femmejosephine | Stiff drinks and stiff upper lips

It could be that this will turn out to be a bad idea, but John finds he doesn't really care as much as he might have once. Root might be right, Darrow might very well be making him soft, but he's been here for three years and Samaritan has yet to try and end his life, which is a level patience he very much doubts those agents are capable of.

Few people really know him here. Very few. He doesn't anticipate that changing much, but he does know it feels kind of nice to let up on the secret identities now and then. Pretending to be someone else can get exhausting and he's lucky that the identity he uses is an easy one, but even so. He's never really been John Riley.

"Hi," he says when he spots Nikita at a particular booth, then heads to join her.

"Hi," she replied, and motioned opposite her. The bottles of booze were all clearly unopened, because she was a suspicious person and thought he might be too. Of course there were ways to alter things so that they looked unopened but weren't, but not here. Not without Walter, even if she'd wanted to.

"Drink? It's my treat."

Obviously it was, since this was her restaurant and her liquor budget.

Edited 2019-07-22 23:47 (UTC)

"Your treat at your restaurant?" he asks with a small smile as he sinks into the booth and then lets out a soft sigh. Even still, John is in excellent physical condition, but some days are harder than others and when he had been working as a spy undercover as a police officer, he had never really paid much attention to just how difficult it really was, being a detective.

It's been a long day.

"You're giving me options and everything," he comments, looking at the bottles. "I feel very special."

Nikita shrugged.

"I don't like it if I can't see a drink being made. Thought you might be the same," she explained. That was due both to Section and, well, being a woman. There were plenty of men who would slip something into a woman's drink and she'd learned very very early not to allow that to happen. Too early, really.

"Oh, I've only been drugged once or twice," he says, then pauses as he pours himself a scotch. "Maybe three times, but the last time wasn't done through a drink."

When it came to Samaritan, there were much easier ways for them to get to him. Keeping out of sight had really only worked for so long, but the John Riley cover had worked back in New York and it was still working for him here. So far he had no reason to give it up or try to be anyone else.

How many times had she been drugged, and did she count the one that brought her into Section in the first place? She ostentatiously counted on her fingers, since apparently they were starting right in with the details that weren't details. Which was fine, really, and almost a relief that she'd read this situation right.

She usually did, but it was still a relief.

"I think I'm at four, and last time was also not in a drink," she replied, and got herself a vodka tonic.

"Are we going to guess what the last ones were?" John asks with a small smile against the rim of his glass before he takes a sip. It's a nice scotch and the warmth in his throat is low and pleasant.

He used to drink whatever he could get his hands on, as long as it got him drunk.

"Something slipped into the ventilation?" he asks, but he's teasing. "A dart?"

"Nope," she replied, popping the the P in a way that always made Operations twitch. Which was, of course, why she kept doing it once she realized its effect. She might actually know better than to poke the bear, but she might do it anyway.

"Good old fashioned syringe full of unknown crap. So if I ever end up with, I dunno, fins, I'm gonna know it was due to all of that."

"At least I knew what I was being shot full of," he says and it's a sad state of affairs that he can consider that a silver lining. "Just good old fashioned sodium pentothal, which is always an... experience for people in our position."

Even if they've never said it, they both know the other is something similar. No one behaves like they do except for other spies. Whatever Nikita was involved in, whatever she's done, John will never ask and if she were to ever tell him, he would never judge.

God knows he's probably done the same.

She'd been given that one. Actually, she'd been given that one as part of her training, so she'd know what it felt like to be given that and know how to try to work through it or what antidote to tell Medical she was going to need (assuming she had time before she was unconscious). She made a face.

"Does that one taste like rotten onions to you?"

"I don't remember much about the taste," he says with a low laugh. "My clearest memory of that day was the rest of it. The other methods they used to... speak with me."

He doesn't want to outright use the word torture, but he also doesn't think he needs to. The way he says it probably makes it clear enough, especially to someone he expects may have been in the same situation once or twice.

Nikita nodded a little grimly, but also understandingly. She knew exactly what he was talking about and he definitely didn't need to say the words. In fact, it was better if he didn't, even though both of them were speaking in a way that didn't carry.

Yet another element of training that they had in common.

"Wet sponges attached to car batteries," she said conversationally, since that was the most memorable of her experiences. Well, other than the rats, but she didn't tell anyone about the rats. Ever.

"Ouch," he answers in a tone just as steady as hers had been. "The last one of mine preferred needles."

But John had been trained to withstand all kinds of torture. He's never once given up any kind of information and while people don't physically get the best of him very often, it's happened once or twice. He's found himself bound and subjected to any number of methods of breaking him and not once has he broken.

"Funny, isn't it? The things people expect will get them results."

"They really should know better," she agreed. She'd been taught to withstand nearly anything, even though the rats had meant she'd "given up" information. Section had wanted her to give it up, though, so it probably didn't quite count.

