I shouldn't need to say this, but I probably do. The references to queens and the like do not relate to anyone in the real world, and they're only applied in a derogatory manner to the character Bryce Larkin, NOT the actor who played Larkin.

Usual disclaimers, no rights to any characters portrayed and this is neither the real world nor a Disney Princess tale.

Meanwhile, Bryce Larkin was at the Farm, bemoaning his fate. About a week after he got Bartowski kicked out, a virus had wiped out his laptop and he lost all the evidence he had on Fleming, what they used to get rid of Bartowski, everything! but Bartowski had already disappeared so he couldn't confirm that that was what he was getting at when he said that he'd get his as he was leaving with his stuff. What Fleming had said about Bartowski not seeming to be too worried about being expelled also seemed to say that he had something up his sleeve, so Bryce got his parents to call in enough favours to get him out of there before the situation embarrassed the family (and more to the point, caught up to him). They used an excuse about him needing to go back East urgently for specialised medical treatment due to complications arising from blows to the head inflicted by Bartowski in an unprovoked attack as he was leaving to get projected results posted for his final exams and his degrees issued early on that basis.

As soon as he'd left, the CIA's techs scrubbed every reference to him except for his final results and degrees that were kept on file from Stanford's systems, so he pretty much disappeared. Stanford didn't discovered this until Bartowski came back with proof of the fabricated case against him, but when they went to his family to question him about it he'd disappeared to them as well. To all intents and purposes, Bryce Larkin had ceased to exist outside of some code name classified files at the CIA that very few people could access in May 2001.

When he left Stanford, he was supposed to go straight to Project Omaha to get started on the grand plan he had waiting for him though, not to go to the Farm for six to twelve months of torture training! Apparently the ones working on Project Omaha code hadn't managed to finish it yet, so the powers that be decided that the time would be best spent getting the Omaha candidate through all other aspects of his training. With that thought in mind, they sent him to the Farm and told the people running the Farm to push him through the system as a priority recruit.

Unfortunately for Larkin, they also told them that the CIA had a lot riding on him, so they were looking to see him beat the Ice Queen's scores…. because after all, as impressive as she was, she was just a woman. The way Larkin pissed people off with his piss-poor attitude and over-inflated opinion of himself as soon as he got there meant that the word being gleefully passed around about him quickly became that the people at the top expected him to be better than the Ice Queen or else! As a result, Larkin was in constant pain from pretty much the day he arrived, and for all the way he flinched at what he saw had been done to him in the mirror, his ego took more of a battering than anything else.

Sarah was disappointed, because word was that, just as that SAD guy had said when she was in training, Mowgli had been called in for the operations in Afghanistan just after Nine Eleven, but while she had originally been slated to be sent over there to participate, Graham had changed his mind and decided that her talents would be better used elsewhere. This pissed her off for two reasons, the first was that she'd really been looking forward to meeting this legend that she'd heard so much about, because the SAD and SOG guys who talked about him didn't just respect the hell out of him, they genuinely liked him. The idea that a legendary figure like this could be a 'quiet but nice young guy, nothing like Baloo' intrigued her, because she'd heard enough about this Baloo to know that he was the type of hard-bitten and accomplished warrior who was normally these guys' hero, and he was Mowgli's sidekick?

The other reason it pissed her off was that Graham had made it quite clear what he meant by 'talents', but no matter what he said she was not going to screw every suspected terrorist they sent her after. She got the information she was sent after of course, she charmed it out of them if they didn't get too pushy and ripped it out of them by other means if they did, and none of it was important enough to give in to Graham's demands in her opinion. There were a few gory additions to the stories about the Ice Queen from the ones who had to clean up after her though, and these helped dissuade some of those idiots who were determined to bag the Ice Queen to add a notch to their belts, so that was a plus in her book.

