A/N If memory serves, I got the inspiration for this chapter from the Chuck This Blog. I got a lot of inspiration from there, as I was writing many of these chapters while they were engaged in discussions about the episodes. One of the big issues in the series was whether Bryce's character and motivations could ever be lined up in any kind of coherent fashion, with many people claiming the answer was no. I decided to prove them wrong.

Casey came around the corner, bag in hand, looking at the open and empty cell B. "Where's Grimes?"

"Secret Service came and got him, said something about how he needed a new suit for his dinner with the President." Carina stood and walked up to the door. "What's that smell? Is this some sadistic new torture, are you a sadist, Casey, bringing a bag of greasy disgusting take-out when you know I haven't eaten all day?"

Casey waved the bag in her direction. "The CIA is not obligated to provide meals to people who occupy cell block A of their own volition, Miller. But if you think chinese is too disgusting for your elevated and educated palate–"

"Gimme!"

"Hold on, hold on." Casey set the bag down, where the smell of the food could get into the cell but Carina couldn't reach it. "Gotta make sure Walker's not around."

"You are a sadist, Casey," said Carina, as he walked away to check around the corner. "You know she's not anywhere near here."

"How could I know any such thing?" asked Casey as he strolled back.

"One, her significant other is in Medical, no way she'd leave him–"

He poised his hand over the door switch but didn't press it. "She might."

"Two, you just called her Walker, which you would never do if there was a chance in Hell of her hearing you."

Casey grimaced, and snarled, "Nuts!" He slapped the switch, standing well clear of the bag as Carina lunged for it. "Secret Service, huh? I thought Grimes got a new suit for the last medal he didn't deserve but got anyway."

Carina stopped drinking wonton soup from the container long enough to answer. "A Ring suit, Casey. Not great quality, considering they were planning to kill him in it."

"Cheap bastards." He shook his head sadly. "Whatever happened to bad guys with style?"

"Us."

He smiled, Casey-style. "You got me there. Still, it's hard to take them seriously as a first class operation. That base of theirs, I only felt three charges and the whole thing folded like a house of cards."

"Maybe that's why they do it."

"Why?"

"So we don't take them seriously. Up until now, who handled the case? Shaw, all by himself. If it weren't for Bryce Larkin we'd still be clueless." She paused. Talking, not eating. "How did Bryce know about it, anyway? Did Shaw ever mention him?"

"Nah. Larkin was working with a rogue–" Casey stopped talking.

"A rogue what, Casey?"

"I gotta go."

"Casey! A rogue what?" He vanished without answering. She speared a wonton. "Definitely a sadist."

Anna Wu pulled the sheet from her new secured printer as she heard a knock on her door. She readied her gun, just in case. "Who is it?"

"Candygram."

"Dark chocolate, or light?"

"Milk."

She opened her door, satisfied with the exchange. Spy codes are usually cool, but this one was kind of lame. "Let me get my coat."

Not what he expected, and he reached for his own gun. "I'm just supposed to pick up a package for the courier bag, Miss Ling."

"There's been a change of plans, apparently just giving my Indian-giver ex-boyfriend his trinket back isn't enough." She handed him the paper. "Your part is on the bottom." She went to get her coat as he read the new orders.

"You're the courier?"

"Either that or the package," she said. She fluffed her hair up over the collar. "Let's go, they're holding a plane for me." For her! This was so cool!

When he entered the door to the outer Medical office, Casey heard the sound of a man's voice coming from the inner recovery room, where Sarah would be until Chuck woke up, even if the building was on fire during an earthquake. He ran to the door, but the only things he saw on the other side were Ellie and Sarah, staring at a computer screen, and grinning. It wasn't even Chuck's voice, just Shaw's. "He was protecting his partner, and the Agency. I would have done the same thing myself. Maybe without the stealth bombers, but perhaps that's just me."

"What's this?"

Sarah pressed a key, and the voice stopped. "They brought us Shaw's computer, so we could go over whatever data he had on the Ring. That was him defending a newbie who called in a tactical strike without authorization, when he thought his partner had been duped by a rogue operative."

Casey grunted at the display of mercy. "That's CIA business. Beckman would've torn him a new one, and so would I."

"That's because you're a heartless NSA goon, John," said Ellie. "I thought the tank was a nice touch."

"I appreciated it too," said Sarah. "I hope his partner thanked him."

Casey's lip curled. "I get it, this is torture. You two heard about Carina and now you're torturing me back, aren't you? Next thing you know, you'll both be telling me you fell in love at first sight, with full descriptions."

One female head shook in denial. "I could never."

"Me neither, that would be dishonest."

"It was at least five minutes for me."

The other female head turned in shock and betrayal. "No fair. I was gonna say five minutes!"

"Can we talk about spy stuff now?" said Casey, head bowed. He looked up, checking for incoming banter and spotted none. "Speaking of rogue operatives, Carina just reminded me of who else knew about the Ring besides Shaw."

"Who was that?" asked Ellie, as Sarah got wide-eyed.

"Bryce Larkin," she breathed.

Ellie must not have been read into that part. "Bryce Larkin? The guy who betrayed Chuck, who died just a few years ago?"

Heh! "Larkin's faked his death quite a few times, and done it for real twice, the second time trying to destroy the Intersect. He had to leave that job to Chuck, but our boy downloaded it instead and saved all our lives."

Larkin trusted Chuck? That didn't sound right. "He was a traitor?"

"Of sorts. Completely compromised, just like you."

Was he calling her a…? "I'm doing this for Chuck."

Casey shrugged. "So was he. Or for Orion, which is the same thing, since Orion did it for Chuck."

"Dad was trying to destroy his own invention?"

"It wasn't his invention anymore, was it?" said Casey, waving in the general direction of the Intersect Room and all it stood for. "Putting operational skills into a strategic tool makes no sense."

