A/N: Huge thank you to Zettel for pre-reading.
Stuttering
Cold and damp
Steal the warm wind, tired friend
Times are gone
For honest men
Sometimes, far too long for snakes
In my shoes
Walking sleep
In my youth, I pray to keep
Heaven send
Hell away
No one sings like you anymore
"Black Hole Sun"
Soundgarden
November 25, 2012
Echo Park, Los Angeles, California
No more pills.
He had resolved, resolute.
The proposed panacea turned practical poison.
First, Chuck had decided he didn't need the prescribed tranquilizers any longer. They had become a nuisance, a hindrance to his functionality. A black blot had obscured his mind, muddling all five of his senses. Oddly, the sensation had reminded him of the sensation of the Belgian's attempted lobotomization in the jungles of Thailand. The worry that he was doing to himself what Sarah had once risked her life to save him from had been the final deciding factor.
What had eventually burned through the fog in his mind was not the brilliance of a hopeful sun, but the glare of molten anger, a lava flow.
Once unsedated, no longer numb, his loss had teeth, vicious fanged teeth that had incised his heart, torn at it.
But his heart had retaliated with equal fury, its own set of teeth just as sharp, just as vicious, sprouting in aegis.
Was it that simple…a biological solution?
Biology was just chemistry. And chemistry was just physics.
Memorable words from an old college professor. The man taught physics, of course—injecting his opinion in order for his students to understand his passion, even in the face of their doubts about its usefulness.
So not biology then, but physics. A once bright star, now dead, collapsed upon itself—a black hole. Gravity so intense, courtesy of an infinitely dense mass, that not even light could escape.
In that same college course, he had read a paper about micro-black holes, a theoretical possibility that had caused him an existential crisis at the time…grappling with infinity with a finite mind. Were such things possible? How could scientists ever be sure?
A bitter, humorless chuckle had escaped his lips as he'd pondered. He had proven it, hadn't he? He had grown one, manifested one that now resided within the confines of his rib cage, threatening him with a total collapse upon himself.
His entire life and all its machinations were disappearing, sucked one by one into oblivion, a measureless darkness. The blackness in his mind had migrated to his heart. And it was growing more dense every day, swallowing his light.
The anger had replicated itself, like rapidly dividing cancer cells, and had smothered the exhausted sadness, pushing it into the vacuum that sucked it away with all the rest. He kept the anger close and it alone sustained him. He tossed the antidepressants into the trash, enduring with apathy the withdrawal headache caused by the abrupt cessation of dosage.
He wasn't depressed. He was enraged—the tranquilizers had only numbed the rage.There was no pharmaceutical cure.
His self-prescribed cure for the anger was action.
What had once been causes for hesitation, accompanied by a thorough examination of cause and effect—now were instinctual responses, effortless and thoughtless in their ruthless precision. The dithering, the deliberation, had been burned out of him.
When this had all begun, Morgan ( Morgan!—the name, the thought of his friend, a pang, a longing for what had been but could be no longer) had started looking for information. Using his skills, righteously as always, Chuck had supplemented Morgan's search with harder-to-obtain, classified information.
All of Quinn's exploits—with Fulcrum, The Ring, Volkoff Industries, North Korea and Russia and myriad nameless terrorists for hire—were unearthed. Ex-CIA listed among credentials was most appealing, carried more clout, when one was looking to work in a manner counter to the government or rules of law. An inside man, so to speak, got results more quickly.
At first, Nicholas Quinn had seemed daunting, based on his reputation and on his exploits. However, the in-person meeting quickly changed Chuck's views of the man. Of all the villains Chuck and his team had tangled with, Quinn was the weakest. Roarke and Shaw, each had sought a similar revenge–but that was where the similarities ended. By comparison to them, Quinn had struck Chuck as almost whiney, driven by jealousy and envy in a way that made little sense to Chuck.
Thousands of CIA agents worked all over the globe, carrying out orders, completing missions fraught with danger. Team Bartowski had been just a part of that large machine. In their time, he, Sarah and Casey were the best–the best success rate and overall track record. But the three of them alone had not been the CIA. And the moment things had turned, the CIA gave them up and pushed them out, and even almost destroyed them before Gertrude Verbanski stopped it with a bomb.
Nicholas Quinn failed. It was as plain as that. Perhaps what Quinn had said in the Vail Buy More had been the truth (Chuck had never learned anything from Beckman or from anywhere else that contradicted those statements.) Quinn seemed to view Chuck as a usurper.
Perhaps Quinn was the intended implant the day before Bryce broke into the DNI, stole the Intersect, and sent it to Chuck.
I haven't thought about Bryce in so long…
Chuck still felt mixed emotions about his old friend. At least now, he thought of Bryce as an old friend, and not as his nemesis. None of the things Chuck had hated Bryce for had happened, none of what Chuck had believed was quite real. Bryce had been wrong just as much as he'd been right, about so many things. But perhaps Bryce had known Quinn. Was he the final straw? Was the threat of his download what had prompted both his father and Bryce to act as they had?
