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He didn’t get into espionage to be a hero. That anonymous star on the wall that fellow agents mourn, his name in the hall of honor, immortalized in a sacrifice for the greater good - after the initial mention in his preliminary interviews, Quinn doesn’t give it another thought. His fellow classmates are beating off at night to the fantasy that they’ll be the ones to go down in a blaze of glory, but the idea has just never appealed to him.
An old girlfriend once accused him of having a martyr complex, and Quinn supposes that her assessment was not technically inaccurate. Infiltrating a guarded compound with a single handgun and the nearest backup on another continent and then succeeding - it’s a thrill, but not because he needs the recognition. For Quinn, it’s about doing what’s right in the end, even when the means to accomplishing that end are painted (always) in morally ambiguous shades of grey.
He read a Time piece once on a flight to Nairobi, lauding intelligence officers as modern day marshals of the west. Clearly, the writer was either working on grandiose speculation or using a starry-eyed rookie analyst as their source, because the methods that Quinn uses are more akin to the mustache twirling villains than the badge bearing heroes, and he can’t recall ever swooping in to save the day.
The only thing he knows to be true is that what’s right isn’t always good, and it’s never kind.
Kindness isn’t a currency Quinn deals in, he’s short on the time and patience for it, and that’s why he’s good at his job. That’s why he’s great at his job.
Which is why Quinn’s confused even himself that he’s sitting in the guest holding pen at the local psych ward, watching, willing, waiting for the clock to tick over into visitor hours.
He tells himself that Carrie still holds onto a shred of information, something that can push Saul off his hastily appointed throne, something that will wrap the op so Quinn can get the fuck out, find some semblance of a real life outside the shroud of secrecy and deceit and that’s why he’s here.
Peter Quinn’s an expert at lying, especially to himself.
The second hand pushes itself onto the 12 and he anticipates the metallic grate of the lock releasing, an instant before it slides open. Clipping the badge onto his shirt, Quinn strides down the hall, scanning the assembly rooms for Carrie’s familiar blonde hair. Coming up short, he follows a familiar route to an open door, halfway down the corridor.
At the desk in her quarters - her cell, call a spade a spade - Carrie counts three cards into her palm, checks her stacks, and flips them facedown onto the pile in front of her. She concentrates fiercely, the curved arch of her spine hunched over a metal chair that’s been bolted to the scuffed lino.
Quinn knocks, as he does every visit, and he can tell by the way Carrie’s fingers halt for a split second that she hears him. Because she doesn’t turn to scream at him with a jumbled, overmedicated yelp, he takes her hesitation for a welcome and enters her room.
He brings her today’s newspaper and orange slice candy in a waxed paper bag. The floor warden scolded him like a naughty child when he brought a cellophane package on his first visit, asked him if they were going to have a problem when he came next.
Quinn knows there are seven ways Carrie could kill herself, if she were really so inclined, with the bare minimum of what she’s allowed in her room, without the help of a candy wrapper. The cards she holds in her hands could slice through skin, for god’s sake.
But Quinn can keep his mouth shut, it’s part of his job. He just nods tersely at the nurse and, next time, stops by the store with bulk bins instead of his corner bodega. He doesn’t know why orange slices remind him of Carrie, or how he ever thought that she’d even want them, they’re not green pens or skeins of twine to help plot the tangled webs of her thoughts. Something about the sugar crust and the vaguely cheerful color made him stop, and now he brings a bag with each visit.
She probably doesn’t eat them, most likely, they’re stacked in one of the shallow desk drawers, but Quinn’s a creature of habit, and even he remembers the adage that it’s the thought that counts.
Not all the humanity’s been scrubbed out of him. Not yet.
Quinn sits on the far edge of her bed, realized somewhere around the fourth visit that hovering near Carrie makes her anxious, that her eyes scan the room for possible exit strategies, that her mind is spinning a thousand different probabilities, and that the reason she’s here is because she needs a fucking break from all of that.
(He disagrees with the agency’s methods, with every moral fiber that still resides in his body, but Quinn knows that butting up against them is nothing but an exercise in futility, and the payoff is usually more permanent than twenty-four hour observation and an experimental trial of conflicting pharmaceuticals.)
So he falls back on that whole keeping his mouth shut skill, with the agency and with Carrie, and Quinn watches her shuffle another game of Solitaire.
Twenty minutes tick by, and the patience honed on three day stakeouts in the desert is starting to chafe, just a little.
Carrie rustles in her chair and he sees her turn, place the cards on the thin bedspread and thumb the edge of the newspaper.
The International Herald Tribune is barely news, the stories are days old, and there’s nothing resembling hard intel that Carrie could use for anything resembling work, but it’s relatively unbiased and it has a decent Middle East section.
“War.”
Her voice is like walking over gravel, dry and patchy, blanketed with dust. It’s small, not the crisp, decisive stream of Carrie consciousness he’s used to. He’s not sure if she’s referring to Saul or Brody or the agency, so Quinn waits her out, watches her trace a headline with a long finger before she scoops the cards back up, pushes them towards Quinn
“Are you playing or not?”
War. Oh.
There’s a dim flicker in her eyes, and for all of his deductive logic, Carrie inviting him to play cards with her was not an option Quinn ran through his mind.
(So much for intelligence.)
He shuffles and cuts the deck, and Carrie shifts over, settling at the head of the narrow bed, drawing her legs underneath her.
“You want to deal?”
She slices the tape on the wax paper bag with her nail and shakes her head, once.
“Trusting me? Say it isn’t so.”
Carrie shrugs her shoulder, fishes an orange slice out of the bag, offers it on a steady palm to Quinn.
He pops the candy in his mouth, chews it down in three bites, and watches her carefully start on a piece for herself. Carrie takes small bites around the perimeter, evening it down from a semi circle to a triangle in the time it takes Quinn to deal the cards.
When she plays an ace on his rather impressive pile of cards, eight minutes into the game, Carrie ducks her head to hide a ghost of a smile joining the scattered crumbs of sugar on her lips.
He tries to extinguish the little flicker of contentment that brings him, tamp it down and attribute it to that innate Carrie stubbornness finally discovering an outlet. It has absolutely nothing to do with him.
Maybe he still needs to work on honing the whole lying part. The hero thing, too.