A/N the First: There are a thousand thank yous to give out. Thank you to everybody who's reviewed. Thank you to everybody who's read. Thank you to my pre-readers, and to those who've supported me. Thank you to KateMcK for allowing me to experience a full five days of nauseating writing in order to achieve my goal of posting on Leap Day. Thank even more to KateMcK for letting me trick her into giving me two updates to read this week, even if I had to sacrifice my health and a great deal of sleep to get those updates. A Common Spy Problem and It's a Wonderful Cover Life are worth every moment of sleep lost.

But most of all, thank you to quistie64 and to mpxw. This was a difficult chapter to write, made even more impossible by the short deadline, and you two have been so wonderfully supportive and amazing, so thank you. mxpw, I knew I dumped a 7500 word chapter on you and you rose admirably to the challenge and you're amazing. Have a "prison cigarette" on me. ;)

And now, the chapter.

Truth hurts—not the searching after; the running from. — John Eyberg

Take a Knee

14 MAY 2008
HOTEL IZMAILOVO GAMMA-DELTA
19:29 MSK

"Okay, lift the leg one more time."

Chuck obeyed. He was tired from the full day of travel—leaving and blowing up the bunker, going a couple hundred kilometers on a snowmobile, traveling in a tiny plane with only Casey as company, navigating Moscow—but he knew better than to argue with Ellie's tone of voice. The second she'd caught even the merest hint of the limp he'd been trying to hide from her, Ellie had set in on Chuck like a pit bull. He remembered the over-protectiveness that had always set in whenever he'd run into illness or injury as a child and teen, far too well. It hadn't changed.

Ellie shifted, probing at his left leg. He didn't bother to hide the wince—the knee was still sore. "Lower it," she said, frowning at whatever she felt.

Chuck sighed and did as ordered. "If I'd known I was going to be doing butterfly kicks all night, I would have brought my old PT gear."

His sister apparently didn't find his joke all that amusing, as she leveled a flat stare at him. He'd switched from the parka and snow pants of the bunker to jeans and a dark, short-sleeved shirt, as Moscow was a sight balmier than Siberia in May. But whatever his outfit, Ellie wouldn't have found that funny anyway, he figured. His Army days were now officially a sore spot all around.

"Why didn't you get help?" she said, sounding exasperated. "Chuck, you could have done permanent damage to your knee."

His brain was the thing permanently damaged. "Ellie, I already told you—"

"You could have come to me. Or Devon. You could have gone to Devon. Even one of our colleagues."

"And that would have led the others right to me," Chuck said, glancing inadvertently at the closed doorway to their right, through which Sarah had disappeared over an hour before. Casey had also retired for the night. Or maybe he was tired of the awkwardness. He hadn't specified.

Ellie's frown deepened. "You're my first priority, Chuck. I wouldn't have given you away."

"I'm not saying you would. But they would have found out either way. Ellie, I didn't have a choice. I had to run. I didn't know who knew what and who could control me and turn me into..." Chuck trailed off and swallowed back the bile that inevitably rose whenever he thought about what had been done to him.

Ellie set his leg down, letting him relax back into the couch cushions. "I brought some pain meds with me. Just...in case," she said, and rose to cross to the room's dining room table. A very awkward dinner had taken place there two hours before. "They wouldn't tell me how badly you were hurt, so I thought it best to be prepared for everything."

"Most of it was superficial," Chuck said. The change in topic didn't pass him by. It was easier to ignore the elephant in the room, actually, and something of a relief. He'd seen the look that came across Ellie's face when he'd first dropped the word "monster" at dinner. It had been beyond uncertain: bewildered, a little frightened. Whether it was of him or for him, he didn't know. And he almost didn't want to, as that made just a little bit of sickness and rage threaten to well up. "The knee was the worst part. The concussion healed fine."

Since Ellie was facing away from him, rummaging through her bag, he saw the tension shoot through her shoulders and back. "You drove for six hours in a stolen car with a concussion," she said.

"I had to deliver the card. I had to let you know—"

"I'm amazed you didn't kill yourself or worse, someone else."

A flash of the empty look on Garret Kohl's face hit Chuck, followed by the sound of Carver's body hitting the pavement, nothing but meat now that he was dead. The FBI agent's shout before the second round of bullets. Kohl hitting the ground, just as dead as Carver.

Chuck gripped the hem of his shirt with his right hand, out of the line of Ellie's sight, his knuckles tightening and flexing as he tried to channel all of that emotion into his fist and out of his body. He couldn't react. He couldn't afford to. Casey and Sarah hadn't told Ellie that Chuck had been the one to pull the trigger, so to speak, on Carver, and as a result, on Kohl. That much had become obvious during dinner. It wasn't Ellie's fault. She didn't know he had killed someone.

It was one of the myriad things that kept him awake at night, staring at the underside of the bunk above him.

