A/N #1: To address some questions about my canon timeline here. Chuck and Jill's past is not consistent as written in the show, as most things. The writers never aimed to jive with each other, for multiple plot points. In the pilot, Chuck says he met Jill randomly. Later, it is shown that Bryce introduced them in 1999 when Chuck was 18. It also is portrayed that their first kiss was 2002, probably when Chuck was 20 (not yet 21.) I use the age of 20 for Chuck and Jill having sex based on the latter. They were in a long-term, serious relationship that went very sour and damaged Chuck's motivation and self-esteem far into the future. Just my own interpretation of canon.

A/N #2: This chapter dabbles in a bit of historical fiction, if you will. Something I had written partially in the past and worked it into this piece, as it seemed to fit with this narrative and timeline. The majority of the backstory comes from Laura Bush's account of September 11th, in her book, Spoken from the Heart, including her interactions and explanation of reasoning with Senator Ted Kennedy at the Capitol while the towers were burning. Not meant as any kind of political statement AT ALL-just history.

Once the novelty of moving and my new situation had faded, I settled into life in D.C. When I say life, I mean work. Working was all that I ever did. Working and sleeping. I had a one bedroom apartment where I lived alone. Aside from my residence at the Farm, and cohabitating with Sam for about a year, it was the only place that I had ever lived that was mine. Home, sort of. I left work to go home…that was what I told myself.

For, I also knew that for all that, I felt lost. I had understood from an early age that home wasn't a place–it was a feeling. A feeling I had never known. My apartment was decorated like a hotel room. The prints on the walls were generic and the furniture was bland. There were no accents in the rooms, nothing that made it personal at all. Anyone could have lived there. What makes a residence a home? Personal touches, pieces of life that spill over into tangible things that others could see. But that was just it–there was nothing to me. If I dwelt on it long enough, it would frighten me. I could just fade away…no one would ever know. Instead, I worked myself to the bone, so I wouldn't have to dwell on anything.

I talked to members of my team while we were at work. Chit chat, when it was allowed. I never divulged anything personal. No one seemed to notice, as I was again surrounded by men, most of whom were old enough to be my father. I don't think anyone suspected I was as young as I was, fortunately. Only a handful of people, including my team lead, knew I was CIA trained. That training, I believed, helped to reinforce my maturity.

Other than that, I was alone. I lived alone. I ate alone. I slept alone. I wasn't into music and I barely watched anything on television other than the news. My apartment was so quiet I could hear the water rushing in the pipes below the floor, the refrigerator humming, and the clock ticking on the wall. The wind howling or the sound of the rain could wake me up in the middle of the night.

It was hard to fall back to sleep when that happened. Before bed, I had returned to my nightly usage of my vibrator. It took time to adjust, I will admit. It never felt as satisfying as having sex, now that I had a mental comparison. At the highest speed, it still took a long time to satisfy myself. If I had wanted to have sex, I could have gone to a bar or a club and picked someone up. Objectively, I knew I was attractive enough to be accommodated immediately. But for the same reasons as before, I couldn't do that, not with someone I didn't know. Impersonal, anonymous sex had satisfied me in the past. But despite that quality to it, it was safe in a way a stranger in a bar was not.

Normal people went on dates and just got to know each other. They had sex at a mutually agreed upon time. I couldn't date. My life didn't belong to me. I had traded my free will and any future dreams in exchange for a dangerous and most likely shortened life. At 21, when most people were celebrating the beginning of their real lives, I felt I had resigned myself to a path that would lead me to an early end. In the middle of the night, alone in my apartment, sometimes I convinced myself that was the best possible outcome. Who wanted to live to be old…and yet, still alone?

I had taken enough personality tests by this point. Deep, probing psychological scrutiny meant to weed out those lacking the fortitude to do the work of a CIA officer. I had tested as an introvert. Not severe, though. It was always on a scale of one to a hundred. All you needed for the label was 51 percent. As if anyone could be reduced to just a stack of numbers…but, that is what they tend to do. It was just slightly more introverted than extroverted. I could tolerate being alone…I needed time alone. That was how that was explained to me.

