Usual disclaimers, no rights to any characters portrayed and this is neither the real world not a Disney Princess tale.

When Sarah finished the mission and wound up everything in Sarajevo successfully, Aunt Jane told her that she couldn't put off coming back any longer, because Director Graham was getting quite insistent about her coming back to wind up the Larkin matter. "I have been forbidden to give you any more assignments over there, and ordered to instruct you to return to the States immediately Agent Walker."

Sarah bit her tongue, as Aunt Jane's formal wording said that the call was almost certainly being monitored, but she had caught the only slack in what was being said, as she was specifically being ordered to return to the States, not Langley! So she responded accordingly.

"Yes Ma'am, I will return to the States on the first available flight."

With that, they would up the call, then she made two more calls, to Carina and Zondra, hoping that they'd be free so she could find a way to occupy herself away from Langley, Graham and Larkin. Unfortunately El Diablo Rojo was in the middle of a high profile mission in Columbia, and while Il Martello di Dio was in the States, she was in the middle of a high profile case as well.

Sarah swore at that, and grudgingly conceded that she had to go back. She couldn't really complain, Aunt Jane had found her a dozen more single agent missions around Europe since the one Graham sent her on to let off steam, so she'd been here for over five weeks, but Graham had obviously worked out what they were doing if he gave Aunt Jane a direct order to bring her home.

With that she went to arrange her ticket back to the States, but on the spur of the moment she changed her flight to San Diego, because that was about as far away from Langley as she could be while obeying the order to get back to the States. After all, she hadn't been back since she was taken away, and she'd suddenly had an overwhelming need to see where this had started again. Graham may even be able to see the irony of it, considering that was where he trapped her into this world.

The first thing she did in San Diego was pick up a gun because she felt naked without one, then she hired herself a nice Porsche cabriolet for a bit of fun (putting it on the card she'd used for the last mission because she knew that it would attract less attention than one of her emergency cards), and went for a trip down memory lane. It didn't take long for her to decide that this had been a bad idea, because where she'd been living as Jenny Burton was somewhere in the middle of a sea of tract homes now, and she really had no interest in seeing James Buchanan High.

Sarah didn't have too many good memories about San Diego, but it had been the closest thing to a home she'd had since her father took her away when she was seven…. that made her remember the last place that she could remember being truly happy, when she was at Auntie Mary's with Charlie, and she suddenly needed to see it again. She decided that driving to San Francisco would help her clear her head, and hopefully help her keep off Graham's radar, so she pointed the Porsche at the I-5.

Halfway to Los Angeles though her phone rang and she answered it on speaker, thinking that it must be Aunt Jane. When she heard Graham's voice she almost hung up, but she wasn't quite angry enough to do something that stupid.

"Walker, where are you?"

"On my way back Sir."

"Are you in America?"

"Yes"

"Thank Christ for that! I need you to get to Los Angeles as fast as you can, Larkin stole something and sent it to someone there, it has to be retrieved. We don't know exactly who or where it's been sent to yet, but we should have that information by the time you get there. You need to be there by tomorrow at the latest, can you do that?"

Sarah looked up at the mile marker she was currently passing and smiled to herself.

"Yes, I think so sir."

"Good, we'll have the information sent through to you as soon as we have it, all we have so far is a name, Bartowski."

"Yes sir."

"Walker, I'm depending on you!"

"Yes sir."

With that, Graham grunted and cut the call.

Sarah scowled at the phone when he was gone, but thought to herself that if she was operating over here for a few days, at least she wouldn't have to see him, so there was a silver lining to this.

By the time she reached Los Angeles, she'd received a few messages with information about the target, apparently it was a Chuck Bartowski, and he owned and operated a small hole in the wall tech business in Pasadena. The last message included the address, and a note to the effect that Bartowski had been Larkin's room mate and best buddy at Stanford. Funny, while he'd talked about Stanford incessantly (presumably trying to impress her with the fact that he went to Stanford, as she'd never mentioned Harvard), Larkin had never mentioned that name? Oh well, she just had to get in, gain this guy's confidence and get whatever Larkin sent him. He might even give her a reason to shoot him if he was anything like Larkin, that thought made her smile, she knew that there was a reason that the first thing she'd done was to get herself a gun!

