A/N1 I have wanted these prequel stories to be canon-compliant, but this one pushes on the limits. More on that in A/N2, below. Sarah's Red Test, but with more focus on context and less on the event itself, since Sarah herself gives a brief narration in canon and I do not wish to crowd that narration. A long chapter for me.

I appreciate the thoughtful reviews. Not an easy story to write or read, I know, but I wanted to see if I could manage to work inside the often tight, canon-created, canon-dictated spaces of the story. And, hey, drop me a line; let me know how I am doing.

Don't own Chuck.


The (Mis)Education of Sarah Walker

CHAPTER SEVEN

Red Rabbits


Out of a gunny sack fall red rabbits
Into the crucible to be rendered an emulsion
And we can't allow a chance they'd restore themselves
So we can't make it easy on you
- The Shins, Red Rabbits


As she trudged its drearily fluorescent intestine hallways, Sarah cursed Charles de Gaulle Airport. The place was the First Circle of Hell. And, unfortunately, it kept appearing in her travel plans. Not normally because she was flying into Paris, but because she was making a connection there to go on elsewhere.

But making the connection meant circling around the never-ending guts of the place, and effectively re-entering the airport, re-visiting security. And normally the connection never allowed time to do all that, so that you had to worry the entire time about missing your flight, then sprint to your gate.

Luckily, she was not going to have to run her suitcase through that gauntlet today. Paris was her destination. She had gotten her passport stamped at Customs, one stamp now among many, so many it was hard for the Customs agent to find a place to put the stamp. Since her first trip overseas, to Leipzig, her first mission, Sarah had seen much of the world. Well, that was misleading: seen sounded like a success-term, like she had done touristy things, visited, say, the Eiffel Tower or traipsed around a pyramid. She hadn't. Well, she had once run through the sand near a pyramid trying to escape an enemy agent from whom she had stolen information, but the pyramid had been cover, a place to hide, not a wonder to behold. Mostly, Sarah had seen other countries as she saw Charles de Gaulle Airport - she passed through for work, barely noticing anything that was not work-related.

Leipzig. A lot had changed for Sarah in the aftermath of that gone-sideways mission. On the military transport back to the US, she had reckoned with herself. Taken stock. If she was going to survive the CIA, if her job was not going to kill her or break her beyond fixing, she was going to have to make herself invulnerable, or as close as she could get, both physically and emotionally.

So she began a purposefully brutal training regimen. She pushed herself physically every chance she got, working to further enhance her hand-to-hand combat skills and her weapons skills. The brutality of the regime had the benefit of helping her sleep. She was too exhausted not too, despite the vortex in her head and the toothache in her chest.

She broke off the few personal ties she had, not pursuing any offer of friendship - not just on the job, but everywhere. She never contacted Donald again after Leipzig. She squashed any thought of ever contacting Gale or James. She worked actively to forget that they were part of her life. She even worked actively to forget that her father was part of her life, or about the grifters' life they had shared. No longer consciously thinking of her work as keeping her father protected, she began to concentrate on her work for its own sake, for the challenge of it. She began to pretend that she had no past and no future. She was a woman without personal qualities. Her only qualities were professional.

Professional. She had locked onto that ideal at the Farm, but she had not been as resolute about it as she should have been. James. Mistake. She should never have had a friend at the Farm. After Leipzig, that changed.

She became all professional, no remainder. In the little downtime she had in the intervening three years, she studied anything that she could find about her job and how to do it. Graham was happy to supply her old mission files of particularly successful and particularly unsuccessful missions, and she pored over them, attempting to find insights, useable pros, and cons, ways of duplicating the successes but avoiding the failures. She examined her own past missions as if someone else's, not just the paperwork, but forcing herself through elaborate re-livings of them under their professional aspect. She identified her weaknesses; she capitalized on her strengths. She became better and better; she became worse and worse.

She and Graham had come to an unspoken, perhaps a bit uneasy agreement, that seduction missions were not in her wheelhouse. They weren't off the table. She had had a few, but mostly Graham had turned her into a glorified CIA thief. The skills her father had taught her, that she had used to sneak a look at Robert's diary back in San Diego, had been made more perfect and added to at the Farm. She could pick almost any lock, circumvent almost any security. She mastered all the devices, the old school, 'analog' ones, like hairpins, and the new school digital ones, like electronic code-breakers. She was a ghost, even among ghosts: in and out in the twinkling of an eye with no one the wiser. A wildcard, she could turn up anywhere and then be gone.