Loneliness, however, was a separate entity. Loneliness was not missing people. It was missing a feeling. Of belonging, comfort…something else. I would always ask myself what was I missing? To miss something, you would have to have at one point known what it felt like to have it. My entire life, I had never felt like I belonged. Perhaps then, loneliness was the hole that was left when everything that should have filled it when you were young was never there. Like a tree that grows around a rock or a power line. It develops incomplete, warped, because of something outside its control.

I was accustomed to being alone, and it never bothered me. I was accustomed to loneliness…and it was slowly killing me, although so slowly I couldn't feel it, for a long time.

I missed Sam.

Again, it sounds different when I say it than how it truly was. I missed him the way I missed my father. Sam and I had no emotional connection, no attachment, in our relationship. I missed him the way you would miss a familiar landmark after it has been torn down. Maybe an old abandoned building that reminded you where to turn on your way to somewhere else…finally demolished into a pile of rubble. A building you had never set foot in, a building whose presence had no consequence to your life, other than you used it to guide you, measure yourself against your bearings in the world. Sometimes you could miss your turn, because you expected it to be there, and now it was gone.

Sam and I had never talked about anything but work and sex. About work when we were working…about sex when we were having it. But before if I had ever awoken in the middle of the night, I would know he was in the next room, and fall back to sleep. I wasn't afraid to be there alone. I was more than capable of defending myself…both with my bare hands, and the weapons that I kept with me in my apartment. However, It was just familiar and comfortable to know he was there before.

I know what it is to miss someone, truly miss someone, with every fiber of my being. When Chuck had been taken by the Belgian, and he was being held in Thailand…when I had been in Russia trying to bring Chuck's mother out of Volkoff Industries…I knew what it was like. Every beat of my heart ached, every breath vibrated hollow inside my chest. I needed him like air, and missing him like that had suffocated me. Even while my memory was gone after the Intersect had fried my brain, during those two weeks when I tried to go after Nicholas Quinn by myself, I missed him without even knowing that was what I was doing. I would wake from a dream, feeling like I was drowning, unable to catch my breath…searching desperately to submerge myself back into the dark, fuzzy dream…where I was safe. I missed, more than anything, the way Chuck always made me feel safe. He would laugh now, if he heard me say that, sure to tell you that I was always the strong one, the one who could kick anyone's ass if need be. Maybe that is true, but the safety I am talking about wasn't physical. And it depends on how you define strength. I contend in life, overall, Chuck was always stronger than me. Chuck kept my heart safe, kept my soul safe…from a darkness that was always looming, waiting to pull me down again at a moment's notice.

Looking back now, I understand that I only missed the buffer Sam had provided against my loneliness. But, I could tolerate the loneliness more at that time, because doing the Secret Service detail wasn't eating away at my soul. Being groped once, and then twisting his arm painfully, was the worst of it.

That didn't last long enough.

Just like every person alive at the time, I remember the day of September 11th perfectly. Maybe more so than an average person, because I was so close to it while it was happening.

The Bushes' daughters were at college—one in Texas and the other in Connecticut. My team was assigned primarily to the First Lady. We kept meticulous track of her itinerary. On the docket for the day was a long meeting with Senator Kennedy in the Capitol, Congressional testimony, and then the Congressional Picnic at the White House later on. The President was in Florida.

We were waiting for Mrs. Bush to come downstairs for her limousine when we heard the news that a plane had hit one of the towers of The World Trade Center in New York City. My first instinct, like most people's, was to think it must have been a small craft, a one seater or crop duster type. We were trained to be on high alert at all times, so it didn't have that much of an effect on us. The team lead, using our comms, actually told everyone that it was a commercial airliner. I remember thinking immediately that this was more than what everyone was thinking, and I know he did as well. I could tell by his face, usually set like stone and expressionless. He actually looked anxious.

We were traveling to the Capitol during that 15 minute time span in between thinking something was wrong–and knowing it, when the second plane hit the other tower, broadcast live on national television. Everything changed at that moment. I could cut the tension in the vehicle with a knife. Mrs. Bush was worried, but she went into her meeting with Senator Kennedy just the same. I was tasked with shadowing her more closely. I was there, listening to Kennedy drone on and on. I know the meeting was important, something Mrs. Bush was passionate about…but Kennedy's apparent disregard for the horror on the television was unsettling. I found out much later that Mrs. Bush thought much the same way as I did, only she was wise enough to give him the benefit of the doubt, telling herself he must have been in shock and his coping mechanism was to just keep going.