She'd stopped along the way to change into a skirt, blouse and heels that were more sexy secretary cosplay than professional, but just tame enough to be taken as a legitimate business outfit with her hair in a bun and glasses. If this guy was anything like Larkin though, it should be enough to have the blood rushing to his little head and make him a little more malleable when she engaged him.

She found the business and frowned to herself, because this looked a hell of a lot more upmarket than she'd been expecting from the information she'd been sent... oh well, there was no point in trying to clarify the information as she knew that she had everything the analysts had scraped together... She thought about calling Pete Tong to see if he could get her anything because Pete was smarter than the analysts but shook her head, she wasn't supposed to be operating on US soil anyway so getting it over and done with quickly was the best approach, with that she quickly ran though a few scenarios in her head, undid another button on her blouse and headed for the building. It didn't take too long to find the right door, though finding any doors on a building completely faced with mirror glass had been interesting. She was uncomfortable with the fact that she was going into what was obviously a secure building without any information about what was inside, but mentally shrugged, thinking 'worst comes to worst, they die or I do', and pressed the button on the intercom for Piranha Security & Technology.

The woman who answered the intercom buzzed her in but when she saw her, she obviously wasn't a receptionist, so she must work with Bartowski.

Sarah plastered a suitably polite smile on her face and said."Hello, I'm Sarah Walker, my company needs a piece of work done and one of our associates recommended your firm as the best people to talk to about it. I was told that I'd need to speak to Mister Bartowski?"

The initial look of lustful appreciation that crossed the woman's face had quickly changed to confusion, as if she was trying to remember something, but she raised her eyebrow at that, so Sarah had obviously said something wrong there, then she turned her head and called out. "Chuck, there's a…. lady here to see you!"

A very tall man with good shoulders and a mop of curly brown hair wandered out of one of the offices at that with his head down, engrossed in reading something as he walked, but he was saying good naturedly "Anna, we put those intercoms in for a reason, it's much more professional than just shouting across the office."

When he finished reading whatever it was he was so interested in, he looked up with a pleasant smile on his face and Sarah froze. She knew that smile, she knew those eyes. "Charlie?"

He froze at that too, dropping what he had in his hand. "Sammie?"

The Asian woman whipped around to stare at Sarah with the confusion fading from her face. "That's it! You're Auntie Em's daughter!"

None of them said anything for a while, she and Charlie just stood there looking at each other, aside from Sarah glancing at this other woman, trying to work out how she knew her mother.

Then Chuck said "Anna, call Auntie Em!"

At that the woman nodded and ran into the office that was presumably Chuck's.

Now that he'd found his voice, Chuck asked "Where have you been? We've been looking for you but could never find you."

Sarah shook her head. "I was on the road with Dad until I was fifteen, then he got arrested when I was finishing high school and I was made an offer I couldn't refuse…."

"By the CIA!"

"How do you know that?"

"We found the reports about Jack Burton's arrest in San Diego a couple of months later because they'd been suppressed, just after you graduated from high school and disappeared. The way that everything had been scrubbed screamed the CIA but we couldn't find any references to any of the names we knew of for you in their systems either, and Uncle Joe didn't know anything about what happened to you when we sent someone in to ask about you..." his anger as he muttered "or care!" was obvious.

Sarah shook her head, but firmed her shoulders. "Yes, I've been in the CIA for the past nine years, and that's why I'm here, you're Chuck Bartowski now?"

Chuck nodded

"Did you get something from Bryce Larkin recently?"

"Yeah, I got an email from him…."

Sarah cut him off. "I need that email Charlie, it's government property."

Chuck shook his head "It's gone, I opened it to see what Larkin had sent me, because I thought that it may be some form of apology, but it destroyed itself when I opened it."

"What do you mean destroyed itself, and what was he apologising for?"

"It fried the computer, or it would have if it had been a physical computer, and no trace of the email was left afterwards. He wasn't apologising, at least I didn't see any trace of an apology, but as for why, that'd be the fact that as far as he knew he got me thrown out of university when he framed me for cheating and screwed my girlfriend."

"He slept with your girlfriend?"

"No, I said as far as he knew he did, she wasn't actually my girlfriend."

