A/N#1: From reviews, worth addressing here. The show did not do Sarah's backstory in any kind of order that made sense. I stuck to canon here, which makes it seem bizarre. North Korea, Iceland, and Milan are all referenced by the CATs in Season 4, though we know from Season 3 Sarah did not have her Red Test until 2005. Be that as it may, it is what it is. Sarah mentions Pakistan with Carina in Season 1...I added that to the CATs, even though never mentioned in show.

A/N#2: From another review. Sarah says Chuck was the fourth man she had been with. And then...all of this. But remember, she also says the word "technically" because she blacked out and couldn't remember the incidents. The definition of sex is not for debate, but her estimate was between one and three, which correlates to how this is written.Her personal count leaves that out, as she also states, because if she couldn't remember, by themselves they didn't matter, just her overall behavior that ended up allowing those scenarios to occur. Anyway, this is the end of the CATs. Next is Bryce.

It was October of 2003. The CATs had been chasing the Gentle Hand off and on for almost four months. Brazil to Venezuela, then Belize and Costa Rica. Spain, then Paraguay, and later Mexico. I know there were others, stamps in a phony passport I could check if it actually mattered. It didn't.

I did my best to temper my alcohol intake, and refused to let myself be drawn into Carina's plans. It worked, for the most part, but it left me even more isolated than I had felt before. In order to refrain, I needed the distance. I was, as Carina called it, a real Debbie Downer, a wet blanket and/or stick in the mud. Without the ability to numb myself, I spent more time thinking. Not a good thing, not in this line of work anyway.

Carina and I had almost come to blows over the incident in Gstaad. I tried to have a normal conversation with her, asking her what she thought she was doing, why she had done what she did. She was flippant as always, not caring and turning it back on me for being a prude. Honestly–that was the word she used. She called me a prude, and I called her a prostitute. She pushed me, and I hit her. Zondra broke us apart, but not before I told Carina if she ever kissed me again, I would knock her lights out, and if she ever slipped me drugs, even once, I would kill her. I was furious, not really serious about the life threatening, but they had seen enough violence from me at that point to take it seriously.

I was either giving away my body, or giving up my soul. At least it seemed like that to me. It was actually both, almost all the time, just wavering back and forth between the two. If I wasn't losing myself having sex, I was losing myself in the mission. That was more dangerous, overall. It stripped away more of my emotions, and more of myself. I had thought to myself a long time ago I wasn't going to let someone fuck me just for this job. But I realized, in a roundabout way, that was still what I did, by needing to get shitfaced drunk and fuck men whose name I didn't even know. It was the job. I had lost control, and I needed it back.

The only way I had at the time to take it back was during missions. I had been the one holding back, timidly, committing violence in the mildest of ways compared to my teammates. Did they know, questioning my fitness, or my dedication? I never knew if they did. It was never spoken of, although Carina found out after it all blew up, almost literally. That story is coming, but this part is needed to explain that. My Red Test didn't come until after the CATs had been disbanded, but I wreaked havoc in other ways. I participated in torture. I broke bones, slashed faces, arms and legs. I let marks touch me, even kiss me, when the mission called for it. Any means necessary, they said. As in, we can't legally ask you to do it, but you probably should consider it if you want your mission to succeed.

Like I have said before, Carina included sex in that arsenal of means. I didn't. I refused to cross that line. It was her choice, hers alone, and as potentially judgmental as I might sound, I never judged her for it. What I had issues with was the same thing Zondra did–she put the job at risk, her teammates at risk, when she was careless. She would later take down dangerous drug cartels by herself sometimes. She did what she needed to do to survive. She was the best the DEA had for a reason. She could fuck information out of the most dangerous and mysterious drug lords. So here, at least doing that part of it, she was in control and not a liability to us or herself. To her, it was all a game, and why not have fun if you were playing a game?

What I had started to notice was that Gaez, always just within reach, was suddenly just not, right when we were so close. It was almost as if someone was tipping him off that we were after him, our exact moves and location. I kept those thoughts to myself, partially because I wasn't sure who I could trust, partially because I feared Carina could slip up while she was intoxicated, like Zondra had worried about, and if she was fucking a member of the Gentle Hand, whether she knew it or not, I would have no way to know if she was a real traitor or just a sloppy spy. So I did my own spying, internally keeping track of everything, looking for patterns or clues.