We were still inside the Capitol when we were informed a third plane had hit the Pentagon. That was the moment that hell rose from under the ground to swallow us whole.

As Secret Service, we were trained to protect our charges at all costs. No circumstance, no other lives, nothing–was more important than protecting Mrs. Bush at that moment. I could razor focus, pushing everything else out of the forefront of my mind. They ordered the White House evacuated. They ordered the Capitol evacuated. The Vice President was rushed into the underground bunker at the White House.

My team lead suggested the basement of the Capitol, but chaos had started to erupt. People were wandering around the streets of D.C. in a terrified daze. A split decision was made to take Mrs. Bush to the Secret Service Headquarters, which was double reinforced and blast-proof. One of the agents yelled at us to run…out of the building, into the limousine. I drew my weapon and ran with the group, keeping our charge covered at all times. I remember thinking to myself, at this point, our defenses had been breached. What was my one weapon going to do if another plane, or a nuclear bomb, was somehow released in our midst? I even wondered in the back of my mind if I would have to fire my weapon, something I had only done in simulation training.

The Secret Service men waiting outside the Capitol were in full tactical gear and armed with high-capacity machine guns. It was their protocol, worst case scenario shit. Body armor and machine gun, or my glock. Almost useless based on what it looked like we were facing. Once inside the facility, far below the ground in a bomb shelter, the news of the last plane crashing in Pennsylvania reached us. There were other, unconfirmed reports of more planes crashing…that fog of war and panic that takes over when a defensive perimeter has been breached. It took all my strength to remain calm and cool, as we were ordered first to do. Sort of like the guards at Buckingham Palace, for an analogy.

Mrs. Bush was a strong woman, but she was frazzled, understandably so. She was in shock, trying to calm down. She wanted to talk to her husband, but he was in the air on Air Force One, and she couldn't reach him. The Secret Service had whisked both daughters away to safety, and she couldn't reach them either. The only thing I remember her saying clearly during that time was a sentence that we always knew everyone in that building was thinking. Was that plane that crashed in Pennsylvania destined for the Capitol? It was, but we didn't know that for a long time.

That day felt like it never ended. I think, to be perfectly honest, it was September 13th before I slept again, if the restless, nightmare-ridden tossing I did could be called sleep. I wish I had gotten more sleep then, because for me, the hardest part started on the 14th, when Graham called an emergency meeting with me.

D.C. was mayhem during those days, but we were still trying to do our jobs the best we could. It took me three hours to complete a commute to CIA headquarters that would have normally taken 20 minutes. When I arrived, and I was called into Graham's office, my first impression was to wonder why there was any damage in this building, so far away from the Pentagon. All it was, I later learned, was Graham sweeping the entire contents of his desk and the bookshelf behind it onto the floor with several furious sweeps of his arm.

I had never seen him that angry before, or ever again until the day he died. He was still the Deputy Director of the CIA, and he would stay in that role until 2005, when he was appointed Director by the President.

"You wanted to see me, Sir," I said, speaking up once I was in his office. He had his hands on his hips, his unbuttoned jacket swept up on both sides. He stood with his back to me as he looked out the wall of windows.

He seemed to be ignoring me, but I waited. Just before I almost spoke again, as the silence was becoming awkward, he said in a low, rumbling growl, "We warned them. And they didn't listen."

"Sir?" I asked. My initial urge was to gasp, but holding my emotions in check was paramount when dealing with Graham.

"Have a seat, and shut the door, Agent Walker," he said stiffly. I did what he asked.

He stayed gazing out the window for a long time. He finally turned and said, "I know you were in the line of fire with this on Tuesday. Damn fine work in an absolute hellish situation, Walker."

"Thank you, Sir," I said blandly, not thinking anything I had done was above and beyond what my role entailed.