She did get to participate in some of the later missions in Afghanistan, but while they were major operations and achieved quite a bit, Mowgli wasn't there so she was pissed at Graham for taking away her chance to meet him. The way they took out some of the hardest sites was what came to be called the 'exploding captive' act, she allowed herself to be captured and dragged into the facility for the usual purposes, but as soon as she was inside she'd make as much mess as possible by taking out as many of them as she could, and the mayhem she caused distracted them enough for the rest of their forces to breach the facility. The beauty of that name was that the other side thought that they were using suicide bombers, so they could keep using it.

Graham did manage to shock her (and Jane) though, because he turned up at their apartment one night a few months after the post Nine Eleven activity had died down and presented her with a medal for her contributions to the big fight, the Distinguished Intelligence Cross. Jane's expression both when she saw the medal and when Graham told Sarah that she was only the second woman to ever get this medal prompted her to ask who the first woman was. Graham just looked at her when she asked that and she was sure that he was going to ignore the question, but eventually he said. "Frost, the one you took most of those records at the Farm off."

That prompted other questions but she knew she'd pushed her luck far enough as it was, so she just thanked him and he left.

When he was gone, they did what they could to circumvent the bugs that they knew would be right through the apartment and Jane explained the significance of that medal to her. Jane was in tears when she asked her to keep it safe for her, and she promised that she would.

Larkin was furious, he'd shown them on the missions he did after Nine Eleven that he was a real agent, he'd done a damned sight better than the so-called experienced agents he'd been working with, if he did say so himself, but they just sent him straight back here to continue his training when they were done. They even marked his record with some shit about failing to show proper respect to the fallen.

He knew he wasn't handling this as well as he could have, he was doing pretty good at the physical aspects of the training, doing better than most of the other recruits, but it was never good enough in the eyes of the trainers….

He shook his head at that, angry at himself because he had to admit that he'd really screwed up... he definitely should have done his homework before he tried to work the trainers here the same way he had the Professors at Stanford. If he had he would have known that offering sexual favours to men in this type of environment was as good as putting your head on the chopping block.

Even if they were inclined that way, none of them would ever allow that to get out in an environment like this, so that marked him as trouble, and they didn't like trouble. If he hadn't come in as someone's Golden Boy who was slated for something important he would have almost certainly had a fatal accident, but as it was they merely tried to work him to death, referring to him as 'the Queen' whenever other recruits couldn't hear and beating him when they thought they could get away with it.

That was something else that he couldn't understand, no matter how well he'd done, the trainers would just tell him that he hadn't matched the 'other Queen's scores yet so he had to go again. He wanted to tell them to fuck off, but he'd quickly learnt that aching from muscle strain hurt less than the beatings that talking back got him. But the thing was, if they reviled him for being a Queen, why did they all appear to revere this other 'Queen'?

One thing was obvious though, he wasn't going to get to Project Omaha by playing the game by their rules, so he revised his plan and started working the administration staff at the Farm. Even they had to be handled a lot more carefully than anyone at Stanford had though, because enough 'bright' recruits had tried to get around the system that way for them to be watching for it, so he had to move slowly to avoid giving the game away. Not that there was any great hurry, because the only news that ever came through from Project Omaha was that there were more delays.

Bryce had an incentive to get through this though, that offer he got from Roberts' Uncle Bernie. Fleming had told him that being the successful Omaha Candidate would take him straight to the top of the food chain as an agent, he'd live the high life, all those other bastards would bow down to him and he could have any of those beautiful agents he wanted…. from then on, the only cock getting sucked would be his!

While that had sounded pretty good though, what Fulcrum was offering was so much better. Their offer was ten million up front and anything he asked for if he brought them the result of Project Omaha once it had successfully been loaded into him. Let those other idiots worship God and country, his allegiance was to Bryce Larkin! He hadn't needed any time to think it over, he'd promised 'Uncle Bernie' to contact them as soon as he had it loaded.

He could see it now, the day he got to have everything he wanted and started extracting his retribution on everyone who'd gotten in his way or crossed him, and Bartowski and his parents were right up there on that list, but he had to get through this damned spy school for that to happen!

He had too much to lose to risk getting caught, so it took him months to carefully coax the admins into starting to modify his records for him, and even then he couldn't afford to take anything but small steps, he'd have to get to the point where he was close to passing a given course before they'd put in a passing grade for him into the system, and then some time after that he'd get one of the others to amend those results to show that he'd smashed it.