"Here," Ellie said, and returned to the couch. She put two small blue pills in his hand.

"What are these?"

"Pain meds. They're mild, but they should help you sleep with that knee bothering you."

Chuck squinted at the pills. "What are they called?"

Sighing, Ellie told him the name. Her eyebrows rose, and rose farther still, when he pulled out his phone and searched Wikipedia. When the name and description fit the pills in his hand, he nodded, but still handed them back. Ellie took them with a hooded look on her face.

"Worried I'm going to poison you?"

"I can't take any risks," Chuck said. "I'm sorry."

"But I'm your sister. I would—"

"I'm not saying you would. But your bag's been out of your hands at the airport. You didn't make those drugs yourself." Chuck shrugged. "There's a sixty percent chance they were the legitimate thing."

"And a forty percent chance they weren't? What would happen then?"

"Oh, I'd start to feel dizzy and sick, and a SWAT team would bust through the door," Chuck said, and tried to infuse a little humor into his voice. As it had ever since he'd arrived in Moscow, the attempt fell flat. "It would be a party all around. But my knee doesn't hurt too much. I'll be fine."

The same bewildered and scared look from dinner crossed Ellie's face again now. "Chuck...why did you come back? You're so paranoid about everything, and you have a right to be, but why come back to the heart of everything that caused you to be..."

"A monster?" Chuck asked.

Ellie's face hardened. "A victim."

"Victim, monster, the fact doesn't change that I am what they made me to be."

Ellie jerked her head, gesturing that Chuck should move to the table. Wincing only a little—Ellie's flexing his knee about had made it sorer than it usually was at this hour—Chuck rose and limped over. Ellie, however, went to the stove and began to fill the suite's kettle. Most of her problems were usually handled with a cup of tea or a single glass of wine.

It made him feel homesick; not for the first time that day. He pushed the feeling away as he sat.

Ellie set the kettle on the stove and used the firelighter to light the burner with enough ease to tell Chuck that she and Sarah had been at the suite for at least a couple of days, waiting for Casey to come back with Chuck. Once the water was on to boil, Ellie came back to the table and sat down across from him. She picked up his hand. He avoided flinching away, but only just.

"Chuck, please, tell me: why did you come back?" Ellie asked.

"Casey already asked me that."

"Good for him. I'm the one asking now. It's obvious that you're scared—you've glanced at the window and door regularly since you got here, you regard all food as suspicious, and the thing with the pills...do you think somebody is going to come after you?"

"It's always a possibility." Chuck looked down. He'd had no human contact in over a month, so to say it felt strange for Ellie to be holding his hand was an understatement in the highest regard.

"Then why risk it, if you're this scared? Is somebody coming after you? Do I need to be worried that somebody somewhere is just going to say something to you and you'll...change?"

Chuck went silent for a long time. He'd wrestled with the very same thing every single day in the bunker, and then on the snowmobile even after he'd blown the bunker to smithereens. The doubt and terror had dogged his footsteps through the airport and Moscow. His brain had been a constant loop of run, run, escape, idiot. Run.

But he'd searched everywhere. He had all of the evidence. Carver was dead. Most of the Lincoln secrets had died with him, and the rest sat in Chuck's head.

"There's always a chance of human error," Chuck said at length, not meeting Ellie's eyes. "There's a chance I missed something. So I can't let my guard drop because what if I did miss something and what if somebody else has to pay for my error?"

"Did you find what you were looking for, when you left?"

Chuck thought of the walls of the bunker. "Yes. I found everything on the Lincoln project that exists. Whatever Carver didn't have me delete already."

A dark look crossed Ellie's face.

"There are only two people left alive that know anything about the Lincoln phrases," Chuck went on when it was obvious that Ellie wasn't going to speak. "And one of them won't share what she knows. I know that."

"And the other?"

This was the source of Chuck's worry. Director Langston Graham had been read in on some of the Lincoln phrases. Not all, as far as Chuck could tell. Dr. Richard Carver had been as paranoid as Chuck was now, never divulging his secrets, always remaining on the move. His brain had been...brilliantly scary, Chuck had discovered while going through whatever he could find on Carver in the bunker. He'd taken subliminal messaging and autonomous control to the next level, a level that the government in the Cold War could only dream about. And when a committee had been appointed to look in on Project Omaha and its darker, seedier offshoot Lincoln, something so secret only a select few knew about it, Carver had seen the writing on the wall and had run.

Not only had he run, Chuck thought. He'd read the writing on the wall as a divine prophecy that only he should know about Lincoln, as far as Chuck could tell. The rest of the scientists and participants had been killed in a variety of car accidents, muggings gone wrong, and house fires. Only the six surviving subjects—as Tango had been killed early on in the programming to teach the others a lesson—had remained, five of them in bunkers across the world.

Assigned to, Chuck thought with a sick feeling, whichever continent they'd specialized in. A sort of first wave attack. Unstoppable killing machines.