It came to a head in Milan, at the end of October. However, before that, the four of us were in Montevideo, Uruguay. Gaez was due to attend a meeting with a few of the local ring leaders, in the back room of a night club. The four of us spread out, with the intention of distracting the guards at the door. Amy, who was the traitor all along, although no one knew for eight more years, thanks to Chuck, was the farthest from us, and must have called him to alert him we were there, because once we finally breached his security, he was gone.

Part of that breaching involved me distracting one of the guards with my body. Classic seduction style saunter and a low cut blouse, paired with a higher than normal pitched voice, and he was distracted. A few compliments, a touch on his lapel, and the keys were mine. I had them in my hand, but to pass them to Zondra, we needed more distraction. I let him kiss me, a disgusting, sloppy wet kiss that tasted like stale cigarettes and bad breath. I also let him slide a hand inside my blouse. He was in the process of trying to reach up my skirt when I knocked him out with an elbow across his face, once I was certain Zondra was inside. All for nothing, because Gaez was gone.

The failure of that mission required a detailed debriefing in Washington with Graham. All four of us were in D.C. for a full week. During that time, Carina was pulled for a raid on the southern border of Texas, a strictly DEA op that she could do with her eyes closed, but requested after another agent had been wounded in the line of duty. While Carina was gone, Graham had discovered Gaez was due in Milan in ten days for another meeting. Graham, suspicious because I had mentioned the possibility of a mole within the CATs, decided to send us separately. I went to Paris, while Zondra went to Barcelona and Amy went to Athens.

I was in Paris, waiting for the signal to travel to Milan, when I got an anonymous phone call, a voice scrambler used to disguise the voice, telling me to stay put in Paris for my own safety. It was odd, and I tried to trace the call, but it had been too short, and it went cold. I thought of calling Graham, but I didn't. I thought he might tell me to just go to Milan as planned, and my intuition was telling me if I had, I might not have survived whatever it was that was going to happen. So Zondra and Amy moved to Milan…and Gaez evaded us once again.

I knew something was going on, and I was damned if I wouldn't figure it out before I had to go back to Graham and tell him why I stayed in Paris in the first place. I realized, without knowing it as it was happening, I made myself look guilty, being the one who never showed. That was Amy's plan all along, though. Divide and conquer. It certainly worked.

The moment we were all together again, I swept everything for listening devices. I found a receiver in the heel of Zondra's boot. I did the sweeping in private, but confronted her in front of the others. Carina had to pull us apart, afraid we would do serious harm to one another. I accused her of being the mole, she accused me of planting it there to make her look guilty and protect myself.

There was a lengthy investigation, and the missions stopped while that was going on. Zondra took a lie detector test, and she passed. The CIA absolved her of any wrongdoing. I was furious, asking Graham if it wasn't her, then who was it? His response? They needed to investigate further, rule out other scenarios we hadn't thought about. Government speak for we don't know and we can't figure out what to do next, so just go with the flow.

Zondra and I were friends. I felt terribly betrayed. I know she felt the same, only I had no sympathy for her then, only contempt. We still had to work as a team, though it became ridiculously difficult to do with so much animosity. That friendship was the casualty of all of that. I did grow closer to Carina as a result, needing something to fill that void, as I literally had nothing else in my life.

The CIA never figured that out, even after they had supposedly investigated exhaustively. It wasn't until Chuck went back over the files that we figured it out. He was only trying to help me, thinking it would be a good idea if I reconnected with my old friends, not understanding about the CATs yet, or that troubled history that was bound to rear its ugly head. I was terrible to him during that time, forced to work with the CATs again and just agitated. I took it out on him, and I felt horrible about it for a long time. I should have had more faith in him, that he could figure it out by himself when the CIA had failed. He was Chuck, the smartest person I have ever known.

Back then, Amy called Gaez to warn him from a CIA safe house in Milan. I was in Paris, and Carina was in Texas. In 2011, when we were reunited, all the clues were there, but we were too busy brawling, and we missed realizing it was Amy until she had taken out Casey, Morgan, and Carina. Chuck ended up taking out Gaez, and we got Amy before she escaped.

