Contains a few bad words and is set post Season Five, spoilers for all seasons, especially "Off Profile". For Artisan, with many thanks.

~*~*~*~

Andrea Karsov. Spec Ops. Section Two.

Your fingers and your blood freeze as the words flash onto the screen. The dull thud of your pulse, lulled by the routine of your usual early morning tasks, flutters once, then twice. The date of the transmission is two days ago.

Two days.

You recoil from the screen and rise to your feet, then reach out a trembling hand to the comm. unit on your desk.

"Walter?"

"Yup?"

The sound of his familiar voice does nothing to soothe you. "Can you come up here, please?"

"Sure thing, Sug- uh, Operations."

It takes him no more than a minute to reach the Perch, but you feel every one of those sixty seconds like a blow upon a bruise. He'll tell me the truth about this. If nothing else, he owes me that.

"What's up?" His smile fades at the sight of you. "What? What's wrong?"

Your mouth opens and closes but the words don't come. They're stuck fast at the back of your throat, burning you, choking you. For a brief, uncomfortable moment, you feel like the raw recruit you once were, unable to believe the evidence of your own eyes. Unable to understand why.

He frowns and starts towards you, concern etched on his rumpled features. When he reaches your side, you point to the screen. "How is it possible," you finally say in a stranger's voice, "that a woman who was canceled three years ago was leading a Spec Ops team in Delhi two days ago?" You watch his face as you speak, wanting denial, reassurance. Anything but what you know he's going to tell you.

He flinches, then looks you right in the eye. "This is Section, Sugar. You know as well as I do that anything's possible."

"Michael told me she'd been canceled." Even as you say the words, you feel something inside you collapse like a house of cards. The distance of time, sadly, has done nothing to lessen the sting of feared betrayal.

Walter's eyes never leave yours. "Would it help if I told you that Michael doesn't know she's still alive?"

The room is cool, but you feel a single bead of sweat making its way down your back, tracing the line of your spine with unwanted accuracy. "That depends."

"On what?"

"On whether you'd just be telling me what I want to hear or whether that's the truth."

He hesitates, then puts his hand over yours. Squeezes it gently, then lets it go. "It's the truth," he says simply, and the tightness across your chest eases faintly. Walter sighs, a shadow flickering across his face. "Not sure you want to hear the rest, though."

"Tell me." Unbidden, your hand reaches out, fingertips pressing buttons and scrolling until a face, her face fills the small screen. She's still a very attractive woman, you acknowledge reluctantly. Her hair, as bright red as ever, is longer now, brushing the collar of her black shirt. Her skin pale and smooth, dark eyebrows arched over almond-shaped eyes that give away nothing. "Tell me everything."

Walter frowns. "Are you sure we can't just file this under 'ancient history', Sugar?"

It feels rather odd for your hands to be so cold when there is sweat prickling your scalp, but you've felt worse. The last time you were tortured, for instance. "Quite sure."

He looks at the screen, his eyes unreadable, then he looks at you. "She wasn't the real target in that little sting Section organised." His blue eyes darken. "You were."

"What?" For a few seconds, you think you've misheard him. Then you stare at him, see the unspoken apology in his eyes, and you know that you heard him perfectly.

He nods. "They - Madeline and Operations - wanted to see how you would react under a particular kind of pressure."

The bile is rising at the back of your throat. You swallow with difficulty, then inhale deeply, sucking in a lungful of scientifically filtered air. "Which was?"

Walter looks more uncomfortable than you've seen him in a long time. "A combination of things, actually."

"Let me guess." Your voice sounds flat. Dead. "Whether I could deal with Michael sleeping with Andrea and then Andrea trying to kill him?"

He does everything but shuffle his damned feet, but he finally answers you. "Pretty much."

You swear loudly and vividly. Walter's eyes widen, but he - very wisely - says nothing. He just waits a moment while you struggle to process the mind-bogglingly banality of this latest revelation, then sighs loudly.

"Not just you, to tell you the whole truth." His gaze flickers over your face, as if weighing up your most likely reaction to his next words. You decide to save him the trouble.

"Gosh, let me guess again." You fold your arms across your chest, turning your back on the ceiling to floor windows that line the rom. "Could they have been testing Michael too?"

"Got it in one."

"I take it we passed?" You bite the words out, holding onto your rapidly growing anger with a tenuous grip.

"You're still here, aren't you?"

Fury claws at you, tearing at the lining of your throat, your stomach. A fucking soap opera, that's what it had been. All you and Michael had tried to do was to survive as best you could, and all they had done their best to do was to turn your lives into a fucking soap opera. "Damn you both to hell," you finally whisper, the cold air in the room - his room, their room - pressing down on every inch of your skin.

A hint of a smile tugs at Walter's lips as he considers your words. "Well, you never know your luck, Sugar." He puts his hand on your shoulder, a fleeting brush of the fingertips, then steps back slightly as if to give you some air. It gives you a tiny measure of comfort to realise anew just how well he knows you. "Sorry to dump this on you and run, but there's a mission loading in fifteen minutes and I gotta -"

"I'm fine." You wave a hand, vaguely pleased to see that it trembles less than your voice, hoping he doesn't see the relief in your face. Having summoned him to you, you now want nothing more than to be alone. "It's okay. Go."

He hesitates. "What are you going to do about -" he stops, glancing at the screen, then at you, his expression almost wary. "Are you going to do anything about her?"

"No," you hear yourself say. "There's no point." He raises greying eyebrows, and you shrug, your heartbeat sounding thick and dull in your ears. "She's been alive all this time and it didn't make a difference to my life."

Walter smiles. "Sometimes I forget how smart you are, Sugar."

Your answering smile feels as though it might crack your face, but you know it's what he wants to see. "Must have learned it from you, hey?"

"You bet."

Flashing you a quick grin, he's gone, his mind no doubt already filled with thoughts of Kevlar and rifle sight adjustments, leaving you alone with your ghosts and your demons. You turn to look at the screen, and her gaze - so flat and empty, so unlike the fiery eyes you remember - meets yours. You have both hated and felt sorry for her for so long, and now it seemed almost ludicrous, as though it had all happened to someone else. All that jealousy, all that anger, all those lies. The whole thing had been nothing more than Section machinations, and yet the memory of your helpless terror as you struggled to save Michael's life in that laboratory is something that still stalks your nightmares.

Sinking into the leather chair, you reach out and brush the screen with your fingertips. The liquid crystal surface gives way slightly under your touch, quivering like the ripples across the surface of a pond. You flick your index finger and the screen goes black, but you see the echo of her face for a moment longer. You know it will take much longer for the image to fade from your mind.

Rising to your feet, you button your jacket, knowing that your presence had been expected in Comm. at least fifteen minutes ago. Your heart is no longer hammering, but neither is it steady. The burning in your throat is gone, but the knot in the pit of your stomach is determined to linger. Glancing at the darkened screen, you take a deep breath, hoping to cool the uneasy fever in your blood. It doesn't work. Perhaps, you tell yourself, it would be best to avoid Walter for the rest of the day. He has grown far too good at reading your eyes - you don't want him to even hazard a guess at the thoughts that are battering at the walls of your mind, clamouring for attention. He would only worry, and you don't want that on your mind as well.

You didn't lie to him, you think as you smooth a steady hand down the front of your jacket. It was true that Andrea had been alive all this time and it had made no difference to your life. But now you knew. And that changed everything.

~*~*~*~*~

Send suggestions and comments to Genevieve