For notes and disclaimer, please see part one.

Dedicated to GoddessofBirth, with wishes for brighter skies ahead.

Here's a couple things you might need to know or maybe you just forgot: Casey decides to tell Ellie that he has a daughter, though Chuck tries to talk him out of it. Ellie doesn't take the news particularly well, and Mandy and Scott notice it. Mandy takes Ellie out for pie to figure out what's going on, and Ellie lets it slip that she's been dating Casey. Sarah talks to Casey about his reasoning for telling Ellie. Alex puts two and two together, and figures out that Ellie is the one Casey was telling her about.

Pie hadn't done the trick quite like Mandy had hoped. She shrugged at Scott as she and Ellie returned to Westside after their brief break.

Ellie numbly crossed to the station, picking up a chart. She struggled to focus on it, caught by the fact that Casey would've talked to his daughter about her. But, what kind of a daughter called her father by his first name?

She replayed the events back in her head several times, but each time she knew exactly what was missing. Alex never referred to Casey as her father. He was a patron, a regular, a good guy, a friend. But he was never, ever, not even once, her father.

The only thing she could think was that Alex didn't know. And what kind of a man would tell his girlfriend (was that was she was to him?) about his daughter but he wouldn't tell his actual daughter who he was.

She rubbed at her forehead, feeling a terrible headache coming on.

Chuck jumped to his feet when he heard the door open. "Sarah, I-" He stopped dead, however, when he saw Morgan standing there.

"Hey, buddy," Morgan said with a smile.

"H-hey," Chuck managed, hoping he didn't sound as deflated as he felt. Clearly, though, seeing the look on his best friend's face, he'd failed pretty miserably in that endeavor.

"What's up?" Morgan asked, closing the door behind him and easing his messenger bag from across his chest, leaning it against the wall.

"Just... nothing..."

Morgan paused before reaching down and snagging the ink pen from its pocket in his bag. He crossed towards the arm chair, easing down into it. He propped his feet up on the coffee table, easing his fist, closed around the pen, under his chin. He clicked the pen a time or two. "Would you like my semi-professional opinion?"

Chuck let out a slow sigh. "Do I get a choice in the matter?"

"Not really," Morgan admitted.

The lankier geek eased back onto the couch.

"Change is painful. But the only thing constant is change... Therefore, pain is constant."

"That's kinda deep for a Sunday afternoon," Chuck admitted.

Morgan allowed a brief grin to peek out from his bearded face. "I know, right?" He quickly straightened back up, however, when he cleared his throat. "The status quo is over. The balance? Broken. You feel that your life is in flux."

"That's... Actually, yeah, that's a pretty good summation."

"You know how much, how deeply, I care about Ellie."

"Of course."

"You know my feelings on the Captain, how they evolved from barely tolerating him to begrudging acceptance to eventual peace, right?"

"Sure..."

"John Casey is... Well, he's an enigma."

Chuck wasn't quite sure where Morgan was going with this.

"At first, I thought he was just an overgrown school bully, right? The kind of guy who used to suspend us upside down, shake us for lunch money, and drop us, unceremoniously, on the linoleum, amid strewn about homework papers and library books... but, then I realized he wasn't spiteful to be mean. Oh, no. He was spiteful because that's his job. He's like... America's pitbull."

Chuck actually cracked a half-grin at that.

"And then, I thought he was this, like, emotionally constipated panda. Quiet, brooding, nearly extinct, and unable to feel a real emotion if it came up and whacked him across the face."

Chuck's eyebrows slowly drifted up his forehead.

"But, he's not really that either. He has feelings. He just experiences things differently than we do."

"If you're going to defend Casey for his relationship, or whatever it is, with Ellie... don't you want to wait and hear the whole story first?"

"The whole story? I thought we were still in the prologue portion..."

Chuck shook his head. "Pretty sure he broke her heart."

Morgan's expression darkened as he got to his feet. "I'll kill him," he said, tossing the clicking pen on the table. "What'd he do?"

"He had a daughter twenty years ago and decided to tell Ellie about it."

"Whoa, wait... Our big guy is a papa bear?"

Chuck nodded.

"Are you sure that revelation broke Ellie's heart?"

"How could it not?"

"If there's one thing Ellie's always been about, Chuck, it's family."

Chuck slowly sat up.

Sarah pointed at the back door to the club. "What about the delivery entrance?"

