A/N: Our scope begins to widen again. Continued thanks to all you beautiful creatures who are reading and reviewing.

Don't own Chuck.

CHAPTER 11 Eyeless in Gaza

Beckmann arrived at Sarah's apartment first, as Casey had expected. Sarah was still unconscious. Casey had used a traquillizer after the blow he had struck her. She would be out for at least a little while longer.

Casey had quickly told Beckmann his suspicion on the phone and she was came prepared to help. Casey had told Ellie that he thought Sarah might need a doctor and a friend around, and since she was both, she should come. He also told her that she would get some answers. Ellie said she would be over as soon as she had checked on Chuck.

Beckmann entered after Casey answered her knock. She went immediately to the bed, where Casey had put Sarah. She began casting straightaway. After some quiet phrases and a couple of twists of her hand, a dwimmer appeared and settled onto Sarah's unconscious form. It glowed pinkish for a minute, then disappeared. But after it did so, Sarah's lips glowed faintly green. Beckmann looked at Casey.

"You were right, John. She's been dosed. Who did this?"

"I am virtually certain it was Carina."

"Carina Miller? The Enforcer? But Miller is Sarah's best friend. Sarah has saved Carina's life more than once. Why would she do this?"

"I suspect she was either dosed herself or lied to by someone she would find it hard to disbelieve. But I don't know who that would be. I tried to contact her telepathically but got no response. I tried her phone number in Sarah's phone. Same. I am actually worried about her too now."

"One battle at a time, John. You said you were going to call Eleanor Bartowski. Did you?" Casey nodded, curious about Beckmann's reaction. "Good. We need a doctor, and the more limited the circle the better. The men who have been watching over her have a high opinion of her and of her intelligence and her medical skills. I worry that a couple of them may be a bit compromised. We're lucky that Devon Woodcomb is in the picture or we might have more of what we have with Sarah and Chuck. These Bartowskis! Let me take the lead when she arrives." Casey nodded again.

There was a soft knock on the door.

Carina's stomach heaved. She felt like she had to vomit. The air around her was sticky, moist and full of stenches. She was in a darkness so complete she could not see her hand before her eyes.

She knew, from touch, that she was chained to a wall. And she also knew, from her power's failure to respond, that the chains were enchanted. She was going nowhere, contacting no one.

She thought she heard a noise in the room, heavy breathing followed by an expectant sigh. Then she heard a door open and close. But no light accompanied the sound.

She hung her head and fought not to gag, but she felt a gag coming, coming, irresistible. She prepared herself to face a future of dark misery.

Carina, what have you done to yourself? But, even more awful, what have you done to your friend? How could you have mistaken her happiness for a spell? Are you that far gone, Carina, that much in denial that anyone could be happy? How could you have let yourself be used like this? Sarah, I am truly sorry!

Ellie stood looking down at Sarah on the bed. Sarah's hands were bound by a glowing cord, and she was, although not conscious, thrashing back and forth on the bed, gasping and perspiring. Casey was standing beside her, making sure that she did not hurt herself. He also had a cold cloth with which he gently wiped her brow. Beckmann was explaining the situation to Ellie.

"So, Eleanor, Sarah has effectively been slipped a drug, but a magical drug. My best guess is that it is an anti-love potion. It has taken her existing fears, doubts, insecurities about Chuck and her, however small, and amplified them until they drown out her love for Chuck. Or I think that is what it was supposed to do. But given her condition, her discomfort, her distress, I would say that Sarah's love for Chuck is resisting, fighting back, and so Sarah is experiencing a pitched metaphysical battle between two different parts, or maybe different versions, of herself. It would be like possession - except that she is being possessed by herself. 'Self-possession' - in a different sense of the term. Paradoxical, but real, obviously." Ellie looked bewildered. Beckmann reached out to touch her arm gently. "If it is this hard for us to understand, imagine what it must be like for her to experience it."