No matter what he tried, he couldn't find out who this other Queen that the damned trainers were measuring him against was, so he had to make guesses about how high to push his scores to show on paper at least that he'd beaten him, without making them so high that alarm bells would go off. The trainers just presumed that the ones who sent Larkin here were getting impatient and told the ones running the Farm up to push the Queen through faster when they saw his records, because he had actually passed most of their courses and was above average if he were being compared to the general recruits after all the extra motivation they'd given him, they were just using the mandate that he had to outperform the Ice Queen to have fun punishing the little bastard by forcing him to chase a standard that he'd never have any hope of reaching…. shit, they couldn't think of anyone who could outperform the Ice Queen, unless all those legends about Mowgli were true.

The non-physical courses were generally easier to get through for Bryce, some he got through OK, others he struggled in, but it was easier to convince people to give him passing grades for them, and then he'd just get the admins to alter the scores to what he believed he deserved.

All up, it took Larkin eighteen months to get through the farm showing anything like the type of scores that were expected of him. The people running the farm knew for a fact that the little tool hadn't earned the scores that had been recorded for him but, much like the trainers, they just presumed that someone above them had organised it so that their 'Golden Boy' looked good on paper. Truth be told, they all just wanted to be shot of him, so they didn't question it. Their parting words to him might have been framed as congratulatory, but Larkin was bright enough to get the message 'Don't let the door hit you in the arse on the way out Douche!'.

Larkin didn't care! He was finally back on track, heading to Project Omaha to make his way to his rightful place at the top of the heap.

While no-one would tell him where Project Omaha was based, from the uniforms and facilities there and what he'd seen from the plane on the way in, he was on a military base somewhere close to DC. Larkin wasn't worried, he'd find someone who could get word out to Fulcrum for him when the time came.

What he was worried about though was that these scientists wouldn't accept anything at face value and wanted to check everything (or rather, confirm the results as they were so fond of saying) time and time again. Luckily, they decided to first put him through months of training intended to maximise his image retention abilities because they still hadn't gotten the code of the Intersect, as the program was apparently called, working to their satisfaction.

As a result, he spent his days working on variations of Fleming's Subliminal Imagery module and other spy stuff, as well as exercising and sparring. Luckily he could hold his own as far as the athletics and sparring went and there was no scoring on the other lessons he was going through, so the only thing he had to worry about was that Subliminal Imagery crap. As far as that was concerned though, they were giving him the means to get on top of this. If Bartowski could ace that test without any preparation, he was sure to top his results after all of these exercises he was working through. He'd spent enough time stuck with that dweeb to know that he was nothing special, that was why he could never understand what Roberts or the professors saw in him, but at least Roberts came to her senses in the end and saw who was the best.

After about four months of this, the scientists decided that they were ready to start trying Intersect tests, so they had Larkin do the Subliminal Imagery test again. When he only scored in the mid-eighties, they wanted to know what the hell was going on, and made him do it over, and over, and over again. The best result he could get was in the high eighties, and that was with making good guesses on the ones he had no idea about.

This of course raised serious questions about the discrepancies in the results. The CIA went straight to Stanford to find out where Fleming was so that they could drag him in to explain, but the people at Stanford swore that they had no idea where he'd gone when he left in 2001, so the CIA started searching for him. The very few people at Stanford who did know what had happened to Fleming were keeping their lips zipped, because that Bartowski business had cost the university fourteen million and done quite a bit of damage to their reputation, even with everything they did to keep it quiet. If it ever got out how many students Fleming had used falsified records and the promise of assistance to pressure into providing sexual favours to him over the years, the university would be ruined! The number of underaged students that Fleming had preyed on made it even worse, because he seemed to have singled them out. Special Agent Harris had handed over copies of all of the recordings and altered records for all the students that Fleming had scammed into giving him sexual favours over a two and a half year period, and the university people were horrified. To be fair, some of them were actually horrified about what Fleming had been doing, but others were only thinking about what would happen to the university if the families of those and other students ever found about this.