"And yet, they keep putting explosive necklaces on people."

That incident (and Riley's help with disarming it) had been what had solidified their mutual understanding of what the other person had been trained to do, as far as she was concerned.

He shouldn't smile, it's not a funny topic of conversation, but even so he can't seem to help himself. People like them, he thinks they need to find humour where they can, especially when their lives have been threatened so often, when they've consistently hurt and told they just have to go back for more. Without humour, that can all leads to some very dark places.

And John has been there. He has no intention of going back.

"And yet they do," he says. "Then the question becomes whether things like that are coming from your enemies or the people you work for. They're not often all that different, are they?"

They really, really weren't, and she made a face. Section One always said its ends were just, but its means were entirely ruthless, as far as she was concerned. How much had they put her through with the excuse of training or preparation?

"Sometimes the 'bad guys' were nicer to me than the 'good guys', yeah. Although the hard part was when they'd swap. Talk about whiplash."

John nods and is quietly thoughtful for a moment, trying to decide what else he wants to say. He's trusted very few people in Darrow with details of his past and besides Karen, no one here knows everything. Even Karen doesn't know all of his life, although she knows far more than most.

Still, he's less worried about Nikita than most.

"My partner tried to kill me," he says finally. "I was CIA and she was instructed to kill me on my last mission. The only problem is that my instructions were the same."

That was a significant admission, especially including the agency he worked for, and she respected that. She appreciated the trust he'd just shown her. She wasn't sure she'd earned it, but at the same time, she knew from her own experiences that sometimes a person in their world had to talk about the things they'd been through to have any chance of being a human.

"I was sent on a mission that I wasn't supposed to come back from," she said in turn. "They meant to get rid of a few of us, all at once, all nice and neat. 'Oops, they just didn't make it out before the place exploded'."

"Funny how that happens," he says with a small, cold smile. It sounds awfully similar to what had happened to him and Kara. He had decided against turning his gun on her, but then she had shot him and refused to listen to what he had to say, which ended up with her caught in the building as the bombs were dropped.

The CIA had wanted to get rid of them both. He has Kara and her behaviour to thank for that.

"Not a very good Christmas bonus, is it?" he asks. "Being killed off by the people you work for. But sometimes it can work in our favour. I disappeared."

"They expect absolute loyalty, but they don't give it back. And then they wonder why they have problems with their people," she agreed with a similarly cold smile.

"I was warned," she shared in turn. She didn't say Michael's name. She hadn't said Michael's name to anyone here, for reasons that were both personal and professional.

"Someone knew the plan and made sure I knew it too. Otherwise I would have gone up with the others."

"I was just lucky," he admits. "My partner shot me and then I heard the planes coming in with the bombs. I realized what was happening. She didn't."

He smiles a little and lifts his glass to Nikita. "Here's to being alive when we very well shouldn't be."

John knows he should have died a dozen times over, given all that's happened to him. All the times he's been shot, stabbed, left for dead. All the times he's been drugged and tortured. But he's still here.

There was a part of her that was a little sad to hear that someone had died, as she almost always was,but another part felt like if Riley's partner wasn't smart enough or aware enough to hear planes with bombs coming (since that was a pretty distinctive sound), it was at least to some degree on her own head.

She raised her glass, but quirked a smile after she clinked it against his.

"Here's to screwing over the people who tried to screw us over," she agreed. "And being officially dead."

She wasn't sure if he was officially dead, but he probably was, since he said he'd disappeared.

"Presumed dead," John corrects her and he shouldn't be smiling at something like that, but it can't be helped. There are all kinds of things people like them have to smile about, because there's simply no other option.

"And now Darrow. I'm not sure what that makes any of us, honestly," he says. It's a strange place, even for a man like John, who had been taking directions from an artificial super intelligence before arriving here. There are days when he wishes the Machine was here, even if Finch can't be. The Machine had made a lot of things very clear.

"Speak for yourself. I'm legally, officially dead," she replied casually, although it wasn't really a casual thing to know that she was officially dead thanks to Section. It was convenient for them to have a whole place fully of highly trained dead people, so no one would care if anyone was actually dead instead of just dead on paper.

"It makes us survivors, as far as I'm concerned. Even with the death certificate."

Edited 2019-08-03 03:15 (UTC)

"Do you have that?" John asks, interested. "A death certificate? Here?"

He would never ask to see it, never presume to be welcome to that much information, but he's curious about the idea of it being here at all. It would be much like his uniform, he thinks, something that simply appeared out of nowhere and could have potentially disrupted the life she's built for herself here.

He still considers himself very lucky that no one had seen the nameplate on his uniform.

"Yeah," she replied. It was very very well-hidden and no one was ever going to see it since it also included the details of her prison record, but she hadn't ever destroyed it. It was her proof for herself of what Section had considered a reasonable act, just in case she ever forgot that.

