A/N: And part three of the in between. Next we are into Pink Slip. I wanted to just get this over with. Being in Sarah's head for this time was grueling. I thought the thought progression might help explain her motivations a bit. She is definitely angry as hell at Chuck until probably Operation Awesome. The gloves come off. This is her memory of thinking she stopped loving him. A lot of emotional introspection here, which is very hard to write. My cat thought I was depressed or something lol. I do and will later try to explain all the who-was-where-when, since it's foggy. Chuck is gone 6 months, which puts us in October. Sarah only leaves for three days, as Shaw says. So she came right back after Prague. But what were they doing in California? That mission with Gilles had to be long-term...and how she never ended up kissing him let alone sleeping with him is just plain stupid. But, I stick to my guns with that. Only a mild transgression. This is a bit ugly, a quick blip before full on Sharah, which no one wants to read, least of all me. Yuck. I have a specific angle for that, and it will be quick, I promise.

Broken heart.

It always seemed such a strange metaphor. Some leftover medieval superstition about where love originated. Love in the heart, courage in the intestines, fear in the liver.

When I was blissfully ignorant of that kind of pain, I thought it was silly. An overreaction, some dramatic flair from old novels with fainting couches and damsels in distress.

Until it happened to me.

And it did, as I stood there in shock. The train left without me, the noise of the wheels on the track deafening, but not able to reach all the way inside me.

Before the advent of science, people may not have understood that love starts in your brain. But empirically based science, what they relied on, could easily make someone believe it came from the heart. The organ quickened, beat faster when a loved one drew near. Surely love lived inside, and love could break it open when it was fiercely ripped away.

I couldn't believe how accurate that metaphor was. Genius.

Alone, trembling, I swear I felt my heart break, surprised that it didn't make a sound that others could hear. Shattered, jagged edges were flying loose inside my chest, lacerating me as they bounced and ricocheted. The pain, physical pain, almost drove me to my knees.

Insanely I remembered hearing that people could die from a broken heart, that it was a real thing. Was I dying? Was that why I felt myself slipping away? How ironic, how tragic…after all the times I had cheated death, only to die on the train platform alone in a foreign country. From a broken heart.

And at its most broken, unhealed state, the heart could no longer hold love. A broken vessel carries nothing.

Did I stop loving Chuck, just like that, in a few moments? No. Anyone who has ever been in love knows that isn't possible, or it was never truly love to begin with. But love is like a flower, always growing, thriving. A broken heart cuts the flower at the stem, freezing it in time. Its beauty stays, but only as a memory, a memory that one must watch fade in real time while it dies.

I never stopped loving Chuck, not from the moment that I first saw him until well after I almost killed him when I couldn't remember that I loved him. That is an important distinction for later, but mentioned here for contrast. But a thoroughly shattered heart cannot love. How I felt about him receded to my memory. When I missed him, I would miss what was, what could have been. In my inexperience, in the new world of broken-heartedness, I believed that I no longer loved him. That I couldn't love him, shouldn't love him. That love was a wound I needed to heal from, like I had been shot or stabbed.

I was wrong, utterly wrong in every possible way. I thought I loved someone who wasn't who I thought he was. And he most certainly didn't love me, not anymore. That immature perspective again, to believe that perhaps he had never really loved me at all, only thought that he did. Love was almighty, unbreakable, was it not? What fairy tale did I pull that from? Love doesn't die, but sometimes it morphs into something we don't immediately recognize, believing it has left us while it sleeps under our skin.

I don't remember much of the next few days. Partially because of the shock, partially because I nearly drank myself to death. I descended into hell, surrounded by the dark. My eyes got accustomed to the dark. Chuck had been the brightest light to ever have shined in my life and he was gone. Though an artificial light instead of the sun, or so I believed.

It was like I had been standing on an impossibly high cliff, ready to fly with my new wings, only to realize those wings would never hold me. Now I was at the bottom of the cliff, broken, every bit of my carefully planned new life in pieces and scattered all around me.

All I had were two train tickets to a train that had already departed and two suitcases full of useless junk, clothes we would never wear to places we would now never go.

I don't know how I got from the train station back to the hotel, the hotel I had to check into again after I had just checked out. I know I asked for a different room. The thought of the same room with the same decor would remind me of the dreams I had lost. I asked for a room with a fireplace. I burned everything in both suitcases, which created so much smoke and ash the hotel fined me when I was checking out. I didn't care. I had all my money…and now no need for it at all.

