Usual disclaimers, no rights to any characters portrayed, and this is neither the real world nor a Disney Princess tale.
NB: One of the characters gets the same parents he had in one of my previous stories, because I happen to think that it's a good combination, but it's evil Graham this time. And both Bry and Anna get double duties at the wedding.
Chuck had them all worried when when he suddenly froze, staring at Rick, and then jumped up and rushed out of the room without a word when they were in the middle of talking about the wedding plans and winding up Ellie about why didn't she have her own wedding if she was so excited about them.
What Chuck wasn't about to tell them until he'd confirmed all the details was that he'd had a flash on Rick, or more to the point Rick's father, and he rushed off to try and get Auntie Phoebes to refute what he'd just seen about who Leroy Jackson actually was. That discussion didn't relieve his worry, because she described Leroy as a tall, imposing man who was reportedly one of the CIA's best black ops specialists, but he'd disappeared by the time she found out she was pregnant. When he pressed for more details she said that he was one hell of a man and brilliant, and there was something underneath, but in general he was pretty much a bastard. She admitted that that had been part of what had attracted her to him actually because he was dangerous and exciting and one of the rare few who were man enough to be able to handle her. She shook her head with a laugh. "Like most girls I was into bad boys back then, and Leroy was sure that!"
She could see that this wasn't idle interest, so she asked him straight out. "Charlie Honey, what's all this about?" (Cleopatra Jones had been one of the few agents who could keep up with the CIA's famous Agent Frost long enough for them to become friends, so she'd known Chuck all his life, even if she hadn't had a chance to see him much when he was little.)
He was starting to worry her now, because he was struggling to tell her, but eventually he forced it out. "I…. I flashed on Rick's birth certificate while we were winding up Ellie about getting married, and when I saw his father's name I flashed on that, too and…. You see Leroy Jackson was the name someone we're dealing with was using back then and…. Oh fuck it!... Do you think this could be an older version of Leroy Auntie Phoebes?"
Phoebe looked carefully at the image he brought up and started to nod, but when she took in the setting he was in she suddenly realised who this must be and looked horrified. "No Charlie... please don't tell me that Ricky's father is actually Langston Fucking Graham!"
Chuck suddenly had the woman who had had almost as many terrified of her as Frost crying in his arms. He pointed out that they didn't know for sure that Graham was Leroy, and was in the middle of promising her that he'd dig up what they needed to prove it one way or another when Rick, Ellie and Sarah arrived, because Sarah and Ellie had been worried about what was up with Chuck, and Rick came along to pick up the pieces if it was something bad. The tide turned for Rick when he saw his mother crying in Chuck's arms and he rushed to find out what was wrong, but Sarah and Ellie had seen the image up on the screen and, being the brilliant women that they were, worked out what this was all about. Ellie looked at Chuck, horrified, and he nodded grimly. He would do the investigation as he'd promised Auntie Phoebes, but there was enough information in the Intersect to confirm the fact that the man that Ellie was destined to marry was Langston Graham's son.
He was hoping to hold off on telling Rick until he had proved it beyond a shadow of a doubt, but Auntie Phoebes knew Charlie, and knew that he wouldn't have come to her unless he was already sure, so she pointed to the screen. "Ricky…. That's your Daddy."
Rick froze when he looked at the screen, because he'd been working for Auntie Di long enough to know who that bastard was. He was almost pleading when he turned to Chuck. "You can't be sure Chuck! You're only guessing at this point, right?"
"As I said to Auntie Phoebes Rick, I'll do an investigation and…."
Phoebe cut him off at that point. "Don't give him false hope Charlie, you knew when you came to me, you just needed me to say it… You're certain that Ricky's father is Graham, aren't you?"
He nodded regretfully. "Yes Auntie Phoebes, I was desperately hoping that you'd tell me something to refute what I was seeing, but yes, I'm certain that Langston Graham is Rick's biological father."
Phoebe gave him a grateful smile for that last distinction, because while Graham may have fathered Ricky, he never had been, and never would be, a father to her son. They talked Rick through the shock of this news, and then Ellie announced that this didn't change anything for her, she still wanted to marry him, the sooner the better! That led to Sarah and Ellie deciding on the spot to have a double wedding, but Phoebe threw a bucket of cold water over the excited discussion by pointing out that Mary had to know who her son-in-law to be's biological father was, so they called Mary and Emma to come to the room, and opened a secure link to Diane.