"Little present awhile ago. I was just looking through a book and poof, there it was. Just like the necklace. The city needs to learn how to give better gifts."

She spoke lightly, of course, but she meant it. The city needed to give better gifts.

John laughs and nods, although he isn't overly bothered by his uniform. The medals pinned to it lend his identity here another level of credibility, supporting his story of having been in the military, but the nameplate had been dangerous. It's locked away now, along with Karen's file.

"My first gift from the city was a rocket launcher," he admits. "I love that thing."

He rarely has cause to use it, but he'd used it once, the very first day he'd gotten it, because there had really been no other option. If he hadn't used it, he knows he and a few other officers would be dead.

"Well, who wouldn't like a rocket launcher?" Nikita asked kind of rhetorically, although probably there were lots of people who wouldn't. None of them had been in a situation where a rocket launcher made the difference between surviving and not, though. She and Riley both had.

"I can picture the gadget guy at my previous employer looking gleeful about it, certainly."

Walter was far more than a gadget guy, but it was a decent title for this conversation.

"It was a gift form my previous employer," he tells her. "The one I had after I went mysteriously MIA."

Finch had been more than just an employer, of course, but after six years, it would have been impossible not to care for the man. At first it had just been the two of them, working so closely together, helping people all over New York. If they hadn't grown to care for each other, John doesn't think their team would have survived as long as it had.

Even now, he hopes they're still surviving back there. Fighting for what's right. Trying to bring down Samaritan.

She nodded. His previous employer must have been pretty wealthy to be able to afford that, not to mention knowing some interesting people. Those things weren't exactly sold at Objective.

"So, obviously, no names or dates or specifics, but what's the worst place you've ever had to go for the job? Define it any way you like."

"Iraq," he answers, then smiles a little. "I know you said no names, but this was during my military service. There's nothing secret about that."

The smile fades and he says, "It was awful. Not because of the location, but because of all the death. It was everywhere. The air smelled like death, there were children in burned out buildings, barely surviving, some of them not surviving at all. I think it was the closest the world can get to hell."

He was from a time a little past hers, which was obvious from the rocket launcher he'd gotten. It had looked like a more updated version of the ones Section occasionally either used, destroyed, or removed from their previous owners.

She had read about Iraq, though. It did sound like hell on earth, and she understood that. She'd been there

"I've been to places like that. It's the sort of place that makes you want to spend time with someone you care about, except if you're in a place like that, there's probably no one who qualifies."

He had cared about the men he worked with, the men who fought by his side, but he also understands what Nikita is saying and there really hadn't been anyone there who qualified the way his family had. The way Jessica had. He can only nod, then take a sip of his drink.

"What about you?" he asks. "What's your worst place?"

She had a few contenders for worst place, just like he had. Prison, certainly. There were worse prisons she could have been in, worse countries, but knowing that she was going to spend the rest of her life there had been difficult to accept when she hadn't even committed that crime. Section in general, honestly, because there was in some ways even less freedom than in prison.

"Anywhere with a civil war," she finally answered. "People are cruel in general, especially in a war, but they seem more cruel in those kinds of wars."

John nods, having seen that, too. People in America tend to forget, having not seen anything like it in a long time, and while they can all speak of history, there's really nothing that comes close to having seen it take place in other countries.

"It's always horrific," he agrees. "There's no way around it. And no way around knowing what you have to do, even if you started out just wanting to help, is horrific in other ways."

She nodded slowly. That was the hardest part of what they did.

"We can tell ourselves -- and our bosses can tell us -- that we're doing this for the long-term good of whoever, but it doesn't change the short term. And if it doesn't bother someone to do that, I'm pretty sure they're a psycho. I've known a few."

Karyn came to mind. That woman liked killing things, enough that even Section couldn't allow her to continue doing it. She was out of control. They liked control.

"So have I," he says. "That former partner I mentioned was..."

He's quiet for a moment. Kara had been broken for a long time before he met her and nothing he had done would have changed that, but there are still days he feels guilty for being unable to save her in the long run.

"She told me once I had to be the murderer or the boy scout," he says. "I couldn't be both or anything in between."

"Well, I was never a boy scout, so I guess that's out," Nikita shrugged. Killer, she'd admit to, but she sort of thought of murder as a different thing. Maybe it was just semantics to help her sleep at night, but she still made a distinction between the two.

"The people we worked for, the things we did -- they're not anything you'd want to be boasting about. But the gadget guy I mentioned, he told me once that it was possible to do what we did and still be a decent human being. Just, y'know, one with a few extra skills."

"I believe that, too," he says. That hadn't been what Kara was talking about, she had killed people just for the enjoyment of it and had passed it off as being necessarily when he knew otherwise. Disabling someone doesn't always have to mean death and John likes to think he's done a very good job at making that something of his motto in recent years.