I had to go back to Burbank. That's where I was supposed to be, where Beckman was expecting me to be. I could still run, but…why? Where? What was the point if I would be alone? In the end, my job was all I had. It had destroyed all the rest of my life, ruined my only chance to be happy. But it was all I had. I had to go back.

But the thought filled me with such dread it was debilitating. Burbank, but without Chuck, was like a living museum to a past I wanted to forget. I told myself the CIA would eventually send me elsewhere, that I could and should ask for a reassignment, anywhere but Burbank.

This debate with myself happened at the bar in the hotel where I was drinking myself silly. I hadn't been this intoxicated since my days with Carina. Thinking about Carina while I was drunk reminded me of what we had done back then, drunk and drugged.

Carina had always numbed herself with sex. The more I drank, the more I started to believe her way of thinking was right. I had been celibate for over two years, fucking myself with a vibrator and crying over someone who decided he would rather kill people than sleep with me.

Eventually, I went upstairs with the man who had been buying me drinks after I had stopped buying them myself. He spoke Czech, which I only knew a few words of, but he wasn't interested in conversation. He wanted to fuck me. And god help me, I wanted to be fucked.

He pinned me against the door once we were in his room and kissed me. The kiss was awful, wet and harsh, tasting like ashes and whiskey. All my helpless brain could do was compare him to Chuck, someone who kissed you like it was the last thing he ever planned to do in his life. A wave of sadness, caused by those memories, washed over me just as this stranger jammed three fingers inside me.

I wasn't aroused enough. I was dry and it scratched, almost like I could feel his fingernails inside me, scraping. It was terrible, mood-killing. It reminded me of when I had almost been raped on that mission with Bryce. I pulled his hand away from me. He said something in Czech, something I couldn't understand other than to know it was angry frustration. He twisted his hand to grab my wrist and pulled me forward, forcing my hand down his pants.

I was drunk and stupid. What the hell was the matter with me? Since when was I Carina? This wasn't me. I didn't do things like this.

And I quickly began to realize I had let everything get out of control. I didn't have a gun or a knife, and I was intoxicated, to the point where I questioned my fighting skills and coordination. But I was alone with a strange man who was bigger and stronger than me, who was expecting sex for the money he had spent on my drinks.

With almost no options, I ended up giving him a hand job, while he jabbed three or four fingers inside me painfully. I faked an orgasm so he would stop, and it worked. Fortunately for me he had almost no stamina and came in my hand after only a few minutes.

I wiped my hand on the stranger's pants and then darted out of the room and shut the door before he could follow. I went immediately to my room and showered, throwing up several times. I sank down and crouched in the tub under the water until it ran cold, sobbing my eyes out. I felt disgusted with myself.

What would Chuck think of me if he knew what I'd just done? What did it matter what Chuck thought? He left me! He was gone…forever. The dream of something better was gone. This was my life now.

But I wasn't Carina, I reminded myself. This catastrophe had just proved that once again, made it crystal clear. I was an emotional wreck; anonymous sex was not the cure-all for me that it was for her.

I just needed to work. Even if it meant assassinations. Anything to take my mind off my pain.

I went back to California and awaited orders. Casey had been otherwise occupied, never seemed to even notice that I had been gone. We rarely spoke, still on quasi-stand-by as Chuck's training went on and on.

Was part of that seduction school? I knew how grueling that could be, how the release of sex with Sam had helped me through that. Chuck had never seemed to me the kind of guy who focused on sex that way. For him, it was emotional, it meant something. But Chuck was becoming a spy. Maybe there was someone there, some pretty girl who wanted to fuck him.

I drove myself crazy for weeks thinking like this. I couldn't sleep with my head full of thoughts of what Chuck was doing and who he was doing it with. I couldn't even use my vibrator to help me get to sleep; where before it had been an agonizing fantasy about Chuck, now it was a hopeless ache for Chuck that was far more pain than pleasure. Alcohol was the only thing that put me to sleep.

So I drank.

The endless, useless days and nights made it easy to drink all the time.

What I found out during that time: sadness made me feel weak, but when I could summon anger, I was strong again. Anger cured the sadness. Or at least, that was what I thought.

For you see, I was actually grieving. You grieve not just for people who die, but for loss. I had never really grieved for anything before, never had a cause to. I didn't know that was what I was doing here. I learned all of this far removed from here, in counseling after I had a miscarriage between my third and fourth child. There are steps to grieving.