They were all horrified by the news, but equally quick to jump on the distinction that Graham was nothing more than Rick's biological father. When Diane tried to lighten the mood by suggesting that Phoebe could have been a little more choosy about the men she slept with, that sparked a round of 'you can talk!s' that had all four of the older women blushing about some of the choices they'd made back then, though Mary apparently had less to be embarrassed about than the others.
When everyone was feeling better, they called in the rest of the wedding planners to tell them that it would be a double wedding now, and that Anna was going to have the distinction of serving as the best man for one wedding, and the maid of honour for the other. Carina was now becoming Sarah's maid of honour and Lou was changing sides to become one of the brides' maids, while Vinnie Smith was being added as Rick's best man and Javier Cruz as another grooms' man. When they contacted Vera to ask whether she would handle both weddings, she tore strips off of them for even suggesting that anyone else would arrange any part of this wedding, but she conceded with a laugh that the situation with Anna was definitely a first.
Now that Rick was to be a groom though, there were comments from those who knew that it would be a little embarrassing for a Navy Lieutenant to be to so prominent with the Admiral and Commanders up there, especially with Anna being a Captain and Rick's bride an Admiral. They suggested that Rick be married as an Army Lieutenant Colonel but Vera was upset that the Army Dress Uniform was going to ruin the image she envisaged (she was picturing an all white wedding with ivory ribbons and gardenias in the snow with the lovely white stone plantation house as the backdrop and Ellie and Rick were just as taken by that winter wonderland imagery as Sarah and Chuck were). That gave Auntie Di an idea and she called the Secretary of Defense, so the next day Vera was flying to DC to try and talk to the Secretary and Chief of Staff of the Army into allowing the discontinued Army full white Dress Whites to be worn in the Wedding Party.
The Secretary of Defense was so entertained by watching these so-called hard men buckle to Vera that he had a quiet word with Diane to confirm that Colonel Casey's primary rank was in fact in the Marines, and Lieutenant Colonel Johnson's (Skip's real name was Michael Johnson) was in the Air Force, and then he gleefully organised meetings with the Secretary and Chief of Staff of the Air Force, and the Secretary of the Navy with both the Commandant of the Marine Corps and Chief of the Navy for Vera. By the end of the day, they had formal dispensations from the Army, Marines and Air Force for the wedding party and others in notable roles to wear their services' discontinued full white dress uniforms, and a dispensation for all attending to wear miniature ribbons rather than medals and miniature badges on all uniforms from all four services for the wedding. Of course, this meant that any of the ones they talked to who hadn't already been on the guest list were now.
There was more than a little grumbling going on about discontinued uniforms being worn at the wedding and the…. request… from the ranking groom that anyone who was required to attend in uniform wear the most conservative version of their uniform allowed, and that all join the wedding party in only wearing miniature ribbons and badges as per the dispensations issued for their wedding. The final note on that request had most men who complained sleeping on the couch though. 'It would greatly appreciated if all would honour this request so that both brides can remember this most important day with joy, and not disappointment because their wedding day was turned into a three ring circus.'
While there was grumbling elsewhere, these dispensations made those organising the weddings quite happy. Vera's people had one more bridal gown, one more brides' maid's dress and two more uniforms to make, and there were four styles of uniform to be made now rather than one, but she was excited about how the wedding had expanded into a double wedding with eighteen in the combined wedding party, and having one woman serving as both a best man and maid of honour…. she had to meet this Captain Wang! (Like Chuck and Ellie, Anna had been active in both combat and intelligence roles for fifteen years and so was a grade above Commander Barnes, but Jeff didn't mind.)
Vera was a little perturbed when she discovered that the original maid of honour and one of the brides' maids were the original groom's sisters, two more of the brides' maids were his daughters, and another was his daughters' mother! The original bride had seemed to be a strong woman, but she couldn't imagine this being anything other than her being forced to take them. Sarah saw this going through her head and pulled her aside for a quiet chat. "It was my idea Vera, not Chuck's! You see I grew up with him and Ellie until I was seven, and even though Chuck and I had decided that we were going to be married one day by the time we were five, Ellie was always like a big sister to me. By the time I came back to them earlier this year, Chuck had another sister, and two lovely daughters, and I had a stepsister as well, so I wanted all of them to be up there with us. Carina and Zondra are my friends from the last five or six years, and Anna, who is Chuck's best man and Ellie's maid of honour, and Lou, who's Lottie and Charlie's mother, are a lesbian couple…."
