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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"Yeah, probably so. Can probably even afford them have salad and vegetables, if you're doing a full meal. Maybe even a choice of terrible-tasting wedding cake flavors." Her face was overly solemn again. The few times she'd been to a wedding, which she was pretty sure had always been for Section, the cake had been awful despite the huge amount of money that was always being spent on the wedding and the security and the everything else.

Yeah, that was right. She'd never been to a wedding for herself and as herself. That was another little detail she couldn't ever share with anyone, since it'd mean too many questions. She was old enough that she should have had some friends getting married by now.

"Maybe we'll just have cookies or somethin'," he says with a laugh, shaking his head. "Jamie's gonna be a part of it, so we wanna make sure it'll all be somethin' he enjoys, too. It's gonna be pretty relaxed, pretty... non-traditional, I think, in the sense of all that stuff."

It seems a little silly that there should be traditions regarding what kind of food they eat and what kind of cake they serve, but Russell's never been big on following the rest of the crowd anyway. It's Katie's second wedding and even though it's his first, he still think they're on the same page.

"I don't know anyone that turns down cookies," she agreed. "Well, I do, and they come in every day, but they worry me."

She smiled when he explained that the little boy was going to be part of it too. That was probably going to be adorable, and she'd probably have a hard time not thinking of Casey. She hoped Section had let Casey go live with her grandmother or something. Gray she knew Section would have to have disposed of, but Casey was so little. Casey couldn't have told anyone anything if she'd tried. Maybe she'd been spared. Probably not, though.

"The only people who have to be happy with your choices are you three. Everyone else can go have their own wedding if they think they can do it better."

"Yeah, that's kinda what I'm thinkin'," Russell agrees, grinning down at his coffee before he takes a sip. "I mean, if our parents were around maybe it'd be different, tryin' to make them happy and everyone else in the family, but it's not the same here. Everyone from home, parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles, all the people who'd expect to be invited and who'd want their opinions to be taken into consideration, they don't exist here."

They still exist -- though maybe not in Russell's case -- but it's not like they'll make it in time for the wedding. They won't be able to just fly in.

"Which is good and bad," she agreed. "There are some really screwed-up families out there and being free of them isn't a bad thing. But I think it might be tough to raise a kid without family. Guess you have to make your own, yeah?"

That sounded like a greeting card, but it was what everyone in Darrow did. They made their own family.

Maybe it's partly due to the fact that he hadn't been there when Jamie had been an infant, but Russell doesn't think raising him has been particularly hard without there being grandparents around. He would love if his parents could be here to meet Jamie and he's sure Katie feels the same, but he thinks they're doing okay without them.

"It'd be nice to see my parents again," he admits. "But I'm pretty sure they're dead." Along with everyone else in Ogden Marsh.

The couple in the corner disentangled themselves and came up to the register to pay, so she took a moment to ring them up and make polite customer service noises. Once they were gone, she came back to Russell. She'd had a chance to think about how she could respond to that and had decided it might be safe to say something.

"Mine might be. Dunno, really," she admitted. "Never knew my dad and my mum and I haven't really talked for awhile."

"Guess bein' here does make it kinda difficult," he says, even though he doesn't think that's what she means at all. It leaves her the opening to correct him if she wants, if she decides it's okay to talk about, but it also means she can just go with it if it's not something she particularly wants to share.

"My whole town, the place I'm from, they're all gone," he admits. "Wiped off the map, probably in a pretty damn literal sense."

He'd given her an out by pretending she meant not having talked to her mum since Darrow, but a year of not talking to her mum wasn't even the beginning of it.

There was a reason Russell was a good cop, even if he said he fell into it. He knew how to handle people and how not to treat them. It all came down to courtesy and decency, but they both knew that wasn't common anymore, if it ever had been.

"That's rough," she agreed. "I don't really have a place I'm from. Moved around a lot when I was a kid. And then more after I stopped talking to my mum."