Almost as if on cue, Sarah sat up, her eyes open but seeing nothing, and then two cries, one after the other, both recognizably Sarah's voice, but the second in a timbre unfamiliar to Ellie.

"Chuck! I'm here."

*He does not love me.*

Sarah's hair was matted to her head, her face pale but her cheeks and forehead pink. She had bit her own lip, and there was a trickle of blood running down her chin. The blue of her eyes had become less saturated.

Ellie shot Beckmann an anguished look. She had seen Beckmann cast the spell that had helped to identify the nature of the potion. She had been told about the first spell that had revealed that Sarah had been given a potion. She could still see Sarah wrists held by a rope that had no material presence even as it bound her.

But Ellie had three things helping her through what might have been a moment that sent her running, screaming, out the door of the apartment. One, she had a disciplined, genuinely empirical mind: she accepted, as a principle, the possibility of things that would throw her understanding of the world into serious disarray. She did not think she knew where to draw the limits of possibility. Two, she loved Sarah and would not abandon her, no matter how strange a situation that put her in. And, three, she loved her brother as much as she loved herself, and she knew how much Sarah meant to him. Leaving her would be like leaving him. And Ellie had never left Chuck, and she never would.

So, she compartmentalized her shock and panic, and became Sarah's doctor. She administered a sedative, and soon Sarah's thrashing stopped. She checked Sarah's vitals. Her blood pressure was elevated and she was running a high fever, but otherwise, she was ok. The fever worried Ellie, though. She had Casey go on with the cold compresses on her forehead, and she was able to give her some aspirin.

It seemed a bit odd to be combatting magic with aspirin, but a fever was a fever. Something needed to be done. She had a million questions, including exactly how her brother, a 'mortal', as Beckmann put it as she had explained a bit more to Ellie, could have magical powers. There seemed to be no end to the kinds of trouble Chuck could get into. She sighed quietly to herself.

She noticed Casey watching her as Sarah grew calm. Ellie smiled at him and he smiled back, a hearty smile. She knew it was his way of both thanking her for her reaction to Beckmann and to him, and for her taking care of Sarah. He wiped Sarah's face.

Beckmann was seated in a chair by the window, thumbing through a large book she had taken from her bag. She looked up when she realized that Sarah was still.

"Thank you, Eleanor. I am going to try a counterspell. I believe I can undo the worst effects of the potion, but it will...linger...in her for a while. I don't know for how long. But I hope to end the constant torment and give her back primary control over herself. I have hope because the people who did this underestimated how strongly Sarah can love. She cannot break the spell on her own, but she is fighting furiously. If the counterspell works, we will need to be careful with her until the spell is entirely out of her system. She will be fragile. The counterspell should not put undue stress on her system, but it would be a good idea to let her rest before we try it."

Ellie bowed her head slightly in understanding just before her cell phone rang. She looked at the screen and then at Beckmann and Casey. "Morgan."

"Hello, Morgan."

Ellie felt her chest constrict again like it had when she had walked in and first seen Sarah. She gasped. Her voice became a cry.

"Slow down, Morgan! What do you mean, 'Chuck has been taken'?"

In the darkened office, the figure was staring again, as so often, at the piece of an ancient manuscript in the pool of light on the desk.

What is this "simple magic" of a "ring of no worth..." that finds more favor in the eyes of the "Regent of heaven" than the priceless treasure from "from the uttermost seas"?

The figure touched the paper, surer than ever that the plan to stop it all was going to work. Walker had been...neutralized. Bartowski was in...safe hands. Everything was falling into place. Soon. Very soon.

Chuck woke up very slowly.

It was as though someone was dripping consciousness into his eyes with a dropper...

...drip drop drip drip drop...

Excruciatingly, little by little, the world came into view and into focus. He was in Dr. Frankenstein's lab. Or at least that is what it looked like. He was still groggy, unsure he could trust either his eyes or his judgment.