She paused to let that sink in. "You see Anna has been Chuck and Ellie's best friend for over sixteen years, and the only reason Lou wasn't there for the same period was that she experimented with Chuck when her hormones started going wild when she was going into her teens, but she found out that while as wonderful as Chuck was and no matter how much she cared about him, he didn't do anything for her that way, but Anna did! However Lou had gotten pregnant at thirteen, so her father carted her straight off to Israel! My Aunt tracked her down and brought her and the girls back six years ago after Anna let slip about them both experimenting with Chuck and finding out that he didn't do it for them when they were thirteen, because she guessed that that may have had something to do with Lou's disappearance, so that's how we're all together!"
Vera was shaking her head, as this had to be the most bizarre arrangement she'd ever heard of, but they were obviously all very close and happy, so she wasn't going to argue with it. The brides agreed to let her go with another idea she had, but couldn't promise to wear them. These were uniform styled evening jackets to go with the wedding and brides' maids' dresses that displayed their rank and miniature medal ribbons and badges. While the rules forbid mixing uniforms and civilian dress, these weren't actually uniforms…. but it was a grey area, and the SEALs would be insulted if Ellie wore her's without her SEAL trident, but that was something they'd tried to keep quiet.
Sarah did catch how Chuck had tried to quickly finish that discussion by telling Vera that they'd send all the rank insignia and medal ribbons over together. She knew about Ellie's and Lou's ranks and medals, so she was pretty sure that that had to have more to do with her, which of course meant that he and her Aunt had some explaining to do when they got back to LA.
When they told her, she found that she quite liked the idea of being Shanti to Chuck's Mowgli (and realised how it helped shore up Auntie Di's story about her being part of the group from the start), but brought up the fact that Rick would need a name to identify him with the group too. Chuck and Ellie agreed, looking at each other as they thought on that, and then Chuck suddenly said. "Won-Tolla" Ellie shook her head at him, but kissed him for it too, and they had to explain for those who weren't as familiar with the Jungle Book stories that Won-Tolla had been on the edge of the pack but earned his place in the pack. Sarah nodded at that, because it did fit Rick quite well.
While Vera had the couples there, she managed to wrangle agreement for creative control of the wedding venue from them as well, because she wanted this to be perfect! It didn't take much effort to get that agreement from them though, because both couples loved her vision of what their wedding should be.
Of course now they had to worry about whether Stephen could stay on an even keel for long enough to give Ellie away and get through the wedding without causing a scene.
In the middle of this, Langston Graham was forced to come to the Human Intersect team again in an attempt to recover someone that the CIA had lost and couldn't locate. He would have preferred to just have this embarrassment eliminated before he could talk to anyone, but he was too smart to try and demand that the Intersect team to do that. That was why he painted Laszlo as a high value asset who was also a homicidal lunatic, hoping to instil enough doubt in them to ensure that when Laszlo did the sort of paranoid and violent things he was bound to do, they would misconstrue his actions and end up shooting him when they tried to recover him.
Graham's problem was that he still had no idea of just how much was stored in the Intersect database, and even less about just what Chuck, especially, could get out of the CIA's systems and archives. That meant that as soon as he identified Laszlo Mahnovski as a high value asset who they wanted recovered, but who had killed his handlers quite gruesomely (supplying copious pictures to emphasise this) in a psychotic incident when he escaped from the facility where he was, the alarm bells started going off so they immediately started digging through the CIA's systems to find out everything there was to know about Laszlo Mahnovski.
He also didn't know any of them very well if he thought that he could make the agents in this team nervous enough to shoot Laszlo rather than trying to find a way to capture him.
The others couldn't work out why Chuck got quieter and quieter the deeper he delved into Laszlo's story, until he put it all up on screen. They understood then, because if not for Diane and Bry spiriting him and Ellie away as soon as his father disappeared, this nightmare could have been his life. That chilled everyone's blood, Casey just looked up at the screen and said "Chuck me!" in a despairing, horrified tone.
