EIGHT

Unbeknownst to her, Jodie wasn't the only one to hear the running footsteps behind them. Someone had been following, doing their very best not to be heard, and if Chuck hadn't been trained specifically to listen out for certain things like that he probably would have missed it. He doubled back to where they had entered the conservatory, using the plants for cover, looking at the ground. There were the footprints left by his and Jodie's sneakers, and the marks left behind by Andrea's fluffy slippers. Trailing behind were doggy pawprints in the potting mix.

And there following was another set of prints, larger than Chuck's own. His lips pressed into a thin line. The tread of the boots was horribly familiar, familiar because he had several sets of boots in his own closet with the same tread.

They were standard-issue law enforcement.

Special Agent Ruttheimer in the Conservatory with a Glock.

Lightly on his feet, he circled back around. Honestly, part of him genuinely hoped it was a cop, rather than some random survivalist psycho who shopped military surplus.

Shattered glass was scattered along the paths, the trees stripped of leaves from panicking civilians looking for a place to shelter. Chuck followed the path of destruction. If someone in law enforcement was after him, there were a myriad of times in the last week where he had been completely unaware and could have been popped off at any time. Shoot and move on. No muss, no fuss, no brains on your clothes. Sloppy, the whole thing was just sloppy.

That was when something caught his eye, sitting among the leaves and shattered glass. He looked around carefully before squatting down to pick it up. It was a small enclosed black leather wallet and a sick feeling settled in the pit of Chuck's stomach as he flipped it open to see a familiar golden shield.

Boots crunched in gravel and Chuck immediately sprang to his feet, gun drawn.

"Stand down, Ruttheimer."

And Assistant Director Sam Halliday, fully tooled up, was standing there staring at him. With some reluctance, Chuck holstered his gun. "Are you good?"

"It depends on how loose the definition." Chuck said. "Where are the others? Where's Mal?"

"Where are the Landons?" Halliday immediately shot back, and the dormant instincts that had once made Chuck such a good anti-terrorism agent began poking at him as he kept a hand on his pistol.

"Gone." He said shortly. Halliday snorted.

"Ruttheimer, we have an active shooter on the ground and a crooked agent behind the scenes. We don't have time to fool around right now. Where are the Landons?"

"How did you find me?" Chuck asked curiously.

"What are you talking-?"

"I mean, the last thing I said was that we were conservatory side. Yet here you are." Paranoia was beginning to cloud his mind and Chuck tried his best to stay objective.

"Oh my god – we can track your phone, you know." Halliday said with some irritation.

From a pocket in his coat Chuck pulled out his cell and tossed it at his boss's feet.

The bullet hole stood out starkly in a shattered casing.

Halliday's face changed abruptly, it seemingly only just occurring to him how suspicious he seemed. "You can't seriously believe that I-"

Chuck smoothly pulled out his gun. "Mind staying where you are?"

Halliday's hands slowly rose, an expression of disbelief on his face. "Charles, I am not the enemy."

"Keep your hands where I can see them." He balled his hand over his other fist, steadying his aim. Time and time again he had idly imagined shooting his boss, as any middle management drone did, but he'd never dreamed that he'd be in the situation to actually do it one day. "Kick the gun over to me. Move."

Scowling, the agent did what he was told, kicking away the pistol.

"We just going to be locked in a standoff, Ruttheimer, or you going to pull that damned trigger? You really going to kill me?" Halliday demanded. His eyes narrowed as he pondered his options, pondered the best way to rattle his opponent.

"Houston's ripped it out of you, you don't have the guts-"

Chuck's hand convulsed on the gun, and Halliday used the tiny moment afforded to him to reach for his backup pistol, bringing it up and-

BAM.

The giant cement pot crashed into Sam Halliday's back, sending the assistant director sprawling. The man smacked his forehead on the ground, twitching intermittently before even that stopped. Wide-eyed, Chuck just stared at the form of his fallen boss, before looking up to see his friend, Special Agent Nathan Sinatra.

Nathan looked back at him with an expression on his face like he was surprised at himself.

"We are so fired." He breathed heavily.

