A/N: More of our Christmas story. Back to Sarah's POV for this (expository) chapter and the next. Two chapters to go.
Bite the Hand
A face on a lover with a fire in his heart
A man undercover, but you tore me apart
Oh, oh now I've found a real love
You'll never fool me again
Last Christmas I gave you my heart
But the very next day you gave it away
This year, to save me from tears
I'll give it to someone special, special
— Wham, Last Christmas
Chapter 7: Cicada
Sarah leaned against the wall of the empty stairwell outside the room she had left, her arms around herself, tears on her face.
She had barely been able to find the stairwell door. The tears had started before she kissed Chuck and they had nearly blinded her by the time she was in the hallway.
She swallowed her sobs, bitter and choking.
All she wanted was to go back to the room, kiss Chuck again, and drag him to the bed. To make love again — or just to be held. And, embraced, to let herself imagine that beautiful and good man as hers — and maybe even as a father to Molly. Imagine being a family somehow somewhere, somewhere safe.
A calm, bright place.
A Christmas tree tinseled in silver and gold. Carols playing. Molly laughing.
But Sarah's prior decisions had made that current decision impossible. She could not go back.
Time. She had no time. The last few weeks had been her slow rebirth, a new or renewed Sarah Walker, but that new or renewed Sarah was not going to survive for long.
Her past demanded the sacrifice of her future. Sacrifice.
And she had messed up — God, how I messed up! How could she have graduated from kidnapping a stranger at gunpoint to making love to him repeatedly in a hotel jacuzzi? How is that possible?
But she knew that part of the answer was Molly, the toddler she saved.
Saving Molly had saved something deep in Sarah, and that saved something had radiant power. It, that power, whatever it was — My heart? — had warmed, began to glow, and in the weeks that followed all of Sarah had warmed, began to glow. Her mother had noticed it, and commented on it carefully, afraid to make too much of it, sensing the difficult division it created in Sarah. Her mother did not fully understand the division but she knew it was there, that Sarah was struggling to make a choice she did not want to make, to drink a cup she did not want to drink, a cup she wanted to pass from her.
Sarah knew the other part of the answer was Chuck, the man she kidnapped.
She had been intensely aware of Chuck since she first saw him, and, making love to him, that intense awareness had intensified further, his every touch and look and breath registering on her indelibly. Why had he affected her so deeply? And at first sight? He is beautiful. Special. She knew that almost immediately, knew it with a bone-deep certainty.
It had been a long, lonely time since Larkin. I terminated my last lover. She hadn't even thought about another man like that since she had pulled the trigger. But when Chuck walked out of the Buy More, her reaction to him was strong and immediate, even if it took her a while to begin to understand it. It was as if she had been waiting for him, brooding in the sunless spy world, waiting for the changes in her that would prepare her to be changed by him. Magic under twinkling lights.
She had no idea if the lights were on the balcony, inside her, or both. Chuck — and the lights.
She swiped at her wet cheeks, determinedly. She had forgotten her plan for a while and then changed it, but it was time to return to it, to what was left of it. The hardest part, harder. Now, she was not only acting for Molly's sake but for Chuck's.
As a girl, for a brief week or two, she had been in an elementary class where the teacher taught them about insects — periodical cicadas, that year. Sarah had been fascinated by their life cycle: they hatch, almost immediately dig down into the ground, and then spend up to seventeen years in the dark, buried, brooding. When they re-emerge and shed their exoskeleton, they live above ground, in the light, only for a few weeks, mating, if lucky, before dying. Then buried, again. But dead this time.
That life cycle came back to her with a touch of allegory and exemplarity as she made herself start descending the stairs, blinking. She had spent most of her life below ground, first conning with her father and then working for Langston Graham. She re-emerged in the Mansion, with Molly, and then shed her exoskeleton.
She had left that part out of her story to Chuck, or, rather, she just hadn't gotten to it. Ran out of time. How she faked her death in Forgacs Mansion, destroying a whole wing in a white-hot, raging inferno, leaving behind her old gun — the one she was carrying now she bought recently, just a couple of days ago — and the throwing knives she kept covertly holstered around one calf, those knives a gift from Graham when she finished her training at the Farm and her one constant weapon. They would convince him that some of the Mansion's ashes were hers.
They had convinced him.