Zondra really thought Chuck was a goofball. I know, he could certainly seem that way at times. It was amazingly cute to me, but Zondra rolled her eyes at him, and snickered about us while she was there in the beginning. I think watching Chuck in the Buy More take out the leader of the Gentle Hand with a broken DVD and a waffle maker changed her tune a bit. Him taking on the entire CIA and Volkoff Industries simultaneously while I was dying of radiation poisoning, with the sole purpose of saving my life, finally made her warm up to him completely, to the point where now she calls him Chuckles, just like Carina does. More on that later.

Back in 2003, I had to accept that the CIA thought Zondra was innocent. She thought I was guilty, but I thought the same about her. We had to shake on it, no hard feelings, etcetera, but, of course, there were. It made everything harder, and eventually the relationships, tenuous to begin with, began to deteriorate beyond our ability to compensate.

We were working again by the middle of November of 2003, but the CATs were done by August of 2004. It ended in a spectacular blaze of failure that nearly got both Carina and myself killed.

The Gentle Hand stayed on our radar and part of our missions until the end of the CATs, though we were spinning our wheels, and everyone, including Graham, knew it. Their investigation failed, so in their minds the CATs were compromised, ineffective, because everything we did was somehow being relayed back to Gaez. Some of those missions didn't deal with him directly, and we seemed to have better success in those types of scenarios. Knowing what I know now, even that should have clued me in on the fact that the traitor was Amy, for she only had the direct line to Gaez, and the rest of the organization was slower to respond to her intel. I let Amy manipulate me into believing there was no way Zondra was really innocent, and as I mentioned before, her bubble-headed affect created this impression that I never saw through until it was almost too late.

Zondra became obsessed with taking down Gaez, going above and beyond in those missions that didn't involve him directly. She thought it was me who was the traitor, and thought by doing all the extra leg work that she could somehow stay one step ahead of me, trip us up so we could finally finish the mission, and her innocence would be known. That was the street fighter in her, for as much as I believed she was the traitor, I followed Graham's direction and just lived with it, just watching my back a little more closely. Eight years later, after Chuck got us back together, Zondra was still doing that. She knew exactly where Gaez was, which made me suspicious of course. However, in the end, it showed how consuming that accusation had been for her for a huge chunk of time.

Our last mission as a team was in August of 2004, making that almost two years of my life I spent with them. It was Gentle Hand adjacent. A bomb that was traced back to one of Gaez' factories in Brazil had been used to blow up a mosque in Cairo. Apparently, Gaez was selling to Al Qaeda. The CIA sent the team to first discover the extent to which Gaez was supplying terrorist cells with weapons, then to also track as many of those cells as we could. The military needed the intel before any type of preemptive strike could be carried out. Carina and Amy were sent with Zondra and I, as the DEA also had interest in one of the terror cells involvement in the opium trade, a huge pipeline that was directing it from Afghanistan and Pakistan.

We were trying to do three missions at once, a herculean task on the best day with a perfectly functioning team. A broken team, suspicious of one another, with two agents at each other's throats, two agents seething, and two agents teetering on the edge of emotional collapse…well, a fool could tell you, we were destined to fail. Looking back now, I almost think Graham wanted us to fail like that. To be frank, he wanted me for other things, and the only way he could get me was to disband the CATs. Too many of those same stodgy old men just couldn't let that idea of us go. Graham was the one who sent us in, and even though we failed, he was promoted to Director right afterward.

They sent us to India first, but the mission was in Afghanistan, and later Pakistan. In 2004, the Taliban was still in control of the majority of Afghanistan. Not so good for the Afghani people, but it made it much easier for women to spy, especially American women, who would have attracted undue attention if we were not covered almost head to toe with a burqa. We were taller than average, but other than that, having a single slit for our eyes was the best possible cover. Our movements were restricted, because we were female, but we were resourceful enough to get the information we needed.