Laszlo was a genius, at Chuck's level if not above in scientific areas, though he didn't appear to have Chuck's range or other attributes he got from his mother. When he was eleven, a CIA recruiter who'd been trolling for late high school and college age prospects had discovered him in an arcade parlour and, having absolutely no morals or compunctions about taking a child's life away, had convinced his blue collar parents that the CIA could give him the all opportunities he needed to make the most of himself, using the fact that they could never do that to talk them into signing control of him over to the CIA's representatives.
Laszlo had earned his degrees at fourteen and his Ph D at seventeen all right, but that was the last he'd seen of the outside world. The CIA had been using him like they had Stefan to create whatever technology they wanted, but they'd kept him locked away in an underground bunker without any access to the outside world to try and ensure that they didn't lose him they way they had Stefan. That was one of the few things that Graham had told the truth about, Laszlo was a lunatic. Because of the fact that he never saw anyone but his handlers and CIA agents or left the facility where he was, according to the reports they found, the life he'd been forced to live had driven him more than a little crazy!
Then there was the fact that they'd been using drugs and sex to try and keep him under control in there for years, and it was a toss up as to which of those things would have screwed with his head more, being so drugged up that he didn't know what was a dream and what was reality for days or weeks, and then the withdrawal from the drugs when they decided that they had more work for him, or having women coming in, to convince him that they loved him and screw his brains out for weeks or months at a time, then walk out without a backwards glance when they were told that the assignment was over. The more they read, the more they wondered how Laszlo wasn't worse than he was.
Reading this made one thing clear to everybody, they had to get to this guy before the CIA and rescue him! They knew that the CIA would have had a head start, because Graham wouldn't have engaged them until he'd just about given up on his own people finding him, but they did have one big advantage, this being that whereas the CIA's agents thought like... well... agents, Chuck, Anna and their crowd, but especially Chuck thought like a nerd, like Laszlo. Going through Laszlo's history, it took less than an hour for Chuck to determine where he'd be, the arcades where the Antichrist had found him and taken away his innocence, his life, when he was eleven.
Time was of the essence here because they were racing to get to him before the CIA, so they were throwing options out all over the place. Casey was too old and looked like a cop, Sarah, Carina and Zondra, hell, most of the girls, were too tall and beautiful for nerdland, and he'd pick most of them as agents after being screwed into submission by so many agents. Lou, Jeff and Skip were out because they didn't have the background to look after themselves in a dangerous situation (IE: shooting it out with the CIA) and Jeff was too old anyway. It didn't take them long to accept that Chuck and Anna were the only ones who could pull this off, as Anna had been part of that world, could change her appearance with makeup and at not much over five foot tall, she didn't stand out like the other girls, but she had at least as much training as most of them, as much experience at this as half of them too. They took along 'tranq' darts that contained a drug left the target conscious, but without control of their motor functions, so they couldn't call out or struggle. Sarah, Casey, Carina and Zondra would be waiting in a van just off-site to extract them or deal with the CIA if they turned up.
All of this was agreed in the fifteen minutes it took for Chuck and Anna to change their appearance enough to blend into the crowd in the arcades while the others grabbed the darts etc and jump in the van, then they were on their way to the Santa Monica Pier. Anna found Laszlo in under fifteen minutes as he was involved in a Guitar Shredder battle with some bearded loser who was way too old to be acting like a brat, throwing a tantrum the way that he was. Even with Laszlo's rampant paranoia, Anna had learnt enough from Uncle Roan to get him off into a dark corner to make out, and they were just getting into this when Chuck stuck the dart into him, grabbing him to prevent him collapsing. Anna bitched at him about not getting there earlier, but she knew that he'd moved in as soon as he could.
Chuck quickly got Laszlo's duster off of him and shrugged into it, making other changes as well so that neither of them looked like they had earlier. He gave Anna a hug and sent her out one way while he 'walked' Laszlo out another way (making it look easy even though he was carrying him), saying "You promised that you weren't going to take that shit any more! This is the last time, you're on your own after this!" as he went. Those who heard put it down to a habitual drug user who always had to be bailed out and looked after by his buddy, and half of them were saying to themselves. 'Yeah, you say that now, but next time he calls you'll come to bail his arse out again, because that's what friends do.'
Anna was out front watching, so as soon as Chuck came out with Laszlo, she called the van in. It was there in a flash and Casey hauled Laszlo in, with Chuck and Anna hopping in and the van taking off within twenty seconds. Sarah swore as she quietly drove off though, because she'd spotted at least two CIA agents heading for the pier, so they'd only just gotten him out in time. A few more minutes and the CIA would have had him, or they would have been shooting it out with them on the crowded pier.
