A/N: Part Two of the Baby flashback. Posted separately because this as one chapter was too long. The end of this is where Chuck begins, for those of you waiting 20 chapters for Chuck and Sarah. Thanks for sticking it out.

Babies need a lot of things.

Chuck said this to me when we were registering for the baby shower Chuck's sister, Ellie, threw for us when I was pregnant with our first child, our son, Stephen. Chuck was absolutely adorable during that entire time, even though he will tell you he was also a nervous wreck. I was exhausted, walking around with swollen ankles and low blood pressure that made me feel the need to sit down at least every ten minutes. Ellie kept marching on, checking everything off, while at the same time giving us a consumer report on each item–which brand was best, what items in general she had that we could borrow, what she had that she never used and didn't think we needed…things she wished when she and Devon were registering that they had thought about.

We even started an argument between Ellie and Devon about whether they were done with their baby items or if they were having another baby. (They weren't. Ellie had our niece, Clara in 2011, our nephew, Dylan in 2013. He was a baby when I was eight months pregnant. They also have our niece, Marianne, who was born in between our son, Stephen and our daughter, Jackie.)

Chuck's cuteness got me through all of that craziness. He was curious about some items, like the breast pump, embarrassed by others, like nursing bras, overwhelmed with others, like car seats and strollers. Buying newborn clothing was my favorite. We knew we were having a boy. I remember standing in the clothing section with this super tiny sweater vest with matching corduroy pants thinking how unbelievably adorable it was, mystified that I would soon be holding a person that was so small that it would swim on him the first time he wore it. They grow so fast, Sarah, you have no idea, Ellie had said. I didn't, but I learned fast.

It seemed stressful, at least on the surface. I know the other parents in our childbirth classes were stressed out, worrying about everything. Chuck is a natural worrier, mind you, which could have set us up for disaster. The thing was, I was so deliriously happy (not just hormones either), I wasn't worried at all. Our situation was a little different, mind you. Not only was I so close to having something I had never thought I would ever be able to have, I had come around to it twice…wanting it, almost having it, forgetting everything, relearning about my life and what I wanted, to almost having it again. A little over nine months after Chuck told me our story on the beach, we got pregnant.

Being parents for the first time was still overwhelming, but Chuck and I had each other. That was all we needed to deal with any of life's problems, big and small. We got through that together, like the magnificent team that we always were…that we still are. Most of my friends are amicably jealous of me over my husband, saying teasingly on more than one occasion that they wished their husband (Tony, Jim, Greg, Peter, etc) was more like Chuck. It was always meant in jest, but I know what they mean. What can I say? I'm a very lucky woman. He changed diapers, took turns willingly with me getting up in the middle of the night for feedings, and cleaned up baby spit-up without me ever even needing to ask. He cooked, I cleaned, and we did absolutely everything else together. A lot of togetherness, but it was always how we were, how we worked, and it worked for us, so I never questioned it.

I was blessed never having to worry about what I would do if I was trying to be a mother all by myself. I don't know how any single parent can do such a thing. Love is powerful, giving us strength that we don't always know that we have, but even when you love your children as much as you do, it still takes so much out of you. Doing it alone…the thought was unbearable. I only did it for a very short period of time with Molly when she was that baby, with me in Hungary, and I barely know how I survived it.

I had nowhere to put her while I was waiting for the morning. She needed food and diapers. It wasn't safe to take her with me. Could I really leave a five month old baby alone? Culturally in Europe, leaving a baby sleeping alone in a house was considered acceptable social behavior, but not in America, not how I thought. I didn't have a choice. It worried me more, because she wasn't even in a crib. I had to empty out one of the weapons cases and place her inside. It was either that or the inside of a dresser drawer, but those that opened were all too high off the ground. I tried to tuck her in as best I could, placing the case on the bed in case she rolled over. I had no frame of reference at the time, but the baby, being five months old, could very well have been able to roll over, out of the case and onto the bed. What if she rolled off the bed onto the floor? I was really starting to panic. I decided to leave the case on the floor, tucked my hair into my shirt collar as the only disguise I could manage, and left to find a store.

That was one of the most stressful things I've ever had to do–shop like that, each item I thought of springing to mind three others that I hadn't thought of before I left, all the while worrying that I had left a small baby alone. She needed diapers. But she needed wipes as well. She needed food–baby formula. I had to guess, staring at a wall of different brands. I saw bottles of baby food, totally unsure how old she was, seeing the ages for the baby on the label. I bought the food appropriate for the youngest babies, telling myself too old was worse than too young, if the issue was her ability to swallow. But she needed a bottle, then a nipple, a spoon, a cloth to burp her on. Food and diapers turned into a cart so full I could barely hoist it onto the counter.

