedule."

"And under budget," said E, who appreciated the cost savings a good housecleaning always brought.

"Agent G will be here soon with the chips," said B. "We should be able to test the entire system end to end. Do we have any particular targets?"

"Do you really need to ask?" said Decker.

"It would be unprofessional of him not to," said A. "We need to remove Bartowski, and we need to do it in such a way that we can recover some of what he's cost us. When Jubilee comes online we can take those steps."

Verbanski Corp., upstairs...

Morgan Grimes was exhausted. Up all night with guard duty, an intruder alert, coordinating the search, the capture, and then the aftermath of all that. Police. Paperwork. He needed his own bed in the worst-

His phone rang. He hit speaker. "This is-"

"Grimes!" shouted the electronic device, "You better get your ass down here pronto! Your damn girlfriend's killing us!"

What? Morgan sat up straighter. Something wrong with Alex? He stood up quickly, too quickly, and turned the wrong way, almost tripping himself when his chair rebounded back into his path. He ran for the stairs, suddenly not exhausted.

What could be wrong with Alex? Not another assassin, please. And killing them? Her students? Most of them were considerably experienced in forms of combat that she wasn't teaching them. The elevator chimed. The door opened and he leaped in before the little ding! of the bell faded, because if he didn't accept the blessings of the elevator gods now, what would happen the next time he needed one?

He pressed the button, watching as the numbers changed, each one coming with a low-pitched beep. No one was attacking her. That left what?

Beep. Laudanol came to mind, but they'd only had the one pill until he'd taken it himself, and it didn't turn him into a killing machine. Maybe some other drug? What drugs? Would Chuck know?

Beep. Alien mind control, maybe? A computer program uploaded into her brain?

He snorted at the absurd thought, glad he was alone in the elevator. Ridiculous. He must be wiped.

Ding! The doors opened onto the sounds of chaos. Morgan headed for the crowd, all clumped up against the windows. He pushed his way through, to see a free-for-all in the gym, his Alex taking on all comers and winning. Or at least not losing. No one appeared to be dead, which was good, since half of them were his buds from Bravo Company.

Morgan went for the door, not taking his shoes off before walking out on to the mat. "Alex?" he said, standing where she could see him.

She whirled, she saw him. She growled at him like Odin in that Thor movie which was so cool to see but not nearly so cool to hear from his own girlfriend. Her lightning, Morgan gulped, Me rod.

Everyone else sensed the entire threat level of the room reorient itself, and fortunately they were all in motion already, sucked in on that receding tide. Half a dozen hands grabbed Alex, stopping her lunge before it even started. "Run for it, Grimes!"

Morgan went for the door. "Run away! Run away!" The crowd swallowed him up and spat him out the other side.

Alex went still, breathing heavily. For a minute no one moved. Then the hands holding her dared to relax, letting go. She just stood there, watching the door swing.

The speaker in the phone spoke up. "Private McHugh, report to Miss Verbanski's office. McHugh to Miss Verbanski's office now, please."

Alex didn't exactly report to Miss Verbanski's office now. She waited until her panting had eased long enough to speak, and turned her head. "Class dismissed."

Sarah walked the paths of Volkoff's compound slowly, the charms of her bracelet brushing against her wrist, aware that the guard's patrolling schedule had changed from the previous time she'd been there. Frost had arranged it that way, offering Sarah a window to walk the paths when no one quite knew where the others were supposed to be. For Volkoff's consumption the story was that a varying guard routine was by definition harder to penetrate. Sarah had been on guard details with the Secret Service, but she'd never had to arrange one, so for all she knew it might even be true.

She turned down the same path, passing through the same space as before, although it was no longer unmonitored. She stopped, flexing a foot against the ground. Leaning against a tree, she lifted her foot from ground and removed the boot. She inverted it and shook it, before putting it back on and testing it. Satisfied, she continued her walk, moving out on to other paths, seeming at random. The guards, when she encountered them, all stood back to let her pass, hurrying to get back on their expected timings once she had. The glowing red flames of her current contact lenses had nothing to do with it.

