Usual disclaimer, no rights to any characters.
Sarah stood in the shadows at Molly's father daughter dance and watched her husband with her adopted sister and her friends, at least Molly's friends were still dressed tonight, most times when they came over for soccer practice at the Castle they ended up in the pool, and half of them always "forgot" to bring their suits, so they'd go for a swim and lay around drying off in their underwear, or just their panties, OK she could see that they were crushing on Chuck, but they didn't need to be so damn obvious about it. Speaking of obvious, the way that Stacy had just climbed into Chuck's lap and was hugging him had definitely crossed the line, so Sarah stepped out into the light and waited the few seconds it took for Chuck to see her and give her his special smile that was just for her. Stacy turned to see what Chuck was smiling at, and then scrabbled out of his lap frantically when she met Sarah's glacial stare. Chuck sent Sarah a thank you look with another smile once Stacy was safely out of his lap. Sarah didn't need to hear them to know what Stacy was saying, but she keyed the bug on Molly to listen in anyway. "Shit Molly, why didn't you tell me that your sister was here, she looks like she wants to kill me!" Molly's innocent response of "Sarah's here?" as she looked around was perfect, as she'd known all along that the only way that she was going to get her night out was with Sarah there to back up Chuck.
Once she'd scared off the would be competition, Sarah went back to watching Chuck with Molly and thinking about what a perfect man she had married. It also made her think about Carina's ongoing need for advice about raising Charlie. As no-one was near her at that point she keyed the communicator to initiate a private link to Carina. When Carina came on she asked what was up, worried that something may be going down. Sarah told her that there was nothing wrong, she just wanted to talk to her about something, then she asked her if she remembered asking them all for tips on how to be a good mother? Carina's response would not have been at all appropriate if said out loud at an event like the one she was currently at, so Sarah grinned and let her go on for a while before she calmed her down and got serious again. She jumped straight into it, telling her that the one person she HAD to listen to on raising Charlie was Ellie, she'd raised the perfect gentleman, someone who would always do the right thing around women, or men for that matter, so there was no better person to give her advice on raising Chuck's son properly than the woman who actually raised Chuck, and for that matter Clara showed that she was pretty damn good at raising daughters, too. Carina laughed at her, telling her that she thought everything to do with Chuck was perfect, but she softly agreed that she was right and thanked her for reminding her, as Ellie had done an incredible job with Chuck (and Clara), and that was part of the reason that everyone loved them.
At that time Chuck caught her eye and waved her over with that smile of his, so she said goodbye and signed off with Carina, and went to have a dance with her husband, they were so wrapped up in each other that they didn't realise that almost every eye in the room was on them, and that they'd crushed or confirmed (mainly crushed) most of the men in the room's hopes for sex that night, because any guy who made any sort of crude or disparaging comments about the couple was written off by their wives or partners as being a useless waste of time for being incapable of recognising something so wonderful and romantic. At the end of the night Chuck left Molly and Sarah at the entrance while he went to get the Shooting Brake. He courteously handed Molly into the car, and kissed Sarah goodbye, telling her that he'd see her at home soon (she'd come in the Odyssey in case that they had any need for secure transport to be available), before taking off to give Molly a wild ride home in her sister's sports car.
Things were fairly quiet at that time around Carmichael Industries, the intel that they got from the BGRU trio (Riley, the erstwhile Ring Director and Jasmine) have ultimately made it possible to scratch several hundred names off the lists that they were keeping watch for (still leaving several thousand yet to be accounted for unfortunately), but of course that was offset by the fact that the mob families affiliated with the one they took down for assisting the trio in coming after them were now trying to organise retaliations against them for that, but they were used to the bad guys of the world gunning for them, that was where they lived. The slack(er) time at least gave them more time to work on the Intersect and genetics research that they'd been chasing down since they got the information out of Graham. Given that Sarah had just been talking to Carina about Charlie, she pointed out that they really should fill her (and Jeff) in on how Graham's breeding plan affected Charlie. Chuck and Ellie agreed immediately, and overruled their father's natural reticence about sharing any information about his family (he would agree once he saw past his standard reaction, so they just saved time by overruling him up front), as Charlie WAS family (he was his grandson), and so were Carina and Jeff.