That was why George Fleming had been buried in prison, with friends of the university ensuring that a 'clerical error' was made to alter his name enough to almost guarantee that he wouldn't be found. The plan had been to keep him in there long enough for any of the students he'd preyed on to be long gone and then release him, but some of the other prisoners had overheard the morally outraged Dean from Stanford shouting at him about forcing underage girls to have sex with him and word had quickly spread around the prison that he was a child molester. Men in prison appeared to hate child molesters even more than anyone else, possibly because they couldn't protect their own children from them while they're locked away, and that had made Fleming a target. He was shivved to death about three months after he got there and cremated under the name that he was incarcerated as, so George Fleming had disappeared and the CIA could get no answers from him.

When they couldn't find Fleming, and no matter how many SI tests he did, Larkin couldn't get higher than the mid to high eighties, they started looking into reasons for his score dropping. They debated whether the year and a half of intensive training at the Farm may have caused it, but that idea was dismissed when it was pointed out that he'd been out of that for over four months. In the end, it was the lies that he and his family had made up to get him out of Stanford before the truth could catch up with him that were accepted as the answer, because they'd gotten doctors' reports to say that multiple blows to the head with some sort of blunt object had caused head trauma and that was why he was being rushed back east for specialised treatment.

The neurologists that Project Omaha consulted opined that head trauma of that nature could indeed result in the lower results that they were seeing here, so they sat down to debate how to proceed. The Omaha scientists argued that if the candidate had the native capacity required, they should load the Intersect and do what they could to get it working. Graham and other senior CIA people on the other hand looked at the enormous investment that they now had in Larkin (especially if you included two years of Project Omaha's budget that had been spent pushing to get the Intersect working for him) and his results from the Farm, which were outstanding on paper at least, and overruled the scientists. The decision was made to send Larkin into the field and make use of his exceptional skills there, in hope of getting some value out of the investment they had in him.

So, in March 2003, Bryce Larkin became Director Graham's newest Golden Boy field agent.

What would have surprised the people who actually knew him was that Larkin was regarded as quite a successful field agent, because while not brilliant himself, he did have a genius for finding people who could get him what he needed, and make him look good. He also had a definite knack for finding scapegoats to cover for him whenever he screwed up. The fact that he could charm the pants off most men and women to get what he needed and had no qualms about doing whatever it took to get the job done and advance his own interests without a second thought didn't hurt him at all either.

What that added up to was that by most standards, Larkin actually was a reasonable agent, but on paper he was one of the best, which was in part how he ended up getting what he'd been after for four years, because he was sitting in Langston Graham's office in early 2005, being introduced to his new partner, Sarah Walker, the Ice Queen.

Of course, the main reason was that Graham had to cover his arse, because it was on record that it had cost the CIA umpteen millions to get his Golden Boy to this point so people were asking why he wasn't delivering anything like what would be needed to justify that kind of investment. On the other hand, Sarah Walker's achievements were enough to make a dozen ordinary agents look good, so the plan was to use her to bring out the ability that Larkin's record said he had, and put an end to those questions about why that much money had been wasted on him.

The first time Larkin made a move on Sarah, she'd made herself stop just short of doing permanent damage to him, but they still had to put a cast on his wrist to help the healing process. He backed off for a while after that, but no matter what she did to try and make it clear to him that she wasn't, and never would be, interested in him…. he refused to believe that she could resist his charms so he kept trying, even if he wasn't interested in her as anything but a conquest.

The next two years were like purgatory for Sarah, not quite hell but not too far off. For a start, she'd had to work harder on the missions to cover for the failings of her 'partner', whether it was due to being incapable of doing what was required of him, or screwing up because he refused to do what he was told or was trying to charm her or some other woman, so she always had to put in the extra effort to ensure that their mission succeeded. In the reports that were filed though, he was the one who was given credit for the success of all their missions! She'd torn into Graham more than once about that, and he'd seemed genuinely confused when he said he'd look into it, but she'd never gotten a real answer from him about what was going on.