When I returned, she was crying. My already frayed nerves were like live wires inside me. I unpacked everything. I changed her, mixed her formula and fed her, then fed her with a spoon from a jar of pureed pears. Once she was dry and fed, she stopped crying. It was late, probably later than the baby was supposed to be up. I picked up the case and put it on the bed next to me. She slept, but I didn't.

Every practical task was interrupted with errant thoughts, wondering what it was that Ryker was really doing. By this point, I was almost certain he was rogue. Whatever his orders had been in the beginning, he was now following some other agenda that I knew nothing about. The most dominant thought in my head–if the CIA was interested in the whereabouts of the baby, this long stretch of time before reporting the success of the mission was unacceptable. He would have been due to check in with his superiors. If the mission was this critical, 12 hours was too long to wait. He was doing something else with this time…tying up loose ends? Transacting exchanges of money? Planning escape routes? Something untoward.

The night slowly turned to day, the sun slowly filling the dingy room with light. My thoughts never let me sleep. The baby was safe with me…but once I turned her over, I couldn't protect her any more. Every fiber of my being told me she needed to be protected from Ryker. The sound of his voice made my skin crawl. When the baby started crying in the morning, needing to be changed and fed, I got up to tend to her. Those blue eyes, just staring at me, so beautiful, so curious…so innocent. At that moment, I decided to not follow my orders.

It was easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. I was sure this was unsanctioned. Graham would back me up. Regardless of anything else he may have been, he wouldn't let me be reprimanded for making a judgment call in the field, especially something this serious. Even if he was somehow involved, of which I was not yet sure, he would be more concerned with protecting himself than Ryker at this point. I was his cleaner, even now. He would send me after Ryker before he would jeopardize his position by admitting any collusion.

I was going to meet Ryker…but not with the baby. I needed a plan.

I had seen an old pram on the first floor of the hostel, in the hallway of the rooms the taxi driver's cousin inhabited. I knocked on her door and asked her if I could borrow hers, just for a short while to take my baby for a walk. She didn't question me at all, just waved her hand as an offer for me. I went back upstairs and used a small voice recorder that was part of my gear, which I used to make my mission logs while in the field. I recorded the baby crying. I put it and my gun in the pram. I looked from the window in my room, searching the tables on the sidewalk. I saw Ryker, in a suit and tie, sitting alone at a table, just where he said he would be.

I circled around the building from the back stairwell, emerging onto the street on an adjacent avenue, so that I could cross the street towards the cafe and approach from the north. He wouldn't know that I hadn't come from the hotel room where he thought I had stayed last evening.

I confronted Ryker. Amazingly enough, he came right out and told me what he was planning and why. A mu-ha-ha moment, as Chuck would say. I knew, as he was telling me, two things. That I had made the right decisions–changing hotels, leaving the baby where he couldn't find her, and that he had no intention of letting me leave Hungary alive. He was lamenting his life's work with the CIA, telling me how I might one day too realize that giving my life away to someone else was no way to live, not enough. Even if there was a modicum of truth in his words, he was insincere when it came to him. He was kidnapping the baby for her inheritance. He had probably been instrumental in killing her parents, or at least using their deaths opportunistically. I had somehow become an accessory. How many of those men were truly Fundai Mafia? How many were just Ryker's competition…people who wanted a cut of what he was not willing to share?

I told him he was a lousy handler—because he was. I pulled back the blanket in the pram, revealing the soft crying he heard was not the baby, but just her voice. I pulled out my gun and shot him. I was aiming for the center of his chest, but he jerked at the last minute, already at an angle in his seat. My bullet went through his left shoulder.

He crashed to the ground. The table overturned. People shouted and moved. I ran through the throngs of people at breakneck speed, weaving in and out, avoiding a straight line to complicate any shot he might take at me while I was running. I had observed a public transit bus stopping across the street from us. Thinking quickly, I ran across the street and into a crowd. He saw me, a hideously angry snarl on his face. The bus pulled up, blocking his view. I ran back into the building where I was staying. I was confident when the bus pulled away, it appeared to him that I had vanished into thin air. The trail was cold.

