Carrie had nearly doubled back several times. She even pulled in at one point to turn the car around. She could still catch up with him, if she chose to. She wanted to. She wanted to so badly. Her heart had broken when Brody let go of her and stalked off into the trees. Her heart had broken again. He hadn't looked back.
But no, she had to go back to Washington. She figured that she was the only person who could fix all this, and she would fix it for him. Otherwise everything they'd been through had been for nothing. She straightened up in the driver's seat, wiped her eyes, blew her hair out of her face unsteadily and gripped the steering wheel hard.
Her whole body hurt back at the dirt track where she left him. She promised him that it wasn't the end for them. He wasn't convinced. He seemed resigned to it. Her chest ached, like someone had punched her repeatedly. Even now, her forearms throbbed, just from the need to cradle his face in her hands so she could hold him still, stop him from looking away when she told him that everything was going to be alright.
Her cell. 17 missed calls. Saul. Maggie. A number she didn't recognize. They'd left her voicemails. Carrie knew she couldn't pick them up just yet, if Saul was looking for her he could have them trace her phone and they'd be able to tell if she'd accessed her messages. She wouldn't be home for hours yet and she'd have to come up with something good to explain her absence. Maggie must be frantic right now. She and her dad must think that Carrie was dead. She'd call them soon.
The auditorium had been completely destroyed, the blast had been huge. She recalled the faces in the rows as she'd waited for the memorial to start, as she'd watched Brody escort Cynthia Walden in. Her colleagues, her friends...they must all be gone. They must be. Estes had been at the podium when she left. It was his speech about Walden that had Brody glowering, the whole reason Carrie had given him the nod and got him out of there. What if she hadn't? She'd had her battles with David, but once they'd been close, inappropriately close. He was on track to become Director of the CIA. He had a little kid, for Christ's sake.
They'd missed it again, she had missed something. Again. They'd been so complacent after getting Nazir, how could they not have seen something coming? Everyone she knew had been in that auditorium. Were 10% of them likely to have survived? 5%, even? How had she let this happen?
She knew how. She'd been busy with Brody, she'd taken her eye off the ball.
After everything, after he'd helped Nazir dispatch Walden in order to save her, after he had left his family and pitched up on her doorstep with tears in his eyes she still doubted him. More than just doubted him. It had been the first thing she thought of once she came to after the blast. She'd held a fucking gun to his head and had been ready to pull the trigger. The man she loved. The man she'd pledged her future to just five minutes before. That was how complicated this whole thing was. That was the knife-edge they danced on still. No, it wasn't complicated...it was twisted, more like. But she couldn't help it. She'd done complicated before. Carrie and David Estes had been complicated, though mercifully short lived. She regretted that it had cost him his family, it had never been worth that. Twisted was working out far harder.
Her and Brody was something else entirely. He scared her sometimes. She had told him so. He had looked a bit hurt by that but it was the truth. Carrie knew that he hadn't cooperated with Nazir just to get him to set her free. For years, Brody had been out to get Walden and those like him. At one point he would have been capable of something like Langley, but not now. She knew that now.
Her chin twitched involuntarily, her bottom lip wobbled and she bit down on it hard, tasting blood.
"This wasn't me. It wasn't", he had repeated at her, over and over, in Saul's office. She had looked right into his eyes and believed him. It couldn't have been him. She remembered how stunned, how overwhelmed he had seemed when she had told him that she had chosen him, that she wanted that clean slate they had talked about. The fact that, almost in the same breath, she could accuse him of this bothered her.
Carrie wondered what Roya Hammad knew. She'd given Carrie the lead that resulted in Abu Nazir's death. On purpose? Or had she just been the sacrificial lamb who slipped up, a clue laid intentionally, this bigger objective at play? Carrie started to think about the interrogative techniques she would use in her next encounter with Roya. She would be better prepared than last time. She would break her this time.
This was good. This made sense. This was what she was heading back for. This is why she had resolved to abandon Brody.
Her mania was rising. She hadn't taken her medication in a while and the stress and exhaustion was getting to her. She knew that she needed to ride this wave though, she felt that it would give her the edge to get through this. She sped down the freeway, only taking her foot off the gas when she realized that getting a ticket, getting picked up by a traffic camera, would place her far from Langley in the aftermath if the bomb. She had to be canny now. For both of them.