A/N: One last Christmas story. I'm not worried about finishing it by Christmas. It will take a little while and I don't intend to shelve The Missionary as I write it. I will be posting them concurrently.

This is a Christmas spy story. No dips into magic beyond the magic of the season. It assumes the canon prelude, some of the backstory of the pilot.

The Light of The World

Chapter One: Angel and Star

It's Christmas and I'm on a mission and I'm always on a mission and missing Christmas, and I hate it but that's just the way it is. Missions and missing things go together.

They did until Budapest. That baby. What did Mom name her?

I don't know whether Agent Ryker expected the hail of bullets and blood I rained down there, but I know he didn't expect me to keep the package, the baby. He must have reckoned any woman who could do what I did to escape from that mansion would want to wash her hands of that baby fast. Double-quick.

I suppose if someone had asked me about it abstractly and hypothetically before it happened, I might have predicted a speedy handwashing too. But I'm beginning to understand that I do not know myself as well as I thought.

I surprised him and me.

In Budapest, I found something I had been missing. I had secretly hoped to be a mom and never knew it. I never even suspected it. No chatter, no hints. I'm so good at secrets I can keep them from myself. The first night with that baby taught me to know myself. Hugging her close, smelling her — she smelled like soap and innocence, especially innocence. That scent cleared my head, like smelling salts in those old movies, except I guess they stank. The baby smelled delicious, like life itself, a scent I had rarely encountered as a Company woman. The scent woke me from my pragmatic slumber. My life had seemed real to me, human life stripped to the studs, revealing all that truly mattered, all of it dark and seamy.

But that baby's scent revealed that I was upside-down. My life was unreality; ordinary lives were reality.

Now I can't get the scent out of my head. It wafts back to me in the car, at quiet moments during stakeouts. It fills my apartment in DC during my rare free days. It visits me as the second-hand moves in the wee hours.

Spies and clocks are linked in movies and books — explosives, countdowns, all that stop-the-clock-on-007 stuff, but spies and biological clocks are not as often linked. Since Budapest, mine has been counting down, tick by precious tick. When everything grows still: tick, tick, tick, tock, tick.

It's been two years, and I'm not getting any younger.

To be honest, I feel ancient, older than the Sphinx. This job, this life, it feels like I've been at it for ages and ages, no amen. No solemn completion. Just the hope of a quick, painless death, a kill shot to the head or heart, instead of a death much worse. Torture or rape.

That mission to Burbank that Graham wanted to assign me I should have taken. I've had this feeling that mission would have changed things for me, that it would have been a different assignment. Besides, it would have been a piece of cake. No trouble at all. A snap of the fingers. But the news of Bryce's death gutted me. He had once meant something to me — what? — but that was over by the time of the news. His death gutted me because it was another reminder, just after my time with the baby, that I had never been alive. The worst sort of reminder. I was going to die without living and without giving life. Bryce's death taught me that I was a zombie, one of the walking dead. They say that walking is controlled falling; my life is controlled dying. Death by small but deep cuts, self-inflicted. I should sleep in a casket.

— Oh, wait, that's vampires, not zombies — but you know what I mean. I've never been much good at keeping monsters straight.

Well, that's not true. I can't keep the mythological ones straight. The real ones I can. My Company time is largely spent chasing and destroying monsters.

You know, I once watched a few episodes of that show, Buffy, — speaking of vampires, which I sort of was. Liked it as much as I like any TV show. She reminded me of me. But I wish that the monsters I chased and destroyed disintegrated into dust, like the vampires on that show. But mine scream or moan or bleed. They often bleed. Messy, their deaths are always messy. Buffy spikes a vampire and it's a clean kill. Dustwork, not wetwork, like me.

The baby and that Burbank assignment I passed on — those were two years ago now. I said that already but I want it to be clear. The baby and Bryce made me realize I was a zombie and yet I went on being a zombie for two more years. I'm standing here, a zombie. Always more controlled dying. Amazing, really, that a woman could make such choices, keep making them. I'm a monster too and I don't deserve Christmas and couldn't appreciate it if I had it.

Those are hard thoughts to entertain about yourself.

