Yeah, I'm hiding in the fallout
Now I'm wasted
They don't need me, don't want me
Don't hear a word I say
Weighed down
Say it now
You're naked inside your fear
Can't take back all those years
Shots in the dark from empty guns
Never heard by anyone
Never heard by anyone
Inside your head
No one's there
And I don't think I'll ever be
And I don't care
"Naked"
The Goo Goo Dolls
October 13, 2021
Carmichael Industries, Los Angeles, California
Chuck stepped aside to let the stretcher pass, Vivian strapped to it under a dark blanket. She turned her head to him and smiled, despite the obvious pain she was in. Seeing the stricken look on Chuck's face, the medic at the head of the stretcher told Chuck, perhaps a little too loudly, that she was going to be fine.
"Wait…wait, wait, wait," Carter called, pushing his way through a group of tactical officers in between the stretcher and the office where he had been treated.
He bumped into Chuck from behind, hard, making Chuck stumble forward. Sarah watched as Chuck shifted his weight, then spun gracefully back towards his friend. Carter's tripping was dizziness induced, and Chuck grabbed him as he swayed. "Take it easy," Chuck murmured to him softly. "You look dazed," Chuck muttered, noting the man's concussion, still blatantly apparent on his face.
"I'll rest later," he mumbled to Chuck, then pushed past him to catch the man with the stretcher.
"Viv," he whispered, touching her face gently as he bent forward. "You're gonna be ok," he told her, smiling though his eyes were full.
"Then why do you look like that?" she asked him, her voice hoarse like sandpaper.
"Because you saved my life," he said intensely. His eyes went straight through her, but softened when he smiled. "So now…you're stuck with me. It'll take quite a long time before I can reciprocate for that."
"Save my life?" she asked, her voice barely audible it was so soft and scratchy. She reached for his hand and squeezed it. "You already have…long before now."
The medic touched Carter's arm, indicating first that they needed to go, second, that her straining her voice after a crushing injury to her throat was complicating her condition. He bent down and kissed her, not sure when he stood if he was dizzy from his concussion…or the way she made him feel.
He made his way back toward where Chuck and Sarah stood, a polite distance away from the emotional exchange. "I called her parents and told them what happened. They're on the way to the hospital." Seeing the question on Chuck's face, he quickly added, "They're calling Morgan. He's on his way to your house."
The Winterbottoms were the "family" Chuck had left Stephen and the girls with, Sarah thought, remembering what she'd said when she had to rush away from Andrea and Stephen's karate practice.
"You got the address, right?" Carter asked Chuck, referring to the information they had found right before the office had been broken into.
"I called it in to Casey," Chuck told him, knowing referring to Casey without his title of General was something he hadn't ever done in the past with Carter, but it felt right now, after everything.
"Its front was a distributing company, from what we could tell. Shipping, ground freight, that kind of stuff. It was the client list that got us digging. They were obviously moving equipment all over the U.S. with their fleet…all related to…whatever all of this is," Carter explained. He held up his hands in mock defeat. "Which, I know, you can't really expl–"
Carter was interrupted by the ringing of Chuck's phone. Curious, Chuck reached into the inside pocket of his suit jacket and pulled out his phone. He wasn't surprised by the call; there were a myriad number of people who could be trying to get in touch with him at the present time. He was, however, surprised by who was calling him. He frowned and clicked the answer button, holding the phone up to his ear for privacy's sake.
"What's up, kiddo?" Chuck asked into his phone after seeing the identity of the caller as his son. The Winterbottoms had been relieved by Morgan. Nothing should have been wrong at chez Bartowski, although that didn't mean that there wasn't.
"Dad?" Stephen asked nervously. Chuck heard the edge to his voice. Not terror…urgency…or anxiety. Chuck could feel Sarah's eyes, focused intently and boring into him as she sensed the tension suddenly radiating from his muscles. He was calling his father. The extra question was a nervous habit.