The large room was rectangular with a tall ceiling. The walls were made out of large cut stones, quite old. Chuck felt the slight tug of memory but ignored it in order to take everything in. He was seated roughly in the center of the room in a large chair, like a barber's chair, the kind Floyd used on The Andy Griffith Show. Chuck and Morgan watched re-runs of the show as kids. They both had a crush on Andy's girlfriend, Ellie (Hey, maybe that's how Morgan's obsession with Ellie, my sister, got started! Oh, and her last name was...Walker. Weird.)

Chuck's current problem was that the chair he was in seemed to belong to Evil Floyd, since Chuck was held in place in the chair by heavy, belted leather straps around his lower forearms and around his ankles. He tried to move, but could not. His head was being held in place by a metal band, wrapped tightly enough around his head to keep him from being able to even turn his head side-to-side. He could see long tables made out of rough, thick planks of wood, and on them were computers and other technical machinery, as well as old leather books and odds and ends of what Chuck now knew to be Casting tools, supplies, and paraphernalia.

He knew he had been drugged. How long had he been unconscious? But his intuition told him he was not in Kansas, that is, Burbank, anymore. The peculiar smell of vegetation and the damp kiss of high humidity (he had awakened covered in sweat), immediately suggested the jungle. He had gone on an archeological dig during his junior year to The Long Wall of Quang Ngai. He knew the smell of the jungle. He knew that wherever he was, it was a place like the jungle he knew there.

Chuck knew he was very hungry and very thirsty. It was likely that he had been unconscious for at least a day. He could have been taken by normal means almost anywhere in that amount of time, but if magic was involved, no jungle on earth would be too remote. Did anyone know he was gone?

The word 'gone' echoed in his mind, and suddenly his eyes filled with tears. Sarah was gone. And now so was he. How could he get her back when he was strapped to a chair in some distant jungle? She would vanish back into the world of Casters, be Enforcer Walker again, and he would never see her. The tears on his face ran down to his chin, pooled momentarily, then fell onto his shirt in slow, fat drops...

...drip drop drip drip drop...

Sarah!

Ellie listened to Morgan's story then hung up the phone. She turned to Casey and Beckmann and repeated the gist of it. Morgan had gone into Chuck's room to check on him. He had heard a sound, and thought maybe Chuck was ready finally to get up and talk. But when he opened the door, he saw three ninjas (Morgan's word) in the room. They had Chuck off the bed, one holding his feet and each of the others an arm, and they stepped forward with him and then simply vanished into thin air. But as the one holding Chuck's feet stepped forward, Morgan dove toward him and managed to grab the dagger out of the sheath on his side just as the ninja disappeared. Morgan still had it. He told Ellie there was a design on it.

Beckmann calmed Ellie down and sent Casey back to Chuck and Sarah's apartment. Sarah was doing better; her fever had gone down and she was in a deep sleep. Beckmann feared the worst for the team of men she had assigned to the apartment. That they had raised no alarm suggested that they had been taken or killed. Everything was coming apart. Team Bartowski had been reduced to rubble in a handful of hours. She called the House and dispatched a new team and sent in a team of cleaners, just in case.

It took Casey a while to return. He had to explain to Morgan much of what Beckmann had explained to Ellie. But unlike Ellie, who accepted it in calm incredulity, Morgan, despite his very real fear for Chuck and Sarah, was clearly excited by it all. The world was magic! His best friend was dating a witch (but not Jill)! His best friend could do magic! Casey got Morgan to calm down and then sent him home. He had assigned one of the members of Beckmann's team to watch over him.

Casey had the dagger. On its pommel was a symbol that he and Beckmann had seen before, the same one as on Shaw's lighter. The Belgian. They knew who had taken Chuck. But how had the Belgian found him? And, most important, where had the Belgian taken him?