Sarah started to say "What….?" but Anna had come back out of the office and snapped. "She was my girlfriend. When we got to Stanford, there were a lot of anti-homo attacks and rapes going on and all the guys immediately started sniffing after Jill, so Chuck agreed to pretend to be her boyfriend to try to protect her, protect us, from all of that shit."

She glanced at Chuck and went on in a softer tone. "He hasn't had a real girlfriend since I met him back in middle school."

Sarah looked at her, remembering one of Larkin's stories "Jill Roberts?"

"Yeah, how did you know that?"

"He told a lot of stories in the two years we were together…." She saw Chuck freeze out of the corner of her eye and turned to him. "No! We were partners, that's all!"

When he relaxed she continued. "Anyway, he was boasting about banging her to round out his top five after her loser boyfriend got kicked out for cheating..."

She glanced at the woman. "Sorry."

Chuck growled. "Yeah, he was pissed off when he found out that the sex tape he made didn't show anything!"

Just then they heard running from further back in the offices and Sarah grabbed her pistol from the back of the waistband of her skirt as she backed up to the wall, trying to cover the two of them and the direction the noise was coming from. When the two women burst into the office, though, she let her hand fall to her side as she said "Mama?"

Emma ran to her and she dropped the pistol as she moved to embrace her. Neither of them could speak for a while, but when she could, Sarah asked "Mama, how are you here? Graham kept telling me he had you!"

Emma shook her head with tears in her eyes. "No Honey, Graham never had me. I was looking for you for a bit over a year after your father took you away, then your Auntie Di told me that Uncle Stefan had disappeared as well…. Auntie Mary was sent to Russia about the same time I left to look for you and she was trapped there for about a year and a half... Anyway, I came back and then we all started a new life down here, because we've all had problems."

Sarah hadn't noticed how Mary and Chuck had frozen when she said 'Graham' (Emma hadn't registered that either, she was too excited that she had her baby back), but she certainly noted the tone when Mary said "Graham, Langston Graham? You work for him?" because she registered the anger as a threat and pushed her mother behind her.

Chuck took note of Sarah's stance and from that knew that she was a dangerous woman now, and he suddenly put two and two together. "Oh no! You're Graham's Enforcer?"

Sarah whipped her head around to look at him. "How do you know that name Charlie?"

Her distraction gave Emma the opportunity to break free of her grip and step out from behind her. "Because he's been hacking into the CIA's systems, along with everyone else's, for over fifteen years now, trying to find you!"

Sarah stared at her mother, and then back at Chuck, just as he made another realisation. "If you're Graham's Enforcer, then Larkin must be his Golden Boy!"

"Not any more he isn't! John shot him last night!"

They looked up at that to see Diane on the screen, but they had no idea how long she'd been connected.

"Would you like to tell me why you would be so stupid as to open anything you got from Bryce Larkin, and why your mother was the one who had to tell me me about it Chuck?"

"I made a mistake, alright? I was thinking that he may have been reaching out to apologise for all that shit at Stanford, and that everyone deserves a chance to do the right thing…."

He was cut off my Sarah's snort and turned a 'not you too?' look on her. She met his eye without backing down and said "Charlie, Bryce Larkin wouldn't recognise the right thing if you slapped him in the face with it, and if you could make him see it, he'd just try to to do the opposite!"

The others laughed when Anna said "Yep, she knows Larkin alright!", but Chuck didn't.

As she thought that this was going in a bad direction, Diane tried to bring it back to what happened of the night before. "I'm sorry Chuck, John had no idea that your name was in the device that Larkin used to transmit the Intersect files, and he handed it in as per protocols to see what the techs could get out of it. The only techs on hand were CIA people, and Graham didn't see fit to share the information with me until just now, obviously trying to make sure that his people got there first. By the way Sammie, how did you get there so quickly? Graham assured me that they only got the first details out of the device a couple of hours ago?"

"I was driving up from San Diego because I wanted to go see Auntie Mary's house when he called me, he did say that all they had at that time was the name Bartowski and that it was in Los Angeles, so he may have been telling you the truth about that."

Diane nodded "That does make me feel a little better, John is taking off from Andrews in an C Thirty Seven as we speak to try to get there in time to head off Graham's infamous Enforcer, Sarah Walker. I can't tell you how relieved I am that to see who you really are."

