The bones of what you believe

Chapter 10: The mother we share

So, Max and Fara were together. It wasn't a thing that should bother Carrie, but it did because, fuck. Just fuck.

(***)

That same week. Saturday morning.

Quinn was chopping wood and looking damn good while doing it. Carrie admired him for a while from a safe distance. He was dressed in another one of his infamous plaid shirt and jeans combos.

'You gonna keep staring or are you gonna tell me what you're doing here?' Quinn suddenly called out while turning around to face her. Carrie walked up to him.

'Yeah, okay, let's date,' she acquiesced. Quinn raised an eyebrow and lowered the blade of the axe to the ground. He leaned one tanned elbow on the top of the axe's wooden handle. It looked completely natural. Quinn, right here, the outdoorsy, easy-going vibe of it. Despite the raised eyebrow, he didn't seem surprised. Like a woman driving all the way out to the middle of fucking nowhere because she wanted to date him was a thing that happened all the time.

'What's brought this on?'

'This whole off limits arrangement is really not working for me,' Carrie admitted. The phrasing was awful. Seriously, that was the worst possible way to describe what not having Quinn in her life felt like. Quinn was understandably not charmed.

'That's too bad, because I like it just fine. Anyway, we barely saw each other before,' he pointed out.

'But I knew you'd be there if I needed you,' she replied. He'd already told her that was no longer enough for him, so she anticipated the next question.

'Why are you here?'

'I missed you. I didn't expect to miss you.'

Quinn thought about that. Carrie observed him while he thought about it. She had the distinct feeling that it might be too little, too late. This had been fairly one-sided from the beginning and she still didn't feel capable of matching Quinn's intensity of feeling. She relied on him, she missed him, and she was prepared to date him. It didn't even compare to the way Quinn looked at her.

'I've been thinking about this for a long time,' he finally told her. 'Loving you is hard, but I'm up to the task. But I don't want to do it while you're still working for the CIA.'

'Jesus!' Carrie exclaimed. 'Couldn't you have thought of this before?'

He pushed the axe aside by its handle. It wobbled on the broad edge of its blade for a second, before falling to the side.

'You don't get what it was like for me. To you PTSD is nothing but a get out of jail free card,' he snapped. Carrie waved that away. He was not suffering from PTSD. Or, if he was, that was a risk you signed up for. Part of the job. You ignore it; learn to live with it, whatever. You cope.

'Do you realize what you're asking of me?' she demanded, wildly gesticulating in his face.

'How's that gonna work, huh? We live in your little Unabomber cabin and, magically, despite having zero skills, we find other jobs and live happily ever after with a dozen hermit babies? You live in fucking fairy tale land, Quinn.'

'And you don't? Your life is fucked up because of the CIA,' Quinn yelled.

'I'm perfectly capable of fucking up my life myself. I really don't need anyone's help with that. I am fucked up all on my own,' Carrie furiously countered. Quinn smiled bitterly and shook his head.

'Have you ever considered that you might be less fucked up if you didn't work there? All they do is amplify all your worst qualities. You're more paranoid than ever. If I had stayed I would have snapped one day and it wouldn't have felt like snapping. It would have felt totally sane and God knows what I would have done.'

'You're not violent,' Carrie scoffed. He shot her another one of his you're-an-idiot looks.

'Of course I am. Whether you like it or not, what you do says something about you. I could have been making the world a safer place in any number of ways, but I picked 'government-funded killer.'

Carrie scowled.

'What's your beef with the CIA all of a sudden?' she inquired. Quinn sighed.

'Let's talk about what the CIA taught us. Human life is expendable. And not just the lives of the enemy, whoever the fuck that is this week. No, the person who works besides you is expendable too. Leave no man behind? Bullshit. Leave everyone behind if retrieving them means jeopardising the mission. Gotta think about the mission!' he sneered. Carrie rolled her eyes and folded her arms in front of her chest.

'Well, please don't hold back on my account,' she dryly interjected, pushing aside the thought that this was that had happened to Brody. It was what they did to agents and assets alike.

'Trust the wrong person and you're dead,' Quinn continued. 'Friends don't exist. If you're exposed, you're on your own. That's it. No one's coming to save you. You want a life? Tough shit: you can't have one. You can't have a wife or a girlfriend. Oh, you can put a ring on someone's finger, but they're never going to know you. You better not have family either. Forget about them. You have to be a stranger to all your loved ones, if you want to keep them and your country safe. You die? Someone will take your place. You kill a kid?'

'Quinn…'

'I'm not finished. You fuck up and kill a kid? Everyone's expendable. Do you believe any of that? I don't. I don't know if I believed it at some point. I must have, because I lived it. I followed all their orders. I was the perfect soldier. Quitting wasn't a rational decision at all. I had to. I was this close to going over the edge. I just couldn't do it anymore. I was done,' Quinn concluded, nearly out of breath.

'Okay, okay. Calm down,' Carrie muttered. She realized that she was saying it more to herself than to him, because he looked incredibly relieved. To have finally been able to tell someone this, Carrie guessed.

'I can't have anything to do with the CIA again. I won't,' he added. Carrie held up her hands in surrender and nodded vigorously to signal that she got it. She understood. No more CIA for Quinn. Ever.

'What do you believe, Carrie?'

'I don't know. I swear. I don't know,' she answered. She knew it wasn't as black and white as Quinn presented it. The CIA operated in a grey area. It was complicated and nuanced. It was… She didn't know what it was. They killed civilians. By accident or design or as an unfortunate by-product of a mission. Collateral was acceptable. It sure as hell didn't feel acceptable most of the time, but that's what she had learned. You learn to be what you're not, she thought, remembering what Quinn had said once. Had she joined the CIA because she was a liar or had the CIA turned her into one? Probably a little bit of both.