A/N It's an info-dump, but I tried to make it a fun info-dump.

"I'm sure he's fine, El."

"He's not here, Mrs. Woodcombe."

"A Marine Colonel and you're babysitting my brother?"

"I want the whole story."

Ellie's eyes bulged. "You…?" Sarah Walker, who couldn't cook one of those wiener things to save her life? She turned to look at John. "But…" An agent? An agent. Who could never seem to commit, would miss dates and cancel at the last minute for no believable reason. The woman who called Chuck because Chuck wouldn't call her. "On…" Station. Her station. Her house, her brother. Was it ever real? Was it ever not real?

Sarah giggled.

Sarah Walker was always serious, quiet, reserved. Her love for Chuck glowed from her face, her eyes, but never before had it found a voice. Sarah Walker, the spy, never giggled. Ellie seized on the sound, the woman. The name. "Bartowski?"

Beckman checked her watch, impressed. Sarah raised her hand, displaying her new jewelry.

"Awesome!" said Devon.

"I'll kill him!" Ellie shrieked. She seized the microphone, the next best thing to grabbing hold of Sarah herself. "How dare he go off and marry you and not tell me! How could he do that to me?"

Someone tapped on the door, and Beckman said, "We're secure."

Sarah sighed, as Casey and Devon between them pried the speaker from Ellie's hands before she crushed it. "Yeah, he knew you'd be upset. But really, we had no choice, and you were already in the air by that time anyway."

"In the air?" It took Ellie a second to remember the last time she was in the air. "You got married this morning?"

"To Hawaii," Sarah clarified. "We got married about nine hours after you did."

What a ghastly, ghastly day. Such a wonderful, miraculous night. "I thought you were breaking up again," said Ellie, confused. "Chuck was so upset…" And then they both disappeared…

Sarah winced. "I tried to tell him at the reception that I wasn't going after all. But then your father came up and said Bryce was in trouble, and you know how Chuck is when his friends are in trouble."

"Bryce? Bryce who?"

Sarah raised her brows in surprise. "Larkin." How many Bryces could one man know?

Ellie growled in mounting anger. That rat bastard traitor. "Since when is Chuck friends with Bryce Larkin?" Wait, isn't he dead? Yes! They were at the funeral.

"Bryce was a spy, too. In fact, he's the one who caused all this trouble in the first place."

"Don't change the subject, Sarah," demanded Ellie, tapping on the table. "Tell me about the wedding."

"Nevada," snapped Sarah, blushing furiously. "Middle of the night, and that's the best that can be said about it. I thought you wanted to know about Chuck."

"Fine," snapped Ellie back. "I'll let you off the hook this time but you owe me, missy!" She sat back, and Devon put an arm around her, not that she seemed to relax one bit. "So, tell me about how Bryce Larkin got Chuck into trouble. Again."

Sarah actually seemed relieved. "Six and a half years ago, Bryce Larkin got Chuck kicked out of school to save his life."

"To do what?"

"The CIA had a program there. Bryce was already recruited, and when he found out how well Chuck did on certain tests he framed him in order to keep the CIA from picking him up too."

"But why? Chuck's loyal, patriotic. He would have loved the opportunity to serve…"

Casey grunted a firm yes.

"Loyal patriotism would only get him so far, Ellie," said Sarah. "The first time he would have had to draw his gun in anger would have been his last." Sarah sat forward, doing something with her computer, and suddenly the screen showed an academic office, with two men. One had his back to the camera, but the other was clearly a very young, very upset Bryce. "You can't put him out in the field! He won't survive!" The screen froze in mid-shout, and Sarah came back on. "Bryce wanted to prevent that, prevent the CIA from ever discovering Chuck, so he had to discredit the tests, which ended up getting Chuck expelled."

The end did not justify those means! "So…so, on the off chance that my brother might become an agent–?"

"No off chance about it, Ellie," said Sarah, shaking her head. He would have been an agent, he just wouldn't have been Chuck. "You have no idea what your brother can do, what he has done."

