Sorry, I was planning on picking up Chuck Verses the Lost Childhood, but when I tried to work out how to pick it up, I found a lot of plot points that I didn't like any more and started changing them. When I'd made changes to over half the chapters I realised that it was pretty much a new story now so I'm closing off that version and starting again as Chuck Verses the Lost Childhood - Revised. Oops! ;^) Sorry, that's just the way it worked out.
This chapter has references to rather unpleasant topics and same sex relationships, so anyone who has issues with these topics should not read it. It may explain how General Beckman ended up with Roan, too.
Usual disclaimers, no rights to any characters portrayed and this is neither the real world nor a Disney princess tale.
Chuck's childhood had ended in November Nineteen Eighty Nine, just after his eighth birthday. It hadn't exactly been idyllic before that, with what were to him scary men watching them most of the time, his Mommy starting their fighting training with their first steps (OK, it had been mostly fun games for the first few years but he could fight well enough to take down multiple bigger opponents by the time he started school), and her and Auntie Em coming and going all the time... but he had Sammie, and Nora, Mommy, Auntie Em and Auntie Sue, he even had Daddy when he wasn't off working on something, though he seemed to do that an awful lot of the time. But just after his eight birthday, Uncle Joe took Sammie away on one of his trips, and they never come back.
Life was empty for him without Sammie, and Auntie Em didn't stop crying for the two week before she left to go try and find Sammie, and she didn't come back. Things got even worse after that, because Mr Graham, that big scary black man Mommy and Daddy worked for, came to the house and he and Mommy were shouting at each other, then Mommy went away on another trip a couple of weeks after Auntie Em left, and she didn't came back either. Daddy spent all of his time working and talking crazy after that, even more so after that time he snuck into his Daddy's workroom just after Ellie's twelfth birthday and set off something on that computer with the flashing 'Activate' prompt, and then about a month later Auntie Sue came to get them in the early hours of the morning because Daddy was gone too.
She told them that their Daddy had called Auntie Di when he left and asked her to look after them, so as soon as they got back to her place they called Auntie Di and she explained in that no nonsense way of her's that she, Uncle Bry, Uncle Roan and everyone else the CIA knew about would have to stay away or Mr Graham and those other scary men would find them, but she told them that as soon as Auntie Em got there they were being moved somewhere else where she would be looking after them... and Uncle Buck, Auntie Sue and Lexie would be moving into the house just over the back fence a few weeks later...
Chuck shook his head in an attempt to dispel this trip down memory lane, because it never went well and he knew it, but of course that didn't work... Auntie Di had done as she promised, a week later Auntie Em turned up at Auntie Sue's place and the three of them left San Francisco to move down to Arcadia in Los Angeles. He and Ellie had become blondes like Auntie Em, they all had new names (stupid names! Charles Irving Bartowski? What sort of name was that? They only got to keep their first names, and even there they'd had to agree to be called Chuck and Ellie instead of Charlie and Nora to make it harder to find them. Eleanora became Eleanor Faye Bartowski and Auntie Em became their widowed Aunt on their father's side, Emmeline Lisa Larouche, but her and Ellie's new names didn't sound as stupid as his did) and ages too, because Ellie had been made just under two years older and he was made just over two years older. The story was that Auntie Em was raising them because their parents were working on the pipeline up in Alaska, that was a complicated story for a family who were trying to keep a low profile, but at least they didn't officially need to work Auntie Sue, Uncle Buck, Lexie, Benjie and Katy into their story, because they'd moved into their own house over the back fence. Their story was that Uncle Buck was supposed to be Auntie Sue's husband, and he worked for a construction company. The story they used for nearly six month old Benjie (Benjamin Wayne Johnson) was that his parents had both been posted overseas for the Gulf War, and two year old Katy (Caitlin Samantha Caine) was living with Auntie Sue most of the time too, because Aunty Charly was running all over the world, setting up and helping manage their organisation. Then Auntie Di had had her baby Josie (Josephine Mary Larouche) a few months later, and she was staying with them too while Auntie Di worked, but the story was that Auntie Em was raising her because her parents had been posted overseas for the Gulf War, the same reason Benjie was staying with Auntie Sue.
Auntie Di had made them a proposal before they left San Francisco, she explained that she'd recently been made a Major in the Air Force but she was actually working for the Defence Clandestine Service and National Security Agency and with some friends' help, she'd officially established an intelligence group so that Auntie Em would be able to work for her in secret, but Auntie Em couldn't do enough on her own to keep that group going. Auntie Di knew that even then they were both every bit as brilliant as their Mommy and Daddy though, so she asked them if they would help Auntie Em so that they could make her group into something that produced enough to stop people asking questions about the money going into it, the money that would be paying their bills.
Chuck went along with Ellie when she said that they didn't really have any other option. Auntie Em had looked angry at Auntie Di for asking them to do this, but she seemed to be angry at her sister a lot back then, so that wasn't unusual. Auntie Em got even angrier when she found out that they'd already staged a series of 'gas main' explosions under a row of houses in Arcadia to give them the excuse to acquire the properties and commence a major reconstruction project...
As soon as she disappeared, looking for Sammie, the family had met and agreed that they needed to do something to protect her, and Sammie, and Mary and her family as well after she was sent to Russia. They had found a report about residents in a strip of houses in Arcadia complaining about bad gas smells in their back yards, but the gas company was claiming there was nothing wrong and refusing to do anything about it. The residents had a court date coming up to try and get the government to force the gas company to fix whatever it was, but Roan and Charly met with them before that, posing as eco activists, and got their agreement to do something drastic to try and put pressure on the gas company.
A couple of days before the court date, when everyone was safely out of the way, they set off a string of explosions along the gas main that blasted great holes in the back yards and half demolished the houses, which made the court came down hard on the gas company, forcing them to pay all the residents market value value before the explosions for their houses, plus damages, but sell off the properties to the Cinders Corporation for the independent valuation set for the strip after the explosions, so it cost the gas company millions and the family acquired the entire strip along Arcadia Wash between West Camino Real and West Pamela for less than it would have been as empty land... With a little strategic prodding from Roan, the court also made a ruling that forced the gas company to pay Cinder Corp's construction company to replace all the gas mains and have them independently tested to confirm that they were no longer a risk to the community. Once the testing of the new gas mains (routed along the back fence, rather than through the massive hole where the old ones had been dug out) was completed, the reconstruction started, and a significant element of that reconstruction was the series of interconnected bunkers that they built under all the properties in the row, which would serve as the base for this group of Auntie Di's.
By the time they moved to Arcadia, most of the reconstruction was completed, and Auntie Di and Charly, Uncle Bry and Roan and most of Mommy's friends had were working on creating the organisation they'd all be working with as part of that group, so a lot of their work in the beginning was actually sorting out everything to make the companies that they were using look legitimate. Chuck and Ellie's ability to learn how to do prodigious amounts of work quickly and well was tested in the first few months as they set all that up, on top the work that they were officially supposed to be doing for Auntie Di's group. Pops, Uncle Jimmy and Uncle Mike, Auntie Belle, Sam and Gypsy had also been added to the family, along with several others who supposedly worked for Pops' construction company with Uncle Buck, Uncle Jimmy and Uncle Mike.