In a way it was good for Chuck, with Jeff being as much of a sci-fi nut as he was, the common sci-fi element of breeding perfect soldiers (or spies in this case) brought up all the same images in Jeff's mind as they did in Chuck's, so they had fun tossing those references back and forth for a few minutes. Sarah watched them doing that with a smile and noticed how some of Chuck's cares were dropping away from him during the brief interlude. She realised for the first time just how much this was affecting him, having to find out that he, his sister and their children were all the results of some psychopath's twisted plan to breed a new master race. Yes, it affected her that her children were part of this plan and that she'd been dragged into it, too, but she wasn't a direct result of it, while Chuck was, so it sat so much heavier on him than it did on her. That made her start berating herself for not realising this before, as it was so obvious now as she was watching him. She had another thought and gave a wry grin as she realised that the last psychopath who tried to breed a master race like this probably would have tried to wipe out Graham and his entire race if he'd managed to succeed, but overall she was glad that that twisted little bastard had failed too.
As usual when things seemed to be going better, they had to change, when they got a call from the General to come up to DC a few months after they'd finished the mopping up exercise after they dealt with the trio they were trying to work out what it was about. It couldn't be Jack, Sarah was serious when she told him that they'd all agreed that this was his last chance, the first time he tried anything else he was going to be terminated, it could have been about Devon Woodcomb, but the General would have given Ellie the courtesy of being part of the discussion if it was, surely? They spent the flight going through the options, but couldn't think of anything obvious.
When they landed at DC they once again had the General's protection detail waiting for them to whisk them in to her office. She didn't offer them a drink this time, so maybe it wasn't as bad as the Jack situation? Her expression was a pretty good match, though, and she sat there and looked at them for about 30 seconds before she slid a folder across the desk to them. Sarah pulled the folder to her and opened it to read its contents. Her reaction was different this time, much less enraged as she just shrugged and said "Kill him" after spending less than a minute reading, handing the folder over to Chuck.
When he looked at the file, Chuck realised that the situation was in fact very similar to the one with Jack, and was actually potentially worse, Morgan Grimes had come out of the wood work and was trying to sell what he knew to the tabloids, and the problem was that he actually knew far more than Jack did. The standard protocols demanded exactly what Sarah had said, he had to be terminated, but the big question was how to handle the situation without kicking off a media circus.
Chuck didn't take long to come up with a plan, one which (not surprisingly) actually gave Morgan a chance to live, although it was likely that the General or someone else on the government side would insist on a chemical lobotomy to protect the secrets in his head if he was allowed to live.
Chuck's plan meant creating a different "real" identity for Morgan, which left "Morgan Grimes" as a fictitious identity that he'd created for himself in his head. The plan needed Morgan to be someone that no-one would believe, or like, but what he laid out actually shocked the General and Sarah, as Morgan would be Lester Burton, a mentally handicapped and disturbed man who was a serial child molester, he'd managed to get away from the last facility he as in years ago and had immediately re-offended, and he'd been on the run ever since. The names of his victims included Sarah, Alex, Ellie, Diane, Carina, Chuck, Casey, Bryce, Daniel, Mike, Lester, Jeff and a dozen or so more names from the life he'd lived. The back-story on that was that he'd created the spy world fantasy life with the name Morgan Grimes that he lived in, in his head, and all the characters in that world had been named after his victims.
As Chuck was laying it out for them, they could see that it was quite plausible, and would give a reasonable explanation for everything he might say (Carmichael Industries had been in the news a few times when agency people let the name slip, and Chuck and Sarah's actual names had been mentioned as well, so he could have seen them on TV and added that to his fantasy world). Also, the fact that the Buy More, Castle and the Echo Park apartment complex had all ceased to exist almost ten years ago would tear more holes in his credibility, especially considering that he could have seen the Buy More at least on the news when it blew up in the "accident". The plan had a good chance of working, and it was the only way that Morgan could get out of this alive, IF he embraced the crazy/handicapped angle and accepted being incarcerated in a mental asylum for the rest of his life, otherwise the government would most definitely kill him to protect its secrets. Of course they'd need records to cover his entire life to support his ongoing mental and criminal issues, but everyone in the room knew (without discussing it) that Chuck had already created far more convincing records for Stefan, which had stood up to scrutiny several orders of magnitude more stringent than anything regarding Morgan would. The fact that he was going to have to recreate the lives of just about everyone in Clan Carmichael, and lay out records to show their new "actual" life path were another big issue, but he wanted to sit down to discuss it with the others before he wiped out their lives.