I had to get back to the U.S. Graham needed to know that my handler had gone rogue and tried to kill me. All of that was important, but as I ran up the stairs towards my room, the only thing that mattered was that the baby was alright. She was crying, probably a mix of being scared and the disturbing noises from the street below. I changed her, fed her…still she was crying. It felt like shards of glass in my ears. Nothing I did could make her stop crying.

I was desperately talking to her, asking her what she wanted, telling her I didn't know what she wanted. After over an hour, I was frantic, at my wits end. Again, I called my mother. I needed help, and she was the only place I could get it. I told her what was going on, that I was on a mission and taking care of a baby. I explained what I had done, and that nothing was working. She suggested that I rock the baby, maybe sing to her. My mother told me she thought the baby needed to feel safe.

I held her close to me and rocked her, singing the lullabye I remembered from when I was very small, listening to my mother singing it with me through the phone. The baby calmed down. I felt an enormous sense of relief, coupled with such raw emotion for my mother it brought tears to my eyes. Had I ever felt safe like that with my own mother? I knew I had, hearing that lullabye as I had and been calmed in the same way. Her anger that had poisoned my life had made me forget that, made me want to leave her and run away with my father. I had to go, getting off the phone quickly, afraid Ryker could track me.

It started raining, a thunderstorm, normal for the late summer. The rain pelted the windows, and she was curious, not the least bit afraid. I held her in my arms and walked to the window. I watched her blue eyes trace the watery tracks on the glass, smiling peacefully at the tinkling music the rain made as it fell. I couldn't remember the last time I felt this calm, maybe never quite this calm ever in my life. It was a beautiful moment.

But it didn't last. Graham called. He knew what had happened, all of it. He was surprisingly sympathetic, almost kind, which was never how I ever thought of him. It was unnerving, but I was strung out, and took the comfort where I could get it. I felt confident enough to pose a hypothetical question to him, about what would happen to her if I returned with her. He told me the truth, telling me she would be placed into the custody of the CIA…and that there was no way he could guarantee her safety. I suspected as much, but I needed to hear him say it. I stated for the record I was not in possession of the package.

He knew damn well that I was. I wasn't fooling anyone, least of all myself. But he accepted it, which was all I had wanted him to do. It was the only redeemable thing I thought Graham had ever done. I'm speaking ill of the dead again, but it's worth saying here, I'm almost certain the only way Daniel Shaw could have found out about the baby being alive was from Graham. He was the only one besides Ryker who had any idea, and definitely the only one who knew for sure the baby was alive. Graham died long before Daniel Shaw waltzed into our lives, but Shaw was a special agent for the CIA during this time. Graham had sent me on my red test to kill Shaw's wife. We never knew Shaw, but Graham certainly did. Whether he learned first hand and used it as leverage, or learned it after he downloaded the Ring's Intersect, I don't know for sure. But the ultimate source, I am sure, was Graham.

Armed with my limited knowledge at the moment, believing that although I wasn't sure of his motives for doing so, Graham had my back, I hung up…and I knew what I needed to do. I kept trying to talk myself out of it, telling myself there was another way…but there wasn't. I was alone in the world again at this point, alone but for my mother. So was this little girl, this baby who had a name that no one would ever know because everyone who had ever known her was dead. It was like looking through a lens down through time, seeing myself in this baby. She deserved to live the life that had been stolen away from me before I had ever known I had it to live. If I had to sacrifice the only thing that was keeping me from being alone, to ensure that this baby wasn't alone, I would do it.

To get her out of the country with me, she needed a passport. That took a bit of time to secure, through illegal channels in a foreign country like that. It would have been easier to go through the intelligence community, but I couldn't take the chance that Ryker could track it back to me. In all, it took me almost two weeks before we could leave. I gave Graham random updates about my whereabouts, what I was, quote unquote, following up on. He never probed, thankfully again, I'm sure because he knew what I was trying to do. Knowing all that I do now, Graham's stake in Ryker's mission couldn't have been the inheritance, or he wouldn't have let me hide her the way I did. Was Ryker blackmailing Graham? It seemed the most likely reason. I merely accepted his intentional ignorance as a gift, however ill-begotten it was in truth.

During that time, I shopped again for what she needed. I spent time with her, calmly and peacefully, in the tiny room, day and night. She was comfortable with me. I knew what to do. She liked the sound of the rain. She liked it when I sang to her and when I rocked her. I was quickly attached, but I knew it was fleeting. It had already started breaking my heart when I called my mother again.