Chuck fought down a wave of nausea.

"I'm not sure," he said, answering Ellie now. "I'm pretty certain he wouldn't share the specifics of the code phrases with anybody. He likes things to run his way."

"Who are you talking about, Chuck?" Ellie stared hard at him, obviously willing him to look up and answer her.

He answered, but he didn't look up from staring at his hand and watching her in the fringes of his vision. "The Director of the CIA, Ellie. He's the one that gave Sarah the few code-phrases she has."

"And yet you insisted Sarah was one of the ones allowed to bring you back," Ellie said. Her voice had gone subarctic.

Chuck let that frost sit for a moment. Carefully, he withdrew his hand and leaned back, looking up at Ellie fully for the first time. "What happened between you and Sarah after I left, Ellie?"

She opened her mouth to answer, but the tea kettle whistled. "Hold on," she said. Preparing the tea only took a minute, but it gave him ample time to wonder at exactly how cold Ellie's voice had gone. Sarah's face had been an expressionless mask throughout dinner, her mannerisms quiet and as controlled as his had been. She'd gone from being a mostly-open book to a closed case against him. Ellie's hostility, on the other hand, hadn't been at all hard to read.

Ellie placed a mug and a tea bag packet in front of Chuck. After he sniffed the tea bag, he shrugged to himself and dropped it into the mug. He bobbed it a couple of times, watching the colors of the water darken and curl around the bag. After a minute, he took the bag out. Ellie might have liked her tea strong enough to stand up and sing opera, but he preferred water overall.

"So you noticed," Ellie said.

"That it turns into the north pole every time you and Sarah are in the same room? Kind of hard to miss."

Ellie wrinkled her nose.

"Seriously, El, what happened?"

"I kicked her out. Not that she's really been in Burbank long enough for it to matter."

"Why?"

"Because she lied to you, Chuck! And then she and Casey refused to tell me everything that was going on, and I had to do something." Ellie shot a vicious glare at the same closed doorway Chuck had been eyeing on and off throughout their conversation. "I don't understand why you wanted her here."

"Because."

"But she knows how to control you."

"She does," Chuck said. Finally, he sighed and peeled off one of the finger-less gloves he'd been wearing all day, even under his thicker gloves in Siberia. On the back of his hand was a symbol in blue ink. The skin around it was cherry red.

Ellie stared at the tattoo in horror. "What the hell is that?"

"The Intersect," Chuck said, as he rolled his sleeve up, revealing a second image similar to the first on the top of his wrist and then a third an inch farther up his arm, "is a little like Project Lincoln. In fact, Lincoln stole a lot of the Intersect technologies to make it work. They both work on stimuli, though the Intersect tends to focus on visual pattern recognition and Lincoln on aural pattern recognition. In doing some of my research, I discovered that the Intersect had a series of triggers, too."

"Triggers to what?"

Chuck shrugged. "I'm not entirely sure. They're flashes of embedded information. The creator—" Orion, his brain said, chiding him for ignoring that fact. The creator's name was Orion, and Orion had contacted him. Orion could remove the Intersect. "—obviously meant them for something, but I've no idea what."

Ellie picked up Chuck's hand again, this time to get a closer look. "These trigger a flash every time?"

"Yes." Chuck avoided looking at his hand. He was tired from the traveling and keeping in check. Even if the Intersect hadn't started causing headaches after his fight with Kohl, flashing when he was tired always hurt a little worse. "The first is a pretty dated map of the Paris métro. The others are an old data-file on some obsolete NASA codes and the recipe to New Coke."

Ellie blinked.

"Yeah, I don't get it, either. But I found them during my research and the Intersect cancels out any Lincoln programming, so..."

"So you have safeguards," Ellie said, her voice wondering now. "That's...kind of brilliant, little brother."

"Thanks. I need to come up with something a little more practical than the gloves, though. Do you know how often you look at your hands? It's a lot." Chuck took his hand back and pulled the glove on, grimacing a little. The tattoos were still fresh enough to hurt. "It's not enough, but it's something."

"It's more than you should have to do."

"Maybe. And don't worry about Sarah."

"Why the hell not? She lied—"

"She had her reasons."

"She was a spy following orders?"

Chuck closed his eyes for a moment. There was always the doubt that Ellie was right, creeping up like black poison, as it had those first weeks on the run. Sarah had lied to him. She could be lying to him about anything. About everything.

She wasn't. It might have made him as idealistic and short-sighted as Luke Skywalker, but Chuck had to believe something had been real. "She did everything she did for me, not for the bosses. It's enough for me."

Ellie went quiet for a long time, watching him with her arms crossed over her chest. "You have put a remarkable amount of trust in a woman who literally has the ability to turn you into a lapdog with a simple comment."

Chuck scowled. "And who's the one that told you she could do that?"

Ellie faltered. "She did," she said.

