Jason Todd is (thelazarus) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2012-08-27 23:15:00 |
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Entry tags: | red hood, rose red |
Who: Max and Jack
What: Meeting up again, and a job offer with the CIA.
Where: An alleyway downtown.
When: Recently.
Warnings/Rating: None.
It had taken Max four hours to locate her targets. She spent the other twenty hours before her check-in wondering if she could really complete this assignment.
She'd been back on the job for four and a half years, with the last four working for the CIA as a field agent. No deep cover, no undercover, not until this job, and she'd already told her superiors she was going to get made on first contact with Target A. They'd weighed the pros and the cons, and decided being made was, in this instance, an acceptable risk if it increased the chances of success. Max would have preferred to be reassigned.
Targets B and C didn't worry her. She didn't know either of them, and she didn't have any emotional connection to either of them. Target B was young, little more than a teenager, and those were easy enough to handle. He'd cave. Target C was going to be a pain in the ass, and she wasn't sure she could do anything to bring that one back into fold. Her area of expertise was information retrieval, intel, not people. But there was enough information work out here that the agency had wanted to minimize their footprint in the area, hence one agent, hence her. She knew there was another agent and handler pair in the area, but they were lower clearance and didn't concern her. The remaining agent assigned to Las Vegas was deeply undercover, and she didn't expect to see much of him. No, for the most part she was alone, but that didn't help her work, for once.
This was messy, and Max had left messy behind after her last fight with Thomas Brandon. She hadn't intended to ever look back.
She dressed in basic black - a snug tank and pants that were made to move with her - and she pulled her long black hair back in a ponytail. She didn't bother to conceal the firearm strapped to her thigh, and she didn't bother with a cover or a public location for an "accidental" meet. No, that would be pointless. And, anyway, she already knew Target A's weakness, the dog whistle that always made him come running.
She watched from a safe distance as he left the apartment he shared with another achingly familiar name from the past, and she took a sharp left when he reached the sidewalk, in order to make it to the long, dark alley up ahead before he did. Once there, she waited, back pressed to bricks, and she waited for nearing footfalls.
Then, she screamed.
If there was one thing in the world that could always be predicted to make Jack come immediately to attention, it was a woman’s scream. He’d just been on the way to the store to pick up some essentials that the apartment was sorely lacking, mundane things - food for Gus, more gauze for Luke so that he could continue to refresh the bandages on his hands. The scream cut all that short, whipped everything else out of his mind like a gale that scoured all away. A few other people on the street stopped or slowed, looking back toward the alley. Jack ran.
He didn’t wait to see what was going on before running into the alley, fully prepared to take out whoever had caused that scream, however many of them there were. Non-lethally, he reminded himself. He wouldn’t kill them. Just make sure they couldn’t make that woman scream again.
But the alley was empty, dark and devoid of people. There was no light to expose who hid in the space, though he could vaguely make out dumpsters and piles of wet cardboard boxes, rotting wood pallets from the store whose back door faced the alley. There was no sign of the woman, not yet, and no sign of an attacker. Not seeing anything didn’t make him relieved, it only made him more worried. If she wasn’t in immediate sight, mean she was already on the ground and dying, behind a pile of trash, out of sight. He stepped further forward, finding his way through the dark, listening for any more noise. He didn’t call out, just in case, and moved as quickly as he could while still being cautious, tensed to react to the first sign of movement. He was starting to have a prickling feeling that something was even more wrong than usual.
"Are you even armed?" she asked from the shadows, knowing perfectly well that he still wouldn't be able to make out her slim shape against the bricks, not until he came a few feet closer. And that voice took her back. Fuck, but it took her back. Life had changed so much since Seattle, and it felt like another world almost, another life, one where she did things she would never do now. Now she was back in the game, back in the world, and reacting emotionally was just not on the agenda. "Or did you plan to tear them apart with your bare hands?"
She stepped out of the shadows, away from the safety of the wall. Her hands were behind her back, her movement and stance entirely military, something she had given up long before the birth of her daughter. "It's been half a decade, Corvus, but some things never change," she added, voice low husk, intentionally not drawing attention beyond the alley. And it wasn't like anyone would come running. There weren't any heroes in the world, not really. Only men and women in uniforms and costumes. That was the organization's stance, wasn't it? Vigilantes needed to be brought in house, made assets when they could be, taken care of when they couldn't.