"Auntie Di, what are you wearing a uniform for? Who are you actually?" (Only then did Diane realise that Sammie was flying blind because she was sitting at her desk without her jacket.)

"Oh I'm sorry Honey, I forgot that you never knew me as anything but Auntie Di. I'm Major General Diane Beckman, United States Air Force, the NSA's co-Director of the Intersect project and Director of the Special Projects Group."

She paused. "I'm so sorry Emma, I never thought it would take us this long to locate her."

Chuck interjected "Well, strictly speaking, we didn't Auntie Di, she located us!", but Emma smiled wanly as she put her arm around her daughter.

At that point, Mary said "Why don't we take this discussion downstairs, where it's more secure?"

They all nodded and Chuck said he'd see them down there in a few minutes after he'd gotten things sorted out.

As soon as Sarah stepped out of the lift, Ellie barrelled up to her, as she'd always regarded her as her little sister and had missed her as much as anyone except for Chuck and Auntie Em.

After she'd greeted Ellie, Sarah looked around and asked "Where's Uncle Stefan Nora?"

They all went quiet for a moment and then Ellie said. "He's in Washington with his therapist Sammie, he tried something experimental on himself about six months after you were taken away, and they've been trying to fix him ever since."

Sarah glanced at Anna and lowered her voice. "What about her girlfriend? I got the impression that there was something off in the way they were talking about her?"

Ellie glanced at Anna as well and said "Something happened and she left after they graduated." She hesitated and then went on quietly "Sammie, no matter what it looks like with Anna, she and Chuck are friends, best friends, but nothing more than that. Chuck pretended to be Anna's boyfriend all through their teenage years to cover for her and Jill. Yes, they've shared bedrooms, bathrooms and beds hundreds of times over the last fifteen years but they're not together that way, they're just a rather unusual twist on the traditional idea of best friends…. And there's something else I need to tell you about Anna's current partner but…."

Sarah looked at her "Why are you telling me this Nora?"

"Because I don't know about you, but there's never been anyone but you for him! He's looked for you every day since you left! If that isn't one sided, I didn't want to risk letting something that has never effected what he feels for you to interfere with it."

Sarah glanced at Anna again "She tried to tell me something similar upstairs when she explained why he pretended to be Jill's boyfriend at Stanford."

Ellie looked at her "Well?"

"Well what?"

"Is it one sided?"

Sarah blushed as she tried to think of how to answer "No, I've thought about him often, and there's never been anyone else for me either, but what I've had to do Nora, I don't know whether we can get past that…."

"Sammie, with what we've been through, we've all done lots of things that we don't think we can be forgiven for, Chuck as much as anyone, when the time comes, just talk about it…. Damn it, I have to tell you before they get here!"

"Look... when we first came down here and started school at Arcadia, Chuck became really close with the other nerds at the school, Anna, Lou and Skip. They thought Chuck was the same age as them because they added a couple of years to both our ages to help hide us… Anyway, when Lou and Anna started coming into their teens their hormones started kicking in and…. Well they wanted to experiment... just as friends because they knew that Chuck's heart was already taken by YOU, the girl he looked for every day! and Chuck agreed because he cared for, cares for them a lot. While they both said that it was really nice, being with Chuck just didn't click for them, so they experimented with each other as well, and they found what really worked for them."

"Then a couple of months later, Lou and her family suddenly disappeared without a word to anyone, and we found out later that they'd emigrated to Israel. Anna and Chuck were really upset about that, and both of them thought it was because of the experimentation… about a year later Jill joined their little group and she and Anna became partners. Chuck pretended to be Anna's boyfriend and Skip, who's gay too by the way, pretended to be Jill's boyfriend right though high school to keep everyone else from working out that Anna, Jill and Skip were gay. When Chuck, Anna and Jill got to Stanford, that changed…"

Sarah nodded. "Anna told me about that."

Ellie nodded. "Skip went to UCLA, where I was, so Chuck was allocated Larkin as his room mate up there, and the girls had fun stirring him about having a gay room mate even without Skip..."

Sarah cut her off. "What do you mean, gay? Do you know how many times that bastard tried to get me into bed? And how many other women he screwed?"