"Right. So: drop it," he said.

"Chuck—"

"She had her reasons for doing what she did. You may not agree with them, and that's fine. But it's enough for me."

Ellie sighed. "I don't want to see her break your heart again, Chuck. When you disappeared..."

"That was my decision. And it was my choice to come back. And so far, it's been my choice how I've come back. If that changes, so will everything else, but until then, I'm going to go forward as I see fit." Chuck pushed the weak tea away from him. He'd rather have something stronger, but he wasn't going to search around for it. Besides, alcohol was off-limits. Alcohol lowered the defenses.

"So what are you going to do?"

"I'm going to meet with Beckman," Chuck said. "And then I'll decide what to do from there."

"Are you going to run again?"

Chuck stared at the closed door. "Only if I have to."

15 MAY 2008
HOTEL IZMAILOVO GAMMA-DELTA
02:16 MSK

Chuck picked up the black queen and fitted it onto the red king. He'd attempted to sleep: it would be yet another long day of travel the next day, and he needed the rest. But sleep was just something not in abundance these days, which was how he'd found himself wandering from the room he was sharing with Casey and into the empty dining/living room of the suite. He hadn't wanted to watch TV for fear of waking up his restless spy roommates, so he'd rummaged quietly through drawers until he'd unearthed a deck of cards.

This was his sixty-fourth game of Solitaire. He'd lost most of them.

He turned over three cards, spotted a two that could be put onto an ace. It led to a chain reaction of filling up three of the four ace slots. Each card was placed neatly on the proper stack.

They would arrive in Washington D.C. late in the evening. His meeting with General Beckman was set for the day after that. Gwen Davenport had already assured him via email that she would be there.

Chuck turned over three more cards. Nothing. He turned over three more.

Gwen Davenport had sounded spitting mad at the government in the emails she'd sent, once those had begun to arrive. It hadn't taken them long to realize that Chuck was checking his emails on his journey. Any attempts to trace these emails, however, had bounced all agents to a Pizza Express in Chicago. Chuck had heard great things about this restaurant on Yelp. He only figured it was a nice opportunity to let the agents get a bite to eat before they had to report failure to their bosses.

Casey had sent a couple "Where are you, moron?" emails. Chuck had sent postcards from Southeast Asia back.

He put a jack on the aforementioned queen and tapped a finger against it. The Jack of Hearts. His deck in the bunker had been missing that card. Chuck had eventually had to incinerate the deck, as it meant he couldn't play a proper game of Solitaire again.

The door behind him opened. The silence that followed told him exactly who had awoken. After a second, Sarah cleared her throat. "Chuck? What are you doing awake?"

"Hi," he said, keeping his face and his voice modulated. He glanced over his shoulder. She hadn't worn his old Stanford shirt to bed. In fact, he didn't recognize her pajamas at all, which meant they were probably new. He stood, though he had no idea why. He needed to stand. "I, ah, I didn't wake you, did I?"

"No, not at all." Hesitantly, Sarah ventured forward. "What are you doing?"

Chuck shrugged, looking down at the cards in front of him. "Playing Solitaire."

"Couldn't sleep?"

"Not really. If you want the room, I can go—I don't want to be in your way."

"It's a big room," Sarah said. "I'm sure the both of us can fit."

Chuck swallowed. "Right," he said. He sat down and began to gather the cards, scooping them into stacks, straightening the piles, making sure each card lined up before he added it to the master stack. He didn't look at Sarah, even when she walked by him to get a glass of water.

Even when she sat down at the table across from him.

His heart was hammering again. It was nerves and a thousand other things that he couldn't identify.

Finally, the cards had been gathered.

"No Go Fish tonight, huh," Sarah said.

"I don't want to play games with you," Chuck said. He set them off to the side and grimaced. He hadn't meant to infuse a double-meaning into his words.

Sarah cringed. "That's fair," she said. Chuck looked down, ashamed and afraid and angry, wanting to never look at her again and desperately needing not to look away. He saw her hand begin to reach across the table, as Ellie's had, and draw back, as if uncertain. "Chuck..."

"Yes?" he asked.

"Would you please look at me?"

Chuck lifted his head.

Sarah met his gaze. She'd lost weight. Chuck had noticed that earlier, but in the sleep-shirt and the pajama pants, she seemed almost gaunt. It hurt, knowing that he'd caused that. Some evil sliver of him felt vindictive and justified—she'd suffered, too, he wasn't alone—and he wanted to look down in shame for that. There were lines of exhaustion on her face, lines that probably matched his. But she never looked away.

"I'm sorry," she said, quietly. "I'm sorry for everything. I'm sorry for my part in what they did to you. I figure you won't forgive me, and I don't expect you to, but I want you to know that I am so incredibly sorry."

