A/N: This is a sequel to my story "Heart to Hearts Require Talking," which was published in May 2014, before Season 5 began. So "It's Time to Move On" does not follow Season 5 canon. Rather, it assumes that the following things took place in or shortly before January 2014 (as they did in "Heart to Hearts Require Talking"): Joan became DCS, Calder became head of the DPD, Annie returned promptly from Hong Kong and resumed her affair with Auggie, and an OC named Clara Weinberg entered the picture. Nonetheless, I do refer in this sequel to some canonical Season 5 plot elements, including the Chicago bombing and Annie's myocarditis.

Covert Affairs is the property of USA Networks. I don't own any of the characters in this story except Vijay Rajagopalan and Clara Weinberg.

Old Friend

Thursday, November 6, 2014

It had been more than two years since that phone had rung. Three rings before he felt steady enough to answer it and stay on script.

"IT department. Anderson speaking.''

"Auggie?"

"Who is this?''

"Auggie, it's Vijay. From Stanford. Vijay Rajagopalan."

So much for the Smithsonian script. What a blast from the past!

"Wow. It's great to hear from you, man. How are you?"

"Fine. Great," Vijay said awkwardly.

They'd graduated in June 2001 but had lost touch a few years later, as Auggie went deeper and deeper into a life in which his college friends had no place. At Stanford, they had been roommates and best buddies, part of a close-knit group of high-achieving Computer-Science majors. The last time they'd seen each other was in the winter of 2003, when Vijay's twins were just a few months old; afterward, it had been occasional email and then not even that.

"I'm still at Google, still married to Neera. Sanjay and Hema just turned 12."

"That's wonderful," Auggie said. "Wish I had something like that to report. You ever see any of the old gang?" Best not to dwell on his own life, which was a bit of a mess and, for the most part, classified.

"Sometimes. Most of them live here in the Valley. Do you ever get out here?"

"Once in a blue moon for work," Auggie said. "Not for hiking in the redwoods any more, much as I used to love it. I don't know whether you heard, but I …"

"Yeah, I heard about what happened in Iraq. I'm so sorry, man. I should have reached out to you then."

"Hey, forget it. I've adjusted. I've got some amazing toys that let me do everything I could do with computers when I could still see – more, actually."

"Yeah, that's something I want to talk to you about," Vijay said mysteriously. "Would you like to come for a visit? We could get the old gang together – most of it, anyway. Neera would love to see you, too. We can even check out some redwoods, if you don't mind hiking with a guide."

It sounded great. Best idea he'd heard all year.

###

When Vijay's call had come in, Auggie had been sitting at his workstation – spaced out, not getting anything done. He'd been doing a lot of that lately. Curiously, he wasn't brooding over losing Natasha yet again. It was the third time that she'd disappeared from his life and the second time that she'd done so voluntarily. By now, he wouldn't be surprised if their paths crossed again in a few years.

Instead, he was feeling guilty about Hayley. "You used me. I was just another op," she'd said when she returned the stuff he'd left at her place. "And then you broke it off, because I wasn't necessary any more."

He'd given her the standard user's excuse: "It's more complicated than that." But he knew it wasn't. Deliberately and with Joan's blessing, he had used Hayley. He'd used her to get inside information about NCTC's investigation of the Chicago bombing. He'd used her to try to protect DCS personnel, including Annie and himself. Hayley's professional dedication, her personal decency, and her genuine affection for him were crystal clear; he had taken full advantage of them, ignoring how much that would hurt her.

He'd used scores of people over the years, and it usually hadn't caused him a moment's regret. He had just kept his head in the game, convinced that his small bad had served the greater good. Now it didn't feel so small; it just felt dirty. He didn't want to be that kind of person any more.

He had at least a month of use-it-or-lose-it vacation that would expire at the end of the year. Time to tell Joan and Calder that he would be taking some time off to visit an old friend in California.

###

Thursday, November 20, 2014

At dinner in Vijay's spacious home in Portola Valley, Auggie felt more relaxed and optimistic than he had in ages. When he'd arrived in the Bay Area a week earlier, he'd fallen immediately back into easy-going friendship with Vijay and his wife Neera; she had been Auggie and Vijay's classmate at Stanford and was now a partner in a patent-law firm in Palo Alto. She and Vijay had dated during their junior and senior years, much to the dismay of Vijay's parents in Madras, who had assumed that they would choose a mate for him, with the help of their extended family. They would never have chosen Neera, who had grown up in the thriving Indian-immigrant community in Edison, NJ, and seemed entirely American to Vijay's parents.

But they had come around when Vijay and Neera insisted on getting married right after graduation. Lingering regrets had vanished completely when Neera unexpectedly got pregnant during her second semester of law school. Vijay's parents had moved to California to care for the twins Sanjay and Hema while Vijay and Neera worked long hours at their high-powered careers. Twelve years later, they were a model extended family. Having joined Google right out of college, three years before its IPO, Vijay's career so far had been fascinating and lucrative; his parents were still with him, but they now lived in their own well appointed cottage on the Portola Valley estate. Both children were brilliant computer whizzes, bursting with energy and curiosity, and very polite to their elders, including Auggie. Family dinners had been delightful all week; Auggie had managed not to dwell on rediscovered longing for the kind of life that almost no one in the CIA had.

He'd rediscovered the gift of friendship as well as home life. He and Vijay had gone hiking in the Santa Cruz Mountains with their buddies Max, Sam, and Peyton from Stanford. When they'd arrived, Auggie had allowed himself a moment to be dazzled by the mist, the smell, the sounds – everything about the feel of the place – then figured it was time to tell his friends that he didn't know how they expected him to hike when he couldn't see. Before he could say a word, the group had set out on its old-favorite trail, and Max had offered Auggie a perfect sighted lead. Then he'd remembered. "Your mother," he'd said to Max. "Yeah," Max had said. "She came to parents' weekend one year. You met her. She's blind since birth."

Vijay's twins had spent much of the dinner talking to Auggie about computers. He was surprised at how interested they were in his own user experience and how there was a lot more to it than off-the-shelf voice recognition and speech-to-text. Just as they were finishing desert, Hema explained.

"Our cousin Padma is blind. We want her to be able to do all the cool stuff that we do."

Auggie grinned. "Maybe I can help with that." He was about to offer to install some of his own tools on their machines when Neera asked the children to help her clear the table.

"Actually, I wanted to talk to you about that," Vijay said. "Let's go to my study."

TBC