She was gone. Off to Pakistan, back to work in the C.I.A., out into the world of spies, confidential whispers, inscrutable personal exchanges. She had gone off, still asking him to follow, sending an email full of information, addresses, ideas, leads. He hadn't even said goodbye, just sent a text message saying, "Bon voyage." He felt like an ass for that, but there it was. He didn't know how to take it back.

Quinn sat on the couch in his apartment, gray t-shirt wrinkled and about two days out from a shower. On the couch cushion next to him sat the "Commence Discharge" papers he'd have to fill out in order to leave the agency with his government pension and danger bonuses intact. It was strange to think the USA paid men -so quietly - to kill people. But then again, if he thought about it, he didn't see how different it was from any other kind of military service. If they expected Private Nobody from Nowhere, NJ, to ship out to Iraq, and go to a warzone and kill as directed, they could certainly expect one of their best educated and trained professionals to do the same. The essence of the job didn't bother him at first. That's what he rationalized over the years, and that's how he got into this spot in the first place.

But things had changed over time. In the earlier part of his career, Quinn's emotions were buried deep, and his ability to control for emotional responses to situations had been airtight. That is, until about two years before, when he'd had a come-to-Jesus moment, and realized that his disillusion had begun when he met Carrie Mathison.

He recalled a documentary he'd recently seen, in his perpetually drunken state, about three weeks before - on the Discovery Channel. It had been about diamonds. The narrator had been describing "Kimberlite Pipes", which were tubes of rock under high pressure, leading from the Mantle, nearly the center of the Earth, and brought to the South African sun by geologic forces, which pushed them to the surface and the sunlight. Originating in a very deep layer, Kimberlite often contained diamonds, which was the reason for all the interest.

DeBeers cartel issues aside, the geology lesson had resonated with Peter. Despite all his repression and control, his feelings had forced their way to the surface. Buried in the deep-earth junk rock was a diamond of amazing proportions - synthesized by fire and pressure, borne of terrible need, and pressed to the surface by the years of killing, waiting. His feelings for Carrie, still surrounded by matrix, were the diamond of his life. He would never get over that, or be able to deny it. It lay like a crystal in the sun. "Mine," his mind echoed again, irrationally.

Quinn knew that his feelings for Carrie went deeper than some kind of collegial impulse. In the crowd with Sandy and Carrie in the car, he had made a judgment. He was worried that that judgment was incorrect, attached, not practical. It made him feel like any and all of the killing he had done might have been made with the wrong instincts and for the wrong reasons. But while he was sleeping, dreaming, his real feelings emerged, and remembering these dreams on waking, he understood himself better. The desire to save Carrie was a hindbrain-level decision, a Neanderthal decision. She was too precious to him, too close to the visceral part of himself that understood the killing game. She was part of him. He could no more have left her to die in the streets at the hands of the crowd, than he could have drunk lava. The import of this was almost beyond his reckoning. Although she returned to the Middle East as Islamabad station chief, without him, he stayed behind. Just to sort his feelings for a period of time. Hoping to clear his mind, and escape some of the memories. Maybe even, improve himself.

Maybe I could do her better, he thought, if I left the service, and just shadowed her myself.

The idea appealed. Quinn considered himself, surveillance techniques and stealth, cleverness and quiet, watching Carrie without her knowledge in a foreign country. If someone so much as stepped out of line to touch her headscarf, he'd be there. If a man looked at her sideways, and elbowed his buddy, he'd know about it. And when she unlocked the door of her apartment, and went in alone, he'd...

A spiral of tension planted itself in his guts. He thought of her hair, in the car that day. The streak of blood on her cheek. How badly he'd wanted to reach back, pull her into the front seat, break down her Drone Queen exterior and hold her. Wipe the blood off her face with his handkerchief, and kiss her cheeks, her lips.

Fucking stalker, his mind insisted. But there it was. He was not comfortable with her being out there alone, but neither was he comfortable with the state of his mind, currently. He felt half-mad, with love of her. Would he make the right decisions? Or would he get someone else killed, someone who was not on the kill list?

He opened his laptop and went over the last email from Carrie, which described the off-site station she was setting up, part of the Agency but outside the IBD HQ purview. She had brought in Fara, Max, Parvez, and Qadir - a good start, but still missing a deep cover man with a solid knowledge of weapons and ballistics. Not to mention, none of them had her back like he did, and he knew it. Her last email just about begged him to come to Pakistan. He could all but hear her voice saying, "Quinn, please." He shut his eyes and closed the computer.

He went to the kitchen to get a glass of orange juice. He had been ashamed at the state of his place when she had come to his home the other night - what a drunk he had been - and had gone and bought healthy things the next morning. Whether he felt like it or not, he forced himself to prepare a basic, healthy meal three times a day. Simple things, scrambled eggs, broiled steaks. He told himself that he had to keep in shape, the subtext being that if Carrie needed or wanted him, he'd be healthy and ready. Washing the meals down with a selection of hard liquor was not the best choice, but at this time, he wasn't quite ready to suspend his only, best anaesthesia. This nominal reason for acting like something of a normal person - buying groceries, cooking and eating - was underscored by the other potential reason - that if Carrie came back, he'd have something nice to offer her. A seltzer, an orange, maybe sitting down by the pool together. Anything to make her stay longer. What might it be like to cook a meal for Carrie Mathison? He'd examined the idea in his mind, fantasized about it.

He realized that simply cooking and eating came naturally to most normal people, and that it shouldn't be such a big deal. But for him, it was a major improvement. He guzzled the orange juice, and went into the bathroom to inspect the deepening gray circles under his eyes. He was 37. He thought about the lives of other 37-year olds that he might have seen.