The voice stopped him cold, and he turned toward the source of the sound in the shadows. Even odds said he had imagined recognizing it. God only knew that if there was a sound he wanted to hear these days, it was Max's voice.
Then she came out of the shadow, and he couldn't really do anything more than look. She looked much as he'd imagined she would, when he thought of her. Older, but still the same, still - he wasn’t going to think it, and then he did - still beautiful. It had been five years, but her face hadn't faded in his memory. He'd just tried not to remember it.
It wasn't an illusion, or a hallucination, like the ones he used to have. She was too solid, too real, too present in the space for that. No, she was here, and she'd drawn him to the alley by screaming - some things never change - why? He didn't know what to feel, glad she was there or suspicious. If she'd wanted to see him, and she knew he was in town, why not just go to Luke's? Why draw him into an alley and hide in the shadows. Max had never been one for unnecessary drama, so why the cloak and dagger?
In the long pause that followed, his thoughts stumbled through all these questions, and came out with nothing more than surprise, and an odd sort of happiness. The kind that hurt. Seeing her shouldn't, by any rights, still ache, but it found a knife he'd thought was gone and twisted it a little deeper. Hopefully, it would pass. "Max," he said, almost just to verify what he was seeing. "What are you - I didn't know you were in Vegas." Something about the way she was holding herself struck a low chord with him, a steady hum of unease. “Why are you in town? Why the...” The screaming, he was going to ask, but then his eyes fell on the gun. Merely a dark shape at her side before, now that he saw it for what it was, his suspicions that something was going on were confirmed. Max had never openly carried weapons. "Are you alright?" Maybe someone was after her, and she'd come to Vegas looking for a place to lay low. It wasn't out of the question, considering how heavily she'd been involved in everything that happened in Seattle. "I don't carry a gun," he added. "You know that." Not usually, anyway. He tended to operate more with close-contact weaponry, knives and heavy instruments, falling back on firearms only when there was no other option, and never carrying them when he wasn’t actively looking for trouble. That aside, it went unsaid that he could very well have torn them apart with his bare hands, if he needed to. She’d seen him do just that, in the past.
Jack didn't know what to think, anymore. "...I want to just be glad to see you," he said, carefully, "but something tells me this isn't a social call." He really did wish they could just run into each other again like two normal people, catch up on the five years of missed time between them after everything that had happened in Seattle. They weren’t normal people, though, he supposed. But where was Amanda? Had she come with her? And where was Thomas? That one was going to nag at him, but there were other things to talk about first, it seemed. She’d never sought him out, and he hadn’t come back to New York to see her, and they both knew why. Why now. That was the real question.
"We both know guns aren't the only kind of weapon," she said, not interrupting beyond that, giving him a chance to think whatever he was thinking, to figure out whatever she was feeling. For all she knew he'd made a life since she'd last seen him, one that didn't involve thinking about her, and she was honestly sorry to fuck that up for him, if it was the case. So, she let him ask his questions, and she just moved further out of the shadows as his gaze dropped to the gun strapped to her thigh. It was intentional, that gun. It did a lot of her explaining for her. No, this wasn't a social visit. No, she wasn't in town to play the slots. It was cheating, but Max was willing to cheat in this case. It was going to turn into a mess as soon as she started talking, and she'd take anything that would make the conversation easier.
She reached into her pocket, and she pulled out a signal disruptor, a tiny, insignificant thing on her keychain that emitted a blue light when she pressed it. It would give them ten minutes of privacy, away from any listening ears, and even the piece in her ear would be shorted out by it. Max didn't get total privacy very often lately, but she was grateful of it for this conversation. "I'm fine," she added, a response to his earlier question, and she stepped forward, close enough to reach out a hand and touch, though her own hands moved into her pocket after the disruptor was pocketed again. She did look the same. Five years older, a woman in her thirties now, but not much different. Thinner, maybe, toner, but that was just a result of work, of the job, and nothing more. "It's not," she agreed about this not being a social call.