Chuck had expected—actually, he didn't know what he'd expected. But whatever it was, it had never really been an apology. Maybe he had figured she would start scolding him as she had at the Grand Canyon, as Ellie had almost from the minute he'd entered the hotel room. With Sarah, he had no idea. It wasn't as though she'd given him much of anything but the impassive Agent Walker mask earlier. Some of that probably had to do with Ellie and the fallout of his leaving and her actions, but it meant that Chuck didn't have a clue what was going on inside Sarah's head.

The mask was gone now. Sarah's expression wasn't pleading, or angry, or any of the things he'd wondered about seeing. All he found was pain and quiet sincerity. One discomfited him a great deal more than the other.

"I get it," he said.

"Even so." Sarah shook her head. "Even so, I'm sorry, Chuck."

"I saw the briefing. The first one, the one where you..." Chuck gestured, a bit helplessly, not wanting to say it aloud. It hurt and it burned, and he felt a piece of that rage that he tried to bury begin to slither out.

Sarah obviously tried for a smile, but her expression became more of a grimace. "Tried to kill Frank?" she asked.

"Yeah." He'd watched it the night after Barcelona, cracking through all of Dave's extra security around Castle from an internet café in Seville. He hadn't wanted to—intruding on Sarah's privacy like he had with the briefing between her and General Beckman felt wrong, no matter how badly she'd hurt him—but he'd acknowledged that he couldn't afford to be blind to what Sarah knew about him. He needed to know exactly what she knew, and so he'd hacked into Castle's mainframe, broken through the protocols, and had watched every minute of Graham telling Sarah that Chuck was part of a Joint Ops experiment using subliminal training on soldiers that might get captured by terrorists and sent into solitary confinement. According to Graham, Chuck had volunteered to undergo the training, and maybe that was the truth. Maybe he had signed up for Lincoln.

It wasn't like he remembered anything.

Graham had listed four phrases to Sarah, phrases that would control Chuck. Chuck had watched Agent Walker accept all of this with a nod. And after that, he had watched Sarah walk into the dojo and pound so hard on Frank that there were still indents on the dummy's face.

The entire time, Chuck had been in his new office upstairs. Oblivious.

He sighed and picked up the cards, but he didn't deal. He merely held onto the cards. "Was that the only one?"

"The only briefing? No, he had follow-up questions. Progress reports." Sarah scowled.

Progress reports, Chuck thought. Just like those she'd had to endure with Beckman about the whole "Keep the Intersect in check" initiative.

"But he never told me anything more than the four original phrases. And I never told him the full truth in the follow-ups. I don't think he suspected anything, but..." Sarah made a helpless gesture and fiddled with her water glass.

Chuck nodded. "Thank you," he said.

Sarah looked up. "For what?"

"For being honest with me."

"Oh." Now it seemed Sarah was the one unable to look up. "I heard you talking to Ellie earlier."

Chuck's stomach twisted.

"Thank you for defending me to her. Though I don't deserve it. And I think you know that."

"If I really thought you were out to control me, I wouldn't have come back."

"What..." Sarah swallowed in the middle of her sentence. "What are you going to do now, Chuck? You wouldn't come back without a plan."

"No. I wouldn't."

One of Sarah's eyebrows rose, and the move inspired yet another bout of homesickness, this time staggering in its strength. "Well?" she asked.

Chuck set the cards down. "I'm going to talk to Beckman on Friday. Gwen's told me the government wants to buy my silence. They can't kill any of the Lincoln subjects without killing all of us. And that would be very bad for them."

"You pulled the Greece bluff again," Sarah said, frowning.

He hadn't known she was calling it that, but he nodded. "Forewarned is forearmed. Either way, they can't touch any of us, so they're going to buy my silence, and I'm going to take their money, build a house up in the mountains, and I'm going to stay there alone, far away from society and keep everybody safe."

It was the first time he'd voiced the full plan. He imagined he'd feel a sense of relief, or sadness, or contentment now that somebody knew what he was going to do. He felt nothing but empty.

Sarah, on the other hand, gave him an assessing look. "And?" she asked at length.

"That's it."

"That's...it."

"You were the one that taught me the value of a simple plan."

"I see." Sarah finished the rest of her water and met his eyes. "I know it doesn't count for much, but whatever plan you have, if that's what you really want, I'll help you."

"Thank you."

"It's the least I can do, after everything I did to you."

So formal, Chuck thought. She had become so stiff and odd and formal, just like he'd forced himself to become in his time in the bunker. It was like they were the marionette versions of the Chuck and Sarah from months before, when Prometheus had been in full swing and when Chuck's life had been a lie.

Since they were being formal anyway, he might as well get this over with. "I'm sorry I ran away from you and Casey in Barcelona. I know you guys probably got in trouble with the bosses over that."

"It's fine."

"It's just that...I didn't know then what you knew and there's these pieces of me that aren't me." Chuck gestured at his head, vaguely. "It's not just that there are phrases that can make me do things I can't control, it's that my whole brain is not mine."