"You guys just lost touch or was it a pointed decision? Not talkin'?" he asks. Since she's given him that much information, he figures it's not information that she wants to keep completely closed off and that asking isn't the end of the world.

He can't imagine that, though. Not with his parents. He knows not everyone is like that, he knows not all parents deserve their children, but he's also pretty sure losing his parents, having them not want to speak to him, that sort of thing might kill him.

"It got pretty pointed at the end," she agreed with a small, almost humorless chuckle. She wouldn't be sharing the details of that, but it had been fairly pointed. Knives were, generally, and Nikita had started carrying one around at a fairly young age. "It just worked out better for both of us if we didn't talk. Or live in the same province."

She deliberately left out her age for now, because she didn't want misplaced sympathy or pity. She'd gotten through it, hadn't she? No need for anyone to feel sorry for her now.

"That's too bad," Russell says, because he thinks he knows Nikita well enough to imagine it wasn't her doing that had caused the rift. She might not be all that interested in nonsense and she might be pretty matter of fact, but he likes her and he knows it's a bias, but he suspects it's maybe her mother's doing.

"I mean, I'm guessin' you're pretty much used to it now, especially here. Not much can be done about it." But he still thinks people need their parents. Rather, they need good parents.

"Yeah, it's been long enough that it doesn't bother me anymore," she replied, and meant it. It had hurt at first, it had made her a very angry kid, but anger took a lot of energy. She'd needed that energy to survive. The anger had to go. It left her with a whole lot of distrust in its place, but she wasn't angry. She could recognize that her mum had a problem with booze, that she'd had a kid she didn't really want, that her life in general had been pretty unfortunate.

"Dunno what I'd even do if she arrived here. Don't think we'd be best friends, though."

Russell laughs a little at that and nods. "I figure everyone's got at least one person like that," he says. "That person they're not sure what they'd do with if they arrived in Darrow."

Most of his are college friends. Guys he'd gotten drunk with, gotten into fights with, caused problems with. He's never really had any enemies, but given the way those guys had screwed him over, he knows he wouldn't want to see them any time soon.

She actually had quite a few of those, from people she'd known on the streets to her mother to people in Section. The list of people she would know what to do with was shorter. It was pretty much Walter and Birkoff, actually, with a possible secondary of Michael. Even Michael was complex, though.

"Well, if you have a list of people you'd really like to see here, makes sense you'd have a list of people you'd really like to not. Or even people that you kinda feel neutral about it."

She paused for a moment.

"I'd like to see my friend Walter again. He's an aging hippie, but I think he'd like it here."

Russell smiles at that, glad to hear there's someone she'd like to see. Even his list is on the short side, most limited to his parents, and David and Judy. He hadn't had a lot of really good friends in Odgen Marsh, which is more or less what it's like here.

"I'd like to see my friends David and Judy again," he says. "I'd like to know how everything turned out. If they made it out okay." He'd like them to have somewhere relatively safe to live, somewhere they could have their baby and be happy.

"To seeing friends again," she toasted, although it wasn't much of toast when he had a coffee cup and she had a carafe of the same. But it was safer than toasting to anything else, and it fit the conversation.

"And not seeing enemies."

She had more of those to avoid, and so did he, so she thought he could agree with that toast.

"Hey, I can drink to that," Russell agrees, lifting his coffee cup with a bright grin before he finishes the last sip and sets it down on the counter. "I oughta get back, Katie's probably waiting for me to take over with Jamie."

But it's been nice, he has to admit that. Just sitting here and having a chat, knowing neither of them are in any pressing danger, at least for the moment. There's a lot about Nikita he doesn't know, but he can make some guesses and then leave it alone. Having some down time is always nice.

"Yeah, probably a nice thing to do," she agreed, chuckling. "Thanks for coming in though. It's nice to catch up, especially since neither of us is bleeding this time."

All he'd drunk was a bottomless cup of coffee, so she wasn't planning to charge him unless he made a point of it.

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