"Assuming he doesn't push for a federal execution." Chuck holstered his gun. "Nate, where the hell did that come from?"

"Pent-up rage?" Nathan winced. "I might have some problems."

"Tell that to someone who hasn't got as many issues as National Geographic." Chuck bobbed down and checked for a pulse. Finding one, he let out a breath of relief, and straightened. "Stick with me and we'll-"

His eyes widened as he saw the gun pointed straight at his face, Nathan's gun.

"Nate, what the fuck-?"

"I won't say I'm sorry." Nathan said, and fired.

The gunshot got him straight in the chest, the force sending him smashing backwards through the glass, sprawling among the foliage.

He was still, blue eyes staring blankly at the ceiling.

"Well, that was easy. Why didn't you just do that the first time?" Nathan spoke to himself. Boots crunched in the glass and soil. "All that planning when you could have just walked up and shot him. I guess it's always easier than you think it's going to be."

The boots crunched closer. "Stupid fucking pretentious bastard, finally got what you deserved." Standing over the body, he raised his gun one more time, prepared to fire a last shot point-blank into the skull, to still any still-firing synapses. "See you in Hell."

Sparkle snapped back into those blue eyes.

"You first."

It wasn't pretty and it wasn't stylish, and it definitely wasn't something taught in the Bureau's hand-to-hand classes, but devoid of any other more classy choice at the moment Chuck pulled his legs up and kicked Nathan as hard as he could in the balls.

As the other agent crumpled, Chuck clumsily rolled to his knees, bleeding from a thousand little cuts and his ribs doing an unpleasant and horribly familiar disjointed scratch-scratch of broken bone in his chest. He managed to push himself to his feet with a groan.

"Aw, fuck."

Nathan had collapsed to his knees, hands over his nuts, a waterfall of tears clouding his eyes. "How-?"

Chuck dragged a hand down his chest, ripping open his coat. His bulletproof vest stood out starkly, the bullet imbedded firmly in the fibres. "Gotta be prepared, Mr Cool Cat." He snarled. Planting a sneaker in the centre of Nathan's back, he sent the other man sprawling. "Stand down, Special Agent. I'm not the crooked agent and you know that."

"Of course I fucking know that." Nathan spoke around a mouthful of dirt. "I'm the best damn analyst in the FBI."

"Then what the fuck are you doing?" The broken ribs and the glass embedded in his shoulder was starting to make his own eyes tear up. "You know me. We're friends."

"I was never friends with you." Nathan snarled. "Especially after Houston."

Chuck frowned, flipping through his mental rolodex of those that had died during the Port of Houston fiasco, who had lost who, family and friends, and the only person that he could think of was-

"Eliza."

The name immediately sent another wash of memories through him. Their first dance. First kiss. The way she'd looked on their wedding day, the way she'd looked at him on their wedding day.

"You took her away from me!" Nathan screamed.

Chuck blinked. The fuck-? "What? I know you were friends-"

Nathan's normally suave and sophisticated countenance was well and truly cracked, his face twisted in fury. "You took her. You came in and you took her."

"You introduced us, you psycho!"

"You weren't supposed to take her. She wasn't supposed to take you." He snorted. "She was supposed to look at you, laugh and put you back, to see how pathetic the rest of them were, to see that there was no one better than me. She was on her way back to me. She always came back to me." He bared his teeth.

"I was her friend and she owed me!"

Holy shit. Chuck gripped his ribs, swallowing back what tasted suspiciously like a little bit of sick in his mouth. He'd run into a few incels online, especially during his brief stint in Cyber Crime, the supposed involuntarily celibate men who believed that offering a woman basic kindness and being the absolute bare minimum of a Nice Guy™ somehow entitled them to free whoopie.

Somehow the notion that one of them would one day get a gun and a badge had never occurred to him, let alone one day be standing before him. And it was horrifying.

Nathan glared at him from the ground, mud streaked across his face, teeth bared like a wild thing.

"She was on her way back to me, but you couldn't even die properly."