Soon after they moved to Arcadia, Auntie Em had another argument with Auntie Di, because she discovered that Auntie Di and the others had been moving forward with a lot more than the houses. What she discovered was that they'd also made a deal with Los Angeles County and the FAA in late December Eighty Nine for the Cinders Corporation to get the contracts to take over the stalled redevelopment proposal for the El Monte Airport area (only three miles from the houses), which rerouted Santa Anita Ave to run along the edge of Rio Hondo, shifted about three thousand feet of Rio Hondo across far enough to make room to fit Santa Anita Ave between it and the airport, moved the Lower Azusa Rd bridge up a few hundred feet and expanded the El Monte Airport property to extend all the way from the rerouted Lower Azusa Rd to the railway, which allowed the runway to be extended to six thousand feet long, and rezoned the land at both ends of the runway to prohibit any buildings within five hundred feet of the ends of the runway and no buildings taller than single storey for another fifteen hundred feet beyond that, which ensured that the approach and departure paths of the airport would remain clear. These changes made El Monte more viable as a commercial airport, while a strict schedule of noise restrictions for the airport made the proposal acceptable to the local community. But the point of the deal they made was that Emerald City would be the owners and managers the El Monte Airport once it was rebuilt, so they'd had the power to veto any proposals that could restrict their ability to use the airport, as well as giving them priority over all other airport users. They built a hangar complex for the group that was big enough to take at least four or five airliners and several other smaller planes and helicopters at the airport, and by the time the airport officially reopened in May 1990, they had a fleet of planes and helicopters ready to use it.
When Chuck asked why Mister Graham and the others didn't just ask Auntie Di where they were Auntie Em sat him down and explained that her Papa went away to war just after her Mama got pregnant with her, but he'd died in the war and her Mama met and married Auntie Di's Daddy about four years after her Papa died, so Auntie Di had a different Daddy to her. She also explained that her Mama had given her her Papa's name, Burdon, and she had been angry that her Mama and Auntie Di's Daddy had never bothered to change her name to match their's (she didn't bring up the fact that the uppity Beckman family had usually just referred to her as 'the illegitimate one' and tried to pretend that she didn't exist, so they had been quite happy when she disappeared), so she wrote down that she came from somewhere else when she left home to go to MIT like her Papa... and his, while Auntie Di had gone to Harvard like the rest of her Daddy's family. So there was actually nothing in either of their records to show that they were related and they had never told anyone about it. She'd laughed and hugged him when Chuck nodded very seriously when she was done, saying that that made sense.
It hadn't been easy, going to school, helping look after Josie, Benjie, Katy and Lexie and working harder than most grown ups for Auntie Di, but Auntie Di was right, they were all brilliant, so Major Beckman's new Spectre (Special Projects and Tactical REsearch) group's services quickly came to be well respected and in great demand. Then he and Ellie got what they agreed was the best present ever just after Ellie's thirteenth birthday, because Mommy came back, as Mary Elizabeth Donner to make it harder to track the kids via her. They were processing a lot of work by then, and there was already enough demand for their work to justify a major expansion of the group, in fact it had grown to more than triple its original size, going from the thirty odd people they had on the books originally (Air Force, Army and Navy identities for Chuck, Ellie, Auntie Em and Sue, Uncle Bry and twenty odd others) to well over a hundred (Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine identities for all six of them and John Casey, who was officially Auntie Di's new assistant, plus eighty odd other people around the country and in Europe that they had working with them), and Emma, Charly, Jack, Ellie and Chuck were building corporate empires for them as well to keep their activities under the radar, because they had many times more people off the books, they were quickly growing into quite a serious organisation.
Ellie and Chuck knew that they weren't getting the whole story of what happened when she was away, but from Mom's expression, and Auntie Em and Auntie Sue's too after they'd talked in private, Ellie wasn't sure that she wanted to know the whole story. All they were told at the time was that Uncle Hartley had had a different version of what Daddy did loaded into him to make him turn into someone else, someone called Alexei Volkoff, and he was sent to Russia. Mom was sent after him to bring him home when he was due to turn back into himself, but he didn't. Someone had also told him that she was a CIA spy sent to kill him, and who and where they and their father were, so she couldn't get away and come home for fear of someone coming to hurt them, not until Auntie Di and Uncle Bry got word to her that Daddy had disappeared and they were safe.
What she swore Emma, Sue, Bai, Charly, Di, Roan, Bry and Buck to secrecy about was the fact that Ellie and Chuck almost certainly had a half sister out there somewhere now. Volkoff had had his fun torturing and raping her after she was captured, and she'd only managed to avoid being killed by getting him to confirm that she was in fact a KGB sleeper, Marjan Zaleska, who'd been sent to America when she was sixteen to get herself recruited into the intelligence community from university, and convince him that she'd changed sides because of the CIA's betrayal so she was loyal to him. She of course didn't tell him that she'd stopped being an active sleeper after she met Stefan Jaworski and they fell in love, but even though she managed to play him well enough to avoid having to have any more sex with him after that, it turned out that she was already pregnant. They took the baby girl away at birth and she never saw her again, but she was in no state to face what had been forced into her by that animal like that anyway, Volkoff wasn't Hartley, he was a monster. Once the baby was born though, she started making plans to get out of there as soon as she could. It was actually the men from the Spetsbrigada that made up the core of Volkoff's security forces who had helped her get away, because they respected her as a warrior and did not approve of what was being done to one who had proved themselves as she had.
As well as all the work they were doing (For Auntie Di, the 'family' and school, because their initial cover story had been that their parents were away working on the pipeline up in Alaska... they'd said that Mary's job up there hadn't been paying that much and she hardly saw their father anyway so she came back to help look after them when she turned up about nine months later... but that hardly paid enough for them to live in Arcadia where the best schools were, so Ellie and Chuck would need to earn scholarships if they wanted to go to university, and they had to make themselves stand out amongst some of the best prospects in the country. Di quickly regretted the decision to have the DIA's Cover Bureau create Emma, Ellie and Chuck's new identities, but she'd thought at the time that they'd need official cover identities to give them solid enough backgrounds to work for the government in her group and they were locked into that now.), they were using the resources of the intelligence group to search for Sammie, and Mom, Auntie Sue, Auntie Em, Auntie Charly, Uncle Bry, Uncle Buck and Uncle Roan were teaching them all the things they were best at, which meant a lot of training. Chuck had heard Auntie Em crying to Mom sometimes about it not being right to take their childhoods away from them like this, but Mom always reminded her that it wasn't them or Di who had taken Ellie and Chuck's childhoods away, it was Graham and those other bastards!
Over the next ten years or so until Ellie and Chuck finished university, they'd worked their arses off. Major Beckman's secretive Spectre Group had quickly became the hottest property of the intelligence community, so much so that the group had grown to more than a dozen times bigger and branched out from military intelligence because the FBI, ATF, DEA, US Marshals (for the witness protection program), and even the CIA had to avail themselves of the group's services to get the results they were after. Mary, Di, Sue, Bry and Roan also extended the training that they were giving Ellie and Chuck (and Anna, after she worked out what the family secret was), either by getting them into training that shouldn't have been possible, like special operations training (even the SEALs' for Ellie and Chuck) and aviator training (all the way up to supersonic jets and the big multi engined transport planes and helicopters), and they started going on special operations and intelligence missions with Mary, Bry, John and Roan, because part of their training had been how to make themselves look older, and convince everyone else that they actually looked younger than they were, their abilities helped with that as they were better than most.
