A/N: Thank you to Zettel for pre-reading (on a holiday :)).
Are we listening
To hymns of offering?
Have we eyes to see
That love is gathering?
All the words that I've been reading
Have now started the act of bleeding
Into one
"The World I Know"
Collective Soul
December 8, 2012
Montreux, Switzerland
Time stood still. Ciel witnessed each moment, distinct, like a freeze-frame as seen through a camera lens. Her mind was sluggish, barely processing the surreal images.
The gun fell from Sarah's hand and clattered across the floor, splashing the tea as it slid on the tile.
Chuck looked faint. Worse than faint, deathly. However, the moment Sarah pitched forward, overwhelmed herself, Chuck sprang to life, lunged to catch her. Once Sarah's body turned, Ciel could see Sarah's eyes had rolled back into her head. In an amazing, impossible bodily contortion, Chuck pulled Sarah against him, sliding underneath her at the same time his legs gave out.
As thunderstruck as he was, he had the strength and agility to keep her from hitting the ground. It was like an inborn reflex, to protect her, Ciel thought as a lump formed in her throat. Sacrificial love.
A miracle. A radiance of light. Ciel had never believed in miracles, not after everything, all the darkness she had experienced in her life. But her choice to disbelieve obviously did nothing to prevent one from happening right before her eyes, for the very first time.
Chuck was possessed, in a fugue state. Ciel had never witnessed a man break down like this, so profoundly consumed by tears, his relief unbearable. This was the other side of what she had seen the night of his fever. This time it wasn't bottomless sorrow consuming him, but unimaginable relief, too much for his body to contain.
What would it feel like to hold someone you loved in your arms again after you had believed them dead for months?
Ciel's eyes overflowed with tears, outside of her own awareness.
Chuck's face was red and wet as he wept against Sarah, burying his lips in her hair. He gasped hysterically, as if suffocating, grasping her against him like she was a life preserver on a stormy sea. He could not pull her close enough, hold her tight enough; as if his relenting in the slightest would result in her crumbling to dust, vanishing.
Ciel had no idea how long he stayed like that. Something unknown made him stop, shift his legs underneath himself as a way to brace, and lift Sarah into his arms. Ciel gasped, expecting a cry of pain caused by the wound in his side. He never flinched, the wound apparently forgotten.
Ciel believed she could have taken a blow torch to his bare skin and he wouldn't have felt it. The world was in his arms.
Ciel watched Chuck's hand on Sarah's back, fingers spread wide, and palpating. He was surprised by her weight, and was feeling for her bones, as if she was now alarmingly thin.
Ciel had no knowledge of Sarah before their first encounter, but her ordeal, slowly taking shape in Ciel's mind as the fabric of two stories was now woven together, made perfect sense.
Wordlessly, Chuck carried Sarah to the back room and placed her on the bed on which he had slept the night before. He handled her like a fragile flower, moving in slow motion to pull his arms out from underneath her.
He knelt suddenly, the thud of bone against wood making Ciel wince in sympathy, but again, it was like he felt nothing. His hand brushed Sarah's hair away from her face, gentle fingers tracing along her jaw with infinite tenderness. He moved as if he were touching a mythical creature. He stayed that way for an interminable stretch.
Chuck's presence, his palpable existence in the room slowly reasserted itself. Ciel watched him take a deep breath, then sit back on his haunches. He trembled, only this time, Ciel realized with worry, it was rage. Directed at her.
{}{}{}{}{}
Out of the timeless void, created by the magical impossibility of the moment, Chuck crashed back to earth. His mind was spinning, questions tumbling in his head.
It utterly amazed him as he felt it coalesce—rage again, only directed outward to the woman in the room. The woman who had information he needed.
"What the hell is this, Ciel?" he barked as he fastened fiery eyes to her.
She retreated, backing herself against the wall, muttering under her breath in what sounded like Spanish.
He was on his feet and advancing toward her. "Answer me," he demanded, his tone dangerous.
"Please, Chuck, listen. I had no idea who she was! She has no idea who she is!" Ciel cowered, shielding her face as if he might strike her.
It was the sight of Ciel, afraid of him, that shook him more than her words. Frightened, he steadied himself, slowing his breathing in the hopes of calming his pounding heart.
"Tell me. Please." He tempered his response, achieving a costly self-control.
Ciel stared for almost a minute before she started to speak. His forced change in body language seemed to calm her. But her words still came out in one rush of breath, barely any breaks between them.
