The bones of what you believe

Chapter 1: By the throat

'You sigh. You didn't use to sigh,' Carrie said, sounding to herself like she was making a statement of some significance. She was being a pain in the ass. Quinn managed a weary smile.

'I think sighing is a pretty normal thing to do,' he pointed out.

'Why'd you quit?' Carrie asked. She could be subtle. It took some effort, but she could turn off her battering ram function. Not tonight, though. Quinn looked as if he had known all along that this question was coming.

'I told you,' he replied.

'Tell me again,' she demanded. Quinn sighed.

'I used to agree with the mission coming first. Rationally. Emotionally. I really believed that. I no longer do. That tells me that I'm no longer suitable for the work.'

She could tell by his expression that this was more than he'd intended to say, but it was still not enough. She was greedy. She wanted details.

'So, what exactly…?'

'It started with the boy I killed. Then it was what we did to you, what we let Javadi get away with, the Akbari operation. It was cumulative. The end,' Quinn explained while he got up from the couch. Startled, Carrie remembered that Saul had told her - not that he had needed to - how not okay Quinn had been with putting her in the mental hospital. She had been a willing participant, though. Quinn knew that.

'Admit that you miss it,' she insisted. Her request was tinged with more than a little desperation. She had thought that they were alike. That they both needed the job like other people need oxygen. Except, Quinn didn't. He was fine without it.

'I admit nothing,' he said drily. He poured her tea. She warmed her hands on the mug and looked at him as he sat down again. He was turning into some sort of hermit/lumberjack hybrid creature. He was wearing plaid, for fuck's sake. Although, come to think of it, maybe he always wore that in his free time. How the fuck should she know?

'You're all... I don't know. Laidback and countrified. Is that plaid?'

She leaned forward to finger the fabric of his shirt. Quinn allowed it to happen. When she was satisfied, Carrie leaned back. She took in his cabin. A cabin in the woods. It was much smaller than the other one. Much more secluded. Nothing like that other cabin at all, really. Still, Carrie felt a little raw.

'You look like a fucking moron,' she informed him. She expected him to smile.

'You're being a fucking dick.'

'Well, you shot me,' she countered, because she couldn't think of anything else to say.

'Besides the point.'

'You shooting me is besides the point?' Carrie laughed, incredulous.

'That's what I said. You wanna do some verbal sparring? Okay, we can do that,' Quinn shrugged, setting his own mug on the floor and facing her.

'I don't know what you're talking about,' she scoffed. He dismissed that.

'You do.'

Carrie glared at him. Quinn smirked and made a B movie 'come at me' gesture. She didn't react.

'We're friends. I can take it. Come on, do your worst,' he urged. Carrie waited a long time before responding.

'We're not friends,' she finally protested. It was childish and she knew it.

'Yeah, Carrie, we are. We talk. We help each other out. That's what friends do. We're friends.'

'Pff,' was the only sound Carrie made. Quinn didn't quite smile, but he was clearly amused.

'Why do you always think that people are lying to you?' he inquired.

'Because people are always lying to me.'

'I don't,' Quinn stated. After a second, he amended that to: 'Not since I quit the CIA.'

'You haven't told me a single untruth? Not one lie of omission?' Carrie needled. He hesitated. A strange mixture of triumph and disappointment washed over her.

'Ah, well, that's it then, isn't it? Good thing we're not friends. Friends don't lie to each other. They're not supposed to anyway. Or so I've heard.'

She had meant for it to lighten the mood. Instead, it just sounded sad. Pathetic. Too close to the truth for comfort. Quinn hardly appeared to notice. Some sort of internal struggle seemed to be taking place.

'So, what's the big lie, huh? What are you keeping from me?' Carrie asked. It came out of the blue, though this might simply be more evidence of how good she was at fooling herself.

'I am in love with you,' he said. She took it in calmly, nodding. It was bullshit, of course.

'It was the surveillance, wasn't it?' she asked. Quinn looked at her as if she'd grown a second head.