I explained it all, telling her what I had done to save the baby I had called her about earlier, the one I had needed help comforting. I told her in order to keep her safe, I wanted my mother to take her and raise her. I knew it was asking more than what was appropriate, but not having children of my own yet then, I had no idea what a monumental thing it truly was, to ask someone to give 20 more years of her life away. But she did it, almost without hesitating. She told me she was proud of me. No one had ever been proud of me, not like that. I think a part of her wanted the same thing I wanted–a second chance at life. My mother could have it, and though I was still forever to be denied it seemed, now the baby could have it too.

I left Hungary and flew to California. I left the airport in Los Angeles and went straight to rent a car. I rented a car seat as well, strapped her in, and started driving. It was one hour from Los Angeles to Riverside. The baby slept the entire ride in the car and she was perky and awake, cooing to herself and me as she saw my reflection in the rear view mirror, when I pulled up outside the address I had memorized from the information I had found online.

I hadn't laid eyes on my mother since I was seven years old. I held the baby in my arms and climbed the wooden steps of the porch. She opened the door, rushing out to us, wrapping us both in her arms, weeping. I could hear her talking, that same rapid, blended word talk…how I was just as beautiful as she had always imagined I would look now that I was grown up.

She was obviously older than I remembered, but she was calmer too. Sweeter, if that makes any sense. Her relationship with my father going bad had boiled away that sweetness in her, but now, almost 20 years removed from his toxic influence, it had returned. It was as if she had grown it in the garden she had planted around the trim of the porch, beside the rows of flowers.

She held out her arms, meaning for me to hand her the baby. Such a simple gesture, but it seemed to freeze time around me, slowing everything down so that each heartbeat was imprinting this moment. All of it stayed with me…the gentle breeze fluttering my hair, the delicate scent of the flowers in the garden next to the stairs, the warmth of the sun on my back as we stood in the shade on the porch. Even now, as I had forgotten and then remembered this again, if I close my eyes, I can still smell the sweet cloy of baby powder, mixed with the scent of the baby formula on her breath and on the front of her clothing…feel how warm she felt in my arms, comforting, not sweltering, though it was quite warm.

I tucked my hands under her arms and transferred her to my mother, who tucked the baby on her hip like it was something she did without even thinking. I watched the baby as she looked from me to my mother, curious, not the least bit afraid. I felt chilled where the breeze touched me, against the part of me that was no longer warm from holding her. My arms ached. I felt it then, the distance that was opening though I was standing right where I had been. I would never hold her again, never look at her again once I left this place, never to return. I didn't even know her name…she was a total stranger. But I gave her my life, the life that was left that I could have salvaged from the wreckage I had been accumulating since I left my mother at seven. Nothing had ever made me hurt quite as much as I did, acknowledging all of that.

This was the best I could hope for. This baby would have what I never did, everything that I had needed and been denied, through cruel circumstances. It was symbolic…but the only comfort I had.

I was fighting the urge to fall apart, break down crying. I started going through logistics, giving my mother the phony passport and all the false documentation she would need to be considered this girl's mother. A birth certificate and a certificate of adoption. In Hungary, the illegal contact had recycled the name of a newly deceased woman. This girl's name was Mariska. My mother shortened it to Molly. I handed over supplies, then started rambling everything I had learned while taking care of her for the short time that I had. She knew, never needing any explanation or instruction from me.

I think my mother could sense how tenuously close to breaking down I was. She told me I could stay with them in her house. My heart felt like lead. That was sincerely the only thing I think I wanted at that time, but I couldn't have it. For all the reasons we both already knew, and worse, because the only way this worked was because the CIA had no idea who my mother was, where she was, if she was even alive. That was the one thing Graham had never known, and consequently that Shaw never found out either. Staying with them compromised their safety. I told her I had to leave and never see either one of them again.

My mother lamented my lack of childhood, choking me with emotion and tears that I struggled to contain. My parting request was that she made sure this little girl had the childhood that I never did, that I should have had. She promised me she would. I turned and walked away.

I heard the echoing clunk my heels made on her wooden steps, feeling that I had left some part of myself here, something ripped through that same open wound from deep inside me. It almost physically hurt to take a breath. I walked more quickly, jogging around the side of my car. I could see them, still standing there, watching me go. I couldn't wave and I couldn't smile. The last thing I noticed with my vision blurred by tears, was my mother's house. I hadn't really paid all that much attention when I'd pulled up, so concerned with taking care of the baby.

It was my dream house.