"Chuck, you needed time."

"I never wondered, you know. Not seriously, anyway, about why I never bothered to get to the bottom of the bunker thing. And that's strange, given that I researched any and every little detail of every case we ever received as a team. I thought about everything: Casey, Ellie, Awesome. You. I thought about you a lot."

Sarah looked down.

"But when it came to me, I just assumed. And yeah, I know now that I was conditioned not to think about anything like that. So I didn't, and now I'm this trained dog and I still don't know which thoughts I think because I thought them, or which thoughts some mad scientist with a tendency toward megalomania thought up for me. It took me two weeks in the bunker to focus on finding everything I could about Lincoln."

Those had been a hard two weeks. His body had been on the verge of collapsing from shock and exhaustion, and his brain had been slippery. Every time he'd thought hard about Carver, trying to remember the years where he'd thought he'd been in a bunker, the thoughts had begun to slip away from him. The harder he'd held onto them, the faster they'd slid from his grasp. He'd learned rote and routine helped, as did having a focal point.

He clenched his fist as hard as he could now, released the tension in his fingers one by one. It grounded him.

"I think the one thing you've proven over time, Chuck," Sarah said, her voice slow and measured, and Chuck looked at her, "is that whatever they throw at you, the things that make you Chuck are always going to overpower those."

His heart thudded once, hard, against his sternum. It grew a lot harder to breathe, though he forced himself to remain steady. "Do you think so? I wish I could feel the same way."

"Can I ask you a question?"

Chuck nodded.

"What do you want from me? Why tell Beckman that I needed to be involved at all?"

"I needed people I can trust."

"But how? Knowing what I know..."

"Sarah, I get why you did what you did." Chuck finally gave into the stress and the exhaustion and rubbed his hands over his face. He was tired, even if his heart was still thumping adrenaline through his system. "I wish you'd told me, but I get it."

"I was going to. I know that doesn't matter, not now, but when I went away, I was..." Sarah tugged at her hand, fidgeting now. "I was trying to figure out how to tell you."

"Tell me that I was a patient in isolation testing?"

"It's worse than that." Sarah took a deep breath. "Nobody told me anything official, but there were signs that pointed to it being more than basic isolation conditioning. Basic isolation conditioning shouldn't ingrain you with common spy habits, or make you a perfect shot."

"Why are you telling me this?"

"Because I don't want to keep this to myself anymore. I'm sick of it. I did that for months, and no more. I'll help you get that big house in the mountains, but I'm not keeping any more secrets for anybody. Including you."

The sudden fire in her eyes had him taking a deep, shaky breath of his own. "That's fair. I won't ask you to."

"So I knew it was something more and I chose not to see it, even though there were signs."

"It's okay," Chuck said. "I don't blame you."

"You should."

"It's a lousy situation overall. Which is why I'm coming back, I'm getting the money, and I'm going to the mountains. You can go back to being the kick-ass spy, Casey can go do whatever Marines-y thing he does, and this whole thing can be over."

Sarah's face fell for just a split second, but she nodded, her lips disappearing as she bit them. "Of course," she said in a neutral voice. "Whatever you want, Chuck, we're all in this with you."

"Thank you."

"Well…" Sarah stood and deposited her water glass in the sink. She wouldn't look directly at his face, though she did turn toward him. "You should get some sleep. We could both use it."

"Okay."

"I'm glad you're back, and that you're safe."

Chuck merely nodded. She was almost to her bedroom door before his nerves finally kicked into gear. He turned, suddenly. "Sarah?"

"Yes?" She didn't turn, but he could see the tension in her body, just like Ellie's earlier.

"I have to ask. Did you ever…" Please say no, Chuck thought. He wanted her desperately to say no, though what would that do? It would make things even more complicated than they already were if she'd never used any of the phrases on him, as that would spur more guilt that he felt over everything. But if she said no, would it be the truth? He wouldn't know any differently. "Did you ever use any of the phrases? On me?"

Sarah stood still for so long that he nearly repeated the question. Finally, she turned around. "Yes," she said. "I did. Once."

His heart crashed to his feet. It hurt worse than he thought it would. His hands began to shake again, so he slid them under the table, out of her view. She had to catch it—the woman saw everything—but she didn't say anything. "When?" Chuck asked.

Sarah bit her lips again and turned away, this time to brush at her cheek before the tear could fall. Her eyes were too bright when she looked back. "At the motel, when Fulcrum was closing in. You were—you weren't in good shape, and then you started coughing and I was scared you were going to pass out. I didn't know what to do and we didn't have any time. So I used the calming phrase Graham gave me."

He vaguely remembered the Heartbrake Hotel, and coughing, but he didn't remember Sarah saying anything to him. But then, he didn't really remember much about what had happened in his own apartment with Carver. His mind logically knew that phrases had been used during the encounter, but those were even more slippery than his thoughts from the bunker.