"I wanted you to hear this from me. Agent Hart is dead, Sarah. I know he was your training partner," Graham said. His voice was softer than normal, but still cold.

I still can't describe to you exactly what happened to me when I heard those words. I know I went deaf for a second, completely missing the rest of what Graham said to me. What I had missed was him telling me that Sam was one of the casualties at the Pentagon. Apparently he and an attache from the National Security Agency had a scheduled meeting with the DNI Deputy Director. I do know it took every drop of strength I had to stay calm and collected, but I managed to do so. He explained a lot, but I missed a good portion of the words as I struggled to force my emotions deep inside.

My attention focused again when he started to explain his earlier comment. "The CIA had evidence, for a long time, that something like this would happen. We warned them in April, we warned them in July. The National Security Advisor brushed it off. They had widespread evidence of training camp closures, known terrorists disappearing off the radar. We even told them we thought they would attack us here, on our soil…" He shook his head, pressed his palm over his forehead. "The largest portion of intel we recovered…we recovered because of Agent Hart. He took the lead on this. He was a genius at cryptanalysis and code breaking." I had never known that. His special skill, like my languages. "He lived almost an entire year in hell gathering that intel, and it was disregarded. And he ended up being killed…by the very people he was trying to stop."

My voice sounded like it was coming from someone else, far away from us, instead of from my own lips. "The mission…in May…"

"Yeah, Sarah," Graham admitted. "That was the first strike." He didn't say anything else, and I didn't ask. I thought of his haunted eyes and his desperation. He had somehow infiltrated a group of terrorists back then who had just killed close to 3000 Americans, mostly innocent civilians.

I left Graham's office in a daze. I don't even remember where I went before I went back to my apartment. Before 9/11, I would sit in the Mall by the water. Now, the entire city was barricaded, wounded, and there was no where I could go to just sit. I didn't sleep that entire night.

In the morning, I went to work as usual. Everything was somber and subdued. People seemed reluctant to smile at one another, as if just a smile was offensive to the pall of grief that smogged the city. New York was worse, we all knew. I remember thinking I had been inside the Empire State Building once before, but somehow, my father and I had never entered The World Trade Center in our travels. Now it was a smoking pile of rubble and poisonous gypsum dust. The next time I was in New York after 2001, the memorial was there, at Ground Zero…the empty hole where a glass skyscraper had been, a fountain pouring into the ground like endless tears.

I was my own kind of numb. Graham told me Sam was dead. Who else knew? Who else would have to be notified? I didn't know anything…and then, I realized that I did. I knew his real name. I got to work, my second spy mission as an agent, this time sanctioned only by me. I searched the CIA database for any information on David Fordham. I was amazed at the size of the file. I spent hours reading about his life.

He was from Colorado, a ward of the state and in foster care until he was released by the state at 18. His parents' names were unknown, which would have meant he had been given up or abandoned at an early age. His grades saved him, got him into an ivy league college. He was scouted in college by the CIA after his professors had noted his phenomenal ability at code breaking. There was a gap of time where his whereabouts were unknown, and then his training at the Farm in 1998.

I wondered about the reason when he had done it–telling me his real name. He wanted me to know this information, I thought. Had he been thinking about his potential death? I wish I knew more. I wished I could just talk to him, but he was gone. That abandoned building, now surely leveled and replaced by a barren field.

It was months later before I learned everything. He was listed on the casualty report at the Pentagon by his birth name. It was common practice, a way of permanently protecting cover. If I had been suddenly killed, my death certificate and my gravestone would read Samantha Burtman, though no one but my father knew who that truly was. I found out he was buried in Oak Hill Cemetery. Now, one can easily search the Internet to find a grave location, but in 2001 it was all on paper. Considering it was a newer burial, it was a little less challenging, but it still took me several hours to find it. When I did, I was rocked to the core. I staggered on my feet in shock.

He wasn't buried alone.

His name was on the top of the stone, but its etching was older, slightly greenish from weather and worn smooth around the letters' edges. Underneath his name were two dates…April 5, 1976 and September 11, 2001. The new date was freshly carved, standing out lighter against the gray granite. The second name read Gayle Hyde. She was born on May 28, 1976, and she died on February 13, 1998. Only 22, I thought. It was when I looked at the front of the stone that I understood. Just his last name…their last name. Fordham. She was his wife. And she had died six months before he reported to the Farm. How old were they when they got married? I asked myself.