Gaez had in fact supplied four different Taliban cells with weapons in Afghanistan, as well as four more who had regrouped across the border in Pakistan after the U.S. had invaded in 2001. The CATs regrouped in India again, after the first batch of intel was secured. We touched base with the CIA again, and confirmed our orders remained the same. Proceed to Pakistan and gather the intel about the locations of the cells for the U.S. military, while at the same time tracking the route of opium out of Pakistan for the DEA. Carina and I would be going into Pakistan.

But, there was down time in India, in between those missions. A recipe for disaster that I saw ahead of us like an oncoming train, a train I just couldn't get out of the way of. The tension among us was palpable, animosity simmering beneath the surface like magma under a volcano. Every word, every action had the potential to set it off. We tried to stay out of each other's way, but Carina and I were still closer than any other combination in that group at that time. Strange, when you think of everything that had happened between us, that we would be. Any port in a storm, right?

I had, like I mentioned, done my absolute best to stay sober and out of Carina's sights. Truth be told, the mission in Afghanistan had fried my nerves. My emotional control, that steel I was able to wrap around myself when we were on missions, had eroded to almost nothing. Anger and suspicion had seeped out of every fortification, making it permeable to all the other distracting emotions–fear, loneliness, even hopelessness. The thought of Pakistan, doing the same dangerous things we had done in Afghanistan, coupled with my instability, put me over the edge. I drank, heavily, two nights before we were due to leave for Pakistan.

I was alone while I did so. I remember going back to my hotel, hoping I could just go into my room and actually get some sleep, the one good thing that much alcohol would do for me. Carina was in my room, in my bed, with a man, literally in the middle of having sex. He was obviously Spanish, and they were conversing in that language.

What I know now–he was a member of the Gentle Hand, well versed in her sexual appetite, and in the process of doing to her what she had always done to others. Exactly what Zondra had worried about in Gstaad. He wanted information about what we knew, and who we were surveilling. I witnessed the beginning of him fucking the information out of her. If I had been sober, I think my spy senses would have kicked on, but I wasn't. I had drunk to excess, believing I would be alone and ready to sleep.

"What are you doing in here?" I screamed, hearing my words slur in my drunken state.

"Teniendo sexo," Carina replied, giggling, then screeching as the act continued like I wasn't there. "Esperando por ti," she added. Having sex, and then waiting for me. Carina could hold her liquor better than me, for whatever reason. She still had enough wits about her then to know she had heard me drunk, and knew me long enough to know I couldn't control myself when I was drunk.

I stumbled in the door, falling onto the sofa in the room. They finished. He stood up and moved across the room to me. My consciousness was fading in and out, but I still remember part. He said, "Tu amiga es hermosa." Your friend is beautiful.

"Ella no quiere hacer lo que le estás pidiendo que haga," Carina rambled off quickly. She doesn't want to do what you're asking her to do.

"Yo no le pregunte nada," he replied. I didn't ask her anything. I remember thinking how strange it was, that he sounded so…normal. He wasn't the slightest bit intoxicated, but she certainly was.

My vision was blurry, fuzzing in and out. He was naked, muscular and toned, exceptionally gorgeous to look at. I could hear that conversation inside my head, screaming in intensity on the inside, but almost a whisper in the forefront, the alcohol acting as the screen. My brain was telling me to leave. Just get up and leave. Go to her hotel room, go to the lobby, anywhere…just away from here.

"Te gustaría venir a la cama con nosotros?" he asked, his voice soft and close, like a velvet hand on my skin. Would you like to come to bed with us?

Inside my head I was screaming no, but I stayed silent. He pulled me by my hand and onto my feet. I swooned, and he caught me. The room continued to spin. Before I knew what was happening, I was naked on the opposite side of the bed. I let him blindfold me, which I thought was strange, but had no will to protest.

"Esto es para ella. Tu polla es para mi," Carina giggled, pouting a bit. This is for her, your cock is for me. Carina's two girls and one man rule.

There was nothing delicate about the way he forced Carina's sex toy inside me. I was blindfolded and taken by surprise. I was dry and it was uncomfortable. I squirmed, but he was obviously distracted with Carina. Fucking me with the toy was almost unconscious for him. However, the longer he pumped it in and out, the better it felt. I hated myself at that moment, almost wishing insanely that he would choke me, just kill me, so I wouldn't have to feel the way I felt. Nothing about this situation was alright with me, and yet, there I was, pushing against his thrusts until I had an orgasm. I started crying, silently, the tears absorbing into the blindfold before they escaped. Once, twice…and then I blacked out.