'What the hell are you talking about?'

'You watched me. It creates a sense of connection. An illusion of intimacy. Maybe you even identified with the subject, meaning me. I did the same thing.'

It was a hard thing to do in that fucking cabin with the tea and a guy who looked at her the way Quinn did, but Carrie didn't cry. She blinked and thought about how deluded he obviously was if he really thought that he was in love with her. He placed his hand on her shoulder and peered into her eyes.

'Carrie, I'm in love with you.'

The emphasis and the sincerity didn't change the fact that it simply wasn't true. Couldn't be true. Shouldn't be true. Carrie cleared her throat. She wasn't going to fucking cry.

'We both know that's not true,' she insisted, sounding hoarse and on the verge of losing it. If Quinn would just drop it.

'Do we?' Quinn questioned. 'Your entire line of reasoning makes no sense. For one, you loved Brody.'

She started to cry. Dammit.

'I feel like an open wound,' she blubbered.

'Wounds heal.'

'And what if I don't heal? That's what antidepressants are for, I suppose? Gee, I wonder how those will mix with my other meds,' Carrie ranted. Quinn rubbed her shoulder until she moved away. He got up and came back with one of those big cotton handkerchiefs. She accepted it gratefully and dried her eyes.

'Hey, I didn't mean for you to take a swing at yourself. That's not how this works,' Quinn said softly. She rested her head against the couch. Her hair swung over the back of it. She closed her eyes and squeezed them shut. The weird thing was that she didn't mind the pain. That was old hat by now. It was something else.

'I guess I'm just recovering,' she lied. She couldn't help downplaying how shitty she felt. Quinn was having none of it.

'What you are is lonely,' he said. Am I lonely? Carrie asked herself. What did loneliness even mean? Lonely is not the same as being alone. Lonely is being alone and minding. Well, she was alone. She had never known anything else. It had been Carrie Matheson against the world for as long as she could remember. She didn't know how else to live.

'You've been lonely for too long,' Quinn added. She shot him an angry look. He stared back until she averted her eyes. She knew what he was getting at. She wished she didn't. That the meaning of his words wasn't so clear.

It meant that she had suspected Brody of being a terrorist and that he had been married and what it had come down to in the end was that he had been oh so incredibly unavailable and during their great romance – and she'd built it up, she damn well knew that, she had retouched and rewritten until the whole fucking mess was this perfect thing that it had never been - it had just been her. She had been alone in her suspicions about him and then she had been alone in her trust of him and then she had been alone in the psych ward and why was this a surprise? This was her life. It hadn't just happened. She'd scraped this existence together with her bare hands, throwing away friendships and relationships left and right.

So, she was alone. Big fucking deal. Being alone had made her stronger. But it had never felt like this. If this is what loneliness feels like, kill me now, she thought.

'You don't have to be,' Quinn offered. God, his eyes.

'Don't be a fucking idiot,' she whispered. For some reason, Quinn took that entirely the wrong way. What a strange thing to do.

'That's enough,' he snapped. He wrapped his fingers around her throat and kissed her. It wasn't aggressive. It wasn't tender. It wasn't something in the middle either. Carrie pulled him down into a horizontal position. They tugged aside clothing in between moans. When they were half undressed, she guided him inside of her. She gasped at the first thrust. It reminded her of that time in the car, because every fucking thing somehow reminded her of Brody.

Quinn slowed down; giving her the time she needed to claw herself out of that flashback. His thrusts turned into strokes. Delicious, long strokes, during which she could feel strips of his skin tremble against her body. The tight muscles of his abdomen against her still soft belly. She clutched at his back and caught handfuls of plaid. Looking at the beautiful roundness of his shoulder, she climaxed. He came seconds later, pressing breathy, shivery kisses to her lips.

They stayed entwined for a moment. Quinn looked at her the way he always looked at her.

'We're friends, Carrie.'

She laughed.

'We're really not, Quinn.'