Then, of course, there were Larkin's repeated attempts to get her into bed, no matter how many times that she told him that she wasn't interested, and the way he'd push their 'public displays of affection' on missions to the limit, and beyond. He'd almost gotten them thrown out of functions where they were running missions more than a few times when he pushed things way past appropriate boundaries, but no matter how much she hurt him for that as soon as they were somewhere she could get away with it, and she'd put him in hospital a few times, he was still certain that she was just putting on an act to pretend that she wasn't love with him (his words), the man was a lunatic.

He'd gone too far this time though, she was going to kill him! They were just about to slip away to go after their mission objective at the consulate when he'd gotten them thrown out of the consulate and blown the whole mission by putting his hand up her dress and trying to get into her pants in plain sight of everyone in the ball room! The rest of the team had to stop her from killing him for what he'd tried to do to her, let alone blowing the mission, when they were outside. She could see on their faces that they wanted to the same to the bastard, but they hustled her straight onto a plane back to the States to prevent an incident in country.

Graham normally wouldn't have taken the way she screamed at him in his office, but he was too stunned by what he saw on that video to react, as he couldn't believe that Larkin could have been stupid enough to do that either…. so he sent her off to Europe on another mission to calm down before she exploded all over Washington and put Larkin on suspension when he was dragged back in disgrace.

Bryce didn't know what went wrong, one minute he was getting into the groove and everything was going well, and the next they were being thrown out of the Consulate and that crazy bitch was trying to kill him. And their fucking support team disrespecting him that way was just icing on the cake! They'd get theirs, oh yeah they'd get theirs! By the time he got through with the reports he was putting together about them they'd be lucky if Graham just sent them to the North Pole!

He was plotting his revenge all the way back to the States, but the second the door of Graham's office closed behind him, Graham ripped into him. "What the fuck's wrong with you Larkin?"

OK, that was bad, because Graham didn't swear, ever. "What do you mean Sir?"

"Did you, or didn't you, blow the whole fucking mission by sticking your fucking hand up Walker's dress and trying to get into her pants in plain sight of everyone in the fucking Consulate Ballroom so that both of you were thrown out?"

"No sir!"

"You're sure about that?"

"Yes sir!"

"That's funny, because that's exactly what Walker says you did! And then there's this!"

Graham hit a key and abruptly shoved the screen to spin it around to display the security video from the Consulate. Walker was obviously telling him to back off when he put his hand up her dress, and in doing so he pushed it far enough out of the way for the camera to catch him trying to put his hand in her pants. Luckily, everyone around them had apparently been too aghast with his actions to work out that the knives she had strapped to her upper thigh were anything more than some kind of garter, and she only froze in shock at his actions for a moment before she pulled away from him and got herself covered up. The video went on to show both of them being led from the room immediately after that by guards and officials, her much more politely than he was as they were obviously apologising to her but explaining that she'd have to leave as well, even though she'd done nothing wrong.

When the video was done, Graham said. "I really want to shoot you for fucking up my operations this badly and making all of us look like fools Larkin, but I have to concede that no-one deserves that right more than Walker, so you'll be on suspension until she gets back from Europe. If you try to leave town, you'll be tracked down like a dog and dragged back, or dealt with if you resist! In fact I think I'll ask Beckman if she will loan me her pit bull to do it for me, I understand that Casey has issues with you and is just itching for a chance to shoot you! Get out of my sight! You'll be called to answer for your actions when Walker returns!"

As Bryce started to turn away, Graham barked "Wait! Give me your gun and credentials! You'd really have pull a rabbit out of your hat to have any chance of ever being an agent again after this, and frankly I don't see you being up to it!"

When Larkin handed them over sullenly, Graham barked. "Now get out!"

By the time he got to the front door, Graham had remembered something else and called down to the guards, so they took the keys of his SL 55 off him and he had to get a cab back to his apartment.