In the morning, we woke up alone. She was a little more hungover than usual, as I mentioned she could drink more and for longer before it affected her. She actually apologized, which I also thought was strange. Had she felt something just wasn't right, like I had, only too drunk for her spy senses to focus enough? I wondered.

I spent over an hour in the shower, no amount of soap and hot water able to rinse away the disgust I felt at myself for giving in to that depravity once again. I needed a way out, only I couldn't see one. I felt desperately helpless. All I could do was tell myself I needed to focus on this mission, and get through it, and I would figure it out later.

The mission had already been compromised by Carina's pillow talk with the terrorist she had unwittingly fucked. My way out came, just never in the way I had intended. We were lucky to escape with our lives.

The plan was to sneak in, take reconnaissance photographs, and get out. But, they knew we were coming. Carina was the photographer, and I was her back up. We heard the commotion, realizing too late that we were being ambushed. The two of us against an army of men was hopeless. She passed the camera to me, a wild toss in the air, and I caught it. She was taken.

Proper procedure in that situation? I had the intel. She was a casualty. By protocol, I was supposed to leave her, to get the information back to my superiors. Countless lives and a planned military strike depended on that intel. She was trained to withstand torture…and trained to take her own life when the torture became unbearable.

Sober arguments inside my head were easier to parse out. The CIA wanted a robot, a trained spy who did what I was told. But, the part of me that was still human, the part they were trying to snuff out, couldn't just do what I was told. She was a member of my team. She was my friend, for all the crazy ways she failed to show it. I had been searching for that handhold the entire time I had been falling down that shaft, and there it was…inches from the ground. I took it.

I waited until it was dark, another three hours from the point Carina was captured. I hid the lipstick camera somewhere, in case I was taken as well, at least they wouldn't know what got back to the U.S. I just prayed that after three hours she was still alive.

The complex where we were was underground, and we were separated at the entrance which was at surface level. I slowly crept back through the winding tunnels until I found her. She was well guarded, tied to a chair while they surrounded her in a semi-circle. Her jacket was torn open, and I could see what looked like a cigarette burn on the top of her breast that was peeking out through the tear. She had bleeding cuts along both arms, clean gashes obviously cut with a knife while she was being tortured. One eye was bruised purple and swollen shut. She was just barely conscious.

I could have shot someone here, and killed for the first time. That initiation was not what ultimately deterred me, rather, I could only shoot maybe two of the five men surrounding her before the others started to react and I lost the element of surprise. Instead, I used my knives and my fists. Two knives at once, then a rapid fire third, and I was down to only two guards before they noticed me. I kicked the gun out of the hand of one, then swung my leg back and kicked the other in the center of his chest, sending him flying backward. My fist, then my elbow in the other one's face, and he dropped. The last one stood again, and I repeated the fist and elbow until he went down.

Carina didn't know I was there until I cut her out of the chair. "Sarah, what are you doing?" she asked me groggily.

"Saving you. Now, let's go. Can you walk?" I asked.

She said yes, but she needed me as a crutch. She had a concussion and had lost a significant amount of blood. We moved as fast as we could. I grabbed the intel on the way, then hightailed it back to our rendezvous point. Carina was taken to the hospital. Zondra grilled me with questions, assuming I was the one who had tipped them off and gave away our position. The screaming match that ensued was the last time I talked to Zondra until she showed up via helicopter to the courtyard at Echo Park after Chuck contacted them on my behalf in 2011. The CATs were done.

But, the turning point in my life happened after that last, drastic confrontation. Carina was recovering, and I stopped by to visit and talk to her. There was a lot she had missed.

"The CATs are done, Carina," I told her the moment I walked into her hospital room. "Zondra and I…separately…are due to report back to Langley at 1300 hours tomorrow."

"Your flight must be leaving soon," she countered.

"I have a few hours," I told her. "I'm assuming the DEA will reassign you and Amy. She's already gone," I added.