The paths at no point came near a wall, but some passed nearer than others. On one such path the cameras failed to overlap by a small amount, A space a single step across, coincidentally also blocked by a flowering shrub from direct observation. In the space of that one step Sarah pulled her hand from her pocket, flinging the object she taken from the side of the tree over the wall before putting it back in her pocket again. Her task accomplished, she strolled leisurely back toward the mansion for dinner.

Somewhere out in the dark, Zondra would find the object, whatever it was, and put it to whatever use Frost intended.

Gertrude Verbanski sat at her desk, holding the picture of John Casey from the file when the door to her office slammed open without so much as a knock. She lifted her gaze from the father to the daughter, watched her striding across the floor, no longer the hyper-controlled death-machine her officemate had described, as the picture descended onto the pile of papers in the folder.

"You knew!"

Verbal, too. Excellent. Gertrude closed the folder. "Yes."

Alex leaned on the desk, doing her best to loom, and was more successful than she should have been, given her size. "Back at the convention, you knew."

Verbanski yielded her the space. "It was kind of hard to miss." She smiled, no teeth showing, trying to defuse her protege's mood. "The same show. The same room, even the same juice. The same expression on your faces when that assclown bothered you..."

Said protege wasn't going there. The hard look on her face didn't change. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"Why didn't John?" Gertrude stood up, reclaiming her space. "I didn't know you then, Alex."

Alex shrank back. "You know me now!"

Verbanski nodded. "So I do. It doesn't change anything." She scooped up the folder. "My loyalties in that situation, in most situations, would be with John, and he, for whatever reasons he may have had, didn't want you to know. Most likely he couldn't figure out how to tell you. I can understand that, and so should you. I could have violated his faith in me but I didn't. Neither did Morgan."

Alex looked away. "Morgan."

"He had to know, Alex. Before he ever met you, he had to know." The origin story of their relationship, which she'd heard at great length in stereo on the first day, made that perfectly clear.

"He said men were coming after me because of who my father was." Alex' eyes widened, and she turned to look back at her boss. "No. He said 'because of who my father is.'"

Verbanski shrugged. "A natural slip."

"I told him my father was dead, and he said 'yeah, that's true', like he was humoring me," said Alex bitterly.

Maybe he had been. "He didn't know you either, at the time," said Gertrude. "Why rock your boat unnecessarily, when the truth of the matter is hardly clear. War changes people, some more radically than others. Alexander Coburn was iron ore, going into that fire." She left that part of the metaphor for Alex to complete. "Most people come out ashes, but change is change."

Alex finally, finally sat down. "Could be worse, I guess," she said to the desk. "At least he's not Vader."

Gertrude remained standing, but she did not loom. "Just so you know, putting you on my team has altered my loyalties. Had the situation gone on much longer I was getting ready to bring John and Morgan in here with us and discuss it like rational adults. Not this...mess." She dumped the folder back in her drawer. "If Swan wasn't already dead I'd kill her myself."

"She's dead?"

"They took her off life support this morning. She had a DNR on file and no one willing to fight it." Half bent over already, Verbanski sat down again. "She left you that file, but she didn't do it to help you, Alex. She did it to hurt Morgan. Are you going to help her?"

At the casa de Bartowski y Grimes...

"Chuuuuuuuuck!"

Chuck threw himself out of bed automatically, not really awake after his long night, his tangled sheets and blankets keeping him from a headlong fall to the floor. He heard the door to his room slam open. Hands grabbed his shoulders, lifting his head up.

Morgan was staring into his eyes, a panicked mess. "Where are the deflector shields, Chuck? Where are the controls for the automatic defenses?"

Chuck tried to say "What?" but it mostly came out as an 'uh' sound with stuff stuck on either end.

Morgan shook him. "Come on, buddy, there's no time. Alex is coming and I have to get ready."

Chuck frowned at him woozily, only able to interpret that sentence in the most obvious way. Deflector screens on a date?

Morgan dropped him. "Hopeless." He grabbed Chuck's hair and lifted his face up a bit. Chuck spat carpet fuzz from his mouth and Morgan wiped it away gently. "Remember me buddy. Promise me that."

Chuck closed his mouth as Morgan slowly lowered his face to the floor. The carpet was strangely comfortable. He didn't hear the door shut as Morgan left.

A/N2 I hope you'll tell me what you think because this is really hard and it's nice to hear.