"What? What's wrong?" Chuck prodded. "Is Uncle Morgan there?" he asked, jumping to conclusions, trying to keep his mind from not running away with him when it came to the possibilities.
"Yeah, he just got here," Stephen said in a rush, dismissively, as if it were superfluous to the question. "Listen, Dad. You said if I…zapped," he whispered the last word, "that I should let you know."
"Ok," Chuck said hurriedly, urging him to get to the point. "What?" he asked, his exasperation growing.
Stephen sighed into the phone. "I was watching TV and Aunt Corrine switched my cartoon to a show on PBS about Ireland." He stopped.
Chuck's face reddened as his patience grew thin. "Get to the point, Son," he urged, pulling the phone slightly away from his ear.
Stephen sighed again. He may have the world's most efficient version of the Intersect imaginable, but he was still a nine year old boy. "When I was at your work before, and I zapped on the stuff…when we were with Aunt Vivian. The name that he wanted me to confirm?"
Juliska Lorcan, Chuck remembered. Stephen had been correct in that as well.
"It didn't happen at your office, when I heard the word. It happened when I got stuck watching that boring show," he added. Sarah was observing curiously, watching Chuck motion with his other hand in the air, like Stephen was taking too long to tell him whatever it was. "Lorcan is a Gaelic name. It means "fierce." Most original Gaelic names were anglicized after the Norman invasion in 1169. Lorcan changed…to Larkin. That made me zap."
Sarah heard Chuck gasp out loud, reminiscent of only one other time in her memory–when Clyde Decker had explained the power of the Omen Virus. She watched as the color slowly drained from his face. The hand that held his phone to his ear was shaking violently. "What, Chuck?" Sarah asked urgently.
Chuck didn't hear her ask. He also didn't hear his son asking "Dad?" repeatedly into the phone either. His mind was racing. No version of Intersect that Chuck had ever downloaded had ever had one piece of intelligence about Bryce Larkin specifically. Once Chuck had known the entire truth behind all of the Intersect lore, it made sense. Chuck's father purposely removed it, each time he had rebuilt the program. The bastardized versions he had come across–both Fulcrum's and then the Ring's, had been built on the original frame, without information on Bryce. Stephen's Intersect was different. Whatever he absorbed, both consciously and subconsciously, was constantly being collated by his brain.
Bryce Larkin was dead. Sarah had carried his ashes to Portugal and buried him while Chuck had been training in Prague. This wasn't Bryce related…it was Bryce adjacent. The old contact from Fulcrum…Damn it, he wished he could make sense of all the thoughts swirling in his head.
"Dad?!?" Chuck heard Stephen scream into the phone, so loudly that Sarah jolted at the noise.
"I'm…I'm…sorry," Chuck stammered. "I…I..is that all?" he managed to ask. His throat burned and his mouth was dry.
"No," Stephen barked sarcastically. "That's what I've been trying to tell you!" he shouted.
"Easy," Chuck reprimanded him, not liking the tone his son had taken with him, despite the strange information being exchanged.
"Aunt Corrine was in the middle of asking me what happened when I zapped a second time. It was a…weird word. Haboob. I asked her if she knew what it was. She told me to Google it. It's in Arizona…they call it the Arizona monsoon…it's a…dust storm. A sand–"
"Sandstorm," Chuck muttered over his son's last word, feeling his heart sink to his feet.
Chuck heard Sarah gasp at that.
"Dad, is that important? Are you–" Stephen asked in a rush.
"Yes. Yes, thank you, Son, it is," Chuck said back, so quickly his words ran together. "We've got to go. We'll be home soon." He didn't wait for his son to say goodbye. He was already redialing the phone with both thumbs.
"Chuck…" Sarah said, a statement of worry and a question at the same time.
"I need to call Casey. Now. I think I know who Juliska Lorcan is."
She looks like the real thing.
She tastes like the real thing.