When they started ramping up Ellie and Chuck's weapons training in the first half of Ninety One, Mary contacted her friends in Russia and Israel, and about a month later she went out one night and came back with a truck load of high end special operations weapons, ammunition and explosives. The majority of it had come from Russia, but the best weaponry from the rest of the world was included too... John, Uncle Bry and the other operatives drooled when they saw what was there. Di and the others had had their Arcadia base created in early Nineteen Ninety. Once they located a row of suitable houses together in a location that met their requirements with owners who wanted to get out, they engineered a series of major gas main explosions under the yards of the houses to create the situation which let them acquire and completely rebuild the row of houses without attracting undue attention, once the initial flurry of news coverage that large gas explosions in a fairly affluent residential area was bound to attract had died down. The rebuilding work included adding garages that would take the trucks they used, basements under the houses and a string of interconnected bunkers that ran the entire length of the row, so there was plenty of room to expand the more ordinary special ops armoury they originally had in the bunker, just like when they added all the other equipment they used, and adding a lot of security to all the houses as well. Officially, the Spectre group's California base was just listed as 'somewhere in California', the Spectre group officially having facilities at Los Alamitos, Moffett Field and Mare Island helped muddy the waters about where it was and they quickly learned how to cover their tracks and keep themselves off everyone's radar.
Ellie and Chuck had no trouble earning the scholarships they needed to get into university, as they were both the valedictorians for their years. Ellie went into medicine at UCLA in Ninety Three and got herself locked into the trauma and neurology tracks (because Chuck, Mom, Uncle Bry and John came back from the missions they went on with bullet wounds and other injuries all too often so she needed to look after them, and they'd gotten Stefan into therapy after he called Auntie Di to tell her what he'd done but his brain was half fried by that thing he'd tried on himself after Chuck did it without harming himself, so he was up at Red Mountain with Leo Dreyfus, a therapist who was one of Auntie Di's friends, as Stephen Donner (they were going to use Bartowski but realised that that would just put him, Ellie and Chuck in more danger because he was in DC at first), but it was obvious that it was going to take more than therapy to fix him, so Ellie was studying to become a neurologist), and Chuck went into Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford in Ninety Six. They had been worried about Chuck going to Stanford, because there was always a chance that CIA might still be keeping an eye on San Francisco in hope that his father may go back there, but Stanford was the best university that had offered him a scholarship and he took his looks mainly from his mother, so they were hoping to get away with it.
They had one win in regard to Chuck going to Stanford, because they'd had the hangars at Moffett Field NAS formally transferred to the Spectre group in and legally sold them to Emerald City early Ninety, long before the NAS was closed down and handed over to NASA in early Ninety Four, so they were irrevocably theirs. There had been two primary reasons for acquiring the Moffett Field Hangars originally, the first was to give them somewhere to fly into in San Francisco until they got the runways fixed up at the old Naval Auxiliary Air Facility on Mare Island, and the other was to give them an alternate base for operations in the San Francisco area to their facilities on Mare Island.
The NASA administrators' attempt to pressure them into giving up their hangars and leave after Moffett Field was handed over to NASA in Ninety Four by requiring them to strip every speck of the contaminated materials out the hangers and dispose of them properly had actually played right into their hands, because petty minded bureaucrats trying to play power games like that just pissed them off and it gave them the excuse they needed to completely demolish and rebuild the hangars, which in turn gave them the opportunity to create an on-going base of operations to serve their more confidential requirements in the bunkers they built under the hangars.
That was a large part of the reason they decided to make the Emerald City Hangars there into a long term facility, though it also gave them access to the adjacent Ames Research Center's facilities. The fact that having the facility there made it easy to keep a team close by to support and watch over Chuck and Anna when Chuck got the scholarship to go to Stanford in Palo Alto a few years was just a side benefit, though a very important one for the family.
Of course, the 'poor scholarship kid' cover that Chuck was stuck with meant that he had to go with the allocated housing as well, but with Skip going to UCLA instead of Stanford, he didn't have a ready made room mate like Anna and Jill did, so he ended up sharing with a trust fund jock from Connecticut by the name of Bryce Larkin. However they found that this wasn't as random as it appeared at first when they looked into the matter after everything fell apart, because Larkin's family had used its influence to get him placed with the brightest of the scholarship kids (Chuck, obviously) in an attempt to get him the help they knew he'd need to get decent grades.
Anna had been Chuck's best friend ever since they moved to Arcadia, because the little pocket rocket was every bit as brilliant as she was feisty, and she was into martial arts too, but while everyone thought that they'd been boyfriend and girlfriend since their early teens, this was just an act to cover up the fact that Anna had a girlfriend, Jill. They and their other best friend, Lou, had experimented with sex when Anna and Lou's hormones were kicking in as they were moving into their teens (the girls didn't know that Chuck was two years younger than them), but Anna had found that while she loved Chuck and what he did to her felt great, she wasn't into him that way at all, as she found that it was girls that she was attracted to. When she tentatively broached the matter with their new friend Jill (because she was worried that she might disappear like Lou had), she was delighted to find that Jill felt the same way, but therein lay a different problem, because Anna was from a traditional Chinese family, while Jill was from a strict Christian family, so neither family would ever accept their daughters being homosexuals! The faith issue would just add to the problem.
Anna came up with the solution to that problem one day when the girls were crying on his and Skip's shoulders about it in Chuck's room…. and Skip was commiserating with the girls, because he was in much the same position, being gay himself. That made Anna suddenly sit up and look at Jill in Skip's arms, then turn to look up at Chuck with a hopeful expression. "Chuckles, you're the only one here who isn't gay, but we both know that there's only one girl for you. You know that I'll keep helping you look for her for as long as it takes, but until you do find your Sammie, do you think…. is there any chance that you could pretend to be my boyfriend in public? I'm sure that we won't have any problem convincing my family and everyone else that I'm your girlfriend because they think that already, so if Jill and Skippy can pull off the act too, no one should ever be able to work out that we aren't straight."
Chuck smiled, kissing her on the head and giving her a squeeze, then looked at the others. "What do you guys think? Can you pull off being boyfriend, girlfriend?"
Jill and Skip looked at each other and nodded eagerly before turning back to him and Skip answered. "Sure we can, but what about you Chuck? You're the only one who isn't getting anything out of this!"
Chuck shook his head with a smile. "Sure I am! Like Anna said, there's only one girl for me, so this way I get a pint sized pit bull to scare off any other girls who might decide that they want something from me. And besides, this one and you guys are my best friends, what kind of friend would I be if I didn't help you with this?"
Anna elbowed him for the 'pint sized pit bull' crack, but kissed him for doing this for them, and that was how it was up until they got to Stanford. There was a slight change when they got there though, because they were met by religious head cases up on their soap boxes, ranting about homosexuality being a sin and all the jocks were leering at Jill. This was frightening Jill, so Anna asked Chuck if Jill could be his pretend girlfriend instead of her while they were there. He agreed because they wouldn't ever be doing anything more than kissing and cuddling to keep up the act in public anyway and he would still be protecting both of them, so he had himself a new 'girlfriend' at Stanford.