Her life was no longer punctuated by the clock, or by the rotation of days and nights, or the cycle of the seasons. It was punctuated wholly by missions. Even her downtime was mission-oriented. Graham helped with that since he gave her almost no downtime. She worked.

Mission. Mission. Mission. Be professional. Do the job. No mistakes. Mission. Move on.

She became a minor legend. She worked alone; she got the job done. After Donald, she had not had another handler. Graham gave her all the leeway she wanted since she was producing results. She rarely ever got back to DC, to the apartment the CIA, Graham, supplied her. When she did, she was there in the same way she was in hotel rooms in foreign countries. She never unpacked. She studied, worked out, and watched her phone, listened for a knock. She feared to be alone with herself.

Since she was almost always out-of-country, she now typically got her missions in situ via packet from other agents. Graham talked to her on the phone often enough, checking on how she was doing, how the mission was going, but she rarely saw him in the flesh. Her life had become almost monastic, single-mindedly devoted to the Agency.

She did not try to justify her practical faith by an appeal to abstractions like the Greater Good. If Graham talked like that, she let him. She left the significance of what she was doing to others to assess. She just did what she was expected to do and did it superlatively well. She did not want to think about significance. That would weaken her.

The missions that she had studied that went wrong almost always did because the agents involved had allowed themselves to become distracted, to feel something for a mark or asset, or to worry that what they were doing was somehow wrong. She did not allow distractions. She had learned - after Sebastian, but especially after Christiana, to disregard the fate of her marks and assets, to treat them as accessories to her missions, like her knives or her S&W.

She did not imagine their inner lives, ask about their motives or reasons, their hopes or fears, and she shared absolutely nothing true of herself with them. Not only because it could rebound on her disastrously, but also because sharing it would mean thinking about herself, wondering about her own motives or reasons, her hopes or fears, her inner life. She had become practiced at pretending that she had no inner life, that she was empty. Not hard to pretend that.

Like her marks or assets, like her knives and gun, she too was really only an accessory to the mission. The mission mattered. Nothing else. Who am I? Special Agent Sarah Walker. And the 'Special Agent' was not a role, not a removable predicate that modified who she was, as 'blonde' did. No, she was a Special Agent. That was who she was essentially. Nothing more.

It was working for her. She was not unhappy. She was just not happy. That was okay. In The Space Between Unhappy and Not Happy: The Sarah Walker Story.

Graham had still not told her about his special plan for her. She was unsure if it had started or was still to start, but he seemed pleased and she kept her head down. There was no margin in wondering about his motives or reasons either.

ooOoo

But this trip to Paris felt different. After her last mission, Graham had talked to her by phone for a surprisingly long time, and he seemed to be feeling her out, trying to determine something, and she was sure by the time she hung up that he had.

She was to meet her contact, a CIA agent, she did not know who, at a small, out-of-the-way hotel in Paris. All Graham had told her was that she would be returning to DC when the mission ended and that they would have things to talk about when she did. He seemed to expect the mission to be quick.

She finally emerged from the bowels of Charles de Gaulle and went outside to join the line waiting for a taxi. She would know more about what was going on soon. She thought of her own term, 'monastic', and she smirked to herself. Nuns wore a ring, the sign of their marriage to Christ. She wore no ring, but she was married to the Agency. Happily married? No. Just married. Committed, regardless of the circumstances of the commitment. "Till death us do part…"

ooOoo

The taxi wound through the Paris streets. As was her habit, she watched the streets go by, careful to catch their names, filling in more of her mental map of the city. She had been here twice before on missions, so she had a good grasp of the place, but it never hurt to keep track. Streets changed names, traffic got rerouted, construction crews were out. She noted everything she saw but enjoyed nothing. Paris was the physical location of the next mission, not a place to be seen.

After paying the taxi driver and collecting her bag, Sarah went to the desk. She gave them her cover name, Katie O'Connell, and they had her reservation. The desk clerk told her that her friend had already picked up a key. Sarah asked no questions; she just nodded her acknowledgment, careful to show no surprise, to give no reaction. She had not expected the other agent to be there first.

She took her key and got on the elevator. She arrived at the room and stopped. She listened at the door and heard nothing. As silently as she could, she opened the door. Stepping inside, she could hear the sound of the shower. She made her way slowly into the room. There were two double beds. A suitcase, black and unremarkable, like Sarah's own, was on one of the beds, the one closest to the bathroom. It was unzipped but closed.