Casey explained the situation to Ellie as well as he could. She had taken in a lot in one day and he could tell that she was getting punchy. After a bit, she told him she had heard enough for now, and she returned to Sarah. Casey could tell Sarah was doing better. Beckmann was preparing the counterspell. It was time to cast it. Ellie stepped back from the bed.

Casey chanted together with Beckmann for a few minutes, and then he stopped and Beckmann continued on her own. She took one of Casey's hands and then reached out and took Sarah's right hand. Ellie was watching, her eyes wide in amazement. A pinkish light began at the intersection of Casey and Beckmann's hands and traveled along her arm, enveloping her and then traveling along her other arm to Sarah. As it reached Sarah's hand, it began to turn red, then redder, until she was herself enveloped in an angry red glow. The glow pulsated, growing ever more red, until Casey saw Ellie shield her eyes with her hand. Sarah's eyes snapped open and her lips parted. Slowly, a greenish vapor issued from her mouth and was burned away by the red glow. Sarah's lips closed and her eyes did too. The red glow slowly returned to pink, and then reversed its direction of travel until it extinguished where Beckmann's hand met Casey's.

Ellie slumped in the nearest chair, her mouth agape. Casey walked over to her and put his hand on her shoulder. "It's a lot to take in, Ellie, a lot to accept. Don't rush it." She shook her head at him, and he could see the strength in her eyes beneath the stunned confusion. She would be ok. These Bartowski's were strangely tough for such gentle people. Casey had never known those two features to be united before. Like Ellie today, and Morgan, Casey had been finding the world to be a bigger place than he had known before.

"Sarah will be awake soon, Ellie. She will be weak. When she finds out Chuck is missing...well, that's going to make what we saw already today look tame. Sarah is not just a Caster. She is an Enforcer, like me. But she is better than me, more powerful. She will want to go after him. We need to find some way to make her wait. She will not only be weak. As Beckmann said, the potion will have lasting effects. They will dissipate, but slowly. We need to find a way to make her stay here for a little while."

Ellie nodded slowly. "I will do what I can, John. And thank you, for today and for looking out for Sarah and my brother."

Casey had gone out for coffee and brought it back before Sarah began to awaken. At first, she was badly disoriented. She expected to be in bed with Chuck, in their apartment. She panicked when she realized she wasn't. Her panic grew when she realized exactly where she was and that Chuck was not there. Beckmann soothed her, calmed her. Ellie helped. Sarah drifted back to sleep.

Casey finished his coffee. Beckmann did hers. Ellie drank at hers fitfully, but never finished it. She checked Sarah once more. The fever was gone. Most of her color had returned. Casey put his hand on Ellie's shoulder.

"You should go home. Beckmann and I will manage from here. Talk to Morgan tomorrow. You two can help each other with all this, and with Chuck being taken. We've been so worried about Sarah's reaction to that, we haven't done anything to help you with it. We will find him, Ellie, and we will bring him home. I...am fond of him too. And that woman," he gestured with his shoulder toward Sarah, "will storm hell's gates themselves barehanded in order to find him. Go home. Try to get some sleep. I will call you in the morning."

Casey was sleeping in one chair when Sarah woke up. Beckmann was sleeping in the other.

"Chuck? Chuck?"

"Walker, Sarah, it's me, Casey."

There was a long silence. "Casey, why am I in my apartment? Where is Chuck? What has happened?" Sarah sat up, then gasped and grabbed her head in pain. Casey moved to her quickly and gently pushed her back onto the bed. She reclined, her eyes still squeezed shut.

"Let me answer those questions one at a time, Sarah. You were given a potion, an anti-love potion." Sarah's eyes shot open in question. "Yeah, I know. I never heard of such a thing either. Some dark shit, Sarah. We are pretty sure it was Carina who dosed you." A look of pain of a different order crossed Sarah's face.

"Why, Casey? She's my friend, we trust each other...But she did act bizarrely when she visited, even for her…"

"I believe she did it either unwillingly or unknowingly. We can't find any trace of her, Sarah."