'Uncle' Jeff took their things up to Palo Alto for them in his 'work' van, because Chuck was driving the girls up in 'Anna's Lancer (even Jill didn't know that this was more Chuck's car than Anna's, because Anna was a part of their group before she met Jill, and she kept the secrets that were entrusted with her, even from her girlfriend. Anna's parents had agreed to buy her a car for when she went to university, but didn't argue when she took her American boyfriend and his Uncle John instead of her father to find the car she wanted, as they accepted that the two of them knew more about cars than he did. They had had a few words to say when she came back with the Lancer instead of the sensible little hatchback that she was supposed to buy, but it didn't cost them any more than the hatchback would have and they just put it down to her being influenced by her boyfriend. What they didn't realise was that the Lancer actually had a full works spec Evo IV drivetrain, brakes and suspension underneath it from Japan that cost many times what they paid for the car. The Lancer looked tame enough on the outside to be believable as a university student's car, but had enough performance to give them an effective getaway car for missions, because Chuck and Anna would still be working for Auntie Di while they were up at Stanford. Of course they had other cars at Moffett Field, but they never knew when they'd need to make a getaway, so having Anna's car set up that way made sense.)
Anna couldn't resist taking advantage of the fact that Chuck couldn't say too much in front of Jill, so she started pointing at the massive airship hangars and asking him what they were, and what this place was, as they were passing Moffett Field. She did feel a little guilty about doing that to him, because she knew that he was already pissed off about the fact that they'd had to waste over six hours driving up from LA at legal speeds to just maintain the façade that they were normal students in front of Jill, when they had the Emerald City facility in there which had all the facilities they needed, including the ability to store any of the planes they would normally use for general transport. She also knew that he'd already confirmed that with the Yak, or any of their smaller jets for that matter, he could cut the trip time to under an hour door to door... And after all, it was her girlfriend who had made all this play acting necessary, but it was just too much fun to wind Chuck up and they'd been doing this to each other since they were eleven.
As well as hauling their things up for them, Jeff was supposedly looking for a place to set himself up in Palo Alto, because he'd be staying up there to support Chuck, using a tech services business (Munchkin Technical Services, or MTS as it was usually known) to explain what he was doing there. 'Uncle' Jeff's name was actually Thomas Jefferson Barnes now, better known as the hacker Rosco (it had been Tom Baker up until Chuck caught him and he chose to start a new life with them). Given the fact that he was only offered two alternatives after Chuck uncovered his activities on government computer systems and tracked him down so that John could arrest him, work with Chuck, Anna and Skip on the cyber side of the Spectre group, or disappear into a black site somewhere, never to be seen again... well it hadn't been a hard choice for him to make. Having the chance to work with the Piranha and the Lotus (and to a lesser degree Skippy) was something Jeff wasn't likely to pass up anyway, because they were up there with the best in the game, which Chuck had proven by how easily he'd caught him because Rosco was one of the hacker elite too. Jeff had been part of their group for over two years now, and he still regarded being caught by Chuck as the best mistake he'd ever made.
The girls had more fun winding up Chuck about the fact that even without Skip coming to Stanford, he still had a gay room mate, after they met Bryce when they helped him move into his room. That was aggravating, because he didn't need any more complications, but he wasn't too worried about Bryce because he knew that he'd be able to handle anything the guy may try, if he did. They had a bigger worry anyway, and that was probably why the girls were trying to wind him up, to get their minds off that.
While they were moving the girls' things into their dorm, they had heard lots of talk about girls getting raped in the dorms, especially girls who were thought to be lesbians. There were already girls packing up and going home because of those attacks, before classes had even started, and when Anna asked some of the girls what the campus police were doing about it, she was told "Nothing!".
This frightened Jill even more, so Chuck tried to calm her while they were helping him move into his room by telling her that Uncle Jeff was already looking for a place to live as he was thinking of moving up here for the business opportunities, so they'd just ask him to look for a bigger place and think up something to tell their parents (Anna of course knew the real story, so she followed Chuck's lead on this). That did calm Jill down a little, but they both begged him to stay with them that night so they'd feel safer. Anna smirked at him, with a subtle nod in his room mate's direction as she whispered. "Maybe you'll feel safer that way too Chuckles."
He swatted her on the behind with a smile for that, but said that of course he'd stay with them, getting a kiss from Jill when she belatedly remembered that she was supposed to be his girlfriend. They had discussed the fact that him being as affectionate with Anna as he was with his 'girlfriend' much of the time would probably have many people thinking that it was actually a three way relationship, but agreed that that would serve their purposes better anyway, so they weren't worried if people saw.
With Chuck's skills, it wasn't difficult for him to slip into the girls' dorms and then Anna and Jill's room without being noticed later that night. The three of them had had so many sleepovers over the years that the girls had no compunctions about getting undressed and changed in front of Chuck, sure they knew he was straight, but they also knew that he was a perfect gentleman and that he'd spend the rest of his life if need be looking for the one who'd been taken out of his life when he was eight, they'd heard that story from the whole family and Anna had seen his anguish when he couldn't find any sign of Sammie. To Anna and Jill, Chuck and Skip were as good as one of the girls, so they just got ready for bed and settled down for the night after a round of good night hugs and kisses.
Chuck was alerted in the early hours of the morning by sounds out in the hall, so he leapt out of bed and woke the girls. Jill was terrified, because she couldn't see how they could fight off the packs of men she'd been told would be coming for them, but Chuck quickly swapped places with Anna when she spat out "Chuck, the girls were saying that they're targeting lesbians, so get in here with Jill and make it look like you're making out! Maybe that will make them leave us alone if they're really only attacking lesbians!" as she clambered out of bed. He was surprised when Jill ripped her top off and threw on the floor then fell on him in a heated make out session while Anna hopped into the other bed, but before he could say anything the door of their room burst open and at least half a dozen big, burly figures in ski masks rushed in.
As enthusiastic as Jill was being, Chuck didn't miss a word of what was said when they entered. From what they said, the ones in front were obviously in charge.
"Shit, I thought she said that they were dykes?"
"Who cares? Looks like the beanpole's warmed that one up for us, which one do ya wanna do first?"
"She looks ready, I'll take her and you can start with the Chink…."
At that point the clock radio that Chuck had grabbed from the bedside table cut off his words as it smashed into his face, the heavy base of the lamp took out the next guy and the vase the one after him. Then Chuck swept Jill off him and rolled out of bed, snatching up the solid wood chair that was sitting against the wall and using it on the others (because that would be easier to explain than talking them all out bare handed). They were all down in under thirty seconds, and the ones he took out with the chair were in by far the worst shape because they all had shattered arms, legs and ribs.
Chuck went to the nearest conscious one, yanking off his ski mask and grabbing him by the hair.
"Who's 'she'?"
"What the fuck are you talking about?"
"Your buddy said 'she' told you that the girls were dykes, who's 'she'?"
"Fuck you! I'm not telling you any….."
His words were lost in a scream as Chuck grabbed the spot where he'd shattered the guy's leg with the chair and squeezed.
When he stopped screaming, Chuck repeated the question. "Who. Is. She?"
The guy wasn't about to take any more of that, so he frantically pointed out the door. "HER! HER!"