Ellie knew damned well what he hadn't done. "Has he drawn a gun in anger? Has he killed anyone, or even hurt anyone?"

"He refuses even to touch them," said Sarah. "And even if he didn't, I wouldn't let him, and neither would Casey."

"Moron would probably shoot his own toe off," grumbled Casey.

Sarah tried to smother a grin, not quite successfully.

What's that all about? "You couldn't have trained him?" asked Ellie. Why was she asking, it's not like she wanted them to.

"She would have killed me if I tried," said Casey. "Anyway, she was the AOS, she made the call."

"Sounds to me like she made the same call," said Devon.

"Actually, it was our call, Dr. Woodcombe," said the General. "Director Graham's and mine. In our view Chuck was either an enemy or an asset, and in neither case did we want him given that kind of training."

"I'm gonna go get some coffee, El. You want some?" He pointedly excluded the people in the room who disrespected his bro-in-law.

She shook her head, and he got out from between her and General Beckman. "How could you think he was an enemy? He's no one's enemy."

"Bryce Larkin," said Sarah. "He went rogue, stole some critical software and sent it to Chuck. I was tasked by the CIA to get it back."

"Why Chuck?" Just to mess with his life some more? Ellie shook her head, that was too petty even for Bryce.

"No one knows," said Sarah. "Bryce said he stole it to keep it safe from a rogue agency inside the CIA, and he did, but no one knows why Chuck got it, especially after all the lengths Bryce went to, to keep Chuck out of our sight."

"I still say his thumb slipped." Casey held up his hand to Ellie. "Chuck, CIA, Chuck, CIA," he said, moving his thumb up and down. "Honest mistake, considering he was bleeding out at the time."

Not the only mistake. "You thought Chuck was a spy? That he was in it with Bryce?"

"That's what I was sent to find out."

Ellie gave her a strange look. "And that took you longer than five minutes?"

Sarah smiled. "Less, actually." Her gaze went away for a moment, someplace nice and warm, but then it came back. "I knew he wasn't a traitor, but I still had to get the software back, not to mention I knew Casey was coming."

Casey shifted uncomfortably, edging away from Ellie, trying to make it look like he was just letting Devon through with his coffee. "Gee, thanks, Walker."

"It's Bartowski, Colonel," snapped Sarah, not at all nice or warm. "Get it right or you'd better stay in California."

"Don't threaten me, Bartowski," he said. "With you two gone the only worthwhile thing in this whole godforsaken state is the Reagan museum and I've already seen that." He snuck a look at Ellie and her husband. "No offense."

"You'll find it pretty hard to offend me right now, John," said Ellie, her voice deceptively soft, her eyes hard. "You came here to kill my brother, didn't you?"

Casey sighed. He knew it had to come up sooner or later. "Not my first choice," he said. "I was supposed to drag him back to DC and throw him in a hole. Wouldn't have minded killing Walker, though."

"With only six men, Casey?" Sarah scoffed.

"You're not upset?" asked Ellie.

Sarah shook her head. "Just insulted."

Devon put his coffee down, hands trembling at all this casual talk of killing. Not awesome. "Why kill her?"

"Why not? Her partner steals the Intersect and she goes looking for it? I wasn't about to take any chances."

Devon looked at Sarah. "Bryce was your partner? You and Jill? Poor Chuck."

Sarah smirked. "He has no regrets."

As Devon's imagination ran wild, his wife stayed down to Earth. "Wait a minute. This Intersect thing. You got it back, didn't you? Chuck's no thief, all you had to do was ask him for it. So why are you still here?"

All the government agents in the room traded glances, none of them willing to tell her it was complicated.

RHIP. "Dr. Woodcombe," said the General.

"Please, call me Ellie."

"Thank you," said Beckman. "The Intersect was originally just a super-sophisticated data-miner. It had two parts, the computer and the data, but it wasn't as successful as we'd hoped. A technique was discovered for using the human brain to do much the same work, so we created a second version of the project, the Intersect proper, only with human hosts rather than a computer. The secrets were encoded into visual images, for ease of retention, but …there were snags."