Chuck administered the antidote to the drug he'd given him, but also gave him a sedative to put him out. Back at the Castle, they put him in the apartment in the dungeon, watching for when he started to wake up. When he did, Chuck went in to talk to him. "Hi, I'm Chuck, how are you feeling?"
"You drugged me!"
"Yeah, I did, and just in time, too." He brought up the video that the van's cameras had taken as they drive away, stopping it when it showed the agents that Sarah had spotted. "I presume you know who they are?" Laszlo spat out. "CIA!"
Chuck nodded "Yeah, that was as we were leaving, did you hear our driver saying 'Fuck!'?" Laszlo nodded. "That was why."
"Are you telling me that you aren't CIA?"
"No, well my wife is still technically CIA but we don't work for them, and we don't like them, especially Director Graham."
"Don't give me that! That bitch who seduced me to get me into that corner for you was definitely an agent!"
Chuck's pleasant expression slipped. "Don't call her a bitch! She's my best friend! And no, even though Anna's had agent training she's not an agent. In fact I'd do my best to avoid her if I were you as she doesn't swing that way so what she had to do with you was quite unpleasant for her, and she could very easily kick your arse if you said or did the slightest thing to upset her."
Laszlo was totally confused by now, all the more so because he actually believed what this guy was telling him. "So what happens now?"
"We need to get you away from here as quick as we can, because as you saw the CIA are looking for you. We've got a plane ready to take you back east where our people can get you out of sight for a while." He hesitated here, as what he said next could go really badly.
"Laszlo, we want to put you in therapy with our psychiatrist, you were put through a lot of shit over the last sixteen years and…."
Laszlo cut him off. "Chuck, it's alright, I'm not so fucked up that I don't know that I'm fucked up..."
It was his turn to hesitate then. "But how do I know that this is therapy and not the agency brainwashing me into going back to work though?"
Chuck shook his head. "Shit! You and my Dad are going to get on like a house on fire!…. Look, there's nothing I can do or say to prove this to you Laszlo, but we have someone else over there working with Doctor Dreyfus to deal with his own problems, my father. You should be able to tell who my father is when you see him. Hopefully that will help give you a little more confidence."
"OK, presuming that this is what you say it is and it works, what happens after that? Can you help me stay away from the CIA?"
"I think so, the first thing we need to do is change your name, as both Laszlo and Mahnovski are too distinctive, too easy to search on. We came up with Leslie Mahoney as the closest name phonetically that isn't likely to be linked to your original name." Laszlo tried 'Leslie Mahoney' on the tongue a few times and nodded, he thought he could get used to that.
Chuck nodded. "Good! We'll use that from now on then, to help you get used to it. As for after…. we weren't planning on going into this until you're ready, but my father was actually your predecessor at the CIA, creating most of the technology that the CIA, or Graham at least, wanted. He did something stupid and desperate over seventeen years ago and he's been having therapy to try to deal with it for the last fourteen years…. He's off with the pixies all too often but when he's there he still has the brain that made him what he was and he's been coming up with the equipment that the group that I work with needs for the last fourteen years or so when he's able to work. What we're planning to do is offer you a choice when you and Doctor Dreyfus think that you're ready. You can either go into the witness protection scheme and hope that the CIA or someone else doesn't find you and put you to work again, or you can work with my Dad. I can promise you that it would be different from what you had to do for the CIA because you would always have the right to refuse to work on anything you didn't agree with. I can guarantee that because I'm actually the one in charge of that group, I work with Dad sometimes and manage everything."
Laszlo no, Leslie, nodded thoughtfully. "Okay, I guess I'll have time to talk to your father about this while we're there, but working with you on interesting projects and being able to say no to things I don't want to work on certainly sounds better than dying of boredom somewhere out in Bumfuck Idaho."
Chuck grinned at that and nodded. He dropped some clothes on the chair and pointed out the bathroom, saying. "Why don't you have a shower and freshen up before we head for the airport."