Beckmann, who had by now also awakened, listened closely.

"I need to get myself together. Get Chuck. We need to find her." Sarah started to lift the blanket from on top of her.

"No, Sarah." Beckmann's command was softly spoken, but still identifiably a command. "You need rest. And there is more to tell. I'm sorry, but there's no good in keeping this from you. Chuck is gone too. Taken."

Sarah sat up straight. Her eyes were suddenly wet and wild. "What do you mean? Taken? Where was I? Where were you two? How could this have happened?" Sarah's voice grew more desperate with each question.

Beckmann moved to the bed and sat down on it beside Sarah. "Sarah, do you remember how you got here?" Sarah looked at her blankly, tears now streaking down her cheeks. Then there was a flicker of memory.

"I came here. I didn't want to but I did. Or I did want to but I didn't." She shook her head, trying to clear it. "I don't understand...Wait. I came by cab. I brought my...suitcase. I left the apartment. Chuck was sleeping. I wrote him...a note. Oh, my God." Sara's voice faltered. Her hands began involuntarily to twist her blanket. "I wrote him a note, Casey. An awful note. I remember every hurtful word. Oh, what did I do?" Sarah began to weep. Beckmann scooted close and pulled Sarah's head onto her shoulder, even as the weeping intensified. The sobs were full of sorrow and self-loathing.

Sarah quieted after a few minutes. Her control reasserted itself. She leaned back from Beckmann's shoulder but gave Beckmann's arm a gentle squeeze as she did so. "I can deal with the regrets later. Even if Chuck understands, what I did," there was a shift on Sarah's face, a new acquist of understanding, "what Enforcer Walker did, was to deliver a sledgehammer blow to his deepest fear. I would, she would, know just how to do that. I don't know if we can find our way back from that. If he can find his way back to me. But none of that matters right now. What matters is finding him. If I can't be with him," her voice broke, even as she tried to keep it firm, "then eventually someone will be. He has to live. He has to love. I can't live in a world where Chuck Bartowski is not alive, or a world in which he no longer loves." She wiped her eyes. "Casey, tell me the story."

Casey told her everything that happened. Morgan finding Chuck. Ellie finding them both. Ellie's phone call. What he told Ellie. Finding Sarah in the apartment. Knocking her unconscious. Beckmann and Ellie. Morgan's phone call. The dagger. The Belgian.

And then Sarah got a strange look in her eyes. "Chuck didn't realize they were coming?"

"No, Morgan said that Chuck made no sound. But he should have, shouldn't he? What happened to his power?" Casey had been wondering about this for a while.

Sarah dropped her head. She then told Casey and Beckmann and Ellie about the second book, about reading Chuck reading it backward.

Beckmann shook her head. "I know you two were worried about what might happen to Chuck, what the Houses might do. But you know that Casey and I are on your side. You should have talked to us, told us. I don't know if that book was from Orion, but I am almost sure that it worked, read backward, as a suppression of The Intersect. Chuck's powers as a Reader were put in abeyance. But even worse, given the especially tight relationship between Chuck's powers as a Reader, and the way he just is, the suppression almost certainly intensified his experience of abandonment when Sarah, ah...Enforcer Walker...left. He had little or no defense against his abandonment or the Belgian. He's out there, powerless."

Sarah listened silently but with intensified, visible self-reproach. But she did not interrupt. Beckmann finished and Sarah laid back down. Through her tears, she spoke her determination: "I know I need rest. I will sleep tonight. Sleep is a weapon. Tomorrow, Casey, we are going to see Shaw about The Belgian. He will tell us where Chuck is or I will make ash of him." As she finished speaking, Casey heard Sarah's voice modulate into Enforcer Walker's. He shuddered.

A/N: The lines on the manuscript fragment are borrowed from H. D.'s supercharged book-length poem, Helen in Egypt.