My fake plastic love
But I can't help the feeling
I could blow through the ceiling
If I just turn and run
And it wears me out
It wears me out
It wears me out
It wears me out
"Fake Plastic Trees"
Radiohead
October 13, 2021
Los Angeles, California
It was over.
Everything. Her plans. Her life. It ended here.
Her last hope…the only thing she had left…he was dead.
She scoffed bitterly. How pathetic…she was burning with rage and wishing she still possessed the ability to cry…for someone who saw only money whenever he had looked at her. A means to an end…all of them. Everyone who she had tried to connect herself to in her desperate loneliness. Before…before Kowambe had taken away her ability to feel.
Had that brain damage been why she had never been satisfied? Why nothing ever was enough? Nothing made her happy?
Or had she merely been chasing the ghost of a feeling left behind when she was so young she almost didn't remember…what it was like to be loved. Genuine, honest love.
Oh, she had been the recipient. It had been handed to her on a silver platter. But she hadn't reciprocated. She rebuffed it, rejected it, gave it away…never understanding how rare a gift it truly was, how next to impossible it was to actually find once, let alone multiple times. But she had never even known how to reciprocate, had she? She had taken him for granted…lied to him, hid her true self from him, afraid he would see something there that was inferior…
She sat on the floor, in the corner of the room that had been her office. She held the gun in her left hand…though she was right-handed. Or she had been right-handed, before that part of her brain had started rotting away. All the strength she had remaining was in her left hand. The room was pitch black, but the light from far down the hallway was still visible. All the objects surrounding her were faded black monsters, shapeless blobs occupying the space with her, coming to swallow her down into hell.
She could hear the noises on the street below. Tinny, echoing beeps and sirens. If she could still hear them like this, they must be unbearably loud to someone closer. Red and white lights were flashing. Police? Fire? Probably CIA or NSA…masquerading for the public who may see any of it and wonder.
The light down the corridor flickered. Not an electrical interruption, no…someone was approaching. It was the shadow that was flickering as someone momentarily blocked the wall sconce as they passed. She counted the steps as they became audible until whoever it was stood in the doorway, blotting out all the light, causing all the shapes she had seen to dissolve into the blackness that surrounded her.
"Stop!" she commanded, fueling her voice to what should have been a shout. It was distorted, half mechanical, like the sound of an artificial voice coming from a laryngeally implanted voice box in a smoker. She raised the gun in the dark, pointed it in the general direction of the door, not able to aim accurately.
Whoever was there said nothing…but she could hear him breathing, even across the room. She saw a shadow reach toward the light on the wall.
"NO!" she screamed, and it squealed like feedback.
"Why?"
She recognized his voice. Just one word…but it said an entire paragraph's worth of meaning. It was a superficial question…why not turn on the light, so that they could see? Curiosity. Oh, but there was anger, betrayal, disgust…all of it was there too. Why did she do it? Why did she seek to actively destroy everything that he held dear? She recognized his voice, but she had never heard it sound the way he sounded now. Even on the darkest day she had ever blotted out his life, he had not… hated…her the way she heard now, there in that one word.
The one eye that was still capable of producing tears burned as they streaked away, down the uneven skin on her cheek, surprising her. Did you ever believe he would not hate you? You threatened his child…ordered others to kill him to get to his child.
She watched his hand pull away from the lightswitch. Instead the shadow of his arm folded into the center of him. A thin pencil of light emitted from a device strapped to his wrist. He held it away from his body, trailing it along the floor, ever so slowly creeping to the direction where her voice had come from. The closer it got, the more intense the pain in her eye became. She raised her right hand, palm outward, to shield from the beam.
"Put down the gun," he ordered, as the light fell across the gun that shook with her palsy. Blinded, she couldn't see if he was armed. Would he come in here with a loaded weapon?
He hates you, she reminded herself.
As if answering her unspoken question like he was reading her mind, he added, "I'm unarmed. But there is a tactical team behind me. You can shoot through me…not through them," he warned.