"We put the van there, it won't look suspicious, but look at all the crap we're going to have to go through to take them out that way," he said. "The kitchen is practically a maze of galleys. One wrong turn, one loose riot handcuff, we've got to watch out for flying alcohol bottles or a scorching hot frying pan. Our best bet is still out front. Instead of the bar having to deal with questions about unruly patrons being hustled out the back, it'll look like we're just bouncing them out front, like any other normal drunken asshole causing a scene."

Sarah glanced up at him. There was one question she hadn't asked at the briefings with Chuck, one question she wanted to ask but was almost afraid to, even now, when it was just the two of them, looking at the schematics on his coffee table.

"What?"

"Are you sure you'll be okay?"

"With what?"

"The last time you were a bartender, you were shot."

He slowly looked up at her. "Wasn't the first time I'd taken a bullet. Wasn't even the first time I'd taken a bullet on this assignment." He'll always think of Christmas a little differently.

"Just, I don't think anyone would fault you for sitting in the surveillance-"

"Finish that sentence, Walker, and we are going to have issues," he said, his voice low and deadly, his lips curled in a menacing snarl.

Before Sarah could respond, there was a knock at Casey's door.

"John?"

"It's Ellie," Casey said.

Sarah realized it was like a light switch had been flipped, the difference between his demeanor as soon as he'd heard the doctor's voice. "I'll wrap this up," she said, already working on rolling the schematics. "Go answer your door."

Casey crossed towards the door, opening it. "Ellie..."

She looked up at him, quiet for a moment. "I..."

"Hi," he managed.

She swallowed hard. "Can I come in?"

Casey glanced back at his living room, fully expecting to see Sarah still at the couch, but she was gone, as was the mission prep documents. He opened his door wider.

She eased in, nervously fidgeting with her watch.

"Can I get you something to drink?"

"She works at the Pie Shack, over near the hospital."

Casey looked momentarily alarmed, but he nodded.

"But, she doesn't know who you are, who you really are. She kept calling you John."

"She doesn't know I'm her father."

"A girl-a woman-should know her father."

"If it were that simple, Ellie, but it isn't."

"It is that simple, though, John. All you have to do, all you need to do is open your mouth and tell her. Speaking as a daughter who didn't have a father who was around much... it doesn't matter when you show up, just that you do show up."

"Why do you think I go to the Pie Shack, why do you think I talk to her?"

"That doesn't count. Not until she knows who you are to her."

"It's not that easy," he insisted.

"You're making it hard. There's no need, no reason for that. Do you or do you not want your daughter in your life?"

"I do, but-"

"I just... I don't understand, John, do you honestly think it'll get easier? The longer it takes, do you honestly think it'll become somehow easier to tell her the truth then? After you've continued to establish this friendship, after you've lied to her forever..."

"I'm trying to protect her."

"Knowledge, John. That's the only way any of us are going to survive in this world. You're intentionally keeping her from knowing something. You're intentionally handicapping her ability to protect herself. I... Look back at me, at us, at where we started from. If you hadn't been there with me in San Francisco..." She shuddered to think about the alternative to what had occurred. "Do you really want to be responsible for that?"

Casey closed his eyes tightly. He didn't want to think about what the Ring might've done to Ellie had he not been there. Tate was a mercenary, a killer, a relentless son of a bitch. And it had been bad enough, when his former commanding officer had used Kathleen against him.

Ellie wanted to reach out to him, but she didn't. She found she couldn't. She was still mad at him, annoyed with his unwillingness to tell Alex the truth. Silently, she turned and slipped out of his apartment.

When he opened his eyes again, he saw her, crossing the courtyard and disappearing through her door.

"Isn't this intriguing," commented Lester as he lowered his binoculars.

"What?" Jeff asked.

"Blondie, Chuck's Blondie, just escaped out the second story window of Casey's apartment and is sneaking her way across to Chuck's place."

"So?"

"So, she must've been creeping up the stairs about the time the good doctor knocked on Casey's door. We have our very own drama going on. It's like one of those things on a soap opera, a love parallelogram." Lester paused. "Trapezoid?"

"I'm fond of the octagons myself," Jeff said with a lazy, lecherous grin that made his companion visibly shudder.

"Point being," Lester said, pushing through it, "I think I have an idea."

"Oh?" Jeff inquired.

"We're going to need to make a supply run."

"World Foods?" Jeff asked, starting his Loretta.

"Costco," Lester said with determination.

When Monday dawned, Casey hadn't slept well. Relationships weren't supposed to be this hard, were they? He was losing more sleep this way than he ever had as a Marine on deployment, as a spy on a mission, he was pretty sure. Plus, it was worse torture than he'd ever been through before. Mostly because he knew that his body could take it, whatever a terrorist decided to try to throw at him. He could easily withstand that kind of pain. But his heart was the one muscle that didn't have a wall around it, not anymore. Not since Ellie had disassembled it, destroyed it with kindness, with light.