Larkin was two thirds of the way through the bottle of cognac when he remembered the card he had hidden away in a safe place. Fulcrum had pretty much cut him loose when he couldn't deliver the Omaha Project to them, but they did say to call them when he had something worthwhile to offer. Some of the admins he'd been screwing to make sure that their mission reports on file credited their achievements to him had told him where the Intersect Project, which was the next generation of the Omaha Project, was based now. He was sure that he'd be able to get enough out of them to get him into the facility, because those pathetic bitches would do anything for him.

Up until now he'd been the rising star of the CIA as Graham's Golden Boy so they had been a better bet, but even he could see that he was dead to them now…. Literally dead if Graham let Walker do what she wanted, so it was definitely time to move on. He was hoping that so long as he gave Fulcrum what they wanted they'd protect from the CIA…. and from Casey, he thought with a shudder, because Graham was right about that! He didn't know why, but that bastard definitely wanted to kill him too!

With that, he got up and dug that card out of its hiding place to call that Bernie character and make a deal. Bernie was very interested when Bryce told him that he could get them the Intersect, and promised that if he could deliver it this time, he'd get everything they'd promised before, so Bryce got to work.

It took him a few weeks, but he got all the information he needed out of those admins and found out who he needed to pick up to get access to this 'Intersect facility' by cruising the right bars. He also screwed a few of the CIA techs to get the type of hardware he'd need to get the Intersect programs and other files out of the facility and then went hunting. He did love a man in uniform, and he had so much fun with that boy that he almost regretted snapping his neck…. almost, but he had a big pay day ahead of him with this and he wasn't going to chance leaving anyone alive to raise an alarm or identify him later, even if it had been the best sex he'd had in years. Damned CIA, they'd forced him so far into the closet to maintain the expected lady killer image that he hadn't been able to have a really good time since he'd left Stanford…. oh well, that'd all be over soon, he'd have anything and anyone he wanted when this was done.

Bryce couldn't believe his luck at first, how easily this was going. Mike, the one who's card he'd taken, had had an all access pass and that got him past all the checks, or at least it did until one overzealous guard noted that he wasn't the person on the card. He'd managed to take the dweeb out, but not before he'd taken some damage himself, and the bastard had also set off the alarm, so the job suddenly got a lot more difficult. He managed to get into the room that Mike had told him had direct access to the servers though and jammed the electronic lock to keep them out until he'd gotten what he needed. Looking at the device he was downloading this shit onto, he had to laugh, as he'd had the techs set him up with a backup plan in case he couldn't get out of there with the physical device, this was to send the files to Bartowski, and then recover them from him later after he'd eluded pursuit.

The device would compress the files enough to be hidden in one of those stupid zork files that they'd sent to each other when they were pretending to be buddies. He doubted that Bartowski would be able to unlock it, because he'd barely remembered the correct response to the prompt himself, but if he did, well bye bye Bartowski, because that would activate the program and Bernie had said that none of the test subjects for this thing had survived so far. If Bartowski couldn't open it, he'd just go in and beat the shit out of him for the hell of it, then kill him and take the Intersect program to Fulcrum to start his new life.

Maybe he'd take Devon off Bartowski's sister too, just to rub salt in the wound… that had been a surprise, to see that Devon was with the geek's sister when he was setting things up to finish the job of ruining Bartowski because he'd found out that the geek wasn't suffering as much as he was supposed to…. he'd gotten him kicked out of Stanford just before he could get his degrees, made sure that everyone knew that he'd cheated his way through uni and that he took his girlfriend off him and showed her what a real man was, so the dweeb was supposed to be crying in the gutter, but he wasn't….

Yeah, Bartowski was still working for his loser uncle's stupid computer repair business, but he was also supposedly working with a handful of shelf companies with impressive names that his buddies had obviously set up to try and make themselves look more important and he seemed to have taken up with the chink after he took Roberts off of him, so he wasn't suffering anywhere near as much as he was supposed to be doing!

Seeing Devon with a woman had been a surprise, but he was probably just putting on an act to try and stop Mommy and Daddy pulling the plug on him... They must have sent him off to the west coast to stop him embarrassing the family like his own folks had, but Devon had his talents in bed so he could get some enjoyment out of him and hurt the geek's sister at the same time by taking him off her... yeah, that sounded like a plan.

