A/N Here it is, the last chapter. Wanted to get it up faster than usual so I don't completely lose the few of you still with me. Thank you so much for hanging in there, especially with all the non-Homeland non-Carrie parts of this story. I promise if I ever do this again, I'll make more of an effort to figure out how to post crossovers! This was, as all fanfic is, a simple labor of love. In whatever shape it's in, I'm just glad I got it out there. Thanks again for reading, and your comments, as always, are much appreciated.

Chapter 7: The Hour's Getting Late

Carrie sits frowning over her laptop punching keys and looking bored. Her frustration soon reaches a breaking point and she rapidly gets up, rolling her seat back so it hits the wall behind her desk. As she marches out of her office into the large cubicle bank in the middle of headquarters, she sees that all the chairs are empty, computer screens flashing generic screen savers. She keeps walking and notices the shadows of her colleagues crowded together into an office down the hall.

It's the video screening room.

"Must be movie night," she sighs as she continues her march, fully prepared to let the idiots have it for wasting company time.

As she gets closer to the office door, she hears chanting, many voices screaming out in what sounds like Farsi. The chant sounds familiar, a popular phrase in Farsi heard often whenever she was in Iran, words barely needing translation, "Death to the infidel, death to America."

Inside the office, Dante points at the screen. "See him tensing his neck, looking around, trying to find her in the crowd?"

Another of the operatives in the room, one who Carrie doesn't recognize, chimes in, "Why didn't they put a hood over his head like civilized people do when they're hanging somebody?"

"They wanted the world to know it was really him," Dante suggests. "Or maybe they offered him a hood and he refused it. Maybe he wanted the world to know it was him."

His voice softens to a whisper as he continues speculating. "And maybe he wanted to be able to see her one last time."

The random agent says, "What a sick fuck for wanting her there."

Jack appears between the screen and the agents watching it. "Maybe he told her not to come, and, knowing her, knew she would anyway. And, when she called to him, he heard her voice, and had to try to find her, to see her one last time."

He turns back to the computer and switches off the video. "Don't you all have anything better to do this fine day?"

Outside the room, as yet unseen by her co-workers, Carrie is livid with rage. Corpuscles of emotion appear ready to burst all over her face, engorged with blood. Until he spoke, Carrie had not realized that Jack was in the room too, watching right along with the rest of them, gawking at the worst thing that ever happened to her. Her hands balled up in fists, Carrie gears herself up to burst into the room, to call out these idiots on their gossiping like a bunch of old men. How can she continue working with these people? How can she trust colleagues who have shown such insensitivity to the trauma she faced when she witnessed Brody's death? How can they gawk so callously at what she went through, what she lost?

The rhetorical questions teem in her mind and she decides to pause. Is confronting them really worth it? The entire world gawks at tragedy. Everyone loves tragedy, they get off on it. They don't want to, but they do. And eventually, no one pays any mind to the real human lives connected to all that tragedy. The gawking takes on a life of its own, and there's no stopping it. She winces from the sting of the realization and quickly walks past the screening room before anyone sees her.

After taking several brisk laps around her building, Carrie finds herself once again able to breath without having to choke back the emotion. She comes back in to HQ to find Jack and Dante huddled together over Dante's desk in the cubicle bay.

Despite having cooled down, she still doesn't want to see them or talk to them so she makes an attempt to creep by without them noticing. She still manages to hear bits of their conversation.

"…single-minded, thinking no further than the mission," Carrie hears Jack say. "Even saving Brody, this grand love that came out of nowhere, something she had no control over, even that was a mission.

"What she never gets is that there's always a trade-off. One mission succeeds, another fails. Especially in a world so convoluted, so connected, so over-populated with liars that everything is one big web of lies and connections. One domino falling leading to another and another. The cycle of missions, episodes, seasons going on until someone in power decides to focus energy and funding elsewhere."

Carrie watches Dante thoughtfully absorbing what Jack is telling him. Dante says, "Single-mindedness gets the job done, but is it a good trait for long term survival?"

Jack shrugs. "Who knows? Maybe she's over it. Maybe she's ready to move on. The difference between love and a mission is that you can say goodbye to a mission. Maybe she knows she has to say goodbye. Even if it kills her to do it."

Just when she was sure she was able to tamp down the pain enough to come back to work, after hearing her boss and close colleague talk about her as if she's a mental patient, Carrie realizes she has to leave again. Her knees can barely withstand her weight and she steadies herself on the wall of the hallway as she walks straight back out of HQ.

Carrie steps out into the light of day, momentarily blinded by the strong midday sun. She pats her pockets for her sunglasses but realizes she's left them in her office. The sun pounds on her head and she puts a hand up to keep the glare out of her eyes so she can continue walking. She knows the rapid beat of her heart, her inability to focus or stay still, coupled with what she has just witnessed in her office, could lead to a manic episode. She usually plugs her ears with music when she senses these heightened states coming on. Thelonius Monk or Miles Davis, Sketches of Spain, blaring at top volume directly into her ears, into her brain, into her blood. Thinning out the damn crazy-making chemicals, those sick little neurotransmitters that find a way free from the lithium she's always tried to take regularly. But, like her sunglasses, her music is also back at the office. And so her head continues to pound and she continues to walk.