The sound of the shower ended, so Sarah fought down the urge to look in the suitcase. Instead, she put hers on the other bed and sat down in the chair near it, turning it so that its back was to the wall and so that it faced the bathroom door. She sat down, but only after carefully noting the arrangement of the furniture in the room and gauging the distance from her chair to the bathroom door.

A few minutes later, the door opened and steam rolled out of it. And then, wrapped in a towel in the midst of the steam, she saw Hannah Traylor. Hannah looked at Sarah in studied unconcern, smirking unpleasantly at her, enjoying Sarah's reaction.

"Well, well, Sarah Walker. How the hell are you? I've been hearing good things." Hannah opened her suitcase while Sarah sat in stunned silence. Hannah grabbed some clothes. "Back in a minute." She stepped back into the steam, back into the bathroom, and closed the door.

Hannah Traylor.

Sarah had not seen her nemesis since she left the Farm to go to Leipzig. She'd heard that Hannah had been sent into the field. Rumors were that she had turned into a successful agent in her own right. Sarah had never cared enough to follow any of the rumors, to ask to know anything more. She had hoped never to see Hannah again. The thought of running into her accidentally had made Sarah feel dread on the few times she had been in Langley. Luckily, she had not run into her there. But now she was here, attached to Sarah's mission. Her roommate again.

Hannah Traylor. Shit.

ooOoo

Hannah eventually came back into the room, dressed to kill. She had on a clingy black top and a very short miniskirt, and long black boots. She twirled when she got to the end of the bed. "What do you think, Walker?"

Sarah shrugged but then added, figuring that there was no reason to strain the already brittle atmosphere: "NIce, I guess, depending on where you are going…"

Hannah smirked but less unpleasantly this time. "Out. Out on the town. My mission is to give you this, and then I am done. But Graham's putting me up here for a couple of extra days. So, I am going to make the most of it." She walked to her suitcase and opened it up. She took out a beret, black, and put it on her head. Sarah thought of Christiana then banished the thought immediately from her mind.

She smirked at Hannah. "You know, the only people who wear those in Paris are old men and Americans." Hannah gave Sarah a close look. She frowned, shrugged and then put the beret back in her suitcase. She fished out a large manila envelope, sealed, and walked toward Sarah with it clutched to her chest.

"I don't know what's in here, Walker. But I do know the mission won't take long. And that there's nothing for you to do about it tonight. Look, I need a man, frankly; my last mission gave me no time for a man, and I need one...regularly." She paused then raised her eyebrows. "So, why don't we leave our issues back on the Farm and go out together, cuz?" Hannah drawled her way through the invitation, like some hayseed, and actually smiled as it finished. No smirk. No discernible trick up her sleeve.

A night out in Paris. Sarah had not had many nights out anywhere since she started, not unless the nights were themselves part of the cover, actually work nights. Three years and she had really never taken a vacation, never been between missions for more than a couple of days. But Hannah? And the mission. Maybe she could not take any actual steps toward completing it tonight, but surely she could spend the night doing mission prep?

"Um, thanks, Hannah, but, no, I should go ahead and start prepping for the mission." Sarah glanced into Hannah's eyes and then down to the manilla envelope.

Hannah stared at her for a long moment. She held out the envelope, but just as Sarah took it, she grasped it more tightly, holding onto one end while Sarah held onto the other. "Still the Ice Queen, I see. I'm guessing nothing's ever made its way into the icebox? Still a virgin, are we, miss Top-of-the-Class?" Hannah shook her head dismissively. For a moment, as Sarah looked at her, she was Heather Chandler; Heather Chandler was Hannah. Jenny had been dismissed like that in the high school hallway often enough, for the same reason.

Hannah let go of the envelope and whirled away. She opened her suitcase again and took a purse out of it. She slung it over her shoulder as she headed to the door.

"Don't wait up."

Sarah sat still with the envelope in her hands. Hannah showing up had loosened the bonds on herself that Sarah had been forging so carefully for three years. Suddenly, the vulnerabilities of the Farm, of her seventeen-year-old self, were back with a vengeance. That was the last thing she needed. She had worked to rid herself of those vulnerabilities - or at least to find a way to stop paying attention to them. If they still allowed her to be hurt, she had become practiced at ignoring the hurt. And a successfully ignored hurt is no real hurt at all, right?

