Brody recognized that he needed to shake off this torpor. He knew that sitting there motionless in the gloom was not going to help. But he also knew that his will was failing. The past few weeks were catching up with him, finally. He had nearly lost his mind but now his body seemed to be shutting down too. He just wanted to rest and he felt that the second he stepped outside the cabin he would be stepping back into the fray. He wasn't ready for more 'fray'. He wondered whether survival instinct was a finite thing and whether his had been all but depleted, finally spent after all these years.
He had tried prayer. He swept the floor of the cabin with the gnarled broom he found in the kitchen. He performed his ablutions as best he could using one of the bottles of water. He flattened out his sleeping bag, folded it in two and and oriented it towards Mecca. His own voice sounded far too loud, it felt like years since he had last spoken. Praying brought him peace for the time he was absorbed by it and for a short while after. He thought about all the locations he had ever prayed in. Nazir's compound. His garage. By the lake at Carrie's cabin.
But the nagging dread in the pit of his stomach soon returned.
Brody tried to distract himself by emptying out the backpack properly, setting out all its contents in a neat grid on the cabin floor, meticulously, the way that the military had drummed it into him. Carrie had been thorough at the things she had thought to include when designing the Mathison standard issue escapology kit. He set the maps to one side. Compass, flashlight, bandages and gauze, codeine, swiss army knife, what looked to Brody like a course of antibiotics, rubbing alcohol, the money, traveller's cheques, a notebook, his new passport, the beretta and its ammo, water purification tabs, a waterproof sharpie, a packet of chalk sticks, a firelighter, matches, a trip wire, a fearsome-looking military-issue dagger, crackers, more glucose sachets and some jelly beans. Along with his sleeping bag-come-prayer mat, that's all he had in the world. Not much to base a new life on, not the clean slate he had wished for.
Brody unfolded the map. His current location was marked with a red dot. He saw other red dots, the closest one about twenty miles away. He assumed that these were other places of shelter. He wondered when she had made the map, whether those places of shelter still existed, whether they were cabins like this, shacks or just ruins to provide partial cover from the elements. Even Carrie couldn't have been so prepared that she had her own chain of private hideyholes with food and water. Should he just trust in Carrie and follow the dots? If she had a copy of this map, or at least knew it well, and he followed it, she would be able to find him. If that map or the knowledge that it existed fell into other hands however, Brody would be a sitting duck.
He knew that she wouldn't give up his location readily but he was painfully well versed in the techniques of interrogation and coercion. Of torture. He was scared for her. He knew she had plenty of mettle but he couldn't stand the thought of her sat on the wrong side of that table, lights shining in her eyes, sleep deprived, medication witheld, with a bastard like Quinn ready to use his knife to weaken her resolve. All in the interests of national security.
When the CIA officers had thrown a hood over his head and brought him in with his feet and hands shackled, he was reeling. Reeling because, through Roya Hammad, Nazir was suddenly back in his life demanding complicity in an attack beyond anything they had ever planned before. Reeling because Carrie had suddenly reappeared, smiling brightly and wearing her CIA lanyard, seeming remarkably together. And reeling because she had said something to him in his hotel room seconds before they bundled him away. Something she had said in anger that sounded true and unrehearsed. He had quickly reminded himself that everything they did and said from this point on was designed to destabilise him. He had figured that Carrie had just been first up in their tag team, delivering a sucker punch before they even had the cuffs on him.
Before Roya had made herself known to him, Brody had been something approaching content. He was playing politics and some days even working quite hard at it. He wasn't a bad Congressman at all, he displayed more of a flair for it than guys who were doing it for real. Jess complained that she and the kids didn't see him as much as she'd like, but she did however like the salary and viewed it as recompense for what they had all been through, the way they had struggled for years without him. Ultimately she was just glad he now had something to stop him climbing the walls.
Things had been improving at home. The kids were in a new school, claiming to hate it but settling down and making friends despite their protestations. Chris seemed to be relaxing a little more in Brody's presence, looking for Mike less and less. Dana had stopped seeing Xander and Brody was secretly glad because the little punk had reminded him of himself at that age and he didn't like him skulking around his daughter. He had given Xander the Brody stare on more than one occasion but it hadn't dissuaded him from turning up at their house at all hours waiting for Dana, just as Brody had chased Jess and disconcerted her father all those years ago.