The other day, he had been at the nearest convenience store, which he could walk to. In his current state of active alcoholism, he often needed to reload his liquor supply midday, and if he had had a few snorts, there was no way he was driving and endangering others. He had actually picked this apartment because it had a walkable Seven Eleven. He might have been an assassin, but that only included sniping out the bad guys, not carloads of soccer moms.

He had been at the counter, paying for his booze, when he looked out the door at a similarly aged man in Dockers and a button-down. The man had been putting gas in a minivan, and while the pump filled his car, he was making silly faces at the back window. Afterwards, the man had come inside and paid for the gas, along with two bags of Goldfish crackers. Peter watched him leave the convenience store, open the back of the minivan, and hand the crackers to some giggling preschoolers. Watching this simple, everyday interaction opened a hole in his heart, a gulping suckhole into which all his younger hopes and dreams had disappeared. Would he ever be that normal? Wake in the morning next to a warm, loving... woman? Enjoy coffee on the porch while he watched his children playing? Work a normal job and be sure of coming home every evening? He wiped quickly at the corner of his eye while he paid for his J&B - a step down from Wild Turkey, but now he was economizing. He drank too much.

Especially last night. Carrie's absence, his feelings of inadequacy, all came to a head when he went to the required PTSD exit counseling session yesterday, with the C.I.A.'s pet headshrinker, Angela Byatt. He had sat in the debrief chamber, stiff as a board, as she came in. Blonde-gray hair curled neatly, a huge file folder in her hand. I'm sure it is a huge file, he thought. Probably half a ream of paper for every terrorist I whacked out since 2002.

"Nice to see you again, Peter," she said. "I believe it was almost a year ago. You were looking to leave the Agency, then, as well?"

"That was different," Quinn said immediately.

"How so," she asked archly.

"I'd just shot and killed a kid. And now? I just want out. I'm done." He tried to sound final, and almost convinced himself.

Angela smiled mysteriously. Fucking Agency shrinks. "As I'm sure you're aware," she intoned, "It's not as simple as that. We need to certify that you're not a danger to yourself. Or to others, among other things."

At least I started eating again, he thought. "I have myself under control. I've been in control for twelve fucking years," Peter said.

The psychiatrist nodded, then cocked her head to one side. "Last time you were here," she said, "You were talking about nightmares."

Nightmares, no shit, he thought. Children, blood, darkness. The light in the eyes of another human being fading, going out. Shooting Carrie in the arm and bandaging her in the ambulance, one second too late, as she bled out and died, the life leaving her eyes as he screamed. The deaths of half a hundred anonymous foreign nationals and US expats, out in politically sensitive zones, with plastique in each hand, and a screw loose. His gut twisted.

"Seeing your first kill over and over again, his head in a puddle of mud." Peter looked daggers at the shrink. She was recalling his entry into The Life, the memory of his first kill, and exploiting the way it made him feel. He wished he'd never shared it. He folded his lips into a tight line, and said nothing.

"Obviously, we need to talk about the recent events in Islamabad," she said.

"Obviously," Peter snarled.

"What about the two men you killed on the ground there? Do you think about them?" she asked provocatively.

"I do not," Quinn stated. But truly, it scared him. Had he made the wrong decision? Could he have done something differently? It was a brutal and violent situation, and he had had to act so fast. In the end, the Neanderthal part of him had won out. He, his heart, his mind, had decided to save Carrie, or die trying.

"I think about Sandy and Carrie and the choice I made," he said finally.

The shrink's eyes lit up. Oh boy, thought Quinn, internally rolling his eyes, now we're getting to the good stuff. "Carrie Mathison?" Dr. Byatt asked.

"Yes."

"She came up a lot, the last time we talked."

"I don't remember," Quinn lied.

"You said she was one of the reasons you wanted out of Dar Adal's group," said the doctor.

"Maybe she was," Quinn said cryptically.

"The Agency is worried you might want to talk about this one day."

Quinn tried to produce a reassuring smile. "Well, you tell them not to worry," he said, "I know what I agreed to."

"And what about Carrie? You know you had a choice to make in that car," said Dr. Byatt. She waited a beat for emphasis, then said, "You chose her."

Quinn's throat filled with a lump, and the sick feeling in his stomach intensified. Like he hadn't been over it in his mind 1,000 times.

"I don't see what this has to do with anything, " he said, trying to divert the subject to something less painful, less personal.

"Let me be the judge of that," said the doctor, arrogantly.

Quinn's eyes filled with hot tears, which he swallowed instantly, with iron control. He looked at the wall mirror, knowing full well that there was a camera behind it, and probably observation by that asshole Dar Adal, or any number of another black Ops senior people. He wouldn't - he couldn't - talk about Carrie Mathison like she was part of an operation.

His gut roiled. He couldn't even begin to explain his feelings for her. She was his Achilles' heel. She was an angel on his shoulder -she was an houri tempting him to undress, lips moist and beckoning - she was so much more. He stood up abruptly, pushing sentimentality down the tubes and covering it with an aggressive show of irritation.

"You know what? Fuck this," he spat, and stormed out of the room.

He had gone straight home and opened a bottle of scotch, and was well in the bag an hour later.

The next day, head aching, he thought of Carrie, thought of her words, her voice, her hands, her eyes. Some part of him wanted to curse her, but couldn't. Her very existence had kept him hanging on for another year. But somehow, he was too contained to tell her. Something, somewhere, had to break.

Peter swept the "Commence Discharge" papers onto the floor, straightened up his back, and went into the kitchen. He methodically cleaned and sanitized the kitchen counters, the prepared and ate two scrambled eggs, and a piece of toast. He rubbed his chin and thoughtfully considered a shave. Then, he headed for the shower to clean up. To keep sharp, to keep ready.

For her.