She was Special Agent Sarah Walker, not Jenny Burton. Why was it that Hannah could hurt her? How could the memory of Heather Chandler still sting? She carried knives and a gun. She had traveled the world. She had stolen files and microchips, ran seductions on foreign gangsters. She had stabbed more than one person. Wounded one in an out-of-control firefight in a dark street in Barcelona. Why would she suddenly revert to the girl she had been? Why was all that hurt still there? Because ignoring what you feel does not make it unreal. She drove that recognition from her mind. She shifted topics.

The truth was that she was no longer a virgin, and had not been one for a while. Over the past three years, she had been with men, few, but still...

She would never have told Hannah that, or let on in any way. Part of the reason was that Hannah was, well, Hannah, and she would have demanded details, and Sarah was fiercely private in general, but even more fiercely private about that. She could find ways to say what needed to be said when she spoke as a cover, as part of a seduction gambit, but anytime she had to say anything of that sort as herself, she found that she was either unable or unwilling.

Men. Her need and, frankly, her curiosity had eventually gotten the better of her. She would have nothing to do with marks or assets - that was a firm rule, a line she would not cross: that was the way unsuccessful missions occurred - but she had found herself with time occasionally during missions, when nothing was happening or was likely to happen, and finally, one night, during such a time, she met a man she liked in her hotel bar and she let him take her to his room.

They had sex. It was frightening and painful, then it was frightening and pleasurable. But the next day, all she felt was regret. She had left the man's room as soon as they had finished. In fact, she had not even undressed. She was not going to do that, just as she was not going to spend the night there. She pulled her clothes back into place and left the room without a word or a backward glance.

It had been...quicker and far less...life-changing than she had expected. As she recalled it the next day, she realized that neither of them had been interested in anything except the bodily transaction. He had told her his name but she had forgotten it. She had not told him her name, not even her cover name.

In this case, perhaps, she had not pretended to do before she actually did, but it still felt like it. What she had been curious about and what she needed she had neither found out nor been given. She had acquired firsthand knowledge of the physics and the physiology of the act, and had gotten something bodily from the transaction, the release and the pleasure that accompanied it - but that was all.

The other couple of men she had been with had been variations on the same theme. Less fright, but no more of what she seemed really to want. She had managed with the most recent (now months ago) to take more of her clothes off. But she had been gone as soon as it was over and she could get her removed clothes back on. Maybe normal people could have sex - make love - romantically, freely expressing intimacy and desire for intimacy, where what happened in bed was a culmination of their feelings for each other and simultaneously a renewal of their feelings for each other. Maybe normal people could have that. Sarah could not. Her life had no place for it. She could not afford to have such feelings to culminate and renew. Whatever she had once hoped for - whatever still crept into her mind and heart during the few moments her control slipped - she had finally yielded, accepted the defeat of her hopes. Childish dreams. Too much tv. Too many movies. The wrong books. She was a woman without personal qualities. She had no personal life. She was all professional, all controlled.

She grimaced to herself. No, she would not be sharing any of that with anyone, but particularly not Hannah. It would likely sound worse than admitting to being a virgin. "The Ice Queen fumbles with ecstasy…" Sarah could hear Hannah saying it.

Sarah sighed. She so could have done without Hannah. She had been so done with Hannah. Why had Graham chosen to send her? Sarah had never complained about Hannah to Graham; Sarah had never mentioned Hannah to Graham. Probably, it was just a bureaucratic coincidence.

Sarah turned the envelope over in her hands and tore open the seal. Inside was a file. Putting the empty envelope between herself and the arm of the chair, Sarah sat back and opened the file. On top of a thin stack of papers were photographs. A woman. Young, perhaps a few years older than Sarah. The woman was attractive, stylishly dressed. She had wavy dark hair and large eyes. A nice smile. One picture looked like a picture taken for a CIA photo ID. The others were surveillance photos, but only of the woman. The photos looked like they had been taken over a length of time and at different places. Signs and other things marked some photos as having been taken in the US, others as having been taken in foreign cities.

After studying the photos, Sarah looked at her orders. She saw Graham's signature at the bottom of the page before she began to read it. As she read, her hands started to shake, and her breathing became ragged.

