When they arrested him he had consoled himself that whatever lay in store for him, it couldn't be on the scale of what he had endured as a prisoner of war. When they told him he was off the grid he began to panic that perhaps there were no rules, no human rights, for people like him, that perhaps it was all going to start again. They kept him up. He was so tired that he felt drunk. All he could think of was the snarl on Carrie's face in the hotel room and the fact she said that she had loved him, the two elements of the same conversation wildly at odds with each other, messing with his mind. Had she meant that last part? Was she exploiting him because she knew he had fallen for her? He tried to relax, to not play into their hands and drive himself half crazy before they even touched him.
Quinn started on him. He denied everything. But they had his video. How did they get hold of that? Had someone given him up? Roya maybe, because he had been so reluctant to get involved with this new plot? Had he been cut loose by Nazir? Quinn drove a fucking knife through his hand. It was starting. Brody prepared himself as he always had in the face of torture, meditating almost, visualising his nerve endings withdrawing inside his flesh like withering vines, detaching his body from his mind like train carriages decoupling, the very kernel of himself, his vital essence, retreating somewhere deep inside where their blows couldn't reach. He tried not to imagine what might come next. He was suspicious when two medics rushed out and bandaged his hand, gave him a shot that made the burning pain subside. He worried that they had injected him with something that could make him talk. He awaited the second round, he knew that these things only got progressively worse.
When it came, it came from Carrie. Cruel, he thought.
It was like an autopsy. Except he was still alive. Carrie came in and uncuffed him, applying her ether to his lungs, laying him out on the table and pinning him still. She slit him expertly, from his adam's apple to his navel. She talked to him in the way that one tends to speak of the dead, kind of fondly, casting their misdeeds in a shroud of empathy that you hardly ever extended to them in life. Carrie almost seemed to agree with his perspective, she seemed to recognise what had driven him to this point. Nobody else ever had, and probably ever would. She proceeded to remove his organs one by one, auditing them and laying them out on the table around him. As she did so she explained to him the ways in which each one was diseased, why his body was failing. His kidneys, his liver, his heart. At points she was elbow-deep in his chest cavity, rummaging around, unraveling his entrails. It felt intimate, he was glad she had switched off the cameras. She knew what she was doing. There was no blood, she worked cleanly and efficiently. He felt little physical pain throughout the whole process, only the sensation of being emptied out and scrutinised. He cried at times but it didn't feel altogether unpleasant. He realised he was a masochist. After she had hollowed him out, she put him back together once more, folding his peices back into his chest in the correct order and zipping him up again.
Carrie seemed to have this conviction that she was saving him from himself, but a version of himself that Nazir had created. She seemed to be suggesting that he was not solely responsible. She blamed Nazir. Brody wasn't sure he agreed with her but it was an explanation at least, and one that supported the idea that he was not a monster, and he so dearly wanted to believe that. She appeared to have a far higher opinion of him than he had of himself. She repeated that she had fallen in love with him. Why did she keep saying that? She didn't need to cajole him, he was already cooperating. He edged away tentatively from the corner of himself that belonged to Nazir, she coached him step by step as he cast off each of his lies. Until he finally took the leap of faith and dropped his suicide vest too, staggering desperately towards the haven she was promising, too exhausted to even entertain the notion that she was anything other than genuine. They were both relieved. They held hands. He would have given her anything she wanted if she had just promised not to let go.
In the car on the way home he had taken her hand again. He didn't know why. He just wanted to keep hold of her. Tonight for the first time he had faced up to what he had done, the effect he had wrought on her life. He had seen it for real this time and had apologised for hurting her. But he had stopped short of explaining. He felt purged but he was dissatisfied that he hadn't spoken out on that. He tried to transmit that through his hand holding hers. He hoped she could feel it. Brody was scared out of his mind at what might come next but he was glad that he would get to face it with Carrie. When she stopped the car, there were a hundred things he wanted to say to her. So many questions he wanted to ask. Actually, the rest could wait. There was just one thing he wanted to know: "Did you mean what you said?". But he asked nothing, already scared it had just been another interrogative technique. She looked like she had been through the mill as much as he did. He thought about kissing her, asking if he could stay the night with her. He wanted to feel her fingers in his hair again, soothing his spinning head. Brody just wanted to sleep and he knew he would do so soundly if he could just be next to her. But the memory of her gaining his trust before and then snapping everything away, the possibility that she was still manipulating him, prevented him. He was too tired, too raw and she could use that to tie him up in new and ever more complicated knots. He got out of the car and went inside to Jess, just hoping that she would make things easy for him, let him go to bed and face this new paradigm fresh tomorrow.
The following day he felt differently. The reality of what they were asking him to do was setting in. He felt like he had been assaulted. He had stared down at his hand. He had been. They, rather, Carrie had battered his defences until he sat there prone, wide open and ready to be moulded in her image. Wasn't what she had just done to him exactly what she had described happening to Brody at Nazir's hands? What made them so different? Nazir had given him back his dignity, offered him the love of Allah and Isa. Carrie had promised him peace. But he still had to earn it and there were no guarantees.
The previous night he had been in awe of her again. The following day he felt love and hate in equal measure. As long as the scales didn't tip in her favour he felt a modicum of control.
It dawned on him that he had just traded one puppet master for another.