"It's a recruitment visit, and it's better off if your roommate doesn't know I'm here. You're made, but he isn't, and I'd like to keep it that way," she explained, and she pulled a hand out of her pocket and held out the identification that was tucked away there, CIA, Maxine Main, and very legitimate barcode to go along with it. That out of the way, she smiled, the smile genuine, but troubled. "How've you been, Corvus? Besides the recent fall off the wagon, that is?"
The press of the little button earned her a look. He didn't know what she'd just done, but it was nothing he'd sensed. She was either signalling to someone, or the tiny blue light had some other purpose - some kind of localized EMP, or a scrambler, maybe.
Jack didn't look much different either in the thin light from the ends of the alleys. Still the same scarred face that spoke to a bad history without words. He still didn't wear a contact to conceal his milky blue left eye, and he was still wearing mostly black. Even the fingerless gloves had stuck around, olive green today. "Good," he said, to her being fine. It was good. He'd had a kind of hope that maybe Max would be happy if she went off to New York with Thomas and Amanda, however Jack felt about Thomas and his patent inability to love her. He'd wished it for her. She deserved to be happy, after everything she'd been through.
But something told him it hadn't happened that way.
As soon as the word 'recruitment' came out of Max's mouth, Jack pulled back a step. Oh, this was not what he wanted to hear, not at all, and the longer she talked the worse it sounded. A business call was one thing. A business call for the CIA was another thing entirely. When had that happened? "I thought you were done being military," he said, with more than a little anger. Why had she gone back to those people? She'd done nothing but talk about how her father had practically forced her into it, and now she was back with them?
His jaw set. Unbelievable. He stared down the other end of the alley, then looked back to her. "Did you tell them?" he asked, not bothering to answer her question. There was betrayal in that look. And if he was honest about it, it did sting, more than a little, that it had taken a murder and a mission from the government to get her face to face with him again. It didn't get much worse than this. What the hell was he going to do?
"It's a signal disruptor," she said, catching his look and glancing down to her pocket. "So no one can hear us if they're listening," she explained, another indication that she was definitely back in, and back in deep. His question about her being done with the military earned him a look that was more candid than she gave most people. "I had to get back in the workforce. I'm good at this." It was a confirmation that, yes, Thomas wasn't part of her life anymore, even if she didn't say as much. "Anyway, I made the choice for myself this time. Got transferred to CIA after six months, been doing field work ever since." Which was a lot of explanation, and a lot of unnecessary explanation, but this wasn't a regular asset; this was Jack, and that made things different - complicated, but different.
When his jaw went taut she rolled her eyes. "Yeah, Corvus, I told them. That's why I'm asking you not to tell Luke, because I'm going around selling out masks and I don't want him caught." Her hands moved to her hips, an old and familiar posture of annoyance. "No, I didn't tell anyone anything. They found you on their own. You'd gone cold, but now you lit back up again, and I'm here to make you consider your future." The look she gave him was hard and serious. The life she was in now, it wasn't one she could just walk away from, and she really hoped he would make the right choice here. "Sorry, Jack," she added, because she was. She didn't want anyone else caught in this crossfire, and she was doing her best to make this end in a way that wasn't bad for him. "They haven't made anyone else we know, and these aren't hits. I think you'd believe in what this division was doing, if you gave it a chance." And that was definitely a pitch, which was obvious enough in her tone of voice.
So something had happened with Thomas. He wasn't going to ask now, but he'd find out soon enough, he was sure. "As long as it's what you want," he said. It didn't sound great to him, but she was right when she said she was good at it, and it was her choice, in the end. Selina's words about giving up on everything came back to him then, but this wasn't worth fighting her on. Nothing he could say was going to convince her to quit, not when she was here to bring him onboard.
It was a little difficult to believe that they'd finally managed to catch up with him. The man at the house had been one of the cleanest kills he'd ever made. It wasn't something he was proud of, but it was a fact. Short of a hidden camera he hadn't known about, he had no idea how they'd found him. That wasn't important anymore, though - they'd found him all the same, despite the care he'd taken. At least they hadn't found Luke, or figured out what Wren had been doing.
