Carrie opened her eyes and everything fell back into place, like gravity had just been switched back on and had snapped some order back into the weightless, chaotic jumble of people and events that floated through her dreams. She felt groggy from the sedative and her body ached from the impact of the blast. She could do with some more sleep but there was no time.
She felt physical pain at the fact he wasn't with her. The same pain she had felt when Roya had bundled him into that helicopter and he had been missing so long that Carrie was forced to refer to Brody as 'operationally, if not physically, dead'. She had hidden behind that clinical, analytical term to mask her horror at the acknowledgement that he might be gone. Saul and Quinn had been surprised she had dared to say it. They had been skirting around the issue, not wanting to utter it in front of the woman they had listened to going at it with their asset the night before. Carrie hated that the whole unit had been tuned into events at the motel. She had contrived to seduce Brody, if he let her, for operational reasons, in order to prevent him from going out of his mind and to allow him to feel less abandoned in all this, to give him something and someone to hang on to. It wasn't always the plan, she had just wanted to take him some place safe out of pity and in a bid to calm him down. But seeing how bereft he felt sitting in that motel armchair, she thought it might put him back on track. Back at Langley, she felt that if she used an operational term to describe his disappearance, it would lend credibility to the pretence that she had been in complete control the night before, that she had orchestrated the whole thing to save the mission and prevent an attack. This might keep her from having to cringe quite so much when Saul looked her in the eye.
Carrie wasn't fooling anyone though, and certainly not herself.
She was using CIA jargon in an attempt to maintain a semblance of professionalism. Even though Carrie was able to force the tremor of sheer panic out of her hands, she could still feel it inside shaking her liver, her spleen. She wanted to climb under her desk and howl.
Although she had kissed Brody to comfort him and convince him that her way was the way out of this, Carrie recognized that she had also done it because she so desperately wanted to. As was so often the case with them, things quickly got out of control and she couldn't, didn't want to, stop it. Ever since his interrogation she had barely fought off the urge to touch him whenever she saw him, yearning to show him, to make him believe, that she loved him just as she had claimed. He had pushed her away every time before succumbing momentarily in the woods at the horse farm. There they had started to articulate how confusing, how messed up all of this was but finally to recognize that it was there nonetheless. That was until the hurt and mistrust crept back into Brody's eyes and he walked away, leaving Carrie winded.
In the motel room she kissed him to show him she was there for him. The next moment, Brody had torn off his shirt, tossed it to the floor and advanced at Carrie, pushing her up against the dressing table in one fluid movement. She scrambled at the buckle of his belt. The confusion over how the other was really feeling, the ambiguity over why they were even doing this, Brody's nervous energy and the fact that they both fully expected a SWAT team to blast through the door any second had meant there was no time for niceties. There was no room for anything but the act itself. Carrie had never thought they'd be together like this again. Which isn't to say that she hadn't dared to hope. This was sheer relief, a sudden release of tension. It was serious wish fulfilment and the knowledge that this time could very well be the last time. He made her teeth rattle. She soon forgot any hint of the operation or her strategy to keep it alive.
After, they had collapsed on the bed in awed silence, chests heaving. Within minutes, Carrie felt his exhausted forehead pressing on the back on her own head, his arms still draped loosely around her waist, one of his legs entwined in hers, the peaceful breeze of his breath making her hair tickle her neck. In the dead of night, she felt his fingers trail across her stomach again, him kissing her back between her shoulder blades. In silence she had turned around, pushed him down flat on the bed and slowly climbed on top. She moved against him gently, sleepily, barely at all at some points. It could have been a dream. But she knew they were definitely both awake because they had kissed breathlessly all the while in the darkness. He held her hair out of their faces with his bandaged hand.
"This is for real.", she had whispered into his ear.
When Carrie had come to the next morning, she felt that Brody was already awake. She could hear his mind whirring. She kept her eyes tight shut and sensed him looking at her before he got up, got dressed, took his cell phone off the nightstand and went outside with it. She wondered if he had gone out to call Jess and her heart sank. Maybe things are going back to 'asset and handler' this morning, she had thought to herself anxiously.
Carrie had thrown on her own clothes and tiptoed out behind him. He noticed her coming but didn't make to move off or express annoyance at her listening in, as if it had been a private call to his wife. Carrie sighed relief when she got close enough to hear he was speaking to Roya. Things were back on, she hoped, in more ways than one. She was so badly, so hopelessly lost in this that when they sat together on the bench outside their motel room she had wanted time to stop and the world to melt away entirely. Brody had bent his head and planted a kiss on her shoulder, his eyelashes flickering against her skin. Carrie had a sudden vision of a Disney butterfly landing on Bambi's nose. Her heart performed three perfect revolutions in her chest. Jesus. She was seriously concerned for herself, feeling more helpless in the face of this than any of her manic or depressive episodes.
Carrie rolled onto her side, spilling tears down her right cheek. She was afraid that she would never see him again. It was a very real possibility. She was afraid that they would find him and kill him. The sound of the SWAT team dispatching Abu Nazir in the mill rang in her ears. She was afraid that she would be unable to keep them off him. She was afraid he might give up and turn himself in now that she wasn't by his side. She knew how tired he was.
She stared at the pills in her hand, the silver bullets that kept her stable. But maybe 'stable' wasn't what she needed at the moment? Would Carrie have been stable if Brody had died at Langley? That was what she was going to have to pretend, or pretend to believe, even if they only swallowed it for a short while, long enough for Brody to get a head start and have half a chance of getting away. Carrie knew that she could lie effectively if she had to, she could deceive and dissimulate until black had actually become white. But she couldn't act. She couldn't maintain a story 24/7 in the face of friends and loved ones, she would eventually slip up...look at what happened at the cabin with the Yorkshire Gold, she thought. She was distraught enough anyway, without having to lay it on thick to play the weeping widow. Carrie recognized that her condition had saved her as many times as it had thwarted her. If she let it take over, she figured, just a little, enough for people to worry for her and to elicit the pity that she normally kicked against so fiercely, not only would her story appear more credible, she would also seem less culpable when they realized Brody had got away. She needed to stay in the game, she couldn't afford to be sidelined or discredited, and her illness could provide an useful excuse if anyone tried it. It was a fine balance she needed to strike. Carrie knew it was distasteful to use her condition so cynically, but she wasn't the goddamn poster girl for bipolar disorder and she was prepared to do whatever it took. She wouldn't go poking at snakes, she was confident she could manage the risk.
She put the pills back in the bottle.