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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"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.

"Yeah, maybe," she agreed, and paused for a moment. What could she say? Russell had earned her trust to some degree, in some ways. Maybe she could tell him a bit about her past as long as she edited it even more heavily as usual.

"I'm just glad it didn't turn out to be a pattern. When I lived in Paris there was a dirtbag that killed something like eight women. His last attempted victim was me. Didn't work out well for him, but I don't tend to be a fan of that kind of thing all the same."

It hadn't worked out well for anyone, actually, other than the women Crane wasn't going to victimize in the future. O'Brien had ended up in Section when he really was just a good cop while she'd had to kill Crane and frame O'Brien.

"Yeah, there, uh... there was a guy kinda like that here, too," he says, his voice gone a little more serious. "I'm sorry that's shit you've had to deal with."

He still remembers how Molly had looked when he'd gone into her hospital room to get her statement, how much he'd hated himself and hated being a cop in that moment. She had requested him specifically, she'd wanted to give her statement to him and only him, but it had been so damn hard all the same.

"I'm glad it went up shit's creek for him and worked out... well, as well as somethin' like that can work out for you."

Russell was looking solemn, so she thought she'd better clarify. She'd had a few attempted assaults in her life, unfortunately, but she'd always come out of them okay. She learned very early on to defend herself through whatever means necessary. Section had just made her better at it.

"He didn't really hurt me, so it didn't work out too badly for me. But you could certainly say it all went up shit creek for him," she agreed, although that wasn't a phrase she thought she'd ever used. "From what I heard, they found him dead. Drug deal went south or something like that. I didn't hear much about it beyond that since it wasn't going to trial. Doesn't really matter, all things considered. He's not around to continue attacking women. You get the guy doing that kind of stuff here or did he have a similar end?"

"Someone else got him the same night he kidnapped a friend of his and his girlfriend," Russell answers and he knows there could have been more done to bring the other woman in for what she'd done, but there was no way in hell he was going to be the one pushing for it. Not when she had saved Molly's life. And he knew Molly and Andrea weren't going to turn her in, so he just didn't bother to pursue it.

Bateman deserved what happened to him. He deserved worse.

"He's dead anyway. The last two women he tried to kill are okay. I dunno if you were here when it happened, it was in the news a bunch," he says. "He was the same guy who killed Tiffany Charlotte, so that got a lot of attention."

Someone sounded like a person she'd like, if they were eliminating threats like that. Not that she'd ever say that, but she could understand the vigilante tendency in that case.

"Ah, yeah, I came in a bit after that," she explained. "Missed all the excitement. But it's alright. Now we have vampires to make life interesting, yeah?"

"Shit, if you can call it that," Russell says with a huff of laughter. He's not really on any of those cases and he sort of prefers it that way, if only because he understands the way Darrow works is pretty complicated. There are vampires here who are causing problems, absolutely, but there are others who are just living their lives and it worries him a little, that some people don't make the distinction.

"Agent Reid, d'you know him? He's been workin' on that sorta stuff more than me," he says. "Gotta be messed up, trying to weed on which ones are crazy killing machines and which ones can be trusted. It seems harder than people somehow, maybe 'cause they don't need any additional weapons."

"Yeah, he comes in for coffee sometimes," she replied casually, which left out everything about her being something resembling a CI for him. Reid kept her name out of the information she provided and she wasn't going to change that by blabbing to Russell about it.

"I don't ask him about his work like I don't ask you about yours, but it does seem to be what you might call a challenge. He likes those, I think. Puzzles and all that are good for him. Otherwise he'd be bored and start, I dunno, trying to profile his waitress."

Since his waitress was her half the time, she really wanted to avoid that.

"I dunno. He never much struck me as the kinda guy who does that on just anyone, but maybe I'm just too boring to profile," Russell says with a laugh, wondering what anyone would even determine if they tried to do that to him. He's just a guy from a small town, not much interesting about him at all one way or the other.

"Besides, he seems like he's got a, uh... an active social life," he says, not knowing what to call that bookstore guy.

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