"So this is an ultimatum," he said. “I do this or they send me to prison. Or kill me. I suppose that would be neater.” He wanted to say that he'd been ready to quit. He'd just gotten through all of this. He'd realized the mistake he'd made and he was going to try to find something else to do with his life. But someone was still dead, in the end, and he supposed the CIA didn't much care who they were or what they'd done. "You can spare me whatever they told you to say," he said, and that pitching voice did get a narrowed gaze. "I want to hear what you actually think of these people. I hate to bring this up, but you did spend a year and a half in Seattle trying to get away from them. Nothing I heard about the work you did sounded good, or useful. Why would I help a system I don't believe in fight a war I have no stake in? I'm not military, Max. You know that. I can’t follow orders, or throw my emotions away. I know it. I spent five years trying.”
She didn't address whether it was what she wanted or not. She was too old for that kind of question, way too old for any regrets like that, and too practical to think it mattered. Maybe seven years ago, when she'd first arrived in Seattle and left it all behind. But not now, all these years later and with a child starting first grade in a week. As for how they'd caught him, she wasn't part of that either. She'd only been put on this assignment in the last week. Before that, it was Target C, and nothing more. "If I was really selling people out, Corvus, you think I would have started with you?" she asked, hands moving from her hips to her ponytail, which she tugged tighter for no real reason at all.
"It's a recommendation," she said. "I haven't been assigned to take you out if you say no." She had been assigned to take Silver McKellar out if she couldn't make him see reason, but she was hoping that order would change before she was expected to move on it. And there was a standing "maybe" on taking out other "terrorists" in the area, but again, not her assignment yet. She checked the signal disruptor again, and then she looked at him. "I was running from the Army. This is CIA. It's different. Government, not military," she explained, and she moved back until she could slide up and sit one one of the stacks of old wood. "I've spent four years tracking down men who kill people without the justice system. Some of the people we would have killed. I admit that. But others, no, once it starts getting personal, justice gets lost, Jack. It turns into something else, and that can't happen." Something in her eyes said she was talking about something personal, someone personal. "Those are the people we bring in. I've seen some of them turn around. Some of them can't."
Every move she made was so completely familiar that Jack felt like he was back in Seattle again, tugging at her ponytail and settling her hands on her hips. "I don't know," he said, honestly. Max had been his friend, but it had been five years. If she was working with the government again, that meant a lot of changes. And he couldn't even begin to guess how she felt about him after five years with no contact from either of them. By the time everything in Seattle was done, and they all went their separate ways, she couldn’t have ever wanted to see him again. "For all I know, you remember things differently than I do. You might have decided you wanted a clean slate. I don't think you'd turn in Luke, or Wren, or any of the rest of them. I trust you. But me? I don't know. They never killed anyone, and you don't owe me anything." No, if anything, it was the other way around. It wasn't an insult to her trustworthiness, that doubt, or her loyalty as a friend. He was a murderer, after all. Stranger things had happened than people wishing to cleanse themselves of any involvement with the events in Seattle.
"Government, military." It was dismissive - it was all roughly the same to Jack, all a part of the system of governance and law he'd actively avoided getting involved in, the one he'd seen fail over and over, let so many people slip through the cracks. He didn't even seem upset anymore, really. Just worn thin. He did listen to what she said, though, because her opinion was a lot more important that whatever rhetoric the people behind her might want him to hear. The reassurance that it wasn't a hard and fast decision between one bad alternative or another helped as well. Hard to believe, but it helped. No matter how many years it had been since they'd last spoken, he didn't believe Max would lie to him about something that could mean life or death, freedom or imprisonment.
As Max went on, he wasn't sure anymore who she was talking about, exactly. "Thinking of someone?" he asked. He wondered if she'd tried to bring Thomas into the program, and then remembered that wouldn't have been possible, of course. "And the ones who don't turn around?"