Once the General accepted the basis of Chuck's plan, Chuck had to jump onto the most time sensitive aspect of the plan, erasing any and all references to Morgan Grimes that he cold find, and scrubbing all records relating to the Burbank Buy More, as that was the primary reference point for confirmation of anything that he may have told anyone. Therefore, Chuck got himself set up with an office for a couple of hours, logged into the Carmichael Industries systems and created the search (and destroy) engines to locate and eradicate any references to Morgan Grimes ASAP. Then he got into the Buy More systems and scrubbed all employee records and images relating to the Burbank store, replacing them with faux records that disappeared after a few address changes. The fact that the Burbank Buy More disappeared nearly ten years before assisted the process, as there was no requirement to keep records beyond the document retention standard of seven years, therefore the archived records were all that could be expected to be found, so all he had to do was scrub those and insert a false set that went nowhere. Next after that was to get into the real estate systems and remove any references to any Bartowskis or Woodcombs for the rental and purchase records around the Echo Park complex, and of course wipe out all records of the government presence. For completeness, he also inserted records into other systems elsewhere to cover where the Bartowski siblings had supposedly lived for the period, there was far more that had to be done, but what he'd done so far was enough to cut off any early investigations that may have been started. Sarah had been sitting in the office with him, working on her own jobs while he was doing that, so once Chuck had finished what he had to do, they went back to the General's office to fill her in on what he'd done to date and what they'd need from her before they headed home.
On the plane, they talked the whole way home about Chuck's plan. At first Sarah was less than happy about what she saw as him making so much effort to protect the troll that spent five years trying to destroy their relationship because he saw it as something that didn't work for him, but as Chuck explained the reasoning behind his argument, she came around. As Chuck explained, it wasn't really about Morgan (not all of it, anyway), it was only that the situation had came to the fore due to him. They were all at risk if the other side could track them down, that was a given, and the issue of Morgan trying to sell their story to get an easy life for himself just showed how vulnerable they were. So, at this point, with Ellie, Alex, Kathleen and Emma's agreement (as Sarah, Casey, Carina and Zondra already had fabricated backgrounds, courtesy of their spy life, so it wouldn't be an issue for them if the details were changed, he'd mostly just tell them), he was going to have to re-write all their pasts to make it that much harder to track them down.
It did help that Morgan's knowledge of them finished ten years ago, and they'd cut all their ties with their previous lives around that time, because the majority of what he had to do was just to get in and alter old records, wipe out evidence of where they'd lived or worked up to when Morgan was pushed out of their lives, and create the evidence that showed a different life for them. Morgan's Mom and Big Mike could have been a problem, but they'd arranged for a reasonable payout for Big Mike (a reward for his years of "service") when the Buy More blew up in the "accident", and the last they'd heard they were off wandering around the country in an RV, getting freaky, so they were pretty much uncontactable. Another risk was the Woodcombs, and he had to talk to Ellie (as they were still sort of her family by marriage) before they arranged for them to be transferred to other prisons and held incommunicado, so they couldn't be located to support the stories that Morgan may have already told. Once he created the life of Lester Burton and had him arrested and incarcerated in a mental asylum for the crimes he'd done, there wouldn't be much chance of him being listened to (and that was assuming that the government held off on the chemical lobotomy that he expected that they'd order to ensure Morgan couldn't talk about the secrets he had in his head), but he had already talked to an unknown number of media people, and they had to head off any investigations that came out of what he'd said to date, which was why he'd jumped on-line in DC to wipe out all references to Morgan and close off the most obvious connections to them that Morgan would have known about. The proper operation to re-create all their lives (starting with Morgan's) would of course involve much more work.