"A woman, a woman my contact thought was CIA, she contacted my courier. He is part of the same network as I am, and as the man who brought you to me. He was to meet her at the Zurich airport and bring the patient—Sarah—to me. She was in a coma and near death from blood loss. She woke up here with total amnesia."
With each word Ciel spoke, Chuck felt more of his sanity drain away. He could hardly focus. A woman? A woman had removed her from the base in Japan? What about the baby Parsons had said she had given birth to?
Amnesia…caused by the defective Intersect. That knowledge hit him like a punch in the gut, knocking him into the chair in a hard sit.
Oh God…She had already forgotten Alex on the train…now it was all gone, everything. His blood turned to ice and the edges of his vision started to darken as his brain overloaded, bombarded by too much distress all at once.
{}{}{}{}{}
"Why did you believe she was dead?" Chuck heard Ciel's voice from what sounded like a great distance away.
I'm in shock, he rationalized with himself, acknowledging the strange sensation in his arms and legs that made them feel as if they belonged to another person, alienated.
"The room…was covered in blood…walls, ceiling, floor. They…they said it was too much blood, that she couldn't have survived that much…they…they wouldn't let me see it…"
Chuck felt Ciel's hand on his shoulder, tender. She's not afraid of me now, he thought with relief.
"Chuck…I wish I wasn't the one to tell you this, but…when I examined her, it was obvious to me she had given birth about a month before–"
"I know," Chuck sighed, his voice breaking. "The man who shot me…gave that information up." He continued to speak to Ciel, unable to take his eyes from Sarah.
Her hair was dyed brown, much longer than when he had last seen her. She was rail thin, probably 15 pounds less than usual. Her ordeal had left visible traces, agonizing evidence that gutted him, filling him with guilt and terror.
Tears spilled down his cheeks as he continued in an inflectionless voice. "She…might have been raped. She was kidnapped in January. I…I haven't seen her in almost a year."
Ciel's grip on his shoulder tightened. He looked up to see her face, animated, anxious to share information with him.
"We have so much to discuss. But, first, there is something you have to know. She didn't remember anything, except the fact that she'd had a child. A baby girl. She left here… looking for her." Ciel looked like she was searching for the right words, her eyes shifted away. "Is there… any chance that you could be that child's father?"
Chuck was numb, blitzed, his mind ineffective at processing what she was saying. The thought had never occurred to him, based on what he had learned since then, what Parsons had told him. Could he be?
He started rambling, in the same monotone. "She thought…she might be. Right after New Year's…but she took a test…and it was negative…"
"You were certain she wasn't pregnant?" Ciel asked urgently.
He searched his jumbled thoughts. "She…was…three days late. But…she started…"
"You said after New Year's. So that was the first week of January?"
He nodded, still dazed.
"And she was kidnapped when?"
"January 24." That was clear, seared on his memory like a date on a tombstone.
"Were you…" Ciel winced, blushing, "intimate any time between the first week of January and the 24th?"
Oh my God…Chuck's throat seemed to close and he could barely breathe. His eyes tightly closed, he whispered, "Yes. The last time was about an hour before she was kidnapped."
Ciel counted on her fingers, so quickly they were a blur. She smiled, her breath hitching in excitement. "There is a chance, a very good chance, that you are her baby's father." She grew serious. "I'm not ruling out sexual assault. I couldn't, not that far in the past. But at least, if she was, she could already have been pregnant."
The black hole he had been toting around inside his chest for months inexplicably inverted, a miracle of science, defying the laws of physics. His black hole became a supernova—light and heat bursting forth in every direction. The sun, at last bursting through the clouds of his nuclear winter.
It took him a moment, gasping for breath, nearly choking from the fire burning behind his breastbone, to realize Ciel was still speaking. "She cried for that child in the middle of the night. Desperate, choking tears. I cannot imagine she would feel that way unless somehow she knew the child was her husband's, yours. Desire, not violence."
Chuck opened his mouth to speak, confused, but Ciel talked over him. "She remembered a few things while she was with me. That she was CIA, at some point. That she was married. That you were trying to have a baby. But not your name, not your face."
"You called her Jennifer," Chuck muttered.
"It was familiar to her. Easier than Madame X."
"It was an old alias…"
Chuck was staring at Sarah, still unconscious. Wake up! He wanted to scream it. But she had fainted, overwhelmed. Waking her harshly would only make it worse. His eyes were drawn to her scalp, the tiny red circles marring the skin.
The sensors…the same shape and size as the ones Sarah had pulled from his head in Thailand, weeping, pleading with him to wake up. The Belgian's machine had never transcribed any Intersect data from his brain, only slowly eroded his mind until everything but Sarah had remained. Sarah's depth within his own identity had saved him; she was the very center of him.
