A/N: Thanks again to everyone who's read, followed, favorited and especially reviewed. You guys make this more fun than just the writing.
Sorry for the delay on this chapter, I was having trouble deciding if I should even post it. I'm trying something a little different in this chapter and the next one, and I'm not entirely certain if it works or not, but I wanted to feed some of the back story in and this is what I came up with. Let me know if you think it's a good idea or not. I hope you'll think in the end it's worth it.
Warning not as much fluff as last time but still kind of fluffy at the beginning. Probably would only choke a buffalo.
Standard disclaimers apply: I don't own Chuck, and I'm not making any money at this, just having some fun playing with somebody else's toys. If you're looking for canon feel free to poke around but you're probably going to be disappointed. And like an earlier chapter I'm going to save the line for those looking for cannon till the end.
Meanwhile back at the ranch... (And how many people still recognize that reference?)
Chuck woke up the morning after he and Sarah had made dinner for Ellie and Devon in a place he didn't really recognize. The decor was very green, and the room was definitely not what he had in his room at his sisters. Movement to his left caused him to look over and that's when his memory of the previous night kicked in. He was at Sarah's hotel room in Sarah's bed, which they had put to extremely good use the previous night. Which also explained why he was a bit sore. 'Well worth it,' he thought with a huge smile.
"What's the smile for?" the aforementioned blonde goddess asked.
"Oh I think you already know," he answered. "And a very good morning to you beautiful." He rolled so he could bring her into his arms and kissed her forehead, and then her lips lightly when she tilted her head up toward him.
"Good morning," she returned. "So what should we do today? I thought about just staying in bed and taking advantage of you all day, but I'm already sore in all the right places from last night, so I'm not quite up for that again yet."
"Unfortunately I have to agree on the soreness. I'm afraid you're trying to kill me with sex Agent Walker, but what a way to go," he said with a smile.
"You are not allowed to die on me mister," Sarah said in a mock threatening tone. "I've got plans for you." She rolled over and tried to sit up to poke him in the chest and let out a groan, "Maybe just not quite yet." As she fell back to the bed. "I think you might have broken me."
"I broke you?" Chuck laughed, and then groaned as his abs tried to work.
"We broke each other?" She replied with a smile.
"Ok, I'll give you that one. But since we're both not ready to move yet, is the new plan to just go back to sleep?"
"I'm actually not that tired," Sarah responded. "Are you?"
"Not really, it's nice just laying here though."
"Ok, I told you something about my trust issues with Bryce before. I'd kind of like to avoid that if we could. How would you feel about a story exchange?" Sarah asked.
"Story exchange? What are you proposing?" Chuck inquired.
"We tell each other something true about our lives, no covers, and no lies. If it's classified you can use that as an out, but no pretending it's classified if it's just something you don't want to talk about."
"Ok, how do we pick the topic?" Chuck asked.
"Well, maybe we can trade, off?" Sarah asked.
"Ok, that's fair. Who goes first?"
"Well I came up with it, so I'll let you go first."
"Ok, well, every good superhero comic starts with an origin story. How did you become the super-agent you are today?"
"Well, you already know some of it right?"
"Not that much, just the basics, your dad was arrested for something at the bequest of Langston Graham, and you were directly recruited by him the same day. That's all I know right now." Chuck said.
"That really is most of it, but I can fill in some details I suppose…"
Seventeen year old Jenny Burton was driving home in her yellow VW rabbit convertible. She sang with the radio as she danced in her seat and drummed on the steering wheel. She had purchased the car herself using money she had earned working at various jobs over the last few years. She needed something that wasn't purchased using the proceeds of her father's enterprises, and the car gave her both a sense of freedom and a sense of worth outside helping her dad collect "donations" as he called them. Ever since she'd turned 13 she had become less and less enamored of the life her father led, and she wondered if she could get a college scholarship so she could maybe move away and leave this life behind. That had been on her mind more and more as she got closer to graduation. She found she was a finalist for several scholarships and she was really hoping one of them could change her life. She expected to hear from them soon, and was excited to get home and check the mail to see if any of them had come through.
