femmejosephine | All the cops in the coffee shops

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russell

All the cops in the coffee shops

It was a really slow afternoon, slow enough that she'd sent her one afternoon shift waitress home already to study for an exam at Barton University. She herself was sitting behind the register, which had the dual benefit of giving her a look over the whole place and being near the money in case someone got a stupid idea. It hadn't happened yet, but she was prepared if it did. There was a baseball bat behind the counter. Low-tech, maybe, but no one had to register baseball bats.

The sticky notes for delayed coffees and pastries had been getting a bit ruffled as people ran their hands over them, so she was taking this opportunity to transfer some into the notebook she used to keep them organized. Some of them she left out because they were decorated or had a nice message on them, but a lot of them she could just grab off the page when it was time to redeem them.

The bell over the door dinged and she glanced up with a customer smile on her face.

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It's a bit of a relief to have a day off. Being a cop is something Russell loves, something he wouldn't know what to do without, but it's also exhausting at times, especially while house hunting, wedding planning and looking after a toddler. But he's free for a change and while he usually takes Jamie on his days off, Katie had taken him to the daycare that morning to give Russell some time to himself.

He loves that kid, but he has to admit, it's nice to just be out on his own.

"Hey," he says when he sees Nikita behind the counter at Bondurant's. He'd known she owned it, but it's still nice to see a familiar face. He's got no plans for the day besides getting a coffee and letting himself actually unwind for once. "Slow day?"

"Something like that," she agreed, and her face shifted to a more real smile. "Not that I'm saying anything about it out loud. I learned in my first waitressing job not to do that. It means I'll inevitably get five parties of six who all have things they can't or won't eat."

She was partially serious. She did like Russell, for all that he was a cop, and she thought he might understand the challenges of being at the mercy of the public for one's job. He was at their literal mercy, of course, as evidenced by how they'd met. And as far as she could tell, he still hadn't filed any paperwork about that or her little issue in the park.

"You ever have that problem as a cop? Someone says the shift's been slow and suddenly there are, I dunno, fifteen robbery calls at once?"

"It's never so bad here, but trust me, back home? I learned never to say I was bored," Russell answers with a laugh, leaning on the counter. "This one time, I swear we'd gone a week without gettin' a single call and just as soon as I finished sayin' I wished we had somethin' to do, the phone was ringing off the damn hook."

David had been so pissed at him.

"Turns out these guys'd decided to throw a party and gotten drunk and though some target practice was a good idea. That was a hell of a night."

"Sounds it," Nikita agreed with a chuckle. She could just imagine the chaos of drunk people and firearms. And it was something she could know about without Section, at least in theory, so she could laugh about it.

"Well, hopefully that won't happen to either of us today. Especially the target practice. Hell on my insurance rates, for one thing. You want a cup of coffee and a pastry or something?"

Russell snorts and says, "Yeah, I imagine insurance on a business in Darrow isn't the cheapest thing out there."

In his time here, he's seen businesses shot at, broken into, destroyed by people running from ice bees, and pretty much everything in between. He wonders if it's going to be as bad when it comes time to get insurance for the house they inevitably buy, if maybe that's one thing that might work in favour of staying in the apartment.

"Yeah, sure, a cup of coffee'd be great," he says. "Part of why I came in here anyway." He'll maybe bring something back for Katie and Jamie once he heads out, but that can wait until he's ready to go.

Edited 2015-11-21 15:42 (UTC)

"I never ran a restaurant before, but I don't think vampires are usually part of the policy," she agreed. "But the previous owners never put n a security system, so my rates did go down a bit once I did that. Paid out the nose for the system, of course."

When he said he'd like a cup of coffee, she smiled and stepped away from the counter to grab a thick diner-style mug from a tray.

"Sit anywhere you like," she invited him, since the place was almost completely empty. There were just two teenagers in a corner, and they were more interested in each other than in what was going on around them.

"Since they don't seem like they're very good company, I figured I might hang out here more and talk to you," Russell answers with a grin as he glances back at the teenagers. He remembers shit like that, being just a kid, heading out to the diner with his high school girlfriend -- though he'd had a couple, which had been impressive for a skinny kid like him -- and how adult it had felt to sit together in a restaurant like this, no parents around.

He doesn't miss being a kid, not by any means, but sometimes he misses easy shit like that.