It wasn't always avoidable, but he kept himself from killing people as often as he could.

"But it takes a lot of work to keep reminding yourself of that," he says. "To still see that side."

"It does," she agreed. "And it's harder some days than others. Especially when you don't exactly agree with the particular mission you're on. You can try to fight your bosses, try to argue that a mission shouldn't be run, but it doesn't generally work."

She paused. She'd told Phil this, but not anyone else. It fit here, so she'd say it.

"That's actually why I was scheduled to not come back from that mission I mentioned. I refused to kill too many innocent people and was considered a liability."

John nods and is quiet at first, knowing they're sharing a lot of information with each other, even in the vague and still slightly coded way they're going about it.

"I think it's turning out we have even more in common than we might have initially realized," he says after a moment and gives Nikita a small smile. These things they have in common aren't pleasant, he wouldn't wish his experiences on anyone, but as always, it's nice to be reminded even in this he's not entirely alone.

"It looks that way," she agreed. She'd realized from this conversation that John, like Phil, might be the only person here who could understand what she could do, why she could do it, and why she didn't want to talk about it.

She looked at him levelly. He could make his face show as much or as little as she could, but she knew how to read faces, and she wasn't getting any untruthful vibes here. He wasn't saying everything, but she didn't need or want that. It gave her an idea of something that might be good for both of them.

"So, I have a proposal. Well, two, actually. And you can walk away without hearing it, or turn me down when you do."

John has never been the sort of man to walk away from a proposal without at least hearing it out, especially not when he actually trusts the person delivering it. In a place like Darrow, where his potential for work is generally much more limited than it had been in New York -- proper work, anyway -- he's willing to listen to just about anything.

He looks back, still wearing that faint smile, and nods.

If it's something he doesn't want to turn down, he'll have to decide whether or not to loop Karen in on it. Chances are he'll have to, because while they've both kept things from each other, they've never outright lied either. That's not something he wants to start.

"First, there's a gun range here that doesn't have cameras in the lanes. I go there sometimes when I want to not pretend I can't shoot as well as I can. If you want to join me sometime, the offer's open," she suggested.

She was a damn good shot, but there was no explanation for her abilities that wasn't suspicious given the personas she used here. So, if she went to any other gun range, she held back. Maybe he did too, even with being a cop and having a known military background. There was skill and there was skill.

"Second, I'm pretty much retired. But occasionally, for the right reasons and the right person, I've come out of retirement. If you're ever in a situation where that might be useful, that offer's open too."

Riley had a rocket launcher. She didn't believe for a second that he always did everything by the books, and that meant he might occasionally need some backup. She'd offered the same to Porthos and Phil.

John doesn't mind people knowing he's a good shot, but he's also still working under an identity created by the Machine with his particular skill set in mind. Riley is a good cover, it gives him a believable reason for many of the things he can do, and so he doesn't have to hide quite as much as others.

But it's a good offer and so he nods to the first thing Nikita says.

"Thank you," he says when she gives her second offer. "That's an offer I think will probably come in handy every now and then. Especially when not all the work I do can go through the department."

She had hoped he'd agree or she wouldn't have mentioned it, but all the same, she was surprised that he agreed to both ideas so quickly. There hadn't been any negotiations, any discussions of who owed what or knew what. Maybe that would come later. Probably so, if and when he actually called her.

"Sometimes you have to color outside the lines," she agreed. "For me, as long as I don't go against my personal code, I'm alright with that."

Her personal code had nothing to do with any laws that might or might not exist. She'd been outside society and society's laws in various ways for most of her life.

"Personal codes never seem to line up with the judicial system, do they?" he asks. There's no judgement at all in his tone, because his own personal set of morals certainly don't fall in line with how he's meant to do his job as a detective. The law is restrictive and it gives too many rights to criminals. John understands the importance of innocence until proven guilty, but he's also seen too many extremely guilty people get off on technicalities.

So he tries to make sure that doesn't happen in Darrow. Even if he has to go above, beyond or below the law to do so.

"The judicial system in every country I've ever heard of is designed to protect the powerful and influential," she replied flatly. She knew that personally, because she'd essentially been framed and everyone had been ready to believe she'd done the thing she'd been accused of, mostly because of who and what she was or wasn't.

"Some of them pretend they're less like that, but all of them are. At that point, you do what you have to."

John smiles, but it's an expression without humour. He knows he would never be described as influential or powerful, certainly not in the way Nikita means, and he thinks that's part of what made him so good at the job Finch had wanted him to do. They had protected people. All people. Regardless of who they were or where they came from, if their number came up, they went to work. They put bad people where they needed to be and kept good people safe.

"I think we're very much on the same page there," he agrees.

Stiff drinks and stiff upper lips

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