"I see," he said. He felt his body deflate, as though his sinew and tendons had stopped working. She'd used Lincoln programming on him. He'd known she probably had—she'd spent four months dealing with his agoraphobia and the other thousands of things that kept him from functioning, it only made sense—but the truth still felt like a blade slipped between his ribs. And now he didn't even have doubt to counter that.

"I'm sorry," Sarah said, and swiped at her face again. She shifted her feet, looking annoyed at herself for crying, but the tears just continued to fall. "There's nothing I can say or do to prove it to you, but I'm sorry."

He forced his head up and when that worked, made himself stand up. His body felt like a marionette as he walked himself to the other doorway, the one opposite Sarah's. He needed to get out of that room and sleep or try to escape this hurt.

But at the doorway, he stopped. "Thank you," he said, not looking at Sarah.

Her voice sounded fearful. "For what?"

"For being honest with me." He pushed open the door and disappeared into his room. He didn't collapse onto the bed like he wanted to. Instead, he leaned back against the closed door and stared into the darkness. On one of the full-sized beds, Casey turned over in his sleep, but didn't wake. Chuck stayed where he was.

No matter how much he understood things, it didn't stop the truth from hurting.

And it wouldn't, not for a long, long time.

15 MAY 2008
EN ROUTE TO DULLES
21:09 EDT

Chuck knew that Casey and Sarah were watching him. He did his best to ignore that. They'd watched him, studying him, waiting for him to make some sort of move, all through Charles de Gaulle airport, on the plane stateside. Gwen Davenport had arranged transportation with a group of returning FBI agents, so it was Dr. Bartowski, Mr. Bartowski, Agent Walker, and Major Casey tucked in among what seemed like a bunch of Agent Sandersons and Smiths and Johnsons, and one Agent Lynch. Chuck gave the latter a wide berth.

The FBI agents didn't talk much. Chuck figured they were all exhausted from whatever conference they'd just attended. Most helped themselves to the wet bar. Chuck drank orange juice, watched the others, and pretended not to notice Casey and Sarah watching him.

He glanced at the open file on Ellie's tray table. "Prometheus stuff," she said, without looking up at him. She fiddled with the corner of her reading glasses, and he understood that she was looking at something to do with the Intersect. "Beckman released a bunch of new tests results last week. What with all of the traveling, I hadn't had a chance to review them yet."

Chuck looked at the brain scans. "What do they say?"

Ellie moved a shoulder. "That you're smart. Your preference in card games aside."

"Ouch." He forced a laugh. Nerves had settled like an unwelcome brick in his midsection, as they were only an hour from landing. So far, there hadn't been any signs of interference from the government. Part of him almost wanted to hope that Beckman had fully listened to his demands in a way that she never had before.

He sneaked a look at Sarah and looked down just as quickly.

"Have they uncovered anything interesting? Anything having to do with..."

"There were anomalies. Here." Ellie scooted over, pulling a scan from the file. That was his brain, Chuck realized, staring at the grainy mass on the print. It looked a bit like their great Aunt Edith's not-very-appetizing grape salad.

"Your temporal lobe shows these anomalies here and here," Ellie said, circling two things on the picture with her pen. Chuck could see absolutely no differences, but he also hadn't sweated through medical school and everything that followed. "At first, we assumed they were to do with the," her voice dropped, "Intersect, but the Intersect's more of a visual interface rather than an aural one."

"So those are Lincoln related," Chuck said grimly, staring at the red circles.

"We think so. It's hard to tell. If you'll look at this one..." Ellie pulled out another scan. "Intersect programming and Lincoln programming, as far as I can tell, work on the same neural pathways. Most of it seems to be stored in the pre-frontal cortex, and it controls the amygdala from there, as far as we can tell. There was a lot of activity when we did our tests a few months ago, but most of the others dismissed that due to the Intersect being new to a human brain."

"But you think differently?"

"I think it's all a big jumbled mess, and I need another look at your head, little brother."

Chuck went still. Getting his brain tested had never been part of his plan in returning. It meant more time with the government, and he didn't want that.

But before he could say anything, the seat-belt lights blinked and the captain came on over the loudspeaker to let them know they were going into their final descent. All tray tables and loose luggage should be stowed.

"Who's meeting us at the airport?" Chuck asked, as he adjusted his seatbelt. Across the aisle, Sarah turned the page in her Sky Mall. "Devon, right?"

"Yes. He's rented a minivan so we'll all fit."

"Devon with a minivan," Chuck said, and the image almost made him want to smile. The nerves sitting leaden inside him, however, wouldn't allow that. He'd glanced at Ellie's finger the night before: still bare. "Go figure."

Ellie just gave him a look. Chuck finished his orange juice and handed it to the flight attendant who came around to collect trash, and conversation stopped. He looked out the window, watching the field of light pinpricks against the dark land grow bigger the nearer they drew to D.C. His meeting with Beckman was in less than twelve hours, and it would be, as the saying went, time to face the music.