Those pleasant thoughts left her head immediately when she turned onto her street and found her house with a half dozen cop cars sitting in front with their lights on. She was in shock, but her father had drilled her endlessly on what to do if something like this happened and that training kicked in now. She drove right by her house, looking at the scene just like any other looky loo at a crime scene. That was how she saw her father being led to one of the waiting cars in handcuffs. All her hopes and dreams came crashing down around her as she realized one of her greatest fears was playing out in front of her. She continued on willing herself not to cry and not to panic as she made her way to the hidden cache she and her father set up with their go kit.
As she got to the parking lot in the state park where the cache was hidden, she scanned for any cars that seemed out of place and any sign of police presence. Not seeing any she parked her car and started walking down one of the least used of the hiking trails. At the 1 mile marker she left the trail and started into the woods following her memory of the day they had hidden the escape kit. 'Escape kit, it's just some money to get out of town with,' she thought to herself as she closed on the hiding place. Checking carefully to see if anything looked disturbed, she slowly approached the place where they had hidden the box of money. Not seeing anything that set off her alarms, she quickly dug up the box, and using her knife cut the seal and checked inside, 'All here,' she thought with relief, just as she heard a twig snap and a figure move just out of her line of sight. She quickly turned and threw her knife putting it into a tree not six inches from the large figure that had suddenly appeared. A second knife appeared as if by magic in her hand.
"Don't come any closer, next time I won't miss," she warned the person.
The man was wearing a suit and his face didn't show any indication of worry that she could at any moment impale the knife she now held into his body. "Very good, your father has taught you well, the CIA can do even better," he said with a confident and almost paternal air.
"What are you doing here?" she asked not lowering her knife and slowly moving to a better position to escape from if he should make a move toward her.
"Your father tried to con the wrong people and got in over his head. I had him arrested to keep him safe. I can help you too if you want me to."
"Who are you and why would you want to help me?" she asked, inching away hopefully without him noticing how she was changing her position.
"My name's Langston Graham, I'm an Assistant Deputy Director for Operations at the CIA. As to why, did you know that a good deal of what a field agent does isn't all that different than what your father taught you to do? The biggest difference is we use those skills to help the people of this nation and keep them safe. You've shown great promise, we'd like to tap into that and make you even better."
"What's in it for me?" Jenny asked. Her father had always told her to make sure that anything she entered into had a payoff. Something she needed or wanted to make it worth her while.
"Well for starters would you like to go to college?" he asked with a fatherly smile.
"Well yeah, who doesn't? But it's not like I could afford it. I was hoping to get a scholarship, but I'm thinking nobody's going to give one to a convict's daughter, so that dream is out the window now thanks so much," Jenny said sullenly.
"We can take care of that. An agent needs to be not only educated, but wherever possible should be able to impress with that education. We've got agreements with several institutions of higher learning in this country. How do you feel about Harvard business school?"
"You're joking right?" Jenny asked in disbelief lowering her knife and ceasing her movement.
"No I'm not. If you agree to join us and become an agent, we'll send you to Harvard, give you spending money, housing, tutoring if you need it. All you have to do is give us 6 years after graduation and your summers and breaks for training. What do you say?"
"So let me get this straight, you'll send me to Harvard, get me anything I need while in school. I spend breaks and summers training to be an agent, once I graduate I spend 6 years as an agent and then I'm my own person?"
"That's the deal, obviously if you're as good at the job as I think you'll be, we will try and convince you to stay on, but after 6 years you make your own decision, the degree is yours, and we tie it to whatever permanent identity you want, even a completely clean one which we will make completely legal."
"I have a couple of months until I graduate high school, how does that work?" she asked.
"We'll arrange for the rent on your house to be paid through the end of the lease, and give you money for food and whatever else you need, then this summer after graduation you start your first round of training at the Farm."
Jenny stood there silent as her mind whirled around the possibilities.
"Do you have an answer for me?" the man asked.
"I'll do it," Jenny blurted out.
"Good, let's get you started," the man said as he turned and started to walk back the way Jenny had come. Jenny ran over, grabbed her knife from the tree and ran after him down the path.
"That's pretty much it," Sarah told Chuck as she finished her story. "I spent the next 4 years working my butt off getting through Harvard, and worse the Farm. By the end of my sophomore year I'd been through the basic agent's training. The summer of my sophomore year, I spent in advanced hand to hand and weapons training and going to flight school. My junior year I spent in advanced mission planning and logistics and that summer was a lot of practical training and examinations. My senior year I went through advanced training for asset handling and protection details. They actually had me join a secret service protection detail for about six months after graduation to cross train in their methods. After that I went back to the CIA and I've worked as an agent ever since."