Understanding seemed to strike like a lightning bolt and everything started to unfold before him like a book. The months of blaming himself, hating himself. Visiting the deceased's families. Losing the friends he'd thought would stand by him through thick and thin. The condemnation on his in-law's faces. The judgement of the Bureau and his fellow agents turning their backs on him. His hand shaking as he signed funeral documentation he didn't think he'd have to do for another thirty or forty years.

On his knees after the secondary explosion as the fire roared around him, staring at Eliza's body too still on the ground.

Chuck gritted his teeth so hard his jaw cracked.

All that time losing his mind looking for a terrorist bomber that didn't actually exist.

"It was you. You're the bomber. You killed my friends. You killed my wife!"

"I told her you were just using her, you were just another worthless womaniser like the rest of the Chads, but she just laughed! Laughed at me! She just wouldn't see reason, like every other female refuses to see reason. With you gone, Liza would have come back to me. She would have come back to me! She would have been mine!"

Yes, there was a definite taste of sick in his mouth.

"You killed Eliza." He could barely breathe, and Chuck's heart was beating so fast.

"I loved her! She just needed to see that! I just needed to make her see that." Nathan spat. "She didn't know what she was thinking, marrying you. You just dazzled her like a peacock, and her small female brain was just caught up in the fantasy."

And now the fury was starting to build. Instinctually, part of Chuck knew that he was in trouble here, as fury made people careless. His good hand groped back for his holster.

"You killed Eliza."

"The bomb was for you!" Nathan screamed. "It was so fucking perfect, terrorists shipping their gear through the Port of Houston. So fucking perfect. It just took a few anonymous tips, some extra credible information thrown in to make you pay attention. If you'd just gone through the damned door first like you always did, everything would have been just fine!" Chuck was pretty sure that the tears streaming down Nathan's face now weren't just from his smarting privates anymore, as the man fully succumbed to whatever fantasy he'd written for himself inside his twisted little head. "You killed her! You killed them! There's no one to blame but yourself!"

And he swiped his hand back and flung a handful of soil and glass shards into Chuck's eyes before changing at him like a line-backer, slamming him back into a palm tree. Chuck's broken ribs twisted painfully in his chest as he brought his arms up to defend himself as the blows rained down.

"And then, and then I couldn't get rid of you, until this glorious moment presented itself." Nathan's eyes sparkled with the fervour of the zealot. "You're the bad guy, the Lucianos' double agent, and if you don't get shot you'll spent the rest of your life in prison and I'll be rid of you! I win! I fucking win!" Nate raised his gun, that he'd somehow managed to locate among the chaos. "I win."

"Yeah." About 80 percent of what was holding him up right now was the tree at his back. "And you woulda got away with it too, if not for one thing."

"Yeah? What's that?"

"Well, our boss, passed out on the ground over there, I mean, he's not a complete moron, despite what people think." Chuck said. "So I'm willing to bet that he has his body cam on, and this little fucking psycho conversation is going right to whoever has taken charge of this op." He hissed in a breath. "And there's no way in hell you're just going to walk out of here."

Reason seemed to briefly return to Nathan's eyes and the agent briefly turned to look back at their boss, still crumpled on the ground, the gun swinging around slightly. Seeing his moment, Chuck lurched forward and grabbed at the gun with both hands, pushing Nathan off-balance. The gun discharged, blowing a chunk out of another poor, defenceless palm tree. Nathan brought his elbow back into Chuck's face with enough force to make his grip loosen and he brought the barrel around once more.

"Enough of this! I win!"

"Keep telling yourself that." Chuck snarled. "Maybe one day you'll actually believe it, but until then I'll be the voice that lives rent-free in your head telling you that you're a loser and that the only way you could even get a woman to look at you was to kill everyone else." He bared his teeth in a smirk that probably looked more like a pained grimace. "You know the worst thing? You are so fucking screwed up and up your own ass you don't have the capacity to realise how important you were to her, how much she loved you. Because in your tiny mind, her friendship was irrelevant just because she didn't want to fuck you, and I feel so, so sorry for you that you can't even begin to comprehend that."

"No. You don't get to feel sorry for me. You don't get to feel sorry for me!"

"You're pathetic."