"Until Chuck showed them how much more could be done with it. They would have tried to test it on him, wouldn't they?"

Casey looked grimmer than he usually did. "I'm sure one of their bright boys had the idea."

"I'm sure Dad did." That's why he wanted it destroyed.

"Orion's enemy was Roarke, and Fulcrum," said Sarah. "I wonder what he knows about the Ring?"

The computer chimed, and Sarah looked down to see the paused image of Shaw in mid-report vanish from the screen as it went black.

NOT VERY MUCH.

"Sir, our teams have reported in, there are no traces of Agent Shaw's body so far."

Lensman One looked at Two, unhappy. "They're not gonna like this. Who calls it in?"

"Doesn't matter, they can't tell us apart anyway."

"Do you know what they did to Chuck?" asked Sarah.

Orion didn't type a reply. Instead his distorted voice came through the speaker, his purple pixelated silhouette on the screen. "Only a bit. The Ring is much better at hiding itself than Fulcrum ever was, and without Bryce as my eyes and ears I'm limited in what I can do."

"Why not work with Shaw?"

"Shaw's obsessions would have made any long-term partnership unsustainable. Bryce and I had the same motivations."

"Screwing Chuck over," sneered Casey.

"Colonel Casey, if you saw a wrecking ball heading for someone's head, would you hesitate to knock them to the ground?"

"No."

"Then don't blame me for doing what I had to do to save Chuck from the likes of you. I've known he was special since he was nine years old. I had to do something to keep him off the CIA's radar, and luckily I had Bryce there to help me."

"What does luck have to do with it?"

"I found him snooping around Fleming's test results, the same night I was, but he was trying to change them. They would have caught him if I hadn't stepped in. I sounded him out about Chuck, and we came up with something different."

Sarah snapped, "So you orchestrated the frame-up in Fleming's class?"

"No, I could never have done something like that, no one who knows Chuck would ever—but Bryce is a different man than me. I knew what had to be done, the right as his father was mine, the duty was mine, but Bryce came up with his own way to do it. He was my agent, but never my tool."

"Some best friend," said Ellie.

"Eleanor, don't judge. You know what kind of lives Sarah and Colonel Casey lived before they met Chuck, the kind of people they were. Greatness comes at a cost, and Bryce was very great. What he did was harsh, but he's had a harsh life. Chuck was the only purely good thing he knew in the world, and Bryce would have done anything to preserve him."

Ellie yelled at the screen, "Like stick him in a jar shaped like the Buy More? Put him on a shelf with a label, 'do not open, ever'?"

Orion waited until she ran down. "That wasn't his fault, Eleanor. He couldn't have known that Jill would betray Chuck too, or use his name to do it."

"Then it was a bad plan. He just…assumed it would work out, he never bothered to check."

"He wasn't supposed to, the plan cut him off too, the most heroic thing I've ever seen. Plus it would have destroyed him if he had known, he would have gone after her or back to Chuck, and that would have undone everything. So I never told him, never let him find out. He'd left Chuck's future in my hands and I left him in yours."

Ellie's voice was cold, cold."You finally did something right, you left him alone."

The distortions almost hid the pleading. "You spent years trying to get him over that, do you think I did any less? If he'd simply tried I would have been there."

Ellie slumped, remembering all her own failed attempts to jump-start her brother's life. "But he never tried."

"No. On the bright side, that kept the government from finding him very effectively. But then Bryce sent him the Intersect."

"Why would he do that?" asked Sarah. "He had to know it would put him back on our radar."

"Yes, well, I'd been telling him what he wanted to hear about Chuck, I'm afraid. A stronger Chuck, the Charles Carmichael that Chuck always dreamed of being. When the chips were down Bryce acted on that faulty intelligence, and he sent the Intersect to the only man he could trust with it." Somehow he managed to make purple pixels look sad. "He wasn't happy with me when he found out otherwise. He went deep undercover to get away from me, and kept trying to get Chuck away from you, Sarah, even if it looked like he was trying to get you away from Chuck."

"But that would have just left Chuck with Casey." The heartless NSA goon.

"Until he came after you. Or not. From Bryce's perspective there may not have been much difference. He didn't trust me again until after I got the Intersect out of Chuck's head, and I never asked."

"So together the two of you managed to screw your boy over twice, all in the name of love," snarled Casey. He looked at the two ladies, equally appalled. "This is why they tell us to cut our ties."

"No one fights for an abstraction, Colonel," said Orion.

Casey looked insulted. "I fight for my country."

"No you don't, you're fighting for Chuck right now, we wouldn't even be having this conversation if you weren't. And somewhere in your past, there had to be someone in that country, a mother, a lover, a pet, that's who you were really fighting for. Spiderman never really Hulked out until he thought about Aunt May."

Ellie and Sarah shared a smile. Like nerd father…

Nuts! "Fine, I'm fighting for Chuck. We all are, so let's get on with it."

"I am, Colonel. I've been processing all the files on Shaw's machine since I first got access. My Intersect may not know kung fu but it does what it's supposed to do."

"Let me get my wheelbarrow for a trip to the salt mines."

"Your suspicion is justified, I suppose, Colonel–"

"Geez, ya think?"

Orion's tone got softer, distracted. "There's a lot of raw data in here, but I'm using the contents of the disk you captured as the seed…"

"Seed?"

"Yes, the…seed of the flash. It's why the computer Intersect never worked very well, it had no intuition, no perception, nothing to connect the data to. Nothing to fight for."

Casey growled, "You've made your point."

"With the disk as the seed, hopefully the Intersect will find what they were trying to do with–"

"Orion?"

No answer.

"Dad?"

"Oh boy. Brace yourself, Colonel, you're not going to like this."