"It's been a long damn time since I've done anything like that," he says with another laugh. "Just sat down in the corner of a diner with a girl I like."

"Yeah, of course," she agreed, and glanced at the couple as she poured him a cup of coffee expertly. She had just the right angle on it to avoid spilling and she left enough room in the cup for cream without it seeming like she'd shorted him. It was muscle memory now, just like cleaning and stripping and automatic weapon was muscle memory.

She preferred coffee.

"Want milk or half and half? Real stuff, not the stuff in little plastic pots."

As for the couple, she chuckled. She didn't think she'd ever sat in the corner of a diner with someone she liked.

"Simpler time, yeah?"

"Nah, this is perfect," Russell says, having always preferred his coffee without anything added. It's the reason why he can never quite seem to get on board with those complicated drinks everyone seems to like, the stuff with added shots of flavour and all kinds of things. Plain black coffee is what he grew up on and he doesn't think he'd be able to change that now.

He glances at the couple again and shakes his head. "It's like life just catches up with you all at once," he says. "Don't get me wrong, I like how shit is now and wouldn't give it up for the world, but I just can't remember the last time Katie and I were off at the same time and could spare even ten minutes for somethin' like that."

Since he didn't need anything else for his coffee, she settled down on a stool on her side of the counter to chat. The couple in the corner hadn't touched their half-full drinks in several minutes, but she'd refill them when it was needed.

"A cop who doesn't add all kinds of cream and sugar to his coffee? Someone must actually clean the coffee pot at your precinct. You should tell them to stop," she joked, as if the cliche about police coffeepots was her only knowledge of terrible institutional coffee instead of her reality for years.

"There's this thing called babysitting, you know. Not that I'm volunteering. Can barely keep a cat or a houseplant alive. But they exist."

"Hey, I'm in charge of the coffee and I make great coffee," Russell protests with a laugh, but then he's shaking his head at Nikita's suggestion, still smiling.

"It's not that, it's not that Jamie keeps us too busy, it's just life right now. Between a cop's schedule and a doctor's, that's pretty messed up to begin with, but then we got wedding planning and we're lookin' for a house and y'know, there's a lot of work to do when you wanna adopt someone, even if you're already marrying his mom. It'll slow down in time."

She nodded. That did sound pretty busy, especially with a kid added in, but he didn't seem to be complaining.

"Mazel tov, or whatever the right words are in this situation," she chuckled. "Probably good luck is the best option? Kid, wife, house, you're doing all the stressful things at once. But then again, I guess you'll get it over with, yeah?"

She wouldn't probably ever have a husband (or wife, she didn't rule it out) or a kid, maybe not even a house. Owning and running a bar was about as much permanence as she thought she'd ever have. And it was a hell of a lot more permanence than she'd ever had before.

Russell's not sure if it's stressful or if it's just that it's all taking up a lot of time, but either way, he's glad to be doing it all. They're all things that make him happy. All the sorts of things he figured he'd never get.

"Well, when you're supposed to have died more than a few years ago, I figure bein' busy's not such a bad thing," he says with a little smile.

"That's true. Most things are better than being dead," she replied, although she wasn't sure about his statement that he was supposed to have died. Did that mean he actually was dying or dead in his world and then woke up here like Cole? Or was it more of her situation where she was presumed to be dead and actually wasn't? It was hard to ask without revealing why she knew the difference, and that got into delicate territory.

"Being undead might not be better, and we've got plenty of problems with that. Seems a bit calmer lately, though, at least from my untrained eye."

She wasn't sure Russell would let that "untrained eye" bit pass, but she'd try it. She was very good at being the casual restaurateur, especially since that really was mostly true now.

"We got some people on it, yeah," Russell says, thinking about Reid and that big, hairy bookstore owner he hangs around with. Russell's pretty sure they're together and he's also pretty sure the bookstore guy isn't actually just a guy, but he figures that's all their own business and if he's helping Reid and making sure these asshole vampires don't tear open his throat, then that's all Russell really cares about.

"How many of us are trained eyes when it comes to vampires and other undead stuff, though?" he asks, grinning faintly. "I mean, weird shit went down at home and it still seems crazy to me."

That was a good solid cop non-answer, and she hid her smile at it. Russell knew when to keep his mouth shut. It was an important tool for a cop. Too bad that cop back in Paris hadn't been able to do that or he wouldn't have needed to end up in Section. She'd handled that badly, she knew, but part of it was definitely due to him not backing off when he had to know he should.