Chuck turned to see a severe looking young woman with a worried expression (because this obviously hadn't gone the way it was supposed to) standing there, fully dressed at two in the morning when everyone else was in their sleepwear. When she saw him turn to look at her she tried to run but the other girls crowding around the door had heard what the would-be rapist said too and grabbed her. They'd heard quite enough for there to be no doubt in their minds that this bitch had been setting girls up to be raped just because she didn't approve of what she thought their life choices were. They didn't see that girl being a lesbian, not with the way she and her boyfriend were almost naked and had obviously been going at, and they knew for a fact that some of the other girls who'd been raped weren't either, but whether they were or not was immaterial, that bitch had been setting other girls up to be gang raped, and some of those girls had been their friends, so there was no way that they were letting her get away!
He knew that someone would have called the campus police by now, but Chuck didn't trust them at all, so he called Auntie Di, telling her what happened and she told him to try and stall until she could get an FBI team there. Luckily it was almost time for her to be getting up in DC (the price of success, she'd had to move to DC within a year of the Spectre group being established because that was where most of the government bodies who engaged the group were located, so she had to be there for meetings with them all the time, which seriously cut into the amount of time she got to spend with with Josie, even racking up ten thousand flight miles a week she was only getting to see her twice a week), so she was wide awake as soon as the phone rang.
With that, Chuck went back to the girls, Jill had her top back on and Anna was comforting her. As he walked up, Jill stepped forward to embrace him and he kissed her, whispering in her ear "Remember, I'm your boyfriend." She nodded and kissed him, and then he reached out to pull Anna into the embrace, kissing her on the forehead, whispering "And you were in your own bed if anyone asks." Anna nodded, hugging him and kissing him in the cheek too.
By the time the campus police arrived, Chuck had gotten dressed to cover up his scars and some of the girls who'd been raped had come in and said that they were sure that these were the bastards who'd raped them, while others identified the would-be rapists as all being on the university's football team after their ski masks were pulled off.
Things went pretty much as Chuck expected with the campus police, as they just said that these boys had only been playing around on a harmless panty raid and tried to drag Chuck out, telling him that he was facing multiple counts of grievous bodily harm, attempted murder, unprovoked assault and anything else they could think of. At that the other girls pushed their way into the room and started shouting at them about all the rapes that had been occurring but the campus cops just kept saying that there was no evidence that any of these boys had had anything to do with those and threatened them to try and get them out of the way.
This bickering was enough to keep the campus cops tied up for the short time it took the 'FBI' to arrive, and Chuck smiled in relief to see John, Bai and Uncle Bry walk in with some of the guys from the support team (they would be maintaining a rotating support team of a dozen or so at Moffett Field while Chuck and Anna were at Stanford). Auntie Di must have had John, Bai and Uncle Bry waiting with the team there in case of trouble, but whatever the reason he was just glad to see them. Chuck wasn't sure why John was putting on a southern accent, but it was hard not to laugh as he drawled "Y'all better check yourself there boy! Did your Mama hit you with the stupid stick or somethin'? Tryin' to tell the FBI that we don't have no authority here?" when that jumped up security guard tried to tell them to get out because the campus police had this under control.
With the proper authorities there, the other girls started shouting about the rapes that had been going on and how this bitch had been setting girls up to be raped and the campus cops had been sweeping it all under the carpet. Casey's expression turned very grim at that and he brusquely told the campus cops to get out, but wait outside the building, because he'd be real angry if they made him track them down, that was all it took to make them scamper out the door. John sent one of the support guys after them to make sure they did as he said.
The would-be rapists were taken to hospital to be treated and were kept there under guard, being questioned and having samples being taken from them for DNA tests, and the woman who'd sent them to Anna and Jill's room was taken into custody and questioned too. The next day samples were taken from the rest of their team and they were questioned as well, along with the other university teams. Some of the players tried to argue, but they buckled very quickly when faced with a very angry John Casey and Bryan Mills (both of whom had daughters who would be going to university themselves in ten years or so).
It took a couple of months for the real police (with the FBI and Spectre group's help) to root out everyone who'd been involved in the rapes themselves and setting girls up to be raped, and more than a few people around the university were complaining and threatening retribution because quite a number of the university's first string players ended up in jail as a result of the investigation (how dare those bitches destroy their football prospects with their lies, because those boys had only been having a bit of harmless fun?), along with a number of the religious fanatics who'd been setting girls up to be raped. A number of others (including many of the campus police and the ones making threats) who they didn't have enough evidence on to make criminal charges stick but were obviously guilty as sin were permanently banished from the university as the university tried to clean up its seriously tarnished image. The women of the university felt a little safer after that, but those bastards hadn't been the only predators on the campus so they still had to be careful, and for that matter most of the anti-homo crowd were still there too.
It hadn't taken long for them to supposedly get the purchase of a house through (seeing as it had been done before they got there), and get a $3.6 Million settlement out of the university for fostering an culture of rapes, hate crimes and corrupt campus police who were covering those crimes up, and to have very public charges of false arrest and defamation of character against the Chancellor dropped to officially pay for it. They had only asked for a quarter of that originally, but they played the university officials like fish and Roan (as Auntie Em's cousin by marriage and their family lawyer Bernard Larouche, and himself actually, as that was who and what he'd officially been before he joined the CIA) gleefully doubled it as planned because of the threats and abuse being hurled at them, and thanked them for upping his fee for him.
When one of the university officials spitefully said that Chuck's scholarship should be taken off him and given to someone who really needed it, Roan's smile lit up the room as he said. "Thank you! That was ample grounds for us to double the settlement, and therefore my fee, again!" because that was a bonus. Needless to say, the Chancellor shut up the idiot who'd threatened that quick smart and got him out of there before he could cost the university any more money. While they had them on the ropes, they got the Chancellor to officially waive the pre-requisites and have both Chuck and Anna admitted into Stanford's MBA program, effective immediately, seeing as he 'now' had the money to pay for it. The Chancellor tried to save face by pointing out to the other officials that at least the university would be getting some of that money back this way, but no-one was swallowing it.
The house they set up just off campus had taken them a while to find because they'd had very specific requirements, but the one they found had exceeded their requirements. It was close enough to the University to walk there easily and it had four bedrooms and a study inside, plus a separate two bedroom apartment for Chuck above the garage (which was wide enough to take up to three cars side by side, and quite deep enough to fit more cars in behind them when the others came over). They didn't have a bunker at the house, because it would be too hard to hide with Jill living there and the house would be sold again once Chuck finished at Stanford, and they already had a bunker with all the facilities under their hangar at Moffett Field.
Anna and Jill shared one room at the house of course, but Anna kept most of her things in one of the spare bedrooms that were kept for John, Uncle Bry or the others' use when they were in town for a while, just in case her or Jill's parents came up to see them. Their living off campus had easily been explained away by the attack in their dorm room. They told their parents that they'd asked Chuck to stay with them that night because they were frightened, with good reason obviously, after hearing about those other girls being raped, and Chuck had gotten a false arrest settlement that was big enough to pay for the house. His uncle being there was explained as him having seen that there weren't many tech services companies in Palo Alto when he helped them move up there, so he'd moved up there to try and get a slab of the services market while it was wide open, and the girls felt safer, having someone they knew and trusted in the house with them after they were attacked like that.