Had anything remained inside Sarah after whatever Quinn had done to her? It was difficult to believe some part of her still knew him.
He continued to stare and eventually saw her eyelashes start to flutter.
He jumped from the chair, grabbing Ciel's wrist intensely. "Stay. She might be afraid…if she doesn't recognize me."
Ciel moved in between Chuck and Sarah, leaning towards the bed as her patient awoke.
December 8, 2012
Zurich, Switzerland
"What do you mean, nowhere?" Casey barked. "He's not nowhere."
"The last intel placed him in the train station in Zurich five days ago." Morgan continued to search on the computer, but everything he found only reinforced what they already knew.
"Berlin to Zurich. Two dead men," Casey grumbled.
"Chuck didn't kill either one of them," Morgan said emphatically.
"You don't know that, moron. Just because you want to believe something doesn't mean it's true."
Morgan hunched his shoulders sheepishly. "I know, Casey. I'll be the first one to admit…I don't know what Chuck is capable of, not anymore. But it's more than that. It doesn't make sense." Morgan sighed, collecting his thoughts. "The police in Germany have a description of the man they think shot Deutch. It isn't Chuck. If you look hard enough, you realize it's the corpse in Zurich that fits it better!"
"John Doe with a bullet through his head, execution style," Casey said grimly.
"Chuck may be…unstable, but he wouldn't do something like that. Never."
"Even if he knew our John Doe raped and killed his wife on film and then sold it on the dark web?" Casey's voice rumbled, low and angry, hating himself for saying it but hoping Morgan would acknowledge the possibility.
Morgan rubbed his hand over his eyes, his heart aching with sympathy for his friend. He was laboring up an impossibly steep escalator down to hopelessness—praying anything positive could come from this. Chuck's life, and the lives of everyone he cared about—irrevocably altered.
Not for the first time, Morgan wondered at the futility of this intercontinental chase. What happened when they found Chuck? What happened if they couldn't catch up to Chuck before irreversible damage was done? How much of that damage had already been done?
"Casey, Chuck did not kill Deutch. While we can't say for certain that our second victim killed the first, let's look at the facts. Deutch was an arms dealer, associated most recently with The Ring. No known association with Quinn directly, other than we know at some time in the past, The Ring hired Quinn and his cabal."
The entire time Morgan had also been speaking, he was typing. He was amateurish at best, childlike at worst, with his computer skills, but Morgan had done enough analysis for the CIA to hold his own, at least for their current purposes.
"A-ha!" Morgan shouted, clapping his hands together as he found the footage he had been searching for. "There, Casey!" Morgan pointed to the screen. "This is the train station in Zurich where the FIS ID'd Chuck."
The black and white photograph was blurry, but Chuck was clearly recognizable. He wasn't alone in the photograph. In fact, the man he was with looked very much like the dead man in Zurich.
"So victim number two left Berlin with Chuck. That makes me feel worse instead of better," Casey grumbled.
"Right, but why Casey? Why risk taking our corpse on a nine hour train ride? What was in Zurich that made Chuck leave? If all he planned on doing was killing him, why leave?"
Casey's deep-in-thought look was hard to distinguish from his you're-irritating-the-hell-out-of-me face. Morgan was about to flinch when Casey clapped his hands together hard, instead making Morgan jump.
"Geigenbauer!" Casey shouted.
"I'm sorry, who?"
"It's German for luthier," Casey grumbled. Morgan raised an eyebrow, waiting for an explanation of the explanation. "Violin maker, you heathen."
"And that means…?"
Casey sighed in frustration. "When I was in prison, during that whole Omen Virus mission, Chuck and Sarah wanted me to break out…before you and Gertrude actually did. Sarah offered a name, a contact of hers, to get fake documentation, stuff like that." He spoke the words rapid-fire, like bullets from a machine gun. "He worked out of Zurich. His music shop is a front."
"Wait a minute, Casey. That doesn't explain why Chuck took the guy with him."
"The luthier is a procurer of many shady things, Grimes. And Chuck knew who he was. The man's name is Blaser."
"So you think this Blaser knows where Chuck is?" Morgan asked.
"He knows…something. I guarantee it. It's a place to start. The shop is walking distance from here."
Casey moved as if he was about to stand, but he stopped, feeling his phone vibrating in his pocket. Morgan saw Gertrude's picture on the face of the phone. "Go ahead, Gertrude." Casey clicked the speaker to the on position.