Ellie nodded again. "I can guess, Skip met his boyfriend Jethro when he stopped me damaging the idiot because he was coming onto me and wouldn't take no for an answer, and I know that Jethro screwed a number of girls in our class to cover up the fact that he was gay. But as far as Larkin goes, we think he was actually advised to chase girls by his CIA recruiter in second year to cover up what he was…."

"Anyway, there was an incident on the first night there when Chuck was staying with Anna and Jill because they were frightened about the stories of girls getting raped in their dorms and a group of football players did break into their room to rape them. Chuck put them all in hospital and the Campus Police tried to arrest him and charge him with all sorts of things including attempted murder so he got a settlement for nearly one and a half million out of them and used that to buy a house for them off campus, but the terms of the settlement were secret so Chuck had to officially stay in the allocated housing. That interfered with his work too much so he had to give in to Larkin blackmailing him to cover up the fact that he was supposedly off sleeping with his 'good Christian girlfriend' all the time..."

"Then just before they finished at Stanford the CIA recruiter tested them for compatibility with the earlier version of what Larkin just sent to Chuck, and Chuck got an almost perfect score. That was why Larkin and the recruiter framed Chuck for cheating, because they sent Chuck's results off with Larkin's name on them. That's when we found out that the money for Jill to go to Stanford had come from an organisation called Fulcrum, who had been told that Larkin was the candidate, because she was made to dump her 'boyfriend' Chuck and seduce Larkin to get him to come across to them. When we were discussing how to deal with Jill's problem, Uncle Roan and Anna came out with what Chuck had done for Anna and Lou and they talked him into doing the same for Jill so that she'd be prepared for what she was going to have to do with Larkin…."

She stopped and looked at Sarah. "So Chuck has had sex with three women, as friends only, to help them, and they've all been lesbians, those were the only times he's had sex with anyone!"

"Anyway, while they were staging some fights to convince Larkin that Jill had broken up with Chuck, Chuck got expelled for cheating and once he'd collected all the evidence to clear himself he came home… But Auntie Di had taken note of what they said about the girls experimenting with Chuck and got suspicious, well you know how suspicious your Aunt is! So she got some friends in Israel to check up on Lou and found that she had twin baby girls about six months after the family moved to Israel, her father had been planning on emigrating for a while and it was all organised, but they reason they left the way they did was that they found out that Lou was pregnant…. So what I'm trying to say is that when they get home you're going to see that Chuck has twin daughters, but he is NOT with their mother that way and never was! Lou and Anna are a couple and they're both close friends to Chuck, but that's all they've ever been, YOU have always been the only girl for Chuck and Anna and Lou always knew that, even if they weren't lesbians, which they are!"

Sarah was staring at her, trying to make sense of all this, but when she heard the lift Ellie realised that there was one more piece of information that she had to tell her, no two, no three! Shit! "Okay, there are a few more things you need to know before they get here. One, Uncle Bry got married and had a daughter, Kimberley, Kim, after you were taken away, but his wife was a total bitch who divorced him while he was off on assignment, then got remarried straight away to a sleaze when Kim was twelve. Two, Aunty Em and Uncle Bry finally admitted that they loved each other and got married three years ago to give Kim a good home, so Uncle Bry is your stepfather and Kim is your stepsister. And Three, Mom was raped by the one she was sent to extract in Russia so Chuck and I have a half sister, Vivien, who you're about to meet."

That broke Sarah out of her stunned state as she shrieked. "What?"

Everyone else turned around when she shrieked and Emma glanced at the lift. "How much did you tell her Ellie?"

"All of it, except for what we do."

Emma shook her head at her but took Sarah's hands. "Breathe Honey! The most important parts to remember of what you were told are that Chuck loves you, he always has and you're the only one for him. His daughters are lovely girls and I'm sure you'll love them as much as they love you. They've been waiting to meet you, so has your stepsister and Chuck's sister because there isn't a day that Chuck and the rest of us don't talk about you. And Uncle Bry and I love each other and he makes me very happy, okay?"

Sarah nodded numbly and Emma put her arms around her.

Just then the lift doors opened and Lou came out with Lottie, Charlie, Viv and Kim, stopping as they took in the scene in front of them.