The fact that he'd gotten four times as much as they'd supposedly planned (it was still twice what they'd really planned for) from the university gave Chuck the excuse to spend some money on something fun, a bike (actually six bikes, but four of the other five were normally kept in their hangar at Moffett Field and everyone presumed that they belonged to John or Uncle Bry when they rode them over, the last one was kept in their hangar in El Monte). The six Harleys all had the same core setup, big bore RB Racing ORCA TC126 mills with their fuel injection, engine management and 2 into 1 exhaust setups, RBR's chain drive conversion swingarms, and uprated brakes and suspension. While the core setup was the same though, Chuck's bike had extras like nitrous oxide and such that pushed it further than the ones that John, Jeff and Bry normally used. They all looked like the sort of thing that guys put together in their garage (as even up there they had to pay lip service to their cover life), and in truth Chuck had done a fair bit of the work himself (with John's help strangely enough, wrenching on the bikes together in the garage was probably the closest they'd ever come to bonding off mission), but he'd also spent well over a hundred thousand on parts from RBR to get them to the point where they could have some serious fun with them.
Unfortunately, the terms of the settlement from the university meant that Chuck had to officially stay with the allocated housing for appearances sake because he'd kept his scholarship, so he tried to get Bryce to cover for him, using the argument that Jill's family were strict Christians so they'd go ballistic if they knew that she was sleeping with him. For all his other shortcomings though, Larkin was right up there when it came to manipulation and blackmail, so the deal Chuck had to agree to to get him to cover up the fact that he was supposedly staying in his good Christian girlfriend's room (luckily Larkin was too lazy to check and didn't know that Anna and Jill moved out of the dorms a few weeks after that) most nights was that he spend several hours a week helping him keep up his grades. At first he demanded that Chuck stay in their room at least one or two nights a week and came around at least two other nights to help him. When Chuck shot that down, saying that Jill got frightened if he wasn't there to protect her at night, he changed that to at least four or five visits of at least an hour a week to help him. Chuck agreed to that, because he'd be sticking to the letter of those terms, four visits of no more than one hour each week, at times that suited him, because that way people would see him enough to accept he was staying there. But he'd be staying at the house unless he absolutely had to make an appearance in the dorms because he wasn't going to spend a minute more than he had to around that slug!
Chuck had always steered clear of the over-privileged trust fund jocks like Larkin back at High School, so he'd never really seen how they just expected to get everything they wanted as their due. That was why he couldn't understand how Larkin could straight out blackmail him when he asked him to cover for him staying with his girlfriend who'd been traumatised by being attacked in her dorm room, and then act as if he was doing him a favour by holding up his side of the deal.
Unfortunately, Chuck had his mother's temper and he was having a hard time holding it in as he stormed out of 'their' room to go see the girls less than a week after Larkin first blackmailed him. Anna had seen him like this often enough before though and knew that he had to do something to let off steam or he'd blow, so she didn't ask any questions when he asked to borrow 'her' car, she just handed him the keys, asked him to be careful with a kiss and shut Jill up when she went to say something. She had to explain that tender kiss to her girlfriend after he left, but Chuck had been her best friend and anchor ever since she met him over six years ago, and in many ways he meant far more to her than her girlfriend of three years did. While she loved Jill and would hate to lose her, if she was forced to make to choose between her and Chuck, Chuck would win.
As part of that explanation, she drew Jill over to the window to watch him drive off. Luckily the street was deserted at that moment, because Jill watched in shock as the Lancer got up to at least a hundred miles an hour in the short distance it took to get out of sight. Once it was gone Anna sat her down to explain that as wonderful as Chuck was, he had one hell of a temper, and someone must have done something to make him really angry (she knew it had to be Larkin but didn't tell her that). She told her that Chuck was a drift racer, and a damned good one, but he was currently on probation so if he owned a car the cops would be all over him. When he was like this though, the only thing that could calm him down was to take a fast car up into the hills and let off steam (or a mission, but she wasn't going into that, because for all her intelligence, Jill was too much of a ditzy valley girl to trust with their secrets). That was why she'd gotten the Lancer and let him modify it before they came to Stanford, so he would be able to let off steam up here where he couldn't borrow Ellie's Summit. She nodded at the look Jill gave her at that. "Yeah, Ellie let him modify her car too so that he could let of steam when he needed to, mind you we've had a lot of fun with it too because that little car of her's is damned fast now, and so is my Lancer as you just saw. Auntie Mary and Auntie Em look the other way and pretend that they don't know about the cars or Chuck's racing because they know he's good enough not to endanger others."
Jill was still dubious about that kiss, but accepted Anna's promise that there wasn't anything like that going on between her and Chuck. Anna conceded that they had had sex before she met her, but that was what convinced her that she wasn't into guys, because she knew that if it didn't work with him, it wouldn't work with any guy. She also admitted that she'd experimented with the other girl in their group back then too, but she and her family had up and left town, left the country actually, straight after that, which was why she'd been so tentative with her at first.
That incident helped them keep their other activities under wraps actually, because Chuck was also doing degrees at MIT by distance learning as Charles Carmichael, and he had to be in attendance at MIT sometimes for sessions and exams. He needed to get across the country to Boston and back whenever that happened (They'd also gotten a hangar at Naval Air Station South Weymouth transferred to the group when Ellie started her first degree at Harvard in Ninety Two to give them somewhere to keep their cars, and the jets when they flew over. The members of the Base Realignment and Closure Commission couldn't work out why Major Beckman seemed to be the only officer in the United States Military who actually thanked them for their efforts, but the fact was they'd made things a lot simpler to get facilities transferred to them, especially Navy facilities, because the Navy used any part of their listed facilities that they'd officially transferred to other parts of the government as justification to keep what they were fighting for, so Di didn't have to work hard at all to get hangars etc in Naval facilities allocated to them.), and had to use supersonic jets to be able to do that quick enough, so they often used the letting off steam excuse to explain the times he took off in the Lancer or on his Harley for a while. They also used that excuse sometimes when he had missions, though they needed to come up with a better story for the times that Anna was part of the mission, and for the times when Auntie Di scheduled flights for her to get the flight hours up to keep her aircraft certifications valid (they'd all become Naval Aviators, Air Force Pilots, Army Aviators and Marine Naval Aviators to get qualified on the different aircraft each service had, but this meant that they had to get enough flight hours in each class of aircraft to maintain their aircraft certifications, and that added up to a lot of flight time that they had to sneak in without outsiders like Jill finding out about it). Auntie Di would never admit it, but she was grateful that they'd acquired those Super Tigers at the end of Ninety Six because the F-106Bs that they'd acquired from the AMARC and upgraded with better and more modern engines and systems and bigger tanks in Ninety had been questioned too much because the F-106s were officially retired. People asked questions about the Super Tigers too, but they could be explained away as being part of an on-going research and development program, whereas everyone knew that the F-106s had been shut down.
At least all they had to come up with to explain why Anna spent so much time working with Chuck and Jeff in Chuck's apartment where they had the computers set up was that Chuck had used what little was left over from his settlement after they bought the house and upgraded their computers to buy his Harley and Jeff's tech services business was slow taking off, so they needed to do 'other' jobs to pay the bills and Anna was working with them to pay her and Jill's share. They'd used the story that Chuck, Anna and Skip were making extra money 'hacking for profit' when Jill came into the group (Anna, Skip and Lou had been Middle School's resident nerds when Chuck first arrived in Arcadia and they clicked with him pretty much straight away, but they'd wanted in when he tried to stop their questions about the work he was doing by saying that he was just making a bit of extra money by doing hacking jobs for people his uncle knew. Being as bright as they were, Anna and Lou soon worked out what the family really did from what they were working on and Skip didn't take much longer, which led to them being formally accepted into the Spectre group, working with Chuck, in their early teens), and the story line was that they'd always worked together at Chuck's house because his family never asked what they were doing in his room, so it was easy enough to spin this as just an extension of that. The fact that Jill could never understand their 'techno-babble' as she called it and usually didn't hang around when they started talking that way had always made it easier to cover up what they were actually doing.
