The need for office hours normally didn't rankle Chuck, but today he had a lot on his plate. What made it worse was that the office hours were pretty much unnecessary.

It was Saturday, the last day of final exam week and the spring semester. Because his exams had been on Tuesday and Wednesday, grades for his classes were long since posted and his students had either left campus or had other things on his mind. Still, it was university policy to maintain the hours all week.

This kept Chuck from getting to the lab. Director Graham was extremely excited by the continued progress he was making on the new cognitive index; it had compounded the efficiency of retrieving data from memory while providing more conscious control for the host. Buoyed by that success and under pressure to improve even more, he was anxious to incorporate a few new techniques into the Intersect encoding algorithms so a new version could be uploaded into a pair of newly minted agents before they were sent into the field.

In addition, he was getting pressure from Stanford to write up some of his research that could be published. All the other university professors were required to publish a certain number of articles in order to maintain tenure, and some of the other professors had inevitably started to question why Professor Bartowski was unpublished.

Some things never changed. Here he was, needing to maintain a cover by doing extra work, even if he enjoyed this work a lot more.

He sighed. The clock read 3:23. Surely it wouldn't matter if … no, he needed to stay until 3:30. His mind drifted again.

The real benefit of the cognitive index was that it allowed him to follow the progress of the people he knew in the intelligence committee. He could look up the files on his fellow agents - even now, that phrase felt odd to Chuck - and track their progress. Technically, he probably wasn't supposed to look through the files quite as much as he did, but he had a semi-legitimate excuse in needing to explore the boundaries of what his new encodings could allow, and he couldn't resist seeing how things ended up for his friends.

Casey was leading a team of ten agents called upon for the most complicated and most sensitive of missions. There were also rumors that "Sugar Bear" had been seen in the company of a certain French agent a time or two; however, nothing had been confirmed. At least, not by anyone without access to an Intersect system.

Carina had been seriously wounded in a drug-bust-gone-bad about five months prior. The mission report suggested that she may have pressed her luck one time too often. The initial prognosis was that she would lose enough movement in one of her legs to prevent her from working in the field any more, but she attacked her rehabilitation with a vigor that suggested that she might beat the odds and get her old position back.

Bryce Larkin was still officially dead as far as the CIA was concerned, but the Intersect knew better. With Fulcrum gone, Peter Aldridge now roamed the world in a sort of "Mission Impossible" set-up, where he would receive instructions remotely and then be counted upon to find a way to accomplish his objective with little CIA support.

As for Sarah, Chuck found himself nervous every time he found new files after an upload, wondering if the new file would end with a "KIA", the acronym for Killed In Action. While she had a couple of close calls, in the end her skill and careful planning had kept her safe, at least as far as the files he had could tell him.

Chuck forced himself to watch and read nearly every last detail from her adventures. As he scanned her files, his emotions would run the gamut from amazed to horrified to worried to sickened when he read what she was called upon to do. However, he was determined to know and understand Sarah for the person she really was, not just for what he knew from their time together in Los Angeles. That included the things that were more difficult to stomach.

There were times when he was shaken to the core by what she did, but in the end, he came to love her even more. Knowingly or not, Sarah had shared the core of herself with him, a part of herself that she kept protected and intact from the demands of her job. He understood why she had trouble talking about her feelings and why she needed to keep him at arm's length. She was good at her job, in part, because she kept herself detached from all emotion. Much the way that the two had kept things professional, that was the way it had to be.

He liked to think that he reminded herself of who she truly was, of the person that Sarah might have forgotten during the years prior to meeting him. At the same time, he hoped that the little flashes of emotion she showed in the messages that she sent were now a source of strength. He hoped it was her way of leaning on him for the briefest of moments as she started a new mission, knowing that he was out there waiting for her, trusting in her.

He hoped that was the case.

His desk phone rang, startling him from his reverie. Angrily staring at the phone, he wanted to throw the phone across the room, wondering for the umpteenth time why the university wouldn't let him get rid of the old thing. He gave his cell phone number to all his students any way; virtually nobody called that number.

He stood up as he answered, intending to pack the things from his desk into his computer bag as he talked on the phone.

"Professor Bartowski."

"Hey, man, it's Morgan!"

"Lil' buddy! How are things?"

"They are so good. This new game is gonna be a killer."

"I'm getting a beta version, right?"

"Absolutely. You're going to love it."

Chuck grinned, cradling the phone with his neck as he started to throw things into his bag. Head down and focused on his conversation, he didn't notice the figure standing in the doorway, staring at him as if he were a ghost.

Giving a gentle knock, the figure moved into the room. Chuck didn't notice as he talked to Morgan. "Now, how's the sniper feature? You know you need me to watch your back, or you'll get fragged inside twenty seconds."

Standing in front of the desk, the figure waited patiently to be noticed, giving a gentle knock on the desk. Chuck faintly registered this knock, sticking an index finger into the air as if to say, "One moment please."

He glanced up and back down. When what he saw registered, the phone dropped from his neck and onto the neck with a loud clatter as his neck straightened.

"Chuck? Chuck?!" Morgan's voice came from the ear piece of the receiver. Chuck forgot about him.

Sarah stood in front of the desk, staring at him with those eyes. She wore a flirty blue top with little buttons, a pair of form-fitting jeans and a slightly nervous smile.

"Hi," he said, eyes wide at the sight of her.

Her smile grew a little more confident. "Hi, Chuck."