Once again, he hesitated before continuing. "I know that you could probably get into our systems if you wanted to with what's in here, but if you do, don't fuck with them! We rely on those systems to protect our family and interfering with that protection will lose you any goodwill you have with us. Also, don't try to screw with the agent who's flying back east with you, she's a friend as well, my wife's best friend actually, and you'll find that we're very protective of the people we love. You don't want to find out how far we'll go to protect the people we love, trust me on that!"
Leslie just nodded without saying a word, as this was the second time he'd seen that look in Chuck's eye and he had no doubt that he meant every word he said and that he was quite capable of following through on the implied threat.
Half an hour later, there were teary goodbyes as Carina headed off to the airport with Leslie, they knew that she'd be at the wedding in a month or two and the girls would be seeing her before then at the dress fittings, but it hadn't been that long since she came back into Sarah's life and she might be back east with Dr Dreyfus for a while if she needed more help to get her head straightened out after what she'd been made to do for the DEA for so long.
Jeff was going with them, because they'd decided that the Twenty Eight would be a better way to fly under the radar than the Thirty Seven (figuratively speaking, but the Twenty Eight was quite capable of literally doing that too with a good enough pilot). Carina would be staying in DC with Leslie, Dr Dreyfus and Chuck's father up until the wedding to protect them and work with Dr Dreyfus, and they'd make a call then about whether she and the Doctor thought that staying longer would help with her own issues.
They played Graham along for another week, telling him that they'd had no sightings of the target, then Diane started asking how much longer the CIA was expecting to tie her team up with this and reminded him that the CIA were being charged for the operating costs for her entire team for the period that they were demanding that they concentrated on this manhunt of his. He swore under his breath, because he'd forgotten about that in his panic to recover or shut up Mahnovski, and asked what the charges were so far.
Diane made a show of looking up the figure (because Sarah had told them that he didn't appear to have their memory so it would be better to keep that from him) and told him that the figure stood at four hundred and eighty thousand at the moment, and that would be increasing by sixty thousand per day, plus expenses. He muttered something and told her to discontinue the search for Laszlo Mahnovski and present the bill. Diane smiled and said that he'd have it in his inbox within the hour, cutting the link.
The day of the wedding dawned clear and sunny, which was a great relief to everyone, as this meant that it could be an outdoor wedding as planned and that let Vera's vision of a winter wonderland wedding come about. The last of the participants and guests had arrived from Los Angeles the previous night (the Thirty Seven had been going back and forth across the country for the past couple of days, delivering everyone to the wedding), and they'd been mingling with their guests at the wedding venue for a while before the wedding. There were a few eye openers with the number of three and four star Generals and Admirals present, and some quite notable figures as well, not just the President of the United States, they also had the Secretary for Defense, Secretary of State, the Army, Navy and Air Force, the DNI and the Directors of the FBI and NSA there, but the biggest shock for those who recognised her was the presence of the CIA's Director of the National Clandestine Services, Jane Bentley, because the nature of this group's relationship with the CIA was well known.
They were glad to see that Stephen appeared to be well grounded, and so did Leslie actually because he and Leo Dreyfus had come down with Carina and Stephen. Leo was having a laugh with Diane about the fact that it appeared to be the talking to that Carina gave the two of them about what she'd do to them if either of them did anything to ruin this day for Sarah and Ellie that had dragged them far enough into the real world to stay rooted in it for a while.
Emma also had a nice conversation with Jane while they were waiting for the brides to arrive. Sarah had told her how Jane had helped her when she was her handler, and that when she was her mentor she gave her someone to turn to after that too, so Emma was grateful to Jane for looking after her little girl.
When the ceremony started, those who hadn't known about it were making quite a few comments about the fact that the 'best man' was in fact a rather small woman (especially after the requirements they'd been forced to agree to to avoid a spectacle), but they were pointedly told to shut up by those who knew the brides and grooms. The fact that most of the people who knew them appeared to be rather dangerous had the effect of silencing any comments very quickly.
The only glitch during the actual ceremony was the fact that Chuck had to be prompted to respond as he was looking at his bride in a happy daze. A sharp elbow in the ribs from his 'best man' got him back on track though.
After the wedding kisses there was another surprise, in that there were three separate sword arches, from the Army, Navy and Marines, though were a few Air Force officers in each of them too, and the men making up the sword arches were all in dress whites as well. Any questions about that were merely answered with the fact that the brides and grooms had operated with all four services and therefore it was deemed only appropriate that they should all be represented.