"Death…is all I have left," she bemoaned. He saw it flash across the thin stream of light, the metallic flash as light hit metal and she turned the gun from pointing at him, to pointing at her own head.
In a desperate motion, his arm shot out and smacked hard against the lightswitch, filling the room with garishly bright fluorescent light. The gun went flying as an agonized screech bellowed out from her lungs…like the bleat of a smoke alarm. She recoiled, pulled herself into a tight ball, twisted away from him, into the corner.
He crouched down, scrambling to grab the gun. He had no intention of holding it, pointing it at her. He threw it away, sliding it behind him and into the corridor. Sarah was waiting, at the head of the tactical team that was waiting on his command.
Chuck crept on his hands and knees, to where he was inches away from her. Curled into a ball, he saw her legs first, knobby and bony, skeletally thin. Her hands and arms were much the same, twisted and arthritic looking. Her body looked elderly, 80 years old, though she was the same age as him. Her shoulder blades protruded sharply through the back of her blouse and her entire body shook as if she was having a seizure. Pity overtook him, and he scrambled to his feet, shutting off the light, then dropping back down onto his hands and knees.
In the thin beam of his wrist beacon, he saw her shaking calm. She lifted her head out from under her arms. Her hair was irregularly striped with stark white and dark brown…but only on half of her head. The left side of her skull was scarred, puckered as if it had been cut and then stitched back together haphazardly. No hair grew on the scarred side.
"Jill?" he whispered, with much more tenderness than she had expected.
Trembling, she turned her face upward, missing his face like a blind person would behave when they were uncertain. He gasped in what she knew was horror. One brown eye…one gaping hole at the end of a jagged, badly repaired gash that extended from the eyelid to her jaw. At the back of the empty socket, something metallic glinted. Her face was also covered with hideous scars. "Oh my god…" he gasped, appalled, sickened at the sight of her.
"Chuck…" she wailed, pushing him away with feeble strength.
He struggled to contain his blistering rage, tempering himself as best as he could. "No, damn it, face me!" he growled, grabbing her shoulders and pulling her around. He wanted to demand she look at him, but sickness exploded inside his stomach when he realized she most likely was blind, or at least so vision impared "looking" was something she was no longer capable of doing. He could feel the outline of her bones, feeling almost no flesh beneath his hands.
Her blindness made it easier. He couldn't begin to fathom what was visible on his face, the myriad of mixed emotions boiling just under the surface. He wanted her to feel his wrath, even if he couldn't quite keep his pity and sadness from creeping in. "You tried to kill Hannah and Jacques…you tried to kill me…kidnap my son…damn it, everyone I care about! Why? Why, damn it!" he screamed at her.
"His brain," she moaned. "I needed his brain."
The heat of his anger burned from his scalp to the tips of his toes. "How could you do something like this?" he hissed, pinching her too tightly, loosening his grip, somehow unable to mete out pain, even in retribution for his own.
"I needed his brain," she repeated, stressing the fact that she meant herself and herself alone. "To repair…the damage."
His hands fell away. He squeezed his eyes shut, taking deep breaths to calm himself. She felt the heat of his breath on her face, bellowing at her like fire from the nostrils of a furious dragon. He was angry and unforgiving, but he began to understand more than he had anticipated when he had asked the tactical team to let him in first.
They had used her as a test subject. He thought of all of the medical information Beckman had shown him. The Sentries had been trying to perfect an implantable Intersect, using a modified version of the cochlear implant developed by Molly's real parents in Hungary.
"One month," she moaned, as if in silent reply to a question he hadn't yet asked. She continued. "When you let me go…they caught me…one month later. Ted Roark was dead…the Ring had taken over. They went after all of us…all the Fulcrum agents unaccounted for." She choked, a dry cough grating in the silence. "I was…the only one who survived…after the surgery."