"See, I had a perfectly normal life," she replied. "No vampires or weird stuff at all. And then I get here and my insurance policy has an ice bees rider."

Perfectly normal life was about as far away from the truth as it was possible to get in most ways, but in terms of vampires, it was true.

"Yeah, I did, too. Until the army got involved with their biological weapons and all that fun shit," Russell says with a snort. He tries to make light of it and really, after all this time, he's not nearly as angry as he used to be, but there's no escaping the fact that what they'd done to his hometown is the most disgusting thing he's ever known.

Their mistake had led to the deaths of over thirteen hundred people. His neighbours had gotten sick, gone crazy, killed each other and then those who hadn't gotten sick had been mowed down by machine guns and flamethrowers. Killed just for being in the wrong town.

"Oh, so you're used to the ice bees," she teased, and topped his coffee up even though he hadn't asked for it yet. It was part of the job. She glanced back over at the teenagers, who were now trying to maybe melt into one person. If they started removing clothing, she'd have to tell them to stop before Russell got them for indecent exposure.

"They're biological and they're a weapon, right?"

Playing stupid about what a biological weapon actually might be was her best plan. She couldn't very well start talking about El Virus or any of the other biological weapons various people had nearly released into the world.

Russell's eyebrow lifts at that, but he decides to smile anyway, figuring she knows exactly what he means and is just sort of messing with him now. Most people know what biological weapons are, but he supposes it depends on when in time they've come from or even what kind of world.

"Well, I figure a virus is a little worse than ice bees, but I guess those weren't much fun either."

He remembers them, he'd gotten stung, but he had survived. He hadn't survived Trixie.

Yeah, he'd taken it as her teasing him, and that was just fine. She didn't try the dumb blonde thing because she knew that wouldn't work, but having a little less knowledge about some things was fine.

"Have I asked you why you decided to be a cop?" she wondered, because she honestly couldn't remember. They'd chatted a few times now, but she wasn't sure they'd gotten into the whys and wherefores of being a cop.

"Probably not 'cause if you had, you'd remember it as the most uninspiring and boring reason someone ever became a cop," he says with a laugh, pausing to take a sip of his coffee. "I grew up in a small town and I went away to college, fucked up goin' away to college, then came home and asked the Sheriff for a job. That's about the long and the short of it."

He grins and shrugs. "I was friends with the Sheriff, we'd grown up together, so he gave me one. That's it. I became a cop because I needed the money and I didn't have to interview for it."

"Same reason I started waitressing," Nikita replied with a small smile. "Needed the money and I knew someone willing to hire me. It's the kind of job that doesn't really need a lot of education, and that worked for me too."

She'd worked as a waitress on and off since she tended to get fired for mouthing off at customers, but she was still grateful to the person who'd given her a job that first time, and more grateful to Kenya for taking a chance on her like this. She'd had some experience when she started with Kenya, obviously, but the holes in her resume were pretty much unexplainable. Kenya hadn't asked, though.

"Not everybody's gotta wanna save the world to be a cop. I think for most people it's just a job like anything else."

"Yeah, bein' a cop doesn't require much either, especially not in a small town," he says with a small smirk. "And I got lucky here, showin' up before anyone else did, so once the rest of the department showed up, they just all sorta assumed I'd been here all along and could be trusted."

He'd never had to prove himself, he'd never had to take any classes or show any certificates. He knows that's really lucky, that anywhere else things would be a little different for him.

"Sneaky," Nikita agreed with an answering smirk. "It helps that you actually are a competent cop, though. Other than occasionally letting people go without making them file paperwork, I mean. Out of curiosity, you ever pick up Larry, Curly or Moe for anything else?"

She was still grateful that he'd let her do that, although she knew he had his reasons for not wanting that paperwork to be filed either.

"Nah, not that I know of," Russell says, shaking his head. He'd been keeping an eye out for awhile, but after a few months, he'd gotten bogged down in other work and they'd sort of slipped off his radar. "Idiots like that, though, you figure they gotta get picked up for somethin'. Another precinct might've gotten them at some point."

Or they'd just slipped by him. That's entirely possible. Russell knows he can't keep track of every single person that goes through the system. Back home it was possible, but not here. There's just too many people.

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