While Skip, and Jeff when he took the option to join them, were very much a part of the cyber and to a lesser degree analysis side of the group though, they didn't get into the physical side of what they did the way that Anna had. As soon as she found out that Chuck and Ellie were into martial arts too, she wanted to be part of what they were doing, and even if she wasn't quite up to their standard she was good enough to keep up, so they gave in and got her included in the special operations and operative and flight training that Chuck and Ellie were getting. Between them, Mary, Sue, Bry, Buck, Mike, Roan and John gave Skip and Jeff enough combat and weapons training to make sure that they could look after themselves and they learned how to handle all the vehicles that the group used... They were even made Army, Navy, Marine and Air Force pilots to fly the planes and helicopters the group commonly used and were certified on them, but they didn't go into the more serious training and rarely did any more than provide field support on missions. Skip's workload and responsibilities had expanded a little after Chuck, Anna and Jeff went up to Palo Alto though because he was the only one they had left in Los Angeles on the cyber and tech support side.
Larkin was bright enough to see that what Chuck did to stop the dorm rapes when he first came to Stanford had made him well liked and respected among the female and gay friendly parts of the university population, so while he didn't let him out of his part of the deal that he'd blackmailed him into, he did throw himself into playing the role of Chuck's bestie who he shared a room with most of the time, and made a point of dragging Chuck and his girlfriend and gal pal into the nerdier groups on campus with him. While the idea of being Bryce Larkin's bestie turned Chuck's stomach, this act did help shore up the stupid cover life he was being forced to live with, so he played along in public, and most of the time he was alone with Larkin too (luckily Larkin's narcissism was strong enough for him to swallow the act, and the times that Chuck couldn't keep it up, he just put it down to being out of sorts because of his hormonal girlfriend because someone like Larkin never took the time to understand women's issues, so he took that at face value).
The benefit of this charade was that Chuck could live at the house with Jeff, Anna and Jill nearly all the time, which in turn meant that he was free to go back to putting in at least six or seven hours' work a night (both he and Ellie had inherited their mother's trait of rarely needing more than an hour or two's sleep a night as well as her eidetic memory, so working twenty or more hours a day wasn't too difficult for them), and this helped them catch up on the group's backlog of work fairly quickly.
Hacking into the phone and power companies' systems to cover up the unusually heavy phone and power usage for a household of four people was child's play for Chuck (literally, he'd only been eight when he first did it for their house in Arcadia), and it meant that he, Mom and Ellie could be continuously connected by phone and computer while they worked together through the night. They'd usually have Auntie Di and Auntie Em (and Jeff, Anna and Skip) on as well for a few hours a night up until Auntie Di dropped off to go to bed, and then she would come back on a few hours after Auntie Em and the others dropped off when she got up in the morning in Washington. While working this hard would have wiped out 'ordinary humans' as Auntie Em liked to say (mainly because it pissed off Mom), it wasn't really a problem for them (the Terminators as she called them, usually misquoting the movie after she'd had a few drinks 'The Terminators can't be reasoned with, they can't be bargained with… and they absolutely will not stop. Ever!', which Mom and Ellie said just proved that she spent way too much time watching those silly movies with Chuck).
As gruelling as those hours were, it was the only way they could keep up with the workloads that Auntie Di threw at them to ensure that the Spectre group stayed at the top of the heap in the intelligence community. As the whole family knew though, Chuck's top priority was the search for Sammie, it was the first thing he looked at when he got up and the last thing he checked before he went to bed. If for some reason he wasn't at home, he'd call either the house in Palo Alto or Arcadia or one of their control centres to get them to check for any new hits.
All in all, this setup worked quite well for them, Chuck, Ellie, Anna and Skip were doing well in their degrees at Stanford, MIT, Harvard, UCLA and Caltech, the Spectre group was staying on top of the intelligence game, and he and sometimes Ellie and Anna were going with Uncle Bry, Mom, Uncle Roan and John on special ops and intelligence operations with the SEALs, Special Forces, Marine Recon, Rangers, DIA, FBI, CIA, ATF, US Marshals, DEA and Coast Guard. While wearing, it made for an exciting and rewarding life most of the time.
Meanwhile, down in San Diego, the person who Chuck, Emma and the rest of the family had been searching for for nearly eight years put her foot down. Sammie (or rather Jenny Burton as she was at that point) was fifteen in July Ninety Seven, but all of her records said that she was seventeen and she had no trouble convincing anyone of that. After nearly eight years of being dragged through nearly every sleazy hole in the country, and more than a few over the border…. being chased, propositioned, fondled, felt up and nearly raped more times than she wanted to think about by dirty old and not so old men... and especially that incident in May where she'd had to fight off that group of bikers who were intent on gang raping her in one of the dives her father took her to... she'd given him an ultimatum….. Either give up the con game, go straight and stay in one place long enough for her to complete her final year of high school to get the education credits she'd need to go to university, or they'd be going their separate ways then and there!
Uncle Joe (or Jack Burton as he now was) had no doubt that his daughter could find some nice family who'd happily take her in for a year to do as she wished, because even though he'd never admit it out loud, she was far better than he ever was, she could make people do just about anything she wanted. But that was why he couldn't afford to let her go, he'd never make a fraction of what they did without her planning the gigs and handling the marks the way she did, and he'd most probably be in the pen within a few months as well, so he swore blind that he'd do as she asked without blinking an eye.
Of course, Jack had no intention of honouring that promise, he just said that to stall for time and stop her leaving. Jenny knew that, but even if she was one of the few women on the planet who was totally immune to her father's charms, she couldn't help hoping that just this once, he'd do as he promised.
Jenny Burton wasn't having a good time in San Diego, she'd wanted to fly under the radar for this final year of high school, and also dissuade her father from trying to talk her into 'just one quick job', so she totally changed her look before she enrolled at the school. She got god-awful braces put on her teeth (real ones, which couldn't be removed without a dentist), just about ruined her hair making it look terrible and threw out any nice clothes she had to get the dorky band geek look locked in. The way she saw it, if she was hidden away among the nerds, she'd be ignored by the popular crowd, and her final results when she came out on top when they graduated (as she fully intended to do, to get her best shot at university), it would be less of a surprise too.
The problem was that that didn't work out the way she planned. She fitted in with the overachieving nerds fine (Mama, Charlie, Nora and Uncle Stefan had prepared her well for that and it sometimes made her homesick when she was with the nerds), and she was near the top of all her classes from the start without much effort, but the popular crowd didn't ignore her the way she'd planned, they made sure that they made her life hell. That bitch Heather Chandler was behind it, but they all bought into it, especially that pig Dick Duffy!