He grumbled, rolling out of bed.

He had an early Buy More shift followed by the Club Azure meeting that night. At least there was a little downtime in between the two.

After his shower, he got dressed. After fixing a pot of coffee, he poured himself a mug, but he didn't touch it. He couldn't seem to stomach it. Crossing towards his window, he eased one of the blinds up slightly to look out at Ellie's across the courtyard.

He could tell the lights were on, but nothing else.

He knew she was still on early shifts for a while at the ER.

Dropping the slat, he eased back, dropping onto his recliner. He set his coffee on the table before leaning back and staring at the ceiling.

His life wasn't supposed to be this way. He wasn't sure when it was that it had gotten away from him, but, very clearly, he had deviated from the plan somewhere.

What would've happened, had he not accepted the black ops position? He would've served his time, gone home, and found some moderately distasteful job, something a lot like the Buy More, he guessed. He would've had Kathleen and he would've known Alex. But, would he have been happy? Would she have been strong enough to put up with him, a disgraced Marine, unable to cut it, unable to hack it as special forces?

There was no guaranteeing that choosing differently then would've led to happily ever after.

He wanted to do right by Ellie, by Alex. He just wasn't sure about telling Alex who he was, who he really was. The more he ran that simulation through his head, the more results he got much the same as telling Ellie.

He wondered if Ellie had considered that she and Alex might be different. While Ellie missed her father, while Ellie wanted her father around, Alex seemed to be okay with the fact that she didn't have one. She wasn't pining over something she missed.

He could almost hear Ellie's voice in his head, though: How can she miss what she's never known?

Coffee forgotten, he got to his feet.

The important task of the day was carrying out the mission that night. And that meant having no distractions. Even if he wanted to talk to Alex on his break between retail and espionage, even if he wanted to talk to Ellie that morning, it would be better for him, for his calm center, to try to get through the day, to handle everything else later.

He grabbed his backpack, slinging it over his shoulder. He had a grill or two to sell.

Sarah breezed into the Buy More, a cup of frozen yogurt in her hands. Her blue eyes quickly checked out the place. Casey was talking with an elderly gentleman. Morgan was chatting up a new green shirt, another tall, gangly kid. And the Nerd Herd desk was suspiciously empty.

She crossed wordlessly to Chuck's roommate. Technically, that made him her roommate, too. She smiled politely at Morgan.

"Excuse me," he told the newbie. "One second." He met Sarah near the Nerd Herd desk. "Hey, Sarah."

"You seen Chuck?"

"Yeah, he's on break," he said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder at the Employees Only door.

Sarah started to head that direction.

Morgan moved quickly in front of her. "I'm sorry, company policy. No one allowed through those doors except personnel."

"It'll only take a second."

"It only takes a second to have a full-fledged riot on my hands. If I let you back there, then when... okay, really if Lester or Jeff or Skip or someone were to get a girlfriend, then they would want the same privileges."

"That if sounds pretty speculative," said Sarah.

"Well, yes, mostly, but, as assistant manager, it's my job to keep the peace, to enforce the policies... even when I don't agree with them 'cause I'd totally let you back there."

Sarah fixed him with her deadly blue gaze.

"Maybe just this once it would be all right if I guided you back there. But, please don't touch anything!" Morgan made a note to talk to Chuck at some point about his girlfriend's interrogation and torture techniques.

The break room was a hotbed of excitement. Everyone was there, even Big Mike.

The rotund manager was peering over the charts on one of the tables while Lester and Jeff looked on hungrily.

"What on Earth is going on here?" Morgan asked Chuck.

Chuck glanced up from his comic book. "An illegal, back-room gambling thing."

"What are they betting on?" Sarah asked.

"Among other things? My ability to hold my lunch in."

Sarah looked at the treat in her hands. "This may not help, then."

"You brought that for me?" Chuck asked with a grin.

"New flavor."

Chuck looked at her, concerned.

"Fig and Ginger."

"Fig and Ginger," Morgan said. "Put that together and you'd get... finge... Oh, ew. Finger-flavored? Really, Sarah?"

Reluctantly, Chuck accepted the cup, swirling the spoon around in it for a moment. "Maybe that wouldn't be best, given the pool."

"How's it going, by the way?" Morgan asked, nodding towards the betting action.

"Well, I think the magic number seems to be three," Chuck said. "Three months for Casey and Ellie, three days for me..."

Skip, on his way back to the sales floor, clapped Morgan on the shoulder, shooting him an exaggerated wink.