Lou realised who the beautiful woman in Auntie Em's arms was straight away and she turned to Chuck to excitedly exclaim "You've found her?" before she charged over to hug Emma and Sarah.

While she was reeling from the bombshells she'd just been hit with, Sarah Walker didn't miss anything, and that immediate reaction of joyous excitement from the mother of Chuck's children that she was back was the very thing she needed to accept the truth of everything Nora and Mama had just told her. That immediate reaction couldn't be faked, and to have this woman who she'd never met before be that excited proved what Mama had said, she was always being talked about.

She was introduced to Chuck's daughters and sister, her new stepsister, Lou, Skip and Jeff, and over the next five or six hours, they talked, only taking breaks for drinks, Sarah to bring the rental Porsche inside and the like. There were tears aplenty, some laughter too, but after the girls were sent upstairs and they got into the grittier subjects, the opportunities for laughter were few and far between. Finding out that Chuck was Mowgli, John Casey was Baloo, Auntie Mary was Frost and Akela, Ellie was Raksha and Uncle Bry was Bagheera was a shock, to say the least, but it made a lot of things she'd been told in training and on missions make sense.

Chuck was nervous when Anna and Lou told Sarah about what he'd agreed do for them and Jill, just as Sarah was nervous when she was telling them about what she did for a similar reason, and the times when she was trapped and couldn't get out of it in training and on those first solo missions.

The more they talked, the more Sarah understood what Ellie was saying, none of them were innocent any more, they'd all been forced to do things they didn't want to, to protect themselves, the ones they loved, and others who couldn't protect themselves.

The talk of the paramilitary operations raised the question of where their base for that was, and the others made Chuck take Sarah downstairs to show her the armoury and everything else. Sarah walked around the armoury, having trouble believing what was in there, she'd never seen anything like this, the SAD teams she'd worked with didn't have a fraction of what was here. Her eyes also lit up when she saw the high tech urban combat range and dojo, pool and the rest, oh yeah, she could have fun down here.

As they started to go upstairs, Sarah suddenly stopped and turned to Chuck, and finding that they were pretty much face to face when she was standing one step up she leaned forward to say in a low voice in his ear. "We're going to have to talk about upgrading this piece of crap pistol I picked up in San Diego, OK?"

She laughed at the shiver that went through him when she spoke in his ear like that and threw her arms around his neck as it just felt natural. His arms had gone around her waist the same way, and they stood there, looking into each other's eyes. For all how comfortable they felt like this, the laughter was gone and she said quite seriously "I missed you Charlie, they've all been telling me how much you were looking for me, and I just want you to know that I thought about you all the time too. I never want to lose you again, any of you, but especially you and Mama."

Chuck smiled and nodded and Sarah went to give him a quick kiss, much like the ones they'd always shared before they were split up as kids, but it didn't feel quite the same now. That quick kiss became a much longer one, and afterwards as they stood there, holding each other, Sarah mischievously asked "So, do I kiss as well as your other girlfriends, Anna and Jill?" Chuck groaned and tried to pull away but there was no way she was letting go, so he looked at her "You aren't bad, I've had to put on a more enthusiastic show with them and others more than a few times, but I'd rather kiss you."

She swatted him on the shoulder. "I suppose you are a bit better kisser now than you were when you were eight."

As they stood there, he rubbed her back and breathed in her ear "I'm so glad you're back!" She just nodded and tightened her grip.

They got a call from Casey to say that he was on his way in soon after that, so they asked him to pick up food and drinks for fourteen or so for a celebration along the way. As Casey walked in, he was asking what they were celebrating, but froze when he saw Sarah. It didn't take a genius like her to work out that they'd crossed paths professionally, so to forestall something being said that would be hard to take back, Emma jumped in. "John, I'd like you to meet my daughter, Samantha Blake, but I believe that you may know her as Sarah Walker?"

That made him whip his head around to look at her. "She's your Sammie? You've found her?"

Emma nodded happily, and Sarah found that she was happy about the way he'd put that. As the CIA's top agent, she'd locked horns with 'Beckman's Pit Bull' as Graham and many in the CIA called him more than a few times over the years, so finding him as pretty much part of the family and actually sounding happy that her mother had found her, that was certainly a surprise.