"She already came by to say goodbye," she told me. I just nodded. I had gotten no such farewell from anyone.

"That man in the hotel room," I blurted. "He got the info out of you, didn't he?" I only didn't include myself because I knew I passed out. Was it possible I had told him something? Perhaps, but less likely.

"I know," she grumbled, looking away, never questioning that it was her that was the security leak. "If I still have a job, I'm going to have to dazzle them to ever get anywhere now."

"There's no way to prove that, you know. I won't say anything when I'm debriefed," I told her.

"Why?" she contested, almost angry at my seeming benevolence. "We practically raped you. You could have been killed."

This was more intense than I had ever been with her, but I felt it was needed here, if I was ever going to move forward from this point. "No, you didn't. I never did anything with you, other than take that ecstasy you slipped me, that I didn't want to do. I hated myself for wanting that…for needing that. I just felt like this life was eating me alive, you know?"

"Why do you do it?" she asked me, very softly, looking away.

"I don't have a choice," I told her, unwilling to tell her anything personal about me. My file was brief, briefer than hers, which included that information about her family. "You do, though, don't you?" I asked her.

Her blue eyes seemed like crystals of ice, the white hot anger behind them visible to me for the first time. "You're right. I do. And I will always choose this. Killing them one at a time…is still killing them."

I reached inside for the strength to say what I said next. "It won't bring them back, you know."

Her eyes went straight through me. "I know that. But for every one of them I kill, there's maybe one less little girl who has to live without her parents."

It took a while for me to find my voice again. "You can't help anyone if you get yourself killed doing stupid things like drinking and drugs. I know this life is hard. But there has to be a better way, don't you think?" I asked, not sure if I was trying to just convince her, or myself as well. "I promise I won't bring that up, like I said, if you promise me that you'll stop. That you won't lose control of yourself like you have been."

She nodded silently. "If you answer me two questions," she said.

"Ok," I answered.

"First, who was the guy?" she asked. I was genuinely confused.

"What guy?" I asked.

"Whoever it was that you're looking for…while you're drunk and in bed with me and whoever?" she asked.

My blood froze, even as I felt my face hot like my skin was on fire. I looked down at my lap, not able to show her my face, afraid of what she would see there. She just kept going. "Did you love him, is that it?"

"No," I answered quickly, before she had finished the sentence. In 2004, I had no idea what love was. I believed that it was a fantasy, something unreal that people used to justify something. I was telling her the truth, though. I stand firm, as a convert if you will, that even if you have never felt real love before, you know it when you feel it. And if I didn't know, then I didn't love him. "But I miss him," I added, hearing my voice break. That old abandoned building leveled to the ground…

She left it alone once I admitted that, thankfully. But she wasn't completely done talking. "Second, why did you go back for me? That went against every rule we were ever taught."

"It's just not how I do things," I answered. She also understood. I was taking that piece of my humanity and stashing it away, where the CIA and everyone else couldn't touch it.

I hugged her and we said our goodbyes. The DEA eventually sent her to Argentina, where she almost single handedly took down the Quintana Gang, a huge drug cartel on the DEAs radar since the early 1980s. We talked occasionally, even wrote a few letters here and there. I didn't see her again until she showed up in Burbank after the Intersect mission had started.

She was the same as she had always been, without the penchant for self-destruction she had when she was younger. Not perfect, with the same issues she had always had, but that conversation in the hospital seemed to always be there just below the surface. It made it easier to take, and easier to understand. Chuck didn't understand her at first, how I could call her my friend after how she seemed to continuously antagonize me like she did. He had no idea, and he didn't, not for a long time, until after the CATs reunion.

Her deciding to be better gave me the strength to be better, and for that, I say she saved me, because she did. That arm's-length relationship had an invisible string that bound her to me, and me to her. She was my friend. The only one I had for a long time. It was an almost unwitting save, for she never knew it was that relationship and those feelings that I clung to when my life exploded.

The CATs were done. Graham was promoted. The sex, alcohol and drugs as a means of escape was replaced by a blank void full of death and mayhem, all delivered by my own hand. Graham held my hand and led me straight into hell.

It was Bryce, ultimately, who pulled me out, in more ways than one.