Brody had despised working with Walden. Seeing his glib arrogance up close made his skin crawl, but he consoled himself all the while that his ultimate aim would be to bring him down when the time was right. Perhaps not in the literal way that the bunker plot had promised to, but he would destroy him nonetheless. Isa and his school friends would be avenged. Walden's hypocrisy would not go unpunished. Brody now recognized how naive he had been to trust that Nazir had also been satisfied with this situation, like he would settle for having Brody on the inside, peacefully influencing American foreign policy in his small capacity as Congressman, and biding his time until Walden could be politically disgraced and personally exposed. It was obvious now that this would never have been sufficiently merciless for Nazir's tastes, not nearly grandiose enough to bear his name.
Things had appeared calmer in the Brody household but it was mostly superficial. He still suffered from vicious nightmares and he still lashed out at Jess in his sleep. He still woke to find her standing panicked in the doorway, having leapt out of bed as soon as he started to thrash, with the memory of the Arabic for 'Just kill me, please.' on his lips. The unblemished skin around his bigger scars still prickled, as if to remind his nervous system that something very bad had happened in the not too distant past, just in case his mind was in any danger of forgetting. He hallucinated during his waking hours a little less now, although this occasionally returned in times of stress. He managed to hold it together at work, got through functions and the odd public speaking spot without having visions and Jess seemed to recognise when he was struggling now too, so did her best to bring him down again.
Despite initially being opposed to the idea, Jess enjoyed being the wife of a Congressman. On one hand Brody liked pleasing her, she deserved a break after all. She was proud of him. Only he knew how misplaced that pride was. She seemed to enjoy being welcomed into political society, dressing up and going to the parties, the fundraisers, being fawned over by the liars, the warmongers and the Stepford wives. While he knew she didn't buy the bullshit entirely, there was a trace of the social climber about Jess and he found it distasteful. The longer it went on, the more accustomed to this new life she became, the more uncomfortable he felt. His wife was mixing with Walden's wife, Dana was seeing Finn...exactly what did this make the Brodys? Brody was the only one who knew it wasn't for real. He watched as Dana got her fingers burnt over the hit and run, the way they had brought her up clearly at odds with the company she was now keeping. And he could do nothing about it. Carrie had stopped him and he was mad as hell. Dana was the only one to call him on his hypocrisy but even she didn't know the half of it.
Brody had concentrated on trying to give Jess what she wanted. He suspected that on some level she still wanted Mike but was sublimating it in order to honor her commitment to her marriage and kids. But she was trying and he was trying too. Mike was still present but keeping a respectful distance at least. Brody had moved from the floor back into the marital bed and intimacy was creeping back. Brody was slowly reacclimatising to the fact that the sensation of another person's fingers on his skin wasn't always going to result in a beating and that he had, after all, rediscovered his libido through his encounter with Carrie. And therein lay the problem. Carrie popped back into his head at crucial moments and he couldn't help it. Months after he had all but buried her he was still biting his lip to keep from saying her name in bed. Jess was none the wiser and just pleased that things seemed to be getting back on track. Brody was plagued by the thought that even though he was trying to move on by sleeping with Jess, every time he did so he felt like they took a little step backwards. Even though he wanted it, as soon as they had started some memory of Carrie would surface and he wanted it over with as soon as possible. Both because he felt guilty and because he hated that Carrie still had an undeniable effect on him. Jess just put his haste down to intensity, his relief at physical contact again after all those years. She was confident she could coach tenderness back into him, she knew it was there, it wasn't like he didn't already show it in other aspects of their life together. Like most things in his life, Brody's relationship with sex had become complicated, he couldn't just enjoy the moment. Sex was as inevitable as life itself but he now equated pleasure with betrayal; his betrayal of Jess through his wandering mind and Carrie's betrayal of him through her duplicity.
Carrie was just another one of his demons that he had been unable to forget. So when he bumped into her again, it stirred up all kinds of turmoil and immediately made him question everything, just like that last morning at the cabin.