"Ok. Wow, that was a hell of a story Sarah. Somehow I just don't see you as a Jenny though," was his response.
"Wait, I tell you all that and your response is you don't see me as a Jenny? Really?"
"Well no, but starting with Langston Graham is one special kind of bastard, seemed like the wrong opening ploy," Chuck answered.
"What do you mean? He gave me an opportunity to go to Harvard and the deal was pretty close to what the ROTC students make."
"Yeah, but ROTC doesn't start by putting your parents in jail and then preying on the children while they're still in shock. The deal doesn't sound bad, unless you have some additional knowledge, which I unfortunately do."
"What do you mean Chuck?"
"That program that put you through college exists officially, but not openly. Graham has a history of picking up what we call for lack of a better term orphans. Basically teens without stable homes sometimes with no homes and bringing them into the CIA using some of his operations budget to pay their way through school and giving them an 'accelerated' training program. What this gives him is a group of agents that are personally loyal to him more than the agency. He calls them his 'Wildcards' and they generally do whatever he orders them to do and believe whatever he tells them. They don't generally have long life expectancies. We know of 7 agents he's brought up this way, you're the only one to survive past the first 2 years. We've pulled 6 out at one time or another, including you in Venezuela, 4 more than once. Of the ones we've pulled out, 2 were permanently disabled and pensioned off, the rest kept going back to work for Graham and ended up dead sooner or later. Except for you, you continued to survive, it's probably why you're his favorite."
"Anyway, the survival rate is the worst of any agency. The DEA as an agency is the worst overall, but that's out of hundreds of covert agents. The CIA comes next not really even close to the total numbers of rescues we've had to attempt, but if you look only at the subset of Graham's 'Wildcards' it's just horrible, we can't prove anything beyond his 'scholarships', and there's nothing wrong with what he's doing. He even has it listed as a black trial training program to see the effectiveness of starting agent training earlier. The project has something like a 20 year duration and he's been doing it for more than a decade, long before he was a deputy director."
"You can't be right Chuck, Director Graham has been good to me. I can't believe he'd do something like that."
"I'm sorry Sarah, I really am, but it's the truth," he told her pulling back a bit so he could look her in the eyes. "Ask yourself this question, and answer it honestly: Looking back on it, short of our intervention, was the job in Venezuela survivable? And if in retrospect it wasn't, was there anything about your instructions that might lead you to believe objectively that Graham didn't expect you to survive?"
Sarah was obviously thinking for a moment, and then she answered talking slowly as if walking herself through it again, "Graham had set up a one-time transmission station in the center of town, we had just transmitted and left it when our mark caught up with us. Looking back at it, there was no way out of that town with the data after we made our snatch without outside help and we were told there was none to be had. Once we'd taken possession of the briefcase the whole town locked down, there was nothing about those measures in the brief, but looking back at it, any halfway competent analyst would have seen it as the trap it was. Hell, if we'd have been allowed to do a normal mission prep we'd have seen the trap for what it was, but we were basically thrown in cold at the last minute given a very basic brief and the mission to snag the data." She stopped for a minute and then her face changed to a look of disbelief. "Son of a bitch," she nearly whispered, "That's why the transmission equipment. He knew we weren't going to make it out, and he was making sure that we could get the data out before we were captured."
Chuck pulled her in tighter as what she said sank in. The anger started slow but built to a raging inferno as he realized what Graham had done to this wonderful woman in his arms. There was going to be a reckoning and he was going to be there when it happened. But he didn't have time for that now.
Sarah, sensed the anger rolling off Chuck and tried to explain, "Chuck, it's not like this wasn't part of the job I signed up for. For some reason learning that I was actually sent to be killed is different than knowing it could happen, but I can't say it's a risk we don't know about going in."
Chuck stiffened for a moment as the anger started to run away with him again. He shut it down hard, and squeezed her gently. "You're wrong," he began. "It's not part of the job. We don't believe in suicide missions and no win scenarios. I can think of half a dozen options right now that could have gotten you out of there and the CIA has access to all of them."