A sad hopelessness surged inside him, as he sat back on his feet, tilting away from her. He wanted to stay angry at her…for everything she had tried to take from him…for everything she had almost succeeded in taking away from him. But he couldn't. It was the most pathetic thing he had ever witnessed…Jill, broken, dying…a victim first, a perpetrator of violence second.
As if she sensed his faltering anger, she continued, not begging for mercy or forgiveness, only to tell the truth, for once, to this person…the only person who had ever truly, honestly loved her. "It did what it was supposed to do. I couldn't feel anything. No emotions, no pain. All of this…" She waved a gnarled hand, meant to encompass her entire life in the moment. "Happened when the implant started to fail. They all failed…eventually. I worked my way up…they paid me…but I only wanted…to get this out of my head…" She crumpled into a heap, pulling away from him, hating the weakness he could see.
He stared, looking all the way through her. "You said…you said…they changed you. I…kept looking for…proof that they hadn't. When you saved my life…I thought I had that…but…I don't know who you are. The person I knew…she wouldn't have been able to do this to me…to the people I cared about."
She wanted to say it wasn't her fault…that this machine clamped to her brain was to blame. But she knew that was wrong, just another lie. She had chosen Fulcrum over Chuck…then lied to him. Let him make love to her, talk to her about their future and their plans all the while she was lying about every minute of her day that she wasn't with him. He had given her ample opportunities to redeem herself…she had chosen Fulcrum again and again, rejecting him instead… taking how she thought he felt about her for granted. Until she had poisoned it completely, let it rot in his heart and fertilize his love for someone else. He had selflessly let her go…and she had selfishly gone back in search of her contacts, looking for more money than the two thousand dollars she had cleared from the pawned ring worth ten times that.
She had played straight into Kowambe's hands. Not right to blame them…she had made the bed she was now lying in…dying in. He hated her. She knew this. Chuck, incapable of hating his mother for leaving him, his father for deserting him…now in fully engulfing hatred…for her. It was her due, what she knew was coming like a final judgment. Somehow, what he thought was almost more important…and more damning in its ruthlessness.
His next words shocked her, shook her to her core. "All you had to do was…ask us for help. We would have helped you, damn it. Why?" he asked uselessly into the void of silence.
We, she thought. He meant him and Sarah. Sarah would have helped her? The caustic acid of bitterness burned from her heart all the way to the outside of her skin.
"Sarah? Help me?" she spat, almost snarling.
"Yes."
They both spun quickly, turning to see Sarah's shadowy outline in the doorway. She stepped forward, her face set like stone. Chuck noticed the ever so slight flare of her eyes, her perfect facade denting only slightly that he could tell. Jill's appearance shocked her as well. She recovered almost instantaneously.
"I don't hate you. I never hated you," Sarah confessed. "He loved you," Sarah hissed emphatically, acknowledging inside that no matter how much it hurt, no matter that Chuck was her first and only love, that Jill had been his. Not the same, but not insignificant. "And you gave him away…for nothing," she growled angrily, angry still that anyone dared hurt a heart as pure as Chuck's.
"He wanted you…and he couldn't have you. He settled for me. He made love to me…closing his eyes and pretending I was you," Jill choked, her voice crackling and faltering. It was overloading her brain, the amount of emotion she was trying to process…something she hadn't done in years.
It was a thousand what ifs, useless pondering over a past that couldn't be changed. Had she been for real, not a Fulcrum agent ordered back into his life so they could find Bryce Larkin, who knew? He wouldn't have been happy, true, because all he had ever wanted was Sarah, even then, as he recalled with shame. Both Jill and Hannah…poor substitutes that he hurt in his selfishness. But it would have changed the trajectory of his life…if she had just been Jill, and not Sandstorm, as his son had seen.
The entire right side of her body had gone numb. She slumped, unable to support her own weight. The final cascade failure. She had known this was imminent. All this emotion had hastened the end. It was fitting, she thought with bitterness. Her own emotions for him, coming back to kill her. It was as fitting an end as she could have thought of for herself.