She didn't say anything when he said that Luke and his girlfriend had never killed anyone. She'd been keeping tabs on Luke over the years, even going so far as to regularly check in with someone who he was in contact with as his killing spree escalated. But she didn't mention it. "I don't owe you anything?" she asked instead, cocking her head and giving him a long, quiet, brown-eyed stare. "Do you think five years makes me a different person, Corvus?" she asked, and there was some hurt lingering there, old emotions that bubbled to the surface easier than she would have liked. She shook her head, and she slid off the wood slats, rethinking this conversation. She was a trained agent, and he was an asset, and she couldn't let this get personal.
She started to walk past him, but she stopped partway, because conditioned or not, this wasn't just any asset. She gave him a look that was more direct than the previous ones, more old Max and less of the past five years. "You weren't in New York when it went to shit. This life, it didn't do Luke any good, and didn't do you any good. Show me one person who's better off for killing people in alleyways, Corvus. One." She knew he wouldn't be able to, and the stare she turned on him was piercing. "You may not like the government, but the military would kill you in a second. The legal system would try and convict you. Law enforcement would arrest you. At least this is a fresh option, and I haven't seen them terminate anyone yet, not on my watch." It didn't mean they wouldn't, but this wasn't a backwater organization. She wasn't a huge fan of everything the government did, but this was better than the shit the Army put her through.
His question, that thinking of someone made her pause, but she didn't answer. She still hoped Luke could get out clean. Jack had always been too far gone for that, ever since she'd known him.
"I don't know what it makes you," Jack said. That was the honest truth. "You're different. I just don't know how much, yet." He wasn't trying to hurt her, but how was he supposed to know what to do? She'd showed up out of the blue and told him the government had tracked him down. And she was hardly just a messenger.
Jack looked back at her. Five years hadn't left him any better, but they had left him steadier, calmer, at least on the surface. That fractured gaze didn't waver. "It isn't about being better off," he said, quietly. She was right. It was just never about bettering the person doing it. It was about saving lives, at whatever cost necessary to the psyche, the body, and the soul. The rest of it he didn't address, letting it just wash over him. It was so hard to care about anything for long, these days. She might be right about the job. Maybe it was the only alternative. It was certainly the first fresh idea for what he might do that he'd heard in a while.
"How's Amanda?" he asked. "You said it went to shit in New York. She's alright?" He didn’t bother to ask about Thomas. He’d get his answer, one way or another.
"If it's not about being better off for you, then look at other people, people you care about. What about them? Is it the right life for them?" she asked, because she knew Jack would never be able to look at himself and give a shit what healthy was or wasn't. "If it isn't good for other people, then it isn't good for you either. We do some good work. Take the real bad guys down, and take them down in a permanent way. Not one rapist, but rings of pedophiles. Not one pimp, but entire sex shops. It's something, Corvus. It makes a difference in the way my international work never did." And there it was; her honest sale, and why she'd transferred into this division., despite the dangers. Ending up here, well, that was unexpected.
She gave him an honest smile when he asked about Amanda. "She's starting first grade next week. She's smart, and she's bossy, and she gives great hugs. She lives with Thomas when I'm in the field, and with me when I'm in D.C." Which is where home was these days, D.C. The smile faded a moment later. "I meant things went to shit with Luke, but I'm guessing you already know that, since you're living with him. I left right after."
"I don't really care very much about what's good for me,” Jack said, with the tired surety of something he was aware she knew already. “I want them to get out of it, you're right. But someone still should be doing it. Better me than them." He listened to her pitch, and he'd have been lying if he said it wasn't interesting. What he did was about trying to help people, after all, even if it was driven by his own demons. Helping more people was a good thing across the board. The only question was whether it was actually effective or not. "How permanent?" he asked, a hard edge to his gaze.
Jack softened some as well when Max started talking about Amanda. He could almost imagine what she might look like now, five years on. She'd been a sweet little hellion back in Seattle, and was under a year old, then. "I'm glad," he said. It made him think of Gus, immediately. That was the sort of life Gus ought to have a chance at - something close to normal. "I don't know what happened with Luke," he said. "I know he and Thomas fell out at some point, but I don't know why. You do?" It honestly surprised him that Max had left in the end because of something with Luke, but then again, it did make a kind of sense. He would have expected that she'd just tired of Thomas not caring for her, but that hadn't been enough to push her away from the start. Of course it ended up being someone else's welfare that drove a wedge between them.