"What on Earth was that about?" Morgan asked, mildly weirded out.

"Oh, the third topic in the pool. Ellie's next great love. "Smart money seems to be back on Devon. Skip is second. You, buddy, are pulling up the rear. You're even trailing the geniuses behind this little endeavor."

Morgan lamented. "Man!"

Sarah moved forward, scoping out the poster boards.

"Well, hello, Blondie," Lester said, just as cordially, as sweetly as he could. "Would you care to lay some money down? A ten-spot gets you one in each of our three categories."

Sarah eased a ten dollar bill from her pocket.

Jeff quickly snatched the money from her hands. "Milady," he said, sweeping his arm across the boards.

Sarah picked up the Sharpie, glancing at the options available. She didn't have to ponder long, before scribbling her name down in the boxes on the lower right-hand corners of the first two boards.

"You're... you're actually picking forever?" Lester asked, unable to keep from laughing.

She nodded, recapping the pen.

"Well, your entry fee also lets you pick one on the final board here," Lester said, drumming his fingers on the "Who's Next" display.

Sarah shook her head. "No need. Won't happen."

"You seem awfully... confident," Lester said, quirking an eyebrow at her.

She narrowed her eyes slightly, unsure as to what he was getting at. And he was definitely trying to get at something. "Why wouldn't I be?"

"Come now, let's not be coy," Lester said, an evil, Grinch-like smile unfolding on his lips. "I think we all know exactly why you moved into the Echo Park apartments."

Sarah narrowed her eyes. "What are you talking about?"

Lester scoffed. "Puh-leese. You've got your geek boy eating out of the palm of your hand and your fro-yo cup, but then you've also got the neighbor. Tall, dark and scary..."

She glanced between them, noting that Jeff was nodding emphatically.

"We saw you," Jeff whispered.

Sarah made a note to run back the security footage of the apartment exterior and step-up the patrols.

"You're the reason we started this up," Jeff explained. "Ask any guy, any guy, and they'll tell you. Blonde trumps brunette," he said with a shrug.

Sarah kicked herself for even prolonging the conversation. She just offered a pert nod before retreating back to Chuck.

"What was that all about?"

Sarah snatched the cup back from him. While she could tell he hadn't eaten any of it, she wasn't about to lose. "Nothing."

Chuck huffed as she left. While he knew he'd thrown that word around a lot to her, it was... strange... to be getting it back.

Ellie looked at the silk halter-top cocktail dress hanging on the back of her open locker door. It was a gorgeous, inky dark blue color with beading detail at the waist. She'd bought it a while ago and had never gotten an opportunity to wear it anywhere. It seemed like the best time, out with the girls for a night. She'd initially bought it thinking it'd be to some fancy dinner with Devon.

That wasn't ever going to happen again.

And she might've considered saving it for some meal with Casey, but she wasn't sure what she felt about all of his revelations of late.

She'd done her best to stop thinking about it. She'd wasted most of her Sunday lost in thought and it was threatening to take over her entire Monday. Wasn't the point of girl's night to ignore the rest of the world, to cut loose, to have fun?

Pondering about a boyfriend's previously unknown daughter didn't sound like her ideal night.

Tugging at her scrubs, she tossed them in the nearby hamper before slipping into the dress. It hugged all the right curves, showed off just enough skin to be intriguing. She ran her fingers through her dark tresses. She glanced at her reflection in the mirror. Maybe a little touch-up on her makeup, a spritz or two of perfume and, of course, her impossibly high heels and she'd be good to go.

Good to go. Wasn't that a Marine thing?

She couldn't go two seconds without thinking about him.

Closing her eyes, she thought about calling him. But, she wasn't sure if he had a mission, if he was at the Buy More...

The very last thing she wanted to do was unknowingly interrupt him in a mission.

Stay tuned...

Lines from the next installment:

"He's not supposed to be here for another half hour," Chuck radioed lazily. "I don't see why we have to be here so early. I mean... I get the idea of being prepared, but this is kind of excessive, isn't it?"

"Gives us a real chance to see what the potential dangers are," Sarah responded. She, too, was in the uniform of the club, except instead of the slacks, she had a short black skirt. She breezed about the expansive dining room with a small tray, taking orders and bringing drinks. "Like Casey's entourage."

Chuck sat up a little straighter.

Sarah smiled. "At your seven."

Chuck's brown eyes easily found the three women, dressed to the nines, huddling around a shared table, each pointing, giggling, and holding electric blue drinks.

If Casey ever saw a bottle of Hypnotiq again, it would be too soon.