Her heart, pounding, slowed, even as her fear surged. It calmed…rose again, slower yet again. She saw a flash of motion out of the corner of her eye…Sarah, rushing forward…Chuck's voice…yelling, shouting frantically…but it sounded like it was coming from far away. He was shaking her, but she couldn't feel it. "I never meant…to hurt you…" she murmured, with all of her remaining strength.
She died…with Chuck's hand pressed against the mangled scar on her cheek. His silent tears, his unspoken prayer of absolution, passed with her into oblivion.
Someone's looking for a lead
In his duty to a king or to a creed
Protecting what he feels is right
Fights against wrong with his life
There's no profit in deceit
Honest men know that revenge does not taste sweet
"Every Kinda People"
Robert Palmer
October 15, 2021
Carmichael Industries, Los Angeles, California
Chuck was deep in thought when Casey walked through the door of the conference room. Chuck had been waiting and lost track of how long.
"I thought General Beckman was coming with you?" Chuck asked him.
Casey grunted, curling up his lip on one side. "She thought I should do this solo. Easier coming from me, I guess," he grumbled.
"Really, Casey? Since when are you the sensitive one?" Chuck teased, giving a weak chuckle, somewhat forced, but accepted nonetheless.
"Keep it to yourself, Bartowski. This isn't about your lady feelings. It's a debriefing," Casey grumbled again.
Casey sighed and sat down at the table across from Chuck. He pulled out a file and slid it across the table top to Chuck. "It's all in there. At your clearance level. But I can summarize. It looks like, even as far back as that little incident at the Opera House, Jill and Edgar were a couple. She left that office building and went straight to him. The Ring went after former Fulcrum agents. He was sleeping with her, but he still practically sold her to Kowambe. She was telling the truth when she told you she was the only one who survived. She lived with that hardware inside her head for almost ten years. It was eroding her brain and connective tissue. The autopsy is in there…but…" Chuck just nodded. He had no desire to read that. "All of that, in the end, was meant to save herself. She had to make money, or they wouldn't let her continue, even as the Director. But it was about her."
"I think she thought we hated her…once we knew," he mumbled softly.
"If someone had come after Alex the way she came after your son…I would have killed her with my bare hands," Casey retorted crisply.
"I felt…sorry for her. Even after all of that. I don't think she wanted my pity…but…" Chuck muttered.
"That's why you're you, and I'm me. I always knew you were just…wired differently," Casey mumbled, more emotionally than Chuck was expecting. "You're one of a kind, Bartowski," he added, with nothing but sincerity. Then his face turned stoic and he rose to his feet.
Casey left, and Chuck was alone in the room with the file. He felt so tired the thought of reading it almost overwhelmed him. Did any of it matter? He knew the jist. The Sentries…and Jill…were done. GLF was done. Guy LaFleur. Had he realized that before? He shook his head, rubbed his eyes. Beckman had always thought he hadn't been Fulcrum, only blackmailed by them. Chuck wasn't so sure. Was Jill sleeping with him too?
She receded farther back into his mind, less prominent, the further away from the woman he had known she seemed to have become. She died a stranger…someone he had once loved in what felt like another life.
He opened the folder, flipping through the pages randomly. Too tired, he told himself. He would read it later, at least the parts he needed to know. There was the report, written by Casey. As he flipped through, he found some evidence in there as well, things that the CIA had confiscated from her office. Liam's information, surveillance photographs, medical information. There were even diagrams and schematics for the device they were trying to build using his son's brain as a template.
One page felt thicker, on the heaviest grade of paper, feeling almost like cardstock. It was just a memo, a communique between Jill and Edgar. It was dated November 25, 2011. When Morgan had taken the last version of the defective Intersect from Quinn in Vail. Odd. He pulled it out farther. It looked like it had a watermark. Curious, he held it up to the light.