"No! I win!" It was almost painful, watching the mental breakdown taking place before his eyes. "Shut up!"

"You're nothing but another weirdo shouting at strangers on the internet, to be forgotten in a few months except by a few fringe idiots and neo-Nazi psychopaths." Chuck's voice was wavering in and out. "You're nothing."

"No, I'm the winner." Nathan said. "I'm the winner, and you're just a - a speed bump in my story."

And that was when something smashed into the back of Nathan's skull, sending the other agent crashing to the ground in a heap in a mocking echo of his takedown of their boss. As Chuck's eyes slowly tracked upwards he took in the figure that was standing behind Nathan, fire extinguisher still held aloft and an expression on her face like she'd never expected herself to do anything like that before and was still rather surprised that she'd had the balls to do it.

"Ms Landon." Chuck grinned, and by the way her expression changed it must have made quite the sight. "So glad you could make it."

And doing perhaps the least manly thing he could have done, Chuck collapsed into Jodie's arms.

"I've got you." There was something more comforting than he expected as her arms closed around him, huffing under his additional weight. "I've got you." It was an echo of a few days ago. He almost screamed as she slung his arm over her shoulder to more evenly take his weight and Jodie looked horrified at the idea that she was hurting him. "Can you walk?"

Chuck blew out a long breath through his nose, trying to regulate his breathing. "Let's go."

"Are you sure?"

He gave a tight grin. "Sweetheart, if I drop right now I'm not getting up again anytime soon."

"What about your boss?"

"To be completely honest, I really don't give a flying fuck right now."

And so the two of them started their laborious way to the entrance of the conservatory, towards the sounds of sirens and the flashing of lights. Chuck tried to blink the fog out of his brain, staring at the detritus left by panicking civilians and two armed special agents rolling around in the glass. The damaged plants and shattered or missing glass panels.

"DC is going to be pissed." He said vaguely. "I'm never going to work in federal government again."

"Then I'll have to give you a job." Jodie said matter-of-factly. "Head of security. Or maybe just a dogsbody."

Chuck laughed idly, leaning his head against her shoulder, which Jodie didn't immediately shake off. Dogsbody. He could be a dogsbody, fetching coffee and doing filing. "Ask me in the morning. I'll agree to anything before coffee."

"I'll keep that in mind."

The barks of an excited dog was the first thing that Chuck heard when they were outside, soon to be followed by shouts of Momma! and Mr FBI! He could see the girls, and Mal as she ducked under the tape and started to stride out toward them. It wasn't that far to the police cordon, but to Chuck and his generally torn-up chest and arm, it felt like miles.

There was an enraged scream behind them.

"Charles!"

Fuck.

"Is this guy the fucking Terminator?" Jodie demanded, and Chuck had a sudden urge to laugh.

And bloody Nathan Sinatra was there, gun in hand, any reason at all having left his face. He raised the gun. Not at Chuck and Jodie, but at-

Mal.

All of a sudden it was like everything around him was happening in slow motion. The gun swinging around. Mallory reaching for her holster, and it all was suddenly so clear. He would never answer for the murders of all those agents, their friends. He would never accept culpability for Eliza's death. Nathan was going to take the one avenue of escape still available to him.

Suicide by cop.

But somehow Jodie Landon had managed to keep a cool head, whether that was through being a businesswoman juggling high stakes every day or just being a mom. Through her teeth she gave a high-pitched whistle.

Murphy's ears immediately perked up, head swivelling to watch Jodie and the subtle changes in her body language.

"Go ahead!" Jodie instructed sharply, in the same way she commanded the boardroom, like she had complete command of the situation. A handler's voice. "Come around. Go ahead, Murph. Bite!"

In an instant it was like the police dog had never retired as he charged at Nathan, muscles rippling under his fur before leaping and digging his fangs deeply into his gun hand. Latching on, the dog wrenched the screaming man to the ground as Mallory streaked by, digging her boot between his shoulder blades and roughly cuffing his hands behind his back as the man collapsed in a torrent of ugly, snotty tears.

And that was all Charles Ruttheimer remembered before he completely passed out.