He felt vaguely like throwing up again. It didn't help that he hadn't slept at all, just overturning and revisiting every word he'd said to Sarah, every word Sarah had said to him. His determination, made in the bunker, to stay in control of himself and his surroundings, absolute control, had frayed around the edges. He needed a moment to himself to gather his bearings. He wouldn't get that moment.

They landed in D.C. Casey led the way through the airport, posture perfectly erect in a way that told Chuck he was treating Dulles like enemy territory. Chuck trailed after him, carrying only his pack. Every step seemed to tighten the knot between his shoulder blades further. So much space, he thought, where the enemy could be hiding, waiting to whisper to him and waiting to control him.

He nudged the cloth "bandage" he kept wrapped around his wrist up, but didn't look at the symbol still outlined by angry red flesh on his arm. Sarah remained in his peripheral vision, not too close, and he could tell that she remained as watchful as Casey.

What a group they made.

Vigorous waving made the three agents tense, but it was only Devon, wearing cargo shorts and a UCLA shirt. Ellie broke free of the group and ran up to him, laughing. They did one of those swinging-around-in-a-circle hugs that Chuck had only seen in movies.

He felt twin pangs of envy and happiness for his sister. After a second, he pushed himself forward to greet Devon.

Whatever everybody else's reactions had been, Devon didn't disappoint him. "Chuck! Hey! You're back!" He held his hand out for a handshake and pulled Chuck into one of those back-pounding fraternity hug-hybrids. "I'm so glad you're okay, dude."

"Good to see you, Devon," Chuck said, completely honest. He managed to work up a smile.

"Like the fuzz, dude. Very bohemian." Devon stroked his own stubbled chin. "What do you think, El, would I look—"

"No," Ellie said, though she was smiling and laughing. "I like you just the way you are, honey."

Devon spotted the other members of their party. "Sarah! John! Hey!" Hugs were distributed all around. Chuck's eyes narrowed a bit. Was Devon...nervous? It was hard to tell with his sister's boyfriend, as Chuck didn't really think Devon had experienced much apprehension in that ridiculous bubble of handsomeness he called existing, but... "Good flight?" Devon asked.

"It was okay. Apart from the Feebs," Casey said.

"The whats?"

"We hopped a ride with the FBI," Sarah said, obviously attempting to sound normal for Devon's sake. Chuck still heard the tiniest waver in her voice. "Casey's not really that great at making friends."

"I make friends just fine, Walker. Excuse me a second." Casey headed for the men's room. After a moment, Chuck shrugged and followed. It might be a long drive to the hotel, and he'd had a lot of orange juice on the flight.

He emerged a couple of minutes later to find Sarah standing by herself, next to a gathering crowd. Concern immediately made him want to rush forward, but he checked his movement. He nudged the bandage up another inch. "What's going on?"

Sarah glanced briefly at him and then away. "You should see for yourself," she said, her voice cryptic, and jerked her head at the crowd.

Wary, he skirted around until he could get a look at whatever the crowd had gathered to see. His jaw nearly dropped: the crowd had formed a circle around Devon and Ellie. Devon was on one knee. Ellie had both hands over her mouth, her eyes wide as she stared at Devon and the ring box in his hand.

He caught only the tail end. "...do me the honor of marrying me, Eleanor Faye Bartowski?" Devon asked.

"Yes, oh, my God, yes, of course." Ellie threw herself at Devon as he rose, knocking him back a full step. He only laughed and swung her around, looking very much like his every dream in the world had come true.

Chuck watched, feeling both happy and hollow. A movement at his elbow told him Sarah had joined him. Around them, people clapped and cheered, whistling for the complete strangers they'd just seen get engaged in an international airport. After a moment, Chuck joined in.

His sister was getting married.

"That's really nice," Sarah said, surprising Chuck. She wasn't looking at him, but at Devon and Ellie, who were kissing and laughing. "They deserve some happiness."

"Yeah," Chuck said.

"Though if this ends up on the news, Beckman's going to be pissed."

"Oh well."

"Yeah."

Devon looked over and spotted him, his grin growing even wider. "Chuck! Bro—hey, now I get to mean that literally."

He pasted on an appropriate smile and hugged first Ellie and then Devon as the crowd began to disperse. The "I'm happy for you" and "This is amazing" was easy to say, at least, as both statements were true. "Though did you really have to wait until I went to the bathroom, Awesome?"

"Dude, it just happened. I looked at her and I knew. I can't live one more minute without your sister."

"Ew, don't go into detail, please. I'm happy for you both."

"And now that you're back," Ellie said, eyes shining, "life can go on."

Chuck wasn't so sure about that. But he smiled and nodded and didn't look at Sarah.

A/N the Second: if anybody needs me, I'll be crying in the corner. Ciao!