"I know you don't, but if it isn't good for someone else, then it isn't good for you. And I'm not convinced someone should be doing it. That hadn't changed, Corvus. I still don't think it solves anything." His question - how permanent - didn't surprise her. "Federal jail, federal conviction. The rules are different. These guys, they don't walk. Not after all the work we do to get them. We aren't police, Corvus. We're the CIA. Our rulebook is different. We go after national threats to security, whoever they are. These guys aren't walking. We do a lot of information gathering, though. Might as well know that right up-front."
She was surprised that Luke hadn't told him what happened. She didn't know how the kid hid five years of murders that made Jack looked like the most well-behaved citizen in the country, but she reminded herself of just how far away from that she wanted to stay. "That's Luke's story to tell. Not mine," she managed, after a second's hesitation. "If you tell him I'm here, you need to use my cover. I'm working Digital Forensics at UNLV. Research. No CIA, Corvus. I mean it. Don't compromise me, or they'll move me off, and you might not like whoever takes my place." She smiled then, and it was an honest smile. "Some of the male agents wouldn't be up your alley, and their bedside manner isn't anywhere near as good as mine." A pause. "You'll think it over?"
Information-gathering and throwing criminals in prison to rot didn't sound in line with Jack's philosophy on punishment at all, but at least federal prison promised that the men who were put away wouldn't have another chance to hurt someone, barring a one in a million breakout chance. “Not great,” he told her, “but better than I expected.”
Jack knew Luke had been killing, but no details, no numbers, just some of the motivation behind it. He would remember what she'd said, and ask Luke about it when next they spoke. "I'm not going to compromise you," he said. "But you know it doesn't sit well with me to lie to him." He and Luke were friends, as much as Jack often found himself in more a caretaker role with him, Wren, and Gus. It would chafe to lie to them, but he didn't want Max sent away. He knew that had to do with more than just keeping her on as a potential handler.
That smile of hers caught him by surprise, enough to melt some of his lingering resentment at being found out, and her sudden appearance. "I'll think it over," he said, running a hand through his hair. "...it really is good to see you, Max." He shrugged, slightly. “I thought I might not again.” That, at least, wasn’t bitter. He’d long ago accepted the fact that things simply hadn’t worked out between them, and it was hardly Max’s fault they hadn’t.
"Better than you think right now," she corrected. There was something about stopping the really terrible people that was a welcome change from anything overseas or white collar. "And don't worry, Corvus. We kill plenty of marks along the way," she added, her voice tense. It was what she'd always hated about the job, the disassociation that came with being able to kill, to let a partner die for the greater good, to take that pill if you were made. But there was less of that here, in this division, and she was glad of it. But there was a darkside, and she guessed it was what Silver McKellar had been running from. She only hoped Jack could keep from buying into it too far, which was just as bad as the alternative.
"If you're going to be a part of this life, you need to learn to lie to people to keep them safe. The more people that know what you do, the better your chance of getting them killed. We go after big hitters, Corvus. We're undercover for a reason," she explained, and there was no joking in her voice, nothing that was even a hint of a smile. That particular rule was too important, too crucial. "You don't talk about it, not with anyone. Rule number one."
She nodded when he said he'd think it over. "It's good to see you too," she said truthfully, even if it was a fucking mess. "Though I'm sorry you ended up back here," she said truthfully. "It would have been nice to see you in another kind of life." Luke too, but she didn't say that either. Then, curiously. "The little boy? His or yours?"
"That's not something I'm looking for,"Jack replied, a gentle rebuke. It wasn't as if he was a serial killer, after all. He'd gone five years between Seattle and now without killing a single soul. He tried to think forward, about what this job might mean, what it might entail, how it would be structured, but he couldn't. It was, in many ways, disheartening to think about. Best not to worry about it until he was doing it. It was all too likely that he wouldn't be able to work within a system, with other people, operating under orders. He wouldn’t know until he tried, though.