First is denial, which for me only lasted a few moments. Chuck's decision to leave had a finality to it that couldn't be effectively denied. Bargaining moved on just as quickly, since there was no plan to win him back or change his mind. I was angry for one night, almost had sex with a stranger, and then sunk into depression. I decided anger was better. I forgot about being sad and directed all my energy into anger.

It was so bad I actually convinced myself that I hated Chuck. I stopped seeing things from his perspective, stopped letting him have the excuses I had always made for him.

He had told me whatever he had told me for years, and then decided on a whim that he wanted something better. He didn't give a damn how I felt. Flaunting first Lou and Jill in my face, doing stupid, dangerous things without any concern for me that entire time we were a fake couple. Lying to me about Orion and God knew what else that I still didn't know about. I was willing to give up everything for him and he stood in front of me and broke my heart while I was helpless to stop him. I poured out my heart and he rejected me.

Damn him, I hoped he was happy. I wanted him to see the dark underside of spying, the one I had always protected him from, so he would always know what he gave up was a mistake, one he could never undo. He could fuck whoever he wanted. It would never be me.

So I was an angry drunk.

So bad that Casey, of all people, called me on it.

I don't know what the hell is the matter with you, but you'd better figure it out. You get assigned a mission, you're as good as dead the way you are now. Is this about Chuck?

What a fucking genius, Casey! Ding ding ding, you finally figured it out!

You need to snap out of it, Walker. I just got a call from Beckman. She has a mission for us. Mostly for you. But you need to dry out first.

What about the Intersect 2.0? Isn't he ready for anything? What does Beckman need any of us for?

He's done, Walker. Flunked out. Didn't make it. 2.0 is officially a lemon. They're about to give him his walking papers. End of story. So now, Beckman does need us. Can you handle it?

I was drunk during that argument, but I was sobered up enough by the time I got back to my hotel room to break every single glass item in the room, including the mirrors. That was the angriest I have ever been in my life.

He walked away from me to be a spy…and he couldn't even do it! He ruined everything that we were, everything that we could have been, for nothing!

I raged like an inferno, sitting in a pile of broken glass while both hands bled.

Gradually, I started to change. I could feel it, like a moth emerging from a cocoon in the moonlight. The fire turned to ice, a giant iceberg that filled me to the brim. I was the Ice Queen again. Long live the Queen.

I stuffed every emotion I was feeling deep inside, burying it deeper than I had ever buried anything. I was as close to the me I had been before I met Chuck that I could be, given everything that had happened. I stopped drinking on my own, much to Casey's relief.

For he explained, the mission Beckman had for us was a long-term seduction mission. Never my forte, that was Carina's expertise. I don't know why Beckman thought of me for the job, but she did, so I agreed. I was an automaton now, with barely any feelings. I might have balked at it before, but not now.

I thought about it clinically, how hard it would be to do a long term mission like that without fucking the mark. The CIA never asked it, couldn't legally ask it, but I'm sure Beckman knew very well sometimes fucking a mark kept you alive on missions like that. I had never done it, but I knew Carina had. Hell, she liked them. She said drug lords were usually very rough, and she liked it rough.

By this time, months had gone by, almost six. I was well past two years of celibacy, heading into my third. I had always said I wasn't Carina, that my body belonged to me. And it did. But I could also choose, couldn't I?

At this point in my life I had only been with two men that I remembered. Sam and Bryce. Aside from my dreams about Chuck, Sam was the better of the two. He knew how to fuck me and we had amazing sex. Bryce was more passive, but he always let me fuck him until I was satisfied, and that was the way I learned I liked it. In control.

So what if I could be in control when I fucked a mark? If it was my job? It made me almost sick with pleasure when I thought about it, each orgasm further expelling Chuck from my body and my heart.

It makes me sick to say that here, looking back. I was wrong, in a million different ways. Chuck forgave me, just as I forgave him, for a transgression of his own that he admits was worse than mine.

I never fucked Gilles, the mark on that mission. I went farther with him than with any other in my career, as disgusting as it is to say. Worse than that, I lost something of myself on that mission, so much so that I had to stop telling myself I hated Chuck.

Because I didn't, I couldn't. I still loved him. God help me, I always loved him, even when, eventually, I was fucking someone else.