"She means our people couldn't handle it," said Casey, who hadn't been part of the project at that time but remembered what happened in Meadow Branch clearly enough. "They either couldn't remember anything, or they died, or they went nuts." He briefly reconsidered his words. "Mostly they went nuts."

"And Bryce stole the computer?"

"He blew up the computer," said Sarah. "He stole the data. It was all gathered and encoded, a perfect target. That's what he sent to Chuck, every secret we had in thousands of images, and Chuck saw them all. We couldn't get them back because they were all in him."

"He always has had a good memory," said Ellie weakly.

"He has the most perfect memory ever discovered," said Beckman. "Bryce knew that, and used it."

Ellie got mad again. "Used Chuck. Could have killed Chuck, or driven him mad."

"But he didn't, Ellie," said Sarah, focusing on the positive. "Bryce was right. Chuck is the perfect host. He is the Intersect."

"An untrained, nerd, civilian host."

"That didn't stop him using a computer virus to defuse a bomb, did it?" asked Sarah, fiercely protective of her husband's heroism. "Or fly a helicopter like it was one of his video games. The Intersect never got us out of any of the trouble it got us into, Chuck did."

Ellie's hands shook at the mere thoughts, years after the fact. "He what? And where were you?"

"Which time? We were standing right next to him and the bomb, but neither of us was in the helicopter. I had to talk him through that one."

"Better you than me," muttered Casey.

"Yes, it was," snarked Sarah back. She looked at Ellie mildly. "Casey's not the most patient person in the world."

Any other day that'd be funny. "I thought you were here to keep him safe?"

"Believe me, I tried," said Casey. "We all did. The only thing faster than lightspeed is Chuck to the rescue." Everyone stopped to look at him. "What?"

"Did you just make a nerd joke, John?" asked Devon.

Casey groaned, and slapped a hand over his eyes. "All those bugs, all those inane conversations with Morgan." He split his fingers, peered out at his boss. "I don't suppose you can use that Intersect computer of yours to delete?"

"You're a Colonel," said Beckman, smiling. "Suck it up."

"Unless you want to go back to being a Major again," added Sarah.

"You bugged his room?"

"Yes. And your room too, and no I didn't see anything. I'm a professional intelligence officer, not some damn peeping Tom," said Casey. "I bugged the whole complex, that's why we're having this conversation here, it's already secure. The second we leave all those nice men in suits will be clearing them all out."

Ellie's face fell. "We're leaving? Today?"

"We are, Doctor," said Beckman. "If we can ever get this miserable excuse for a briefing finished, that is. You'll have a few weeks to wind up your affairs here and then you will follow."

"Follow where?" asked Devon. "We can't just leave, I've got patients. We need a place to live, we need jobs."

"We can help you with all of that, Doctor. There are many hospitals in the Washington area that can use a heart surgeon of your expertise."

Not good enough. "What about Ellie?"

She's mine. "I've got a rabbit hole with her name on it."

"Then I'm coming too."

Only one person gave those kind of orders in that room. "You'll come when we call, Doctor, and not before. This team is remarkably adept at avoiding injury, but best to be prepared."

"I thought I was supposed to be the doctor on call?" said Ellie, taking a sip of Devon's coffee.

"You're a researcher, correct?" At Ellie's nod, Beckman continued, "Then you will do research. We'll create a dummy consultancy for you, but you'll be working directly for us."

"On what?"

"On the Intersect, naturally. It's far from perfect, and the scientist who created it has vanished. Again. We need you to come in and finish what Orion started, for your brother's sake."

Oh, God! Ellie pushed back against her husband, and his arms went around her as they always had. She took strength and comfort from them, as she always would. "What makes you think I can? This 'Orion' must ten kinds of genius to make this thing, what makes you think I'm even worthy to eat his dust, much less walk in his footsteps?"

RHIP. "Because you're his daughter."

A/N2 I think I did a little bit of retconning here, but the mythology of the show is so full of holes I hope I can be forgiven for filling some of them in my way. It'll be worse when I get up to explaining Volkoff, I think.