It made his heart sink to think he'd have to start lying to everyone again, with the people he lived with, the friends whose child he cared for. "Tell me that doing this job wouldn't put them in danger," Jack said. He knew that, at least on some level, Wren and Luke needed the extra help he offered. He couldn't just abandon them, not after how terrible things had been lately. "So long as I don't tell them." He could already tell it was going to be a difficult promise to keep.
Jack felt sorry, too, regretted it, but the words hung poised on the tip of his tongue. He wanted to ask her why she hadn't asked him what happened, what drove him back to it after so long on the straight and narrow. The old Max would have asked that first. Things really had changed. "Luke's," he said. "It's complex. I help take care of him. His name is Gus.” For the first time in the conversation, some real warmth came into his tone. There wasn’t much left he still cared about, but he cared about his friends, and he cared about Gus. “Things have been chaotic, and Wren hired me for security." That was the very short version, though there had been so many jumps back and forth taking care of different concerns that he could hardly remember them all at this point.
"Yeah, well." Jack slid his hands into his pockets. "There was never another kind of life. Not for me." There couldn't have been a more despairing thought, but now that this had happened, he truly believed it. The past would out, no matter where he went, or how much he tried to change, be a better person. He couldn't even keep the promise he'd made to Luke, now. Maybe it was right, though. He had promised himself he would stop pretending he was normal, hadn’t he, stop pretending he wasn’t sick? He wasn’t good for much, but he could be good for this.
"What you're doing now puts them in danger, Corvus," she said, and while she hadn't looked into anything Luke had done in years, not since her last conversation with Spencer, she knew that what Luke did put Jack in just as much trouble. She didn't count Wren in the equation, because she'd only seen the woman that she faintly recognized from Seattle once or twice, and she assumed Jack's them merely referred to Luke and the child. "If you're careful, no, they'll be fine." But Jack knew everything came with risks, and messing up here? It came with more than the average job. "Most of the risk here will be to you, Corvus, and to your targets," she said honestly, because she was in danger every day she walked out the door; she wasn't going to lie to him to him about that.
The information that the little boy Max had seen during her recon belonged to Luke wasn't surprising. Given his age, she assumed he was likely Wren's, but the fact that he lived with Luke didn't surprise her either, not given Wren's past. She didn't ask, because she'd been trying too hard not to become involved in Luke's life. That had always been a challenge for her, not involving herself there. Despite it causing dozens of fight with Thomas, who thought she didn't belong in that particular familial relationship, she'd always been more than fond of the kid. It would be too easy to get involved, and anyone she was involved with? The government paid attention to. No dice, and she couldn't afford attachments, not in this job. It was the same reason she didn't ask Jack what put him back on the killing track. And, anyway, she already knew. With Corvus, it was always sexual violence to women, in one way or another.
"This life isn't about being too broken to do anything else, Corvus. It's about making a choice to make a difference. Don't hide in it. If you're going to hide in it, turn it down," she suggested, and that was experience talking. And, in truth, she didn't know if Jack could do it. If it had been her choice, she wouldn't be standing there and recruiting him. But it wasn't her choice. That's the thing about being an agent; the choices were made for you. She took a step forward, and she touched his shoulder, the touch steady and lingering. "It was good to see you. I'll be in touch."
It was a fair point, and Jack nodded in response. "Alright." That was the most important thing. As usual, his own safety wasn't a worry, and if that was the only major risk, he had nothing to really be concerned about.
The touch was unexpected, at this point. "I hope so," Jack said. He wanted to hear from her again, god help him, even if it was just about this job. Whether he was too broken to do anything else wasn't really up for debate any more. There were other jobs, of course, other things he could do to pay the bills, but they didn't have anything to do with a purpose that made life worth living for. If he wasn't being of use to someone, if he couldn't help anyone, he had nothing. The only way he might say yes would be to hide in it. But he didn't tell Max that, of course. He met her gaze for a moment. Every once in a while, he still had dreams about seeing her again. Now here she was, here they both were, talking in an alley like the one he'd met her in. He made a first impression by killing the man who'd tried to kill her. It was hard to talk to her to begin with, even harder to watch her go back and forth between distant and connected, pulling away every tie she exposed some edge of the person he'd known.
It wasn't going to be an easy job.