While they were setting things out, they went over the fact that Auntie Di hadn't been able to fill him in on the fact that Sarah was there or who she was after he'd taken off, because they couldn't guarantee secure communications. Sarah filled them in on the background that she had to get there 'by tomorrow' so she could turn up in the morning as no-one would expect her to be able to engage the target at night. John was also theoretically getting there in the morning, so he could report that he observed Sarah engaging the target and ask the General what to do about her.

The fact that they couldn't recover the file that Larkin had sent was a problem. Chuck had backtracked it, but there wasn't a working copy left anywhere, any copies had either been set to delete themselves when the trigger came back up the line, or they'd somehow been opened, which had triggered the same damage as had happened to the virtual computer that Chuck had used to open it. They all knew what this meant, if Chuck had seen the images and was still functioning, he was the only viable way for them to access the Intersect database, so Graham would be trying to grab him to use him as a resource.

John asked whether they could claim that Chuck couldn't access the Intersect information to get Graham off their backs, but Chuck, Sarah, Ellie and Emma shook their heads (pretty much in unison, which amused the others) and Ellie said. "No, they'd just grab him and put him through whatever procedures it took to get to the information."

Then Chuck spoke. "No, we need to find some way to prove that I can be more use to them out in the real world, that's the only way that I'm likely to avoid a bunker, and I'm afraid that if you (looking at the screen) try to put me in a bunker, there's going to be a war."

Diane didn't bother answering that, they all knew which side she'd be on if it came to that. All she said was. "We might want to put the call out to our friends."

The others nodded, but when Sarah went to ask what they were talking about, Chuck looked at Viv and squeezed her hand to stop her.

Then he said "I can think better when I'm doing something, I'll go get Sammie set up in the guest bedroom in my apartment and we can pick it up when we come back." The others nodded and he took her by the hand to lead her off to the elevator. She got the hint and didn't try to talk about this until he brought it up in his apartment. When he went to put her things in the guest bedroom though she raised an eyebrow "You were serious about that?"

He looked at her "I didn't want to presume anything Sammie, I didn't think we were at that stage yet?"

"I'm not saying that I'm going to have sex with you Charlie, but as both Ellie and Anna have made a point of telling me, you've shared a bed with women hundreds of times without doing anything, we've been apart for nearly eighteen years, I'd like us to be able to spend the night holding each other and maybe talking?"

His smile at that lit up the room and he nodded, taking her bags to his room. Once he'd put the bags down, he sat on the bed and patted the spot beside him. Once she'd sat down and taken his hand he started "OK, about our friends... I presume that Ellie told you how Viv was conceived?"

Sarah nodded.

"When Auntie Em went off to look for you, Graham made threats about what would happen to us if Mom didn't bring her back and Mom countered with some threats of her own. He needed my father to get his project finished but her threats made him decide that Mom was too much of a risk to his plans, so he somehow forced Uncle Hartley to load an earlier version of the program called Agent X that overwrote a person's personality and memories and turned him into Alexei Volkoff…."

"Graham created Alexei Volkoff?"

"Yes... anyway... he convinced my parents that the people who had sent Uncle Hartley in weren't going to extract him, and 'let slip' where the supposed extraction device was, so Mom grabbed it and went to Russia to deactivate the Agent X program and get Uncle Hartley back... but that had been a lie, there's no way to extract that program, and he'd had Volkoff tipped off that she was an assassin coming after him. Volkoff raped and tortured Mom but she managed to get him to confirm her identity as a KGB sleeper, Marjan Zaleska, with the First Directorate so he didn't kill her…."

Sarah cut in again. "Auntie Mary was a KGB sleeper?"

"Yeah, she was sent over here when she was sixteen but she unofficially defected when she met Dad. Anyway, when Volkoff found out she was pregnant he stopped her terminating the pregnancy and made her have the baby. Vivien was taken away at birth, Mom thought on Volkoff's orders but the fact that her foster mother was tortured to death without giving her up about nine years later makes us wonder. After Viv was born he made Mom his enforcer and right hand man, using the fact that he knew where Dad, Ellie and me were to keep her under his control, so she was trapped there. Dad went a little crazy and tried something desperate which was frying his brain and everything was falling apart."