When I searched for information about her, I understood. They had both graduated from Harvard. They had married at 21, and she died of leukemia when she was 22. The obituary said a "long battle with leukemia." He most likely had known she was sick when they married, it seemed. There were pictures accompanying the file, but I couldn't look at them. It was bizarre and surreal, looking at this other life of his I knew nothing about. Knowing what she looked like, I think, would have haunted me in a way I wasn't prepared for. Like it was somehow a disgrace to her memory for me to know her face–the woman her husband was fucking a year after her death.

The CIA wanted him for code breaking. He had married his college girlfriend, the only family he had ever had in his life, and then lost her a year later to a terminal disease.

I remember my eyes stinging as I sat in front of the computer, pondering all of it. This is another one of those things that I can't remember any more without all of my life knowledge applied. Sitting there in 2001, I was sad. He gave his life to the CIA, and his body to me, but his heart was in the ground here all along. Looking back now, understanding with my heart the devastation that had ruined his life at 22 years old, I ache with an unhealed pain, thinking of what he held inside, away from me, because nothing I could ever hope to give him would ever be enough.

I have wisdom now that I didn't then. He had told me I was the best sex he'd ever had. I still believe him…it wasn't just a line. But it was only sex. What he would have had with Gayle, his wife, would have transcended the physical realm. I know because it's what I have with Chuck. Making love with my husband isn't just physical…it's emotional and spiritual. The physical can't be separated from the others. I thought of his explanation to me about his offer to not use a condom with me. Instead of the cheating girlfriend, he had been monogamous with his wife, before he was with me. The spirit of his words were true, even if the words he used to tell me were a lie. He was a spy, after all. That is what we do best. Tell just enough truth to make the lies seem believable.

I don't know what would have happened to me if I'd lost Chuck that way, what I would have done. Most likely nothing as graceful and noble as what he did…fight to protect innocent people, at the cost of his own soul. That change I detected was actually him, after his soul had been gutted. This will come up again with me, and I'll explain more then, but it's important to note here because of everything I learned. The CIA gave Sam his Red Test on that mission in the summer of 2000. That means they forced him to kill someone—a government sanctioned murder. For him—a 14 year old boy who was selling military secrets to the terrorists.

In 2001, once I knew the whole truth, I went back to the cemetery. It was silly. It wasn't like he was there, and I could talk to him. It turns out all they found of his remains were a few bone fragments, and that was what was buried there. I wanted to tell him that I understood about us, about what he tried to do…about why he'd kissed me the way he did before he left…and that I was glad that, at the very least, he wasn't in any pain any longer.

Was he with her, somewhere, in some better place? I didn't know then…I don't know now. I am more sure that it exists now…after looking into the faces of my children. The power of that love, amplified by the knowledge that they were part of my husband that had grown to life inside my body, always seemed too miraculous to me to be explained away by simple biology. Being a mother transformed me in a way nothing else in my life ever had. Chuck and I have four children–two girls and two boys. Our younger son's middle name is David. It was just a coincidence, a name Chuck picked off our list because he liked it. He had brought up Sam too, but disregarded it because it had been my name, not necessarily because it was someone I had known. I seconded it, without ever telling Chuck what it meant to me. He knew absolutely everything about Sam, except his real name. I didn't think that little secret was worth upsetting anyone over, but something I needed to do, for myself as much as him.

Standing at his final resting place in 2001, I almost envied Sam. His pain was over. Mine had only just begun…and there was no escaping the hell my life was about to bring forth. "My real name…is Sam," I whispered at his grave, the first time I had spoken it out loud since I was seven years old. He was David, turned to Sam. I was Sam, turned to Sarah.

And Sarah was dying inside me, a little bit everyday.

What remedied this downward spiral, ultimately saving Sarah's life if not her soul, was a woman named Carina Miller.

Have you ever heard the expression, I wonder what's worse, the cure or the disease? Yeah. Definitely like that.