Chuck and I live in a version of this house…white, red door, black shutters, and a white picket fence. When I was very little, still in school, they would ask us to draw a picture of our house…that was what I used to draw. It was a figment of my imagination, an amalgamation of all the different kinds of perfect houses I'd seen on tv. I was too embarrassed to draw where we really lived…a one room motel room, a broken down trailer, never any place longer than a few months. When Chuck and I were first married, he was trying to find me the perfect house. I told him about that…something I never told anyone, ever.

But my mother knew. She was the one who kept all those drawings from when I was in kindergarten, tucked away in her most prized possessions. It was no coincidence. When she had finally gotten on her feet and moved here from Idaho, had this house been "the one" because she was remembering my drawings, even in a subconscious way?

I sobbed out loud and jumped behind the wheel of the car. I drove away and never looked back. I cried all the way back to Los Angeles, in the bathroom at the airport, in the bathroom on the plane. The stewardesses on the flight kept asking me if I was alright. I asked for a strong drink, and then another, and slept fitfully until we landed in D.C. It was September 23, 2007, in the early morning hours, when I took a taxi from the airport to Langley.

I put on makeup in the taxi, the only way possible I could disguise the washed out look on my face and my lack of sleep. I walked into Graham's office and he never flinched, which made me feel better. He was genuinely sympathetic, telling me he thought such a traumatic mission might have driven me over the edge and burned me out completely. I assured him I wasn't going anywhere…but told him no more handlers, period.

Maybe it was time for me to become one. Graham's words as he handed me what I would soon learn was Chuck's file.

I opened the folder and saw the picture of Chuck for the first time. My mission…my asset, my future husband and the father of my children, the love of my life and the other half of my soul…Charles Irving Bartowski. I was no clairvoyant. I couldn't know all of those things just by looking at his picture. All I saw was something…genuine…in his eyes, I don't have a better word than that.

I started scanning his file, reading about his background. I was distracted though, and I could only read a few sentences before my eyes would wander back to his photograph. He was a Nerd Herd supervisor at the Buy More in Burbank, a former National Merit Scholar expelled from Stanford in 2003 for cheating. He lived with his sister, whose parents' locations were unknown. Phone records indicated an almost complete lack of social life or interactions with anyone other than the people he worked with at the Buy More. There was nothing unusual here. The file screamed malcontent, a typical mark. It was the photograph that bothered me, though. The photo didn't match the mental picture I got of him when I read the words.

When I looked up, I saw a broken, burned out communication device that looked very similar to ones that Bryce and I had used in Mexico. I narrowed my eyes, ready to ask Graham what it was, but he held up his hand to silence me. His face was a mask, unreadable. A memory flashed. It was how he had looked right before he told me Sam had been killed at the Pentagon on September 11th. My heart started pounding, my pulse rushing behind my ears and deafening me.

"Sarah, this will be hard to hear," he said, his voice a hushed rumbling sound that blew into me like a gale force wind. "Bryce surfaced 24 hours ago…while you were in the air. He broke into the Intersect lab at DARPA. Stole the Intersect file and destroyed the computer. We don't know why…who he was working for…any of it. The agents on the scene were ordered to take him alive…but a trigger-happy NSA burn-out stepped in and killed him before we could question him. I'm sorry, Sarah."

My mind had been cycling through everything he said very quickly. Intersect? It was a word from far in my past…the final product of the computer program they had started to develop to use with Omaha before it was disbanded. Bryce had never once told me that he even knew what that was. My racing thoughts disappeared into a dark abyss when I heard Graham say Bryce had been killed. I went deaf, not registering his sympathy. All of the anger and betrayal surged to the surface, now hopelessly wild, since there would never be a way for me to resolve this, to get the answers to what he did and why. I tried to tell myself that it didn't matter, it was done, and now he was dead as a result. I could feel the internal battle between the pain and the ice. The ice won, at least for now.

"That file you're holding?" Graham added. "Larkin sent the only remaining Intersect program to Charles Bartowski via email right before he was killed. Literally the last thing before he died."

"Why?" I asked, still a little bewildered.

"We don't know. Chances are he was working with Bryce. We opened Larkin's file. Apparently Larkin and Bartowski were college roommates. We're sending you there now. Find Bartowski and figure out why he has the Intersect. Retrieve those files by any means necessary."

"Yes, sir," I told him, closing Chuck's file and folding it under my arm.

I didn't know it here, but I walked out of Graham's office, and also across the line of demarcation for my life ever after. Before Chuck. After Chuck. I went into his office before Chuck, I left after Chuck.

Nothing would ever be the same again.