Graham believed she was dead, that she and Ryker and the mobsters had all fought a bloody gunfight and then were trapped in a consuming fire. Sarah's friend, Carina Miller, had told her so. Carina was the only past acquaintance that Sarah had contacted. That fact still made Sarah nervous — Carina was unpredictable — but Sarah had to know if her ruse in Budapest had worked.
Giving up her knives and faking her death were the shedding of her exoskeleton. Afterward, she had spent precious weeks above ground, caring and providing for Molly, and then Sarah found Chuck. And now she was burrowing underground again, although, paradoxically, her destination would take her far above ground, in the penthouse of The Marmoreal. Burial.
This had been her plan all along. All along. To make sure. To eliminate the threat of Graham. Final elimination. As long as he was alive, no matter what he believed or what Sarah did to secret Molly, Molly was in danger.
Graham intended to accomplish two things at once in Budapest: he was going to eliminate the threat he took Sarah to represent, whatever that was, and he was going to terminate the toddler and her parents — he had been paid a king's ransom to terminate them. Ryker had confessed all this, swearing, to the pointed end of Sarah's bloody hunting knife.
Graham did not do loose ends, and Sarah and Molly were both loose ends.
And now Chuck too, even if that had not been Sarah's plan. Graham needed to die so that the people who mattered to Sarah could live, and live unmolested.
She was prepared to sacrifice to make that happen. To sacrifice herself.
That decision had been made weeks ago. She had bundled the sleeping toddler away from the burning mansion, and taken her to a dirty hotel on the edge of Budapest. An old woman at the desk had been willing to buy or gather the items Sarah needed to bathe and feed the little girl. She was too old for bottles, and formula, but that was what the mobsters had fed her. Sarah bought her solid food and milk, the old woman had given Sarah one of her granddaughter's pink blankets, and Sarah had holed up in the hotel for several days, trying to decide what to do and, once she had decided, how to do it.
Molly. I will call her Molly.
Sarah had money in Swiss accounts she had for years. She spent nothing on herself, since she had no personal life, and never took vacations. Almost everything she wore or ate was on the Company's dime, or a mark's. All her travel. But, beyond that, she had stashed away gray money from her missions — all agents did it, all needed a slush fund, Things could go sideways at any minute. Every spy goes rogue at least once. She hadn't stolen the money, not exactly. It had been money for bribes, unused, or money carried by marks and left on-scene. Money that Graham often knew about or must have guessed the existence of but never asked her to account for. Everyone did it.
Langley was painted in infinite shades of gray, its exterior, its interior, twilight hallways.
Eventually, Sarah and Molly — the little girl bundled in the pink blanket — had made it back to the US unrecorded passengers on a cargo plane. By then, Sarah had new documents for her and Molly. They made their way to Sarah's mother's house, and Sarah explained it all to her mother.
That had been a long, tear-filled conversation, years unaccounted for between them, Molly to be attended to. So much to explain. But her mother had listened and accepted, not judged, and she had fallen in love with Molly immediately. Still, her mother did not fully understand Sarah's plan — that Sarah had no plan to return. She knew Sarah was divided, but not divided about that.
Divided. When Sarah left Molly with her mother, she could not leave Molly's blanket behind. It had killed her to sacrifice it to Morgan, but she could not let him chill, wet, tranquilized in a dumpster.
Before Budapest, perhaps she would not have cared. But after Budapest — well, I've changed.
I fall in love with little girls, and with men I kidnap. By love possessed. The Ice Queen rendered slushy.
Sarah reached the bottom of the stairs and swiped at her eyes again. It was a time for clear vision.
The Marmoreal was only a couple of blocks away. Graham was in the penthouse suite, spending his Christmas there, surrounded by his usual armed squad of Company protectors.
As Sarah stood at the door that led from The Marquis' stairway outside, she could faintly hear the Christmas music from the lobby.
Wham's Last Christmas.
Even Sarah knew about that song, knew the song. She stood and listened to it for a moment.
Graham's last Christmas. And mine.
Last Christmas. My heart. — At least I found it to give and gave it to someone special.
Special.
She glanced with longing back up the stairs, gathered herself, turned away, closed her eyes, and faced the door.
The door into the cold — she opened it, and, zipping her jacket as if the zipper could hold her divided self together, moving quickly, determinedly, she marched toward The Marmoreal.
A/N: The confrontation with Graham and more answers next time.