Chuck stopped to, well, chuckle at that point, telling Sarah that he was going to have to make them both about four or five years younger, when she raised her eyebrow at him he explained that it was commonly mentioned that he'd gone to Stanford, so they couldn't change that, but if he pushed his attendance at Stanford back by four to five years, it would prevent any connections being made to people who may have known him, or Bryce, or Jill. Therefore, as there was no way that his stunning and obviously younger beautiful bride could be older than him on paper, her Harvard records and birth records would need to be pushed back as well. For that matter they'd need to do something similar with Ellie to show that she was still studying when she was supposed to be working at the hospital (and some of the long term people at the hospital who may remember her, or Devon, needed to get a windfall/retire/get a better job offer elsewhere so they weren't around and available to contradict her new life story). And he'd of course wipe out any and all records of Devon Woodcomb's medical career.
Sarah sat back, a little overwhelmed by the scope of the changes that Chuck was planning, and a little ashamed of herself that she'd thought that he was doing all this for that nasty little troll. As soon as they got home Chuck called everyone in for a meeting to fill them in on the situation and explain what his plan was, Casey and the other ex-spies just nodded (as expected) when he explained about re-creating their lives, but the civilians looked confused. Once the others had left, Chuck and Sarah sat down with Ellie, Alex, Kathleen and Emma to explain why they needed to wipe out evidence of key parts of their previous lives and re-write them so that they couldn't be tracked down. Luckily, as the baseline for Clan Carmichael was very bright, none of them had any trouble understanding why this was necessary, but the thought of wiping out their previous lives was difficult for them, so Chuck and Sarah gave them as much time as they needed and calmly answered all of their questions. After a couple of hours of discussion (and more than a few tears), they were all OK with the idea, so after a round of hugs Chuck got to work. As he'd said to Sarah (and the others), the first step was to create and insert the records of Lester, the retarded child molester, to get him picked up and away from anyone who might be inclined to listen to him (Casey took an evil pleasure in that, he still hadn't forgiven the troll for what he'd done to Alex or them, any more than Sarah had).
Once the full image of Lester Burton was created and out there, he went to work on everyone else. Ellie was the most difficult to re-create, as she was the one with the most established legitimate career, in the end Chuck primarily left her later records intact, just altering the back trails of her previous medical history and her academic and birth records, to show that she went through a number of years after she actually did, and to cover the lost years, he fast tracked her medical career due to outstanding achievements (which she would have made if she wasn't trying to juggle life, a career and looking after a brother who'd fallen in a heap when his life didn't turn out the way he expected). For the civilians in the family (and his wife) he went through all his proposals before he put them out there, for the others he just told them, for the most part anyway. Carina loved the fact that she got kicked out of university for sexual misconduct and had to pick up her education at another university, but things like that made the story more believable, especially when he got a few details from her which put her at the university in question doing those things within the proper timeframe, so if people followed that up they were likely to find someone who remembered something about it (it wasn't likely that people would forget anyone as wild and beautiful as Carina).
So Lester was found via an anonymous tip and arrested, he was beaten fairly badly in his arrest as he was arrested by long term cops who hated child molesters, but as they could see that he was retarded (as reported) they held back a little. The commitment process was fairly quick and straight forward, the story he tried to tell the judge matched everything in the medical reports that detailed the fantasy life that he was supposed to be living, so he was committed to a criminal psychiatric facility, and flagged "never to be released" due to his history of repeat offences against children whenever he got out. If he could avoid pissing off the powers that be, and they didn't decide to give him a chemical lobotomy anyway, he'd probably be living better than he had for the past ten years that he'd been on the run, hiding from Casey, Sarah and everyone else. The Woodcombs were quietly transferred and held incommunicado, and reminded that if they ever tried to talk to anyone about the Bartowskis or anything else they thought they knew, that would probably be the last thing they said. So, the situation was apparently contained, the people who could cause trouble for the Clan should be unreachable and therefore they should be able to go on with their lives, that was good, right?
A/N: OK, we seem to have people getting upset because their little buddy is getting a rough deal again, no, I didn't like him, never did, but the scenario here is that Chuck created a situation whereby he, and the secrets in his head, could be safely contained without him having to die immediately because he'd tried to sell the story (including government secrets) for personal profit. Not being stroppy, really, I'm just having trouble understanding how people can't see the good side of that?