She finished reading the page. She squeezed her eyes shut. She had to have misunderstood. That could not be the order, the mission. She willed her eyes open and read the page again. That was the order. Execute the woman in the photographs. The woman was never named on the page. She was simply referred to as "the mole" and "the target". She was a double-agent, working inside the CIA but against US interests. She had been deemed "beyond salvage". Sarah was to terminate her.

After sitting for a few minutes, Sarah looked at the other documents. The orders were sanctioned. There were partially redacted pages of evidence against the woman. Although the redaction created a fragmented impression of what the woman had done, it certainly looked like the woman was guilty as charged. Sarah went back to her orders. Graham had ordered her to become an executioner.

A Red Test. She had heard about these, first as whispers among recruits at the Farm. A test given to see if an agent had what it took to pull the trigger. Not just in self-defense or the immediate defense of others. (Sarah had already proven she could do that.) It was a test to see if you could pull the trigger in cold blood, to see if you could execute another person.

Sarah's first thought as she regained some control over herself was to run. She should just get up and get out of the hotel and vanish. Quit. Quit the whole business.

It was bad enough that her life was already a living death; she did not want to live as Death. She stood up, still holding the file. For a split second, everything hung in the balance. Her hands were already on the door handle, her eyes focused on it, even from across the room.

And then her hands were where they were, holding the file on the opposite side of the room. She could not run. This was the only life she knew, and given her childhood, almost certainly the only life she could have unless she took up her father's business and went on the grift.

Her father. She had tried to push him from her mind, as she had everything about her past. She had tried to understand her job as done for motives other than protecting him. But that was, at the end of the day, why she was standing there with a file in her hands. She was doing it to protect him. The professionalism, the control, the seeking after perfection on missions: all of that was to fend off despair, to force her attention away from who she had been, who she was, and who she was becoming. It was a strategy to keep herself putting one foot in front of the other. One line. It kept her moving; if she slowed, she would break, break beyond fixing.

Graham had, of course, made no mention of her father in the orders. In fact, Graham had not mentioned her father to her in a long time, and Sarah had decided that no news was good news. But Graham did not need to mention Jack Burton. Graham knew she knew. If she ran, who knew what would happen to her father. Was he still in danger, even in prison? The con that had put him in danger was now long over, long gone. Could she take the chance that the threat was gone and run? Maybe. Could she leave the only adult life she knew and just go? Maybe. She had money. She spent virtually nothing. She traveled on an expense account and her apartment was paid for by the CIA. She could live a year, maybe more, on what she had, if she were very frugal.

But she could not do it. She could not risk her father. And, bleak though her CIA life might be, it had become her life. She knew nothing else. She might sometimes dream of something else. But those were just dreams. Dreams. She was not a woman whose dreams came true. Sometimes she got to pretend they did, but they never really did.

She sat back down, and though her hands continued to shake, she started to work through the file more deliberately. She had her orders. Sanctioned. The woman had been judged guilty.

The mission. There is only the mission. Do the job. You are just an accessory to the mission, a gun. Do the job.

She rebelled. She squeezed her eyes shut again. She wanted someone to talk to, needed to talk to someone. But who?

She had no one. Had it been some other agent...But, no, it was Hannah Traylor. How could Sarah talk to her about this? Hannah had been cheering against Sarah the entire time at the Farm. More than cheering against her - she had worked against her, made the Farm more miserable for her. One invitation to drinks could not make up for all of that, especially since Sarah was fairly sure, now that she considered it again, that Hannah would have turned the evening into a competition, probably a competition to see who would bed a particular man. Not a competition of which Sarah wanted any part.

Do the job. Stop thinking about it. Stop worrying about motives and reasons. Stop worrying about Hannah. Better it's her here, otherwise, your mission might fail. That is the only unacceptable outcome, Agent. Do. The. Job.

She opened her eyes, shuffling the papers in the file. There was an itinerary. The woman's habits were predictable. There was even a kill zone marked, a side street, off angle from a cafe, the only nearby business. It was closed by the time the woman walked the street as she headed home. The suggested time for termination was on the woman's walk home.

Sarah considered the data. A clean shot and there should be ample opportunity to get away from the scene, especially since she would be using a silencer. She could get into position on the edge of the small park that bordered the street, execute the woman, and then exit through the park, cross two streets, and emerge in a busy area where she should be able to hail a taxi immediately. There was nothing complicated about doing it. Except doing it. Except executing a woman she did not know and about whom she felt nothing other than a vague, distant outrage at what the woman had done - or, anyway, been judged guilty of doing. Her actual guilt is not my concern. Not my concern. Do the job.