Worst case scenario, if he didn't manage to get out and Bartowski couldn't open the file, the authorities would track it to him and charge him with treason, which was still a good solution in his book! But the plan was to get the intel off him, kill him, break the sister and then go off to lead the sort of life he was meant to.

As soon as the download finished, he stuffed the device into his pocket and started the timer on the bomb that Fulcrum gave him to destroy everything left there, then he started running for the door. The concussion wave from the bomb hit the door a second before he did and blew it out. He was a little dazed from the explosion, but recovered quickly enough to pick himself up and get out of there, taking out any guards he saw along the way.

He'd almost made it, he was in the car park for fuck's sake, when a shot hammered into his chest. He knew he was dying as he was laying there, so he struggled to get the device out of his pocket and send the transmission, hoping that Bartowski would manage to open the file so he could take him with him. He'd just hit 'Send' and saw it processing when a face appeared over him that made him wonder whether he was already in hell, because it was John Fucking Casey! When he heard the device go 'phzzzztttttt' as it completed the transmission and fried itself though, he laughed weakly up at him "It's too late Casey, it's gone!" Then he faded.

Casey looked down at Larkin in regret, because killing the little bastard this way hadn't been anywhere near as satisfying as what he'd been looking forward to. He picked up the device that Larkin had been holding, it looked fried, but hopefully the techs could recover enough from it to tell them where the file had been sent to. He was sure that Chuck could recover something from it, but it would have to go through the normal channels first.

Chuck went up to his room after dinner to get ready to go out, as they'd all come home tonight for his birthday dinner and somehow he'd allowed himself to be talked into going clubbing with Ellie, Anna, Lou and Skip afterwards, though he couldn't quite work out why doing something he hated would 'have' to be part of his birthday celebrations. He decided to check for emails before he hit the shower, and one of them caught his eye, Bryce Fucking Larkin? What the hell was Larkin doing sending Chuck an email?

He checked it for malware of course, especially the attachment, but as nothing came up, he opened the zork file to see what it said, because after all, everyone deserved a chance for redemption didn't they? Even Larkin? He read the prompt and automatically put in the proscribed response, and then images started flashing up on the screen.

Ellie, Anna, Lou and Skip were waiting with the girls downstairs for ages after they got ready, but when Ellie started to get up angrily to go and get him, Lottie stopped her, saying that she'd get him before she hurried off to Chuck's room. She tapped on the door, and as she opened it she was saying "Papa, Auntie Ellie's getting angry, you said that you'd go out with them so you have t…."

When she saw him on the floor, she cried "Papa!" and ran over anxiously to check his vitals, and allowed herself a moment to collapse in relief that they were strong before she jumped up and ran to the door to scream "AUNTIE ELLIE, GET UP HERE! SOMETHING's HAPPENED TO PAPA!"

It seemed that Auntie Ellie and Grandma were there before she finished, she always forgot how fast they could move when they had to, and Ellie checked him over thoroughly. She couldn't find anything wrong with him, but he wasn't coming to so they decided to take him to El Castillo and do a full battery of tests on him in the medical centre there. It didn't take long for Mary and Ellie to get Chuck downstairs and into the car between them, and fifteen minutes later they had him in the medical centre, hooking him up to what appeared to be every medical monitor known to man.

They still couldn't find anything wrong with him, and the only problem he seemed to have when he did come too, hours later, was a splitting headache, which wasn't helped by the way they were all screeching at him about how fucking stupid it had been to open an email from Bryce Fucking Larkin when he told them what he'd done.

They eventually shut up about that and he went upstairs to go to bed, Anna going with him to keep an eye on him through the night. When Mary and Emma went home, they were at all surprised when Ellie, Lou and the girls said that they were staying there because they wanted to be nearby, just in case. Mary and Emma would have stayed too if they could have done any more than they could, but Ellie was the one he needed for any medical issues and Anna, Lou and the girls would be watching him like hawks so they went home to handle things there and let Di and the others know what had happened.