Before his eyes focused, he was blinded by a white light. He woke up with his head on the table top, his forehead aching like he'd hit it against the wood. He slid the paper back into the folder. Once the folder was closed, he shook himself. He looked at his watch, surprised that he had been here for this long. Casey had said five minutes. He had been here for 20.
He rubbed his forehead, wondering why it was suddenly achy. He shrugged it off, rose from the table, and shut the light off before he exited.
I feel alive…and can we try
To leave it better than how it came?
Don't be afraid to change
Our love is still the same, still the same, still the same
And here we are
We've come so far
Let's leave it better than how it came.
Don't be afraid to change
Our love is still the same, still the same, still the same
"Still the Same"
Sugarland
October 20, 2021
San Pedro, California
"This is so nice," Sarah said, coming up behind him, wrapping her arms around his waist as he stood on the sand, watching his children running back and forth to the waterline and back again.
He looked over his shoulder, smiling his crooked smile at her.
The last month had been difficult for everyone. The past week had been particularly hard on Chuck, as he had come to grips that all of this ordeal had been orchestrated by Jill Roberts. He had defied his orders and let her go, thinking he was doing the kindest thing he could have done for her. Somewhere in the back of his mind he knew he had hoped she would go back to her parents. She had sealed her fate, reaching out to the man Vivian had killed, her old contact and former lover from Fulcrum. He mourned for the waste of her life more than anything else.
It was a beach day, meant as a break and something fun after such a long stretch of misery. This was their beach, but spending time like this, in their bathing suits, with a beach blanket and a cooler, armed with shovels and pails for sandcastle building…this was a rare treat. Even as he watched, Abby and Ally ran the obstacle course through the trio of castles they had constructed, all five of them together, while their older brother chased them. All three of them were laughing, screeching with hysterical laughter, all gums and barely any teeth. Pure joy, unadulterated, untouched by all of the recent drama. It warmed his heart like nothing else he knew, knowing he could still keep his son a healthy and happy child, though he was an Intersect too.
He leaned back against his wife, warmed where their skin touched, sticking together slightly from the thick layer of sunscreen they wore. "I love you, Honey," he told her, kissing the top of her head as she rested against his shoulder.
"Daddy!" he heard, seeing Abby charging at him full speed, screaming and giggling at the same time. She circled his legs, swinging on him, almost setting him off balance. Ally was right behind, screaming just the same. Before he could even speak, he saw the instigation–his son, a live crab in his hand, ready to deposit into one of his sister's hair.
Sarah released him, instead grabbed her ridiculously tall nine year old son, and swung him up off his feet. "Whoa," she guffawed. "What in the world…" Sarah started breathlessly. Chuck scooped up both girls, one in each arm, and lifted them off the ground, their legs still moving like they were running in place as he held them.
Sarah screeched suddenly, dropping her son back on his feet. Chuck watched her flail and spin. Stephen had placed the crab on her shoulder after she'd grabbed him. The crab sailed through the air after Sarah whacked it off and it crashed into Chuck's chest. The girls laughed so hard, Chuck could hardly hold them still.
"Who's flinging crustaceans?" Chuck laughed, giving a mock disciplinary face to his son.
"That was Mom!" Stephen piped up quickly, pointing at Sarah, who stood there with her hands on her hips.
Chuck, laughing all the while, made a silly face, then poised to run. Sarah took off running to the water, Chuck quick to chase. She ran straight into the water and he followed, slinking an arm around her waist and lifting her off her feet. They tipped, and fell, splashing in a tangle of arms and legs. When they broke the surface of the water and stood, Sarah had her arms around Chuck's neck and was kissing him.
"Ugh, yuck," Abby shouted from the water's edge, rolling her eyes and crossing her arms across her chest.
"We're in public, Mom!" Stephen shouted.
She never pulled her lips away, merely kicked one of her legs, thoroughly splashing all three of her children effectively at the same time.
"Is this what normal people do?" Chuck asked her as he pulled his lips away.
"It's what we do," she said to him, winking. She kissed his wide smile.