"About a year after Mom went to Russia Dad called Auntie Di and then disappeared and Auntie Di and Uncle Bry got Ellie and me out before Graham could grab us, Auntie Em came back to look after us and we were relocated down here to Arcadia, working in a secret intelligence group under Auntie Di. Auntie Di got word to Mom that we were all safe so Mom got the Spetsnaz guys to help her get away and she came back to us on my tenth birthday. Those guys are still helping her and some of them have defected since then because they couldn't put up with what Volkoff was doing any more. There are also some ex-KGB agents and spetsnazovtsi who Mom talked into coming over to us when the Soviet Union fell and they were abandoned, and some American and other agents who we took in and hid when they were burned, that's who Auntie Di was talking about as our friends. The reason we didn't want to talk about this downstairs though is that we want to spare Viv having to listen to what the monster who's taken over her father's body did. She's tough, well she's Mom's daughter, but she's only sixteen and she doesn't need to have her nose rubbed in it."

"Charlie, what happened with Jill, I can see that there's something wrong there!"

"A bit after we graduated…. yes, I graduated... I went back to see the Chancellor with John as an FBI agent, Uncle Roan as our Lawyer and all the evidence to prove that I'd been framed and we convinced them to let me finish quietly and graduate with all my entitlements under a different name, and with a fourteen million dollar settlement to keep quiet. Anyway, after we all got back here, Jill started getting upset and then she just disappeared. About a month later Anna got a letter from her to explain. She hadn't told us the truth because she hadn't managed to get Larkin to use a condom every time. She didn't get AIDS, but she did get pregnant, so she decided to go off and have the baby and start a new life away from everyone she'd let down, as she said. We've been looking for her, even though she asked us not to, so we can try to help her, but we haven't found a trace of her. But Jill's been less of a sensitive subject since Lou came back because Lou was Anna's first love, and it wasn't her choice to disappear while it was Jill's.…."

She came in for another kiss, and they held each other for a while, but finally Chuck reluctantly pointed out that they should go back down so they could try to get a plan together.

When they came out of the lift, Ellie, Anna and Lou looked at each other in obvious surprise.

Unfortunately for them, Sarah read that look quite easily. "No, we weren't having sex! What sort of girl do you think I am?"

Even Emma burst out laughing when Ellie answered "Obviously one with a lot more self control than me, you two have been pining over each other for eighteen years, we expected you to be going at it like rabbits to get rid of all that unresolved tension!"

Both Chuck and Sarah were blushing madly, and the only one who actually looked sympathetic was John, all the women were laughing so hard they had tears streaming down their faces. Chuck just took Sarah by the hand and led her downstairs. While the women were laughing, John brought the shooting range up on the big screen and grabbed himself a drink, sitting back to watch the show he knew was about to start. For about fifteen years now, this had been Chuck's way of dealing with frustration, and when he was wound up like this, his scores were always impressive. Chuck and Sarah alternated and John's surprise grew for the next half hour, because Sarah's scores were almost as good as Chuck's, and he never thought that he'd see two people capable of beating him this badly on the range, for that matter he had a sneaking suspicion that she could beat him in other arenas too, just like Chuck could.

As they wound up and put the weapons away, John looked up at the screen where the General's image was and they nodded to each other... Yes, they had to find a way to convince Graham to go with the plan, because they needed that pair together! Individually they were incredible, but together they would be unstoppable!

When they came back up, still hand in hand everyone noted, Diane asked. "So... Have you come up with a plan yet Chuck?"

"Not a plan as such, but an idea maybe, I'm going try to relax tonight…." At the hint of a comment, he turned his head towards the others and snapped "Shut up!" before turning back to the screen "Then in the morning I'll probably come down here to set up multiple news feeds and stream them concurrently to get the most hits I can, then we'll go over what came up to try and find one, or more, which are big enough to use to build a good enough case to leave me out here in the world where I can be of more value."

The others were nodding, this would be the best way forward, so they agreed to re-convene in the morning and packed it in for the night.

A/N: According to GT. Zondra's nickname 'Il Martello di Dio' means 'The Hammer of God' in Italian and Carina's tag of 'El Diablo Rojo' is 'The Red Devil' in Spanish, they became well known as these names while they were kicking arse in the CATS.