Sarah was quiet for a few minutes, and then she spoke again, "What do you mean?"
"Let's start with an easy one. Your mark had no access to air support or any serious anti air weapons. You had a good 10 minute lead on him before he even knew you'd taken the briefcase. Any competent spec ops helo driver could have pulled you out of the main square of that town before any significant countermeasures could have been put in place."
"The town sat on a river, and the navy has access to some really kick ass jet propelled boats designed for brown water interdiction and extraction, that could easily have gotten you out."
"Preplacing some rebreathers and masks at the river would have allowed you to slip invisibly away from the town to an extraction point where either a boat or a helicopter could have pulled you out."
"Pre-staging a zodiac at the river would have allowed you to get away temporarily, and there was a point about a mile upstream wide enough to get a Chinook in. You could have driven the zodiac straight on board the helo and been gone."
"Next is my least favorite option, but valid none the less, stage a company of spec ops troopers and put them in to cover your extraction in a standard withdrawal under fire. You have no idea how much I hate even mentioning that one, but it's an option."
"And finally Graham could have simply asked for our assistance and we'd have spent longer than 30 minutes and come up with something significantly sneakier than using the Dragon to pound the reinforcements into the mud while an extraction team ran overwatch on your escape. That's my admittedly biased best choice, but they were all options," Chuck finished. He could feel her stiffening in his arms, and he slowly released her, only to be surprised when she tightened her own grip.
"Sarah, are you ok?"
She actually wasn't ok, the fact that Chuck listed off 6 options for extraction, without batting an eyelid, that would have made the mission in Venezuela both safer and more likely to succeed had triggered a deep seated anger in her. It finally hit her that she had been betrayed by the one person she had actually still trusted in the CIA and she was furious. She needed some time to deal with this before she could answer him.
When she didn't immediately answer he tried to pull back to look at her but she kept her hold on him not letting him get the space he needed to look down. "Sarah?" he tried again.
"Hold on a minute Chuck," she actually growled into his chest. "I need to calm down a minute here before I can talk coherently."
He gave her the time wondering what she would say when she finally answered, when it came it wasn't what he was expecting.
"Thank you Chuck," Sarah barely whispered into his chest.
"What for?" he asked now completely confused.
"For being there for me, then and now."
"Sarah, you never need to thank me for that. Back then it was my job, I'll probably always think of that mission a little differently now that I know you, but that's what we do. And I'll be here for you as long as you'll have me. That's specifically not a job, but a privilege." He pulled back and this time she let him. He smiled down at her, "How are you doing?" he asked.
"Well, all things considered pretty poorly. I just learned that my mentor, the one man I trusted in all the CIA sent me off to die and worse than that, he didn't even try to set it up so I could survive. It's going to take me some time before I'm ok again," she said.
"Take as much time as you need, I'm not going anywhere," Chuck told her. "Unless you need me to, and then I will."
"Thank you, but if you try to leave right now, I'm going to do some serious damage to a part of your anatomy that I really enjoy, so do not even think about leaving," she said now pulling him in tighter again. "Now I really wasn't expecting to have an emotional breakdown telling you my story Chuck, you now owe me, so I want to hear how you got involved in all this."
"And for the record. Jenny wasn't my real name, it was just one in a series of identities I had growing up. I'm not ready to tell you my real name yet. I'm sorry about that, I want to, but that's one piece nobody else in the world knows, well except Graham, and he gave me the Sarah Walker cover that day he recruited me."
"Don't worry about it Sarah, you'll tell me when you're ready. But thank you for wanting to even if you're not ready."
"Thank you Chuck, now like I said, your turn."
"Well, you probably won't believe this but I started out even earlier than you, but my story isn't anywhere near as dark, although honestly it wasn't that different in theme than yours was," he began, going back in his mind to that day 12 years ago when his world changed.
A/N2: Ok for those of you looking for cannon, take a quick internet search on Special Operations Craft – Riverine (SOC-R). That's the cool jet boat Chuck is talking about. If you've seen 'Act of Valor' it was used in that movie. Also if you want to see a video of a zodiac loading directly into a Chinook do a search on youtube for Chinookwater Helicopter picks up Navy (spelling on that is not my fault.)