He couldn't ask, of course. Both his father and Bryce were dead, both men dying before his eyes as he watched helplessly.
In the government's hands, the Intersect was meant as an enhancement, not a crutch. Agents like Bryce and Sarah had functioned independently as well as any agent with an Intersect. Quinn's assignment of blame to not having the Intersect was his excuse. Anything but admit his own failures or shortcomings.
Like a little boy reading Superman comics and wishing to be bullet-proof, that's how Chuck had seen Quinn. Pitied him. Everything had happened so fast, but that had been Chuck's gut reaction. Pity.
You don't want it, trust me. Nothing good can come from it.
Take a look at your wife. You think you'd get that without the Intersect?
Now, just as before, rage burned the pity away.
Only now, there was no smothering the flames.
A pathetic excuse for a villain, not fit to be a villain of tragedy, only of melodrama, the weakest of all foes–had somehow caused the most damage.
Living in that moment again, hearing the words in Quinn's baiting sing-song, sharpened the anger like a knife blade. The fire burned white hot, purifying and cleansing.
Each thought was clean and precise as Chuck worked. Quinn had kidnapped him because he needed Chuck to fix Decker's Trojan Horse software in the Intersect glasses. Chuck had been very clear then, he did not possess the skills required to reprogram an Intersect. You've never had the proper motivation. Quinn's words. What had he meant?
Then, Quinn believed Casey and Sarah had been killed at the warehouse. What was his "proper motivation" if not both of them?
Had Quinn meant Ellie? The thought had turned Chuck's blood to ice. But his mind had kept at the thought. Ellie did know how to repair the Intersect, at least better than anyone else alive. Somehow, Quinn must have known that. His people were in place to grab Alex, but nothing would have stopped them from going after Ellie instead if things had gone according to Quinn's plan.
Quinn would have threatened Ellie, forced her to repair the program, and probably then killed us both.
Sarah instead had downloaded the Intersect. She had saved Casey, Ellie and him by doing so.
Once Sarah and Casey had arrived on the train, Quinn's plan had changed. He had sent his people after Alex to use as leverage against Casey. Only in the dining car had Quinn realized the glasses were empty–because he had seen Sarah's Intersect work, and then fail horribly before she had thrown him out the window of the speeding train.
The plan had changed yet again, Chuck reasoned. But to what?
That was the question, the question he couldn't answer. It had kept him up nights as he searched for Sarah. If he could figure out what Quinn's plan was, he could find Sarah.
Quinn took Sarah for a reason. It wasn't leverage, exchange, nothing of the sort. If that had been so, someone would have contacted Chuck. Instead, the two of them had vanished into thin air.
He had always known the beginning of the story. Now he knew some of the middle, and all of the end. Quinn had taken Sarah from the train, his walking, breathing Intersect, and kept her in his base in Japan. Chuck's original intended destination after Quinn took him from Burbank.
The NSA had dissected that lab once it was found. Drugged and stupefied, he had still read the report. Beckman and Casey had both begged him not to, but he had insisted, telling them he needed to know what Casey and Beckman had seen that day, while he waited with Morgan in the hotel. The horror of Sarah's death had colored it all then, pushing the other facts to the background, soon obscured by the ink blots of medication.
Chuck rarely forgot things, even things he didn't know he remembered, his brain's functionality naturally similar to the Intersect. His exposure at nine years old was like that chicken and egg paradox. Did he think that way because his brain was formatted when he was young by an accidental exposure? Or did he survive and thrive with the Intersect, even at nine, because the computer program worked just as his brain did? Which was origin, which copy? Something else he would never know, something else he could never ask his father.
He remembered those pieces of the report. A detailed inventory of all of the equipment the NSA had removed from the base included what the analysts called an extraction device. Those same analysts hypothesized the apparatus had been reverse-engineered from equipment known to have been sold on the black market by Anad Chenerad. Chuck hadn't recalled the name, but after Casey's explanation, Chuck had realized it was a piece of the equipment the Belgian and Dr. Mueller had used on him.
Chuck's Intersect had been involuntarily suppressed at the time, unbeknownst to either the Belgian or Dr. Mueller, and the process had almost killed him. But what would have happened if Chuck's Intersect had been functioning normally?
What would have happened if Sarah's defective Intersect had been firing, and erasing her memory at the same time as it was being extracted?
With all that in mind, Chuck had dived deeper into the dark, crossing virtual boundaries he had never crossed before. Not just skimming the dark web, bouncing against it, he had been wrapped in it, ensnared in it. Once, he had been the fly, then, devoured, he became part of the spider, the one spinning the web. It was an apt metaphor, Chuck believed. Prey turned predator, that was what he had become. Beyond the reach of prayer.