She passes by a store window and from the corner of her eyes she sees a reflection. A tall man, standing rod straight, at attention, like a Marine. She shakes it away from her mind and keeps walking.

But her mind goes to her Marine. Nicholas Brody. A body like a bullet. All clean gun metal shine, freckles vaguely gold tinged, and the rumble just beneath the surface, of sinewy knots moving, shifting, then deeper still, a core of pure gun powder. Silt nascent sparks. Gun powder, Carrie remembered from her forensics class, looked like coffee or dirt, until you smelled it, and there it was inside him, invisible, not noticeable at all, until he made you feel it.

She closes her eyes and sees pale blue.

Carry knows that ultimately, the gun powder was all that was there. Otherwise, Brody was empty. A vessel for various people to put their crap into. Jessica to put her little house and family into, ignorant of the fact that he was still gone even after he came back. His captors to put pain, sorrow, loss, insurmountable destruction into. Brody reached out for faith, any faith, and maybe he found some to keep going, but mostly, he went through the motions of living. Brainwashed to pursuing a revenge that wasn't even completely possible. An eye for an eye leaving the whole world blind. A soldier in an interminable war fueled by hate.

Carrie's mind goes back to being handcuffed to a pipe in a warehouse near Fairfax Virginia. Highway 50, east of Chantilly. Her little conversation with Nazir about ethics. He'd told her: it may take a century, two centuries, three centuries, but we will exterminate you. The hate would burn strong until all things Western were destroyed. Brody was a vessel for that hate. When she had Nazir's attention, Carrie should have asked him, then what of your god? If you believe the West and all it stands for should fall, and you believe that God also wants that, why not just let Him do it? If you are so bent on our destruction, why not let time and fate, trust in God, to destroy us? Or don't you have faith that God Himself will do as he's ordered you to do?

Brody wasn't the typical Marine, all pomp and spine. Of course, as per his training, his demeanor was predictably detached, his officer stance still focused, even when he was at home, on doing a soldier's job: getting out alive. Something about his movements, though, something about the way he carried himself, was always more personal. A phantom of something more personal. Like despite being a Marine, despite being deserted and left for dead, despite being beaten and turned, there was still a shred of something human left, a shred he built a nest of straw around. Of course, no one really saw that shred of humanity but Carrie.

Carrie blinks away tears. And she hears music. Not the chaotic jazz she needs to give order to her whirling chaotic thoughts. This is a woman's voice. A cover of a Velvet Underground song. Her voice, throaty and rough, like it's sung through dirt. And exceptionally sad.

Sometimes
Sometimes I get so sad
Sometimes I feel almost heavenly but
Lately I just feel bad
Yeah, baby, I just feel mad
Linger on, your pale blue eyes
Linger on, your pale blue eyes

It was good what we did yesterday
And I'd do it again
The fact that you're insane
Only proves that you're my best friend
Well, I will never fuck anyone else again
Linger on, your pale blue eyes
Linger on, your pale blue eyes

Thought of you as my mountain top
I thought of you as my peak
Thought of you as everything
I had and I couldn't keep
Yeah, that I had but I couldn't keep
Linger on, your pale blue eyes
Linger on, your pale blue eyes

You explode inside of me
Yeah you explode my heart
I never had nothing anywhere so
the end is where I start
Cause I'm real and that's all that matters
Linger on, your pale blue eyes
Linger on, your pale blue eyes

Now the tears are flowing freely and Carrie struggles to keep walking, away from her office, away from that song, away from her memories and the lingering thoughts of the man she loved so mindlessly and completely. Blinded by the sun and by her tears, she stumbles on. She hears her name. Thinking it's yet another thing that's circling around just in her mind, she keeps stumbling. She hears her name again.

"Carrie!" It's Kara. "What are you doing? The office is this way."

Kara looks like she's seen better days: layers of clothing seemingly put together blindly, combat boots, aviator sunglasses barely covering dark circles around bloodshot eyes, her skin pale and translucent, exposed. She sees Carrie's tear-streaked face and puts an arm gently around her shoulders, not saying another word.

They walk like that for a bit and pass another storefront. This time the music is very different. Again a cover, but this time of a Bob Dylan song. Jimi Hendrix's version of it. The women stand together and listen, entranced.

"There must be some kind of way out of here, "
Said the joker to the thief,
"There's too much confusion, I can't get no relief.
Business men – they drink my wine
Plowmen dig my earth
None will level on the line
Nobody of it is worth."

"No reason to get excited, "
The thief – he kindly spoke,
"There are many here among us
Who feel that life is but a joke
But you and I we've been through that
And this is not our fate
So let us not talk falsely now
The hour's getting late."

All along the watchtower
Princess kept the view
While all the women came
And went, bare-foot servants too
Outside in the cold distance
A wild cat did growl
Two riders were approaching
And the wind began to howl, hey.