Gabriel Reed (matchesmade) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-06-23 23:40:00 |
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Entