A/N: Thank you for reading and for reviewing. This next chapter covers a few things: Why Maggie and Carrie's relationship is what it is, Carrie and Frank's relationship immediately after her first episode, Carrie discovering new things about her illness, and how foreign policy became integrated into her life. There should be 1 or 2 more chapters about her time in school, then I'll get into Langley/Saul.
Maggie had tried her best to come home to see her, she really did. Carrie still knows this. She had been a first year resident at her medical school all the way in California and just couldn't do it. Carrie also knows that Maggie still feels guilty about it and that she's still trying to make up for it - even though she doesn't have to. She'd never really considered her sister then. All that shit happening thousands of miles away and not a thing she could do to fix it.
Frank had insisted that she come home, but she doesn't. He begged her relentlessly at the hospital. She didn't even want to be in the same fucking room with him, and she knew that he knew why and that it was breaking his heart.
The pills become a routine when she comes back to her dorm and it's absolute solitude. Only taking them to avoid that prison. If it meant being a zombie then so be it. They were a fucking poison though.
She can't concentrate. Feels useless. Skips class. She stumbles on a world news station after one of her fourteen hour naps and watches it for two days straight, forgetting to take her pills, watching coverage in Iraq and having no idea why.
She feels it might be coming again, an episode. At first she doesn't care or do anything about it. Then she's in a limbo. A margin that she wants to control, has to control, because it's the closest thing to control that she'd felt. Her energy is back in an invigorating way. She cuts the pills into tiny pieces to take them in smaller doses to keep herself there, on the edge. It's the brim of mania where she finds a thread of satisfaction.
It's thrilling actually. Her mind and body creating a productive dynamic. Functioning becomes much easier. An experiment well done she'd thought.
She becomes obsessed with foreign affairs; spending every waking hour watching coverage in the Middle East, reading every detail about the gulf war, writing down what came into her mind in the moment. Staying up for twenty hours a day to do so. She's occupied finally.
Then she comes across something else. An article about a Gulf war veteran. One who became a domestic terrorist. Timothy McVeigh was his name. She recalls the incident from a few years back, never invested or interested until now. It was a tragedy, the Oklahoma City bombing. One hundred and sixty eight lives lost that day, hundreds more injured. She thinks about why it happened in the first place, why it was never stopped.
It manifests into her conscious like a magnetizing force, pulling her in it's entirety. She wants to know more, more about these people who were worse than her. Most of them residing in the Middle East. Distinctly remembers how she thought about how fucking horrible these people were, because they were. People who hurt other innocent people without a care. For days on end she probes into the lives of terrorists, delving into their motives. Questions what makes them tick.
She's afraid that she doesn't know what makes her tick, makes her bomb go off. And she's terrified of finding out.
It's what she fears now the most now - who she crosses paths with. Still unaware of her capabilities. Petrified of harming them, scaring them too, like she scares herself. At any minute she feels like she can burst into a lunatic, erupting pure havoc. She knows that she's impulsive and sometimes aggressive, but never sinister - at least hopes not.
She thought about when she wasn't occupied with her readings or newscast. Pondering about leaving her room - it had been at least three weeks. So one day she does it and she learns a lot more about her new self than she wanted to. Wonders if that changed everything.