She was pretty sure she knew what Chandler's game was, because while she was a horrendous bitch and slag, she was actually fairly smart, so she was almost certainly trying to set it up so that she got the number one spot and got to be valedictorian without having to work hard for them. Jenny could see her prodding that pig Duffy into harassing her, and quite likely if that didn't work raping her as well, so that she'd leave the school, which would of course leave the way clear for her because none of the other smart girls would risk getting in her way after they saw what happened to Jenny.
It wouldn't be hard for Chandler to get Duffy to do something like that either because it was just the sort of thing he'd do if he thought of it, if he could think... She really couldn't understand how he'd made it onto the football team, because he was so dumb she was surprised that he could run without tripping over his feet, or more likely his tongue as soon as he saw a girl in a tight shirt or a short skirt. That was one thing she was glad of with her current look, all her clothes were so baggy you could hardly tell there was a girl under them so most of the jocks ignored her, but that wouldn't stop Duffy once Chandler wound him up, he'd go after old Missus Smith in the lunch shop if Chandler got him wound up and asked him to.
She wasn't worried about being able to stop Duffy, between her natural ability, what Auntie Mary and Auntie Sue had taught her as a kid and what she'd gotten others to teach her over the last eight years she could handle him easily, but she doubted that she'd be able to do so without anyone seeing it, and she doubted that she'd be able to stop herself from permanently damaging him when it got to that because the pig made her so angry, and either of those things would put a black mark on her record and probably draw the cops' attention. That would probably be enough to ruin her plans of getting into university, because she expected that her father would have spent all the money they'd made before they came to San Diego so she would need a scholarship to get into university and with only one year to do it, she'd need to stay squeaky clean to get one.
Jenny was handling the situation fairly well, she'd backed off enough to make it look like she wasn't at the top any more unless you knew about everything else she was doing behind the scenes, and a little gentle persuasion with the teachers 'Please don't tell the others, they're so mean to me when they get jealous!' was enough to keep all that under wraps. Chandler looked smug when she thought that she'd scared her enough to take herself out of contention, but at least she'd stopped prodding Duffy to go after her so that was working. Then, just as the end was in sight, with only two months left to graduation, her father screwed her over!
Her internal dialogue as she drove past their house with hardly a pause after she saw all the ATF and over government cars outside was brutal. 'You didn't really expect him to keep his promise did you? Idiot! You were fuckin' stupid to ever give him the chance to screw you over like this! You should have just left without a word, you know he wouldn't have been able to find you if you'd done that!'
This went on until she reached the first of the spots where she was hoping to find at least one of their emergency money caches, if her father hadn't cleaned the last of them out yet she'd collect whatever was left and do what she should have done last July, find herself a decent family and set it up so that she could stay with them until she finished high school. She was surprised to find that the money was still there, but just as she was about to take it and go she heard a noise.
She spun and threw the knife she'd just used to open the box the cache was buried in with one smooth motion, but the moment she saw who was standing there, she regretted trying to scare the man off rather than kill him, because it was Mister Graham, the one who'd been Uncle Stefan and Auntie Mary's Boss, and Mama's too sometimes from what she heard Mama saying to them when she was supposedly asleep.
From the way Graham was talking, he obviously didn't think that she'd recognise him, which presumably meant that he didn't know that she'd acquired Mama's eidetic memory... or possibly that he didn't know that Mama had one for that matter. Unfortunately, Graham was bright enough to realise that his goading wasn't working and cut to the chase, she was going to work for him because he had her father and he'd make sure he suffered if she didn't do exactly as he said.
Once again, he read more than she wanted from her reaction, because he saw that the idea of her father suffering didn't bother her that much so he upped the ante. "If you don't care what happens to your father, what about your mother? We've had her and the Jaworskis somewhere they won't escape since your father took you away and we caught her trying to go after you! Didn't you ever think to wonder why you couldn't find them? Unlike your father, we need to keep your mother in good enough shape to work, but there are plenty of other ways to punish her that won't effect her ability to work!"
The smug, self satisfied smile on his face said that he knew he had her then, and he proceeded to tell her exactly what she was going to do. She was going to go back to the house and she'd be staying there with CIA handlers until she graduated, as valedictorian. She'd be going to one of the Ivy League universities back east…. "Harvard, I think!" and she'd do damned well there or her mother would pay. As well as her academic requirements, the handlers she'd have up until she graduated... as valedictorian... would be getting her prepared for the three month intensive boot camp she would be doing between her high school graduation and starting at Harvard. She'd have another handler at Harvard, and she'd meet every target she was given in her extra curricular training as well or her mother would pay…
When he finished he looked at her. "Do you understand what is required of you or do I need to use your father to convince you? I realise that your mother is a better incentive but I don't have her right here like I do your father."
He just smiled again as she bit out "Yes, I understand!" because he could see that she desperately wanted to kill him... and from what he'd seen from that incident last May she might have a good shot at that... but she was too afraid of anything happening to her mother to risk it.
Just to twist the knife a little more, Graham buried any official mention of Jack Burton's arrest and conviction, but made sure that word got around town about it so that the popular crowd would make the rest of her time in high school a living hell, as well as making sure that her handlers made her life a living hell at home. She was working harder than she ever had before to try and keep Mama safe, but she was worried about what Graham's retribution would be after she put the male handler through the door when he came into the bathroom while she was having a shower and tried to attack her, he was just replaced though and Graham didn't say a word about it. At least the female handler actually looked as though she felt a little guilty about letting the bathroom incident happen and backed off on her a little.
Jenny did derive some small satisfaction from the reactions of Chandler and the rest of the popular crowd when she swept the floor with them, topping every class to become valedictorian, and the independent auditor their parents insisted on bringing in to expose her cheating couldn't find anything to dispel the evidence that their children were obviously inferior to her. Unfortunately she got a phone call from Graham just before she went on stage to remind her what would happen if she gave the speech that she wanted to, so she just gave a short cookie cutter speech and walked off the stage.
She was immediately hustled into a car and driven straight to the airport to be put on a plane to Virginia, where she spent the next three months getting into shape and learning all the core tools of the trade for a spy (though that went much further than they'd expected because she already knew quite a bit of the subject matter, and mastered what she didn't faster than any other recruits could too, so she was well into the advanced operatives' subjects by the time she went to Harvard), and was given a total makeover to make her into this 'Sarah Walker' who Graham had told her she was going to be from now on when he caught her. It was obvious that Graham wasn't pleased when he saw that the new look they'd come up with was actually a slightly older version of the real her, because it was plain to see he'd wanted to force her to turn into someone else to make it easier to control her, but he had to accept that forcing them to make permanent changes to her appearance when Samantha Blake's (her real name was Samara Liisa Burdon, her Mama never married her father and called her Samara but Auntie Mary and Auntie Di had the records set up to show that they were married and her official birth certificate said she was Samantha Lisa Blake) true look would ultimately serve him better would be counter productive, so he just turned and walked out. Sarah knew that he'd find some way to make her pay for the triumphant smile she couldn't hold in at that moment, she just hoped that he wouldn't take it out on Mama.
A/N: The actresses who played General Beckman and Sarah's mother in the series are both about the same height and have similar features, so disbelief shouldn't need to be suspended too much to believe that they could be sisters. ;^
NB: The actual Terminator quote was "Listen. Understand. That Terminator is out there. It can't be reasoned with, it can't be bargained with...it doesn't feel pity or remorse or fear...and it absolutely will not stop. Ever. Until you are dead."