Chuck started with words he recalled that Quinn had uttered in passing, the claim there was a pristine version of the Intersect in government hands. He had hacked into the DNI, straight into DARPA…and corrupted their files, locked them away from anyone else's access.
After all this time, they never learned, he had told himself bitterly. Failure upon failure upon sabotaged failure…and they would not learn. They were building another Intersect. Quinn had known, but General Beckman had never shared that information with Chuck. He could have destroyed the program, but there was no way to leave a calling card, so to speak, if it was simply destroyed. The CIA and NSA would wonder about the sabotage, always believing some enemy of the state was the perpetrator.
No, this time he made certain they knew it was him, not Chuck Bartowski, but the Piranha.
Such a stupid moniker. Back then Lemon Shark would have been more suitable. Plenty of teeth, but no intention of biting. What had they said at Stanford? Lightning fast and left no trace. Sort of piranha-ish. Less gruesome than the truth–a mouth full of deadly, razor-like teeth, ready to bloody the water and devour flesh down to the bone.
Without tripping security, he co-opted the program and bent it to his will, adding layers of security only he could access. He had destroyed nothing, only rendered it useless, his calling card attached to the now-useless program.
Sarah had been captive from late January until mid-October, when…when…
He had crushed his eyelids closed, though they could not block the pictures in his mind, hazing the blackness to red.
Did his…extraction…take that long? It had seemed unbelievable.
He squeezed his eyes shut again as more imagined images assailed him. Ten months was an agonizing eternity. There was no dark corner of possibility unexplored, every conceivable torture that could have happened to Sarah before she was killed played over and over in his mind pushing him to the boundaries of sanity.
Light could not escape the gravity of a black hole. But guilt, and maybe memory, had smaller particles, capable of remaining. Just like anger.
Invoking physics again. Proving his insanity to himself.
Chuck had corrupted the Intersect at DARPA. Quinn, in all the time he had Sarah, had not touched it, hadn't even attempted to touch it. Why? Had his plan changed yet again? It could have been dependent on what he was able to extract from Sarah.
During unanesthetized brain surgery or some other unbearable horror…
Sarah was dead. So whatever Quinn's alternate plan was, it was in motion now. Chuck had kept Quinn from the DARPA program, though Quinn would not know yet. Was it possible Quinn had an Intersect now, somehow transcribed from Sarah's brain?
The defective, mind-eroding Intersect that Chuck now wished upon the man with all his strength, wishing the screaming agony he had seen and heard from his wife onto her killer…except Chuck wanted it never to end. A hell.
It was torture, eternal, but still more merciful a fate than the man deserved.
It should have been more difficult, more troubling to his conscience, but it wasn't. Rage had pulled his strings, a merciless puppeteer. Once Chuck had stopped resisting, it all became easy. He had danced along the dark web, an eight-legged creature spinning his path before him into places he had never dared to go.
At the root of it all, always, was money. Truly and justly the root of all evil.
Chuck had followed every transaction, followed every unsavory deal where it led. Chuck hadn't know where Quinn was, or what his next step was…but Sarah had been dead for over a month. Whatever Quinn was planning next, he could move any day. But Quinn could do nothing without money. One by one, Chuck had found the accounts…and emptied them. Less stealing and more Robin Hood-ing, at least that was what he had told himself. He had stolen it, but then given it away, untraceably. On the stealing end–he had left his mark.
This descent into hell had taken only a few days, once Chuck had made up his mind. He had showered and shaved, delighting his sister, though she could not have known the light she was witnessing was a forest fire beyond the horizon and not the sunrise. He had a purpose, however dark, and for him, it was enough. For now.
In the back of his mind, Chuck knew it was only a matter of time before Quinn came for him again. Certainly no one in Quinn's circle had the skills to even identify Chuck, let alone stop him, but the constant, persistent, needling persecution being metered out logically led back to only one man. Chuck would need to run to protect his sister and Morgan, and everyone he cared about. What happened to him no longer mattered. He had one purpose and one only. Surviving afterward was not imperative, actually not even desirable.
Tonight, Chuck had begun moving beyond the money, looking for physical traces of Quinn.
A lead, a trail…and suddenly, Chuck stumbled upon something, completely by accident. A purveyor of live-action horror, catering to some sick and twisted fetish-minded individuals. The search algorithm had led from Quinn to here. Someone in his circle, making money on the side.
The first video, viewed only for a few seconds…and Chuck was on his knees, vomiting into his wastebasket until he felt his entire body was turning itself inside out. He smashed the computer screen with his fist, drawing blood. At least it stopped, the noises he'd heard while his stomach was emptying.
He needed to leave now. Whoever had attained this footage to sell was linked to Quinn. Chuck could find him, of that he was certain.
He would take his darkness, his heart-sized black hole, with him. It would lead him through hell.