Sarah knew that sleep was not going to come. She put the file in her shoulder bag and went out into the Paris evening. She walked for hours, trying not to think, not to feel, not to be, except in the sense that she was locomotive, moving through space. She was an accessory to a mission. A mission. Do the job. Move on. Do the job. Move on. it became a sing-song, timed to her mechanical steps, a march. She marched through much of Paris; she saw none of it. A death march.

ooOoo

Hannah was in her bed, asleep, alone, when Sarah returned to the room. No Do-Not-Disturb sign, no sock on the doorknob. But that guaranteed nothing. She undressed quietly and climbed into her bed. Supine, she watched the room begin to fill with morning light. She felt queasy, feverish. Her body shook unpredictably, sometimes violently. She allowed herself to feel nothing. She blanked her mind. Still, sleep would not come.

And then it did, a mercy.

She tumbled into obliviousness.

ooOoo

She was standing on the street. She had somehow survived the day. But the mole would not survive the night. She saw her approaching. Mole. Traitor. Beyond salvage. Beyond.

Sarah tightened her grip on her pistol, the one that had arrived by courier at the hotel in the early afternoon. She had secreted it in her red coat. The woman reached her. It was time! Sarah could not do it. The woman stopped, kneeled down. Had she dropped something? She started to stand. There was a flash of metal in the woman's hand. Sarah's gun was out and up instantaneously. I can't kill her. I can't kill her. I can't. Kill her.

Sarah's gun jumped and spat in her hand. A living thing spitting death. The woman's eyes went unfocused almost immediately. She never finished standing up. She sank back to her knees. Then she fell face-forward onto the sidewalk. There was something in her hand. Had it been a gun? Sarah had thought so, but in a way that took no time to register as such. She started to step toward the woman...the body...when she heard laughter and voices up the street.

No time. No time to know. What did it matter? Motives? Reasons? She was an accessory to another successful mission. That, this, was what she lived for. She put the gun away and hurried through the park, away from the body, from the pooling red beneath it.

ooOoo

She never remembered the taxi ride back to the hotel. She never remembered getting to her room. Her first memory after turning away from the body was of scalding water showering on her. She was standing, fully clothed, under the steaming blast of the shower. Her gun was on the shower floor, immersed in shallow standing water. She could not bear to look at it or touch it. She wondered if the water could clean it, clean her. Sunday school. Pontius Pilate. "I am innocent of this blood…" She stood beneath the water for as long as she could. Then she undressed, putting her soaking clothes in the sink. She had a flight out in a few hours. She crawled beneath the covers of her bed and pulled them over her head. Hannah was not in the room. Sarah wanted to weep; tears would not come. She could not let them. I did the job.

ooOoo

The next day, Sarah was seated in Graham's office. She knew she looked like death warmed over. But she could not summon the energy to care, to try to hide it. She let Graham look at her. There was the briefest flash of sympathy in his eyes but then it was gone.

"I am very pleased, Agent Walker, with all of your work since the Farm. With your doing what needed to be done in Paris. The job had to be done and you did it. I...acknowledge your sacrifice." He was silent for a moment, almost as if he were taking a moment of silence for the final passing of Jenny Burton.

"But enough of that. Not something to be dwelt upon. Something to do and then forget." He gave her a significant glance before he continued. "I have good news. I can now put into place the plan I have had for you. I want you to become my good right hand, say, my... Enforcer. You will be answerable solely to me, all of your orders will originate with me. It is possible that some of the work may be...unsanctioned, off-the-book. At least at the time it is done. I will need you to trust me, trust my judgment. I need a weapon at my beck and call, someone I can trust absolutely, and who I know will get the job done. Someone who can be on the move immediately. Someone who works light and alone. I will shield you from repercussions. Anything off-books will be off-books, secured and accessible only to me. I am increasing your pay grade. Your expense account, within reason, of course, is now unlimited. Once you are on a mission, it is yours to perform as you see fit. I am sure that you will act as I would have you act." He smiled at her. "This is your true graduation, Agent. Congratulations."

Sarah knew she had never agreed. But what did it matter? One line. She could only walk it, not decide where it went. She nodded gravely one time. A fate in slow motion. Graham's smile grew, and grew more relaxed.