So, I'm on this Christmas mission. — No, that makes it sound like the mission has something to do with Christmas. It doesn't. It just happens on Christmas. '

Christmas is cold here in Zurich. That's where I am, Switzerland.

It's a place that would make you think of Christmas year-round. It looks like elves were in charge of the architecture and the decorations. I've been standing here on this windswept street waiting for another Company agent to make contact with me. I don't know this guy, never met him. Agent Carmichael.

The Director, Maggie Donald (she took over after Graham died in some mysterious explosion a year or so ago), called me once I landed in Zurich to tell me about the meet and about Carmichael.

It's weird, I've never even heard of him, this Carmichael. Maybe the name's an alias, sort of like mine, like Walker. But I'm an odd case: I didn't enter the Company wearing my right name. I came in wearing an alias and trailing a cloud of other fake names. It had already been so long since I used my given name that it felt alien. Sarah Walker feels right if for no other reason than I've been using it for twelve years, the Company's used it for twelve years. Graham gave it to me. I suppose you could say it's my second given name.

McDonald told me where to meet Carmichael, a side street off Uraniastrasse, not far from Lake Zurich. The wind off the water is damp as well as cold. There's a bar nearby, Urania, and they sell coffee; I've been watching people carry cups out. I wish we'd met there and not outside. I'm freezing, icy through and through, and tired. It took me three connections to get here from Portugal, where I was last, where I finished my last mission. I expected to go home. Well, back to DC. I no more have a true home than I have a true name.

I was told where to meet and who to meet but I was not told anything about the mission. That makes me nervous. Budapest had been sort of like that. Agent Ryker attempted to manipulate me. I won't let that happen again.

I shiver head to toe and blow on my hands despite the gloves I am wearing, black, like my overcoat and my Cobra beret, my lucky hat, a hat I bought in France, in Oloron-Sainte-Marie. I bought it shortly before Budapest and wore it on my mission there, and wore it while I mothered the baby. I've worn it all over Europe since; it's grown battered. It would have been too warm for Burbank.

Snow starts to fall and I hear someone walking behind me, long strides. The steps are careful but not muffled. I tense but do not expect any attack. I hear a voice.

"Is there an angel on top of the tree?"

The code phrase.

I turn to answer but the response sticks in my throat. Standing in front of me, in a long gray overcoat and a gray knit cap, snowflakes melting delicately on his long eyelashes, is Chuck Bartowski.

I know him only from a single photograph, the photograph Graham handed to me and that I held and gazed at while Graham outlined the mission to Burbank.

But I handed the picture back to Graham and refused. Politely. After Budapest and Bryce, Graham accepted my refusal. He gave me two days to recoup, then sent me to Poland.

I have remembered that photograph many times over these two years. It showed a face I liked. A good face. The face would return to me when I wondered about my choices. Not just my choice against the Burbank mission, but my choices going all the way back to choosing my father and his confidence artist life over my mother and her ordinary life.

The face in that photograph was ordinary in absolutely the best possible way. And handsome, the kind of handsome that grew on you, stuck with you.

And now I was looking up into that face.

The hazel eyes harden a bit and glint. I still had not responded. I am meeting a man in a dream. That's how it feels. I've slipped behind the wall of sleep without knowing it. "No, there's a star on top."

The response.

Chuck smiles tightly. I don't know if he knows I know who he is; I've kept my face impassive, a talent of mine. He leans forward and speaks softly. "Hello, Agent Walker. Meeting you is meeting a legend."

I know what he means. I blink, checking to see if I am awake. But you can dream that you're blinking. Chuck Bartowski was not a Company man. He lived with his sister and worked at an electronics box store.

The Buy More. What is Chuck Bartowski doing in Zurich?

He nods toward Urania. "Let's grab a coffee and I'll tell you why we're here." He extends a gloved hand. "Our cover is a couple, so…"

I take his hand. How is this possible? The wind blows harder, the snow falls faster, and my heart thumps in my chest.

A/N: Not quite sure how long this will be yet. Likely (in total words) it will be longer than The Santa Chair but shorter than The Vanishing Woman (my other Christmas 2022 stories).