There were more outraged comments when the wedding pictures were being taken (that was another restriction of this wedding, no pictures would be taken other than the official ones, and the guests were actually searched and had their phones etc taken from them) about these people wearing rank insignia and medals that they couldn't have possibly earned, because Sarah, Ellie, Carina, Zondra and Lou were all wearing the faux uniform jackets to display their ranks and medal ribbons and Mary, Emma, Phoebe, Stephen, Diane and in fact all of their core people were there in dress whites, but these people were told quite forcibly to shut up and read their name tags. Reading 'Mowgli', 'Raksha', 'Rikki', 'Baloo', 'Bagheera' and 'Akela' shut most of them up. 'Shanti', 'Won-Tolla', 'Ikki', 'Ferao', 'Darzee', 'Chil', 'Ko', 'Kaa', 'Pappu', 'Mang' and 'Mor' didn't mean as much to them, but they'd gotten the message and accepted that this group had earned their ranks and medals, and more besides with what they had done.
The ones who didn't understand what those names meant were taken aside and had it explained to them in very clear and simple terms just what would happen to them if they ever spoke a word about this to anyone. It was pointed out that the President and just about everyone important in the Military and Intelligence communities were there (with more than a few from friendly powers as well), so there was no chance that they would have been allowed to wear them if they hadn't earned them. They also pointed out that the SOCOM Commander was a SEAL himself, so he would never have let anyone who hadn't earned the right to do so wear a SEAL trident, but he obviously didn't have a problem with Mowgli or Raksha, in fact he'd looked proud to see them wearing their's. (Both Chuck and Ellie were wearing miniature SEAL, Naval Aviator and Command Ashore badges.)
The reception was inside the plantation house (because while they wanted Vera's winter wonderland for the wedding itself, it was too cold and there was too much chance of the weather turning to have the reception outside), so the newlyweds led everyone inside once all the pictures were finished. That took a while though, because as well as the wedding party and their families, they had to have pictures taken with many of the dignitaries there. They had to thank Roan again when they got inside, as the setting was utterly beautiful. There was a quite a bit of laughter when the first woman that Chuck danced with after his bride and his sister was in fact his 'best man', but next after her was his bride's maid of honour, then the rest of the brides' maids, his new mother-in-law, his mother, the President's daughters, Alex (McHugh), Josie, Auntie Charly's daughter Katie, his sister's new mother-in-law, Auntie Di, 'Aunt Jane', Auntie Charly and most of the women working for Thebes Security after that. He hardly got to sit down throughout the reception.
One thing that they'd grudgingly had to concede was that they couldn't afford to be off-line long enough to take a proper honeymoon, so Roan had pulled out all stops to get the structural work done on the other end of the building building, get it re-clad with mirrored armour glass and complete the penthouse and roof garden in time for the wedding. Building the penthouse off the existing frameworks for the roof perimeter armour glass had saved them enough time to get it done on schedule. One thing that Chuck and Ellie didn't know (they knew that they were up to something, but thought it was just something to do with the wedding) was that Roan had had a meeting with Sarah and Rick soon after Ellie and Rick decided to get married, to get their thoughts on a proposed change to the design of the penthouse.
The original design of the penthouse had had it as an 'L' shape, with the entertainment areas right across the end of the building and a residential wing up one side with the bedrooms, a private kitchen and lounge and the like. What he was proposing now though was a 'U' shape with two residential wings, one for the Carmichaels and one for the Nobles. They all knew how close Ellie and Chuck were, even when Chuck was up at Stanford, they'd always started the day off talking to each other, they also knew how much Chuck hated him getting anything that Ellie didn't when he believed that she deserved just as much, so when Ellie and Rick announced that they were getting married too, Roan had had the penthouse redesigned, with a private wing for each couple and shared formal entertainment areas. Rick and Roan looked at Sarah, because she was the one who would be sharing her penthouse here, but she shook her head at them. "Are you kidding? Chuck and Ellie will love this, and so will I! Do it Uncle Roan!"
Roan beamed at her, as that was exactly the answer he'd expected from Emma's daughter, and said that they would also be making some changes to their covers to make Ellie more prominent to help explain this, so they'd be letting it get out that Ellie and Chuck were in fact siblings and she'd come west with him. Charlemagne's old office space would be taken over by her new business, Noble House Consulting, which would be marketed as an industry think tank.