"Very good. I have some good news. Your father is up for probation in a few days. I have...guaranteed he will get it. He should be out and on his own in a month or two. I will make sure we keep an eye on him for awhile, just to be sure all is well, but my information strongly suggests that those who had a vendetta against him have moved on. After all, his crime against them was only intending a crime against them, so to speak. If you would like, I can arrange for you to see him, either before he is released or after."

Sarah shook her head. Why see him? What would she tell him? She could not tell him who she was, not only because she needed to keep that secret, but also because it would lead to questions. She did not want him to know what his con had made her. Why awaken feelings that had become mostly, mercifully, dormant? Better to let him go his way.

"Alright. There are some perks of the new job at your apartment. We will do great things for the Greater Good together agent. Great things. I plan to keep you busy."

"With all due respect, sir, you have already been doing that." Sarah regretted the words but they had come unbidden.

Graham weighed her in his glance, his eyes narrowing slightly. "I apologize for the lengthy...probation, Agent. But I had to be sure you could withstand the rigors of the job. There will not be two of you. But I will sometimes need it to seem as if there are. I need someone for whom there is nothing but the job, someone for whom the job is enough. No, better, someone for whom the job is everything. I believe that is you, Agent. You have proved it." His relaxed smile returned.

Sarah agreed with him about herself, or at least she agreed with his words, if not their meaning. The job was everything to her. Not because she found it noble or exciting, but because there was literally nothing else in her life. It was everything by forfeit, not by merit.

ooOoo

When she got to her apartment, she found a new set of knives and a new S&W there on her coffee table, a closet full of new, very expensive clothes. The cupboards were no longer bare. There was food in the fridge.

Then she saw it. On the breakfast counter was a set of car keys, Porsche keys. For a moment, she was genuinely excited. She went out into the parking lot and pushed the button on the key fob. There was a chirp. A beautiful new Porsche. She hurried back and got her sunglasses and a jacket, locked her apartment.

She almost ran to the Porsche, jumped in, and roared its engine to life. She wanted out of DC, away from Langley and her full but empty apartment. She made her way out the city, eventually onto rural mountain roads nearby in West Virginia. It was not warm enough to put the top down, but she could put her foot down, and she raced the car around the hairpin terms and up and down the roads, tearing along the guardrails, risking deep chasms. She was driving, driving away from Paris, away from all the places before it and after Leipzig. She was trying to escape from her life. But the car, as much as she already loved it, was a part of that life. She could not escape from the life while seated in the life.

Still, the car was the one good thing the life had given her. It was at least a movable cell inside her prison, and for the moment, she had the wheel.


A/N2 Yeah. Tune in next time as we begin a series of CAT chapters, Chapter 8, "Girls Will Be Girls". How about a review? I'd be heart-warmed.

So: when was Sarah's Red Test?

I don't mean that I don't know the canonical answer; I just wonder if it makes much sense. Canon places it five years in the past in S3.

Part of the problem with answering this question about sense is the general problem of Sarah's past. The show writers kept it as their private Pandora's box, from which they could at any point dredge up something to trouble Sarah and torment Chuck. (Remember, these are the same writers who could imagine nothing better than Shaw, which makes me believe their imaginations as wooden as their imaginative creature.)

Anyway, I don't believe there was ever a solid backstory for Sarah. The writers could get away with that because she was "a mystery". But it also left so much about the character under-interpreted.

I have decided here to move the Red Test up, to make it earlier in her CIA career. While not much really hinges on it, it seems unlikely that Sarah would have become Graham's Enforcer prior to a Red Test, and, frankly, unlikely that she would have had time to establish her intelligence-community-wide reputation (the one Casey mentions at various points in the show) if she had taken the Red Test only a couple of years before Burbank. The woman to whom Amnesiac Sarah reverts as the show ends seems to believe that she can kill, that she is willing to kill - and in cold blood. So, too, the Chuck-less Sarah of vs. Phase Three. And the Flash Sarah of early S1.

We could split hairs (to save starting them?) about killings in self-defense vs. executions as ways of gaining a reputation, but that discussion strikes me as subject to the law of diminishing fleas. Sarah calls herself an assassin. I will take her at her word and I will suppose she took on that mantle fairly early, even before her CAT days. I also think this makes better sense of the little we know of the CATs dynamic.

By the way, I have also more or less excised the Harvard/Secret Service stuff from her history here, since it plays little, really no role, in what happens in canon or in self-reportings there from Sarah.