"John, I have news."
"Grimes is listening," Casey grumbled. Gertrude gave a feminine version of Casey's usual grunt to acknowledge.
"The dead man in Zurich? His name is Walter Parsons. He was the one who was selling the footage from Quinn's base in Japan. Chuck had to have gotten his information and tracked him to Berlin. It's not official, but I have reliable intel that the same gun was used to kill Deutch in Berlin and Parsons in Zurich. It was Parsons' gun."
Morgan and Casey locked eyes. "So Parsons killed Deutch? Why?" Casey held up his finger to keep Morgan from speaking as his mouth opened.
"Again, I'm still looking for confirmation and corroborating evidence. But as far as my team was able to discern, Parsons was in Berlin looking for something specific. A key."
"The key to what?" Casey asked.
"Not a key like you're thinking, John. This is…Intersect related. Apparently there are three pieces of a device that can be used to alter the Intersect program. Like the program that fried Morgan's brain. Deutch had one of those pieces, the spoils of a bet with Alexei Volkoff. Parsons took it, but it wasn't found on his body."
Morgan felt a cold hand close around his heart. "Quinn needs the…the keys or whatever they are…to repair a faulty Intersect. How does he have an Intersect, Casey?"
"Sarah." Casey growled. Morgan watched Casey's white knuckles on the table top.
"I know, John." Her voice was sympathetic.
"So you think Quinn killed Parsons and took the key?" Casey asked.
"It's the most logical explanation at this point. And now he has one of three. One was associated with Fulcrum. The other piece's location is a complete mystery. I know your only mission was to retrieve Bartowski, but this whole thing just got instantly more complicated."
"Bartowski's a ghost. Parsons was our only lead," Casey grumbled.
Gertrude made a surprised noise before she spoke. "You didn't seriously think Bartowski killed either one of them, did you?"
"He's not Ward Cleaver anymore, Gertrude. We…had our doubts."
Morgan glared, reminding Casey that at least he hadn't had any.
"I have one more lead I can follow up on. It's more of a rumor than anything else, but at this point, it's all I've got."
"What do you mean?" Morgan asked.
"It's an…underground network, supposedly operating behind the scenes in Europe. Only like the opposite of Fulcrum. Bartowski on his own personal manhunt for justice sounds like a cause right up their alley. I'll have to do some digging, but I'll see what I can come up with."
"Sounds good. In the meantime, Grimes and I are hoping we can talk to an old contact of Sarah's, see if maybe Chuck's been to see him."
"Good luck."
Morgan thought, not only how different Gertrude was now that she was with Casey, to offer something as flippant as luck, but that the best he and Casey could hope for, was something as flippant as luck.
December 8, 2012
Echo Park, Los Angeles, California
"Babe!"
Ellie woke to her husband shaking her. Bleary eyed, she rolled towards him in the dark.
"Your phone," Devon murmured sleepily, pointing to the instrument on her nightstand as it glowed in the dark.
Ellie fumbled, shaking her numb arm as she struggled to grasp the phone. The brightness hurt her eyes and she had trouble seeing the screen.
Encrypted line.
General Beckman.
Instantly awake, shot through with adrenaline, Ellie answered the phone. She was right.
"Dr. Woodcomb, I apologize for the late hour, but I have some urgent information I needed to relay."
Late hour? It was one in the morning, which meant it was four in the morning in D.C. Late or early. Ellie shook off her freshly-awoken daze and tried to focus.
"What is it, General?" she asked. She felt Devon stiffen beside her, hearing the address.
"As you know, our analysts haven't stopped combing through everything we pulled from Quinn's base in Japan. I know it's been a while since we've learned anything new, but…well, this was so disturbing, we had to be sure." Ellie's heart was pounding in her mouth. "There was…a large amount of Intersect data on those computers. It's highly probable that Quinn successfully transcribed a working version of the Intersect from Sarah's brain. But, also, there is evidence that suggests…he was…interested in the brain of Sarah and Chuck's child."
"What does that mean?" Ellie asked in horror.
"We don't know." Beckman sighed in frustration. "To be fair, Doctor, you are the best subject matter expert we have on the Intersect. We were hoping we could convince you to come to D.C. and–"
"I'll be there, General," she answered urgently.
"I know you have a young child yourself, Doctor," Beckman offered sympathetically.
"I need to help Chuck if I can, General. I'll be there as soon as you need me."
"I'll send the instructions through your computer," Beckman added. "And thank you. Right now, you're our only hope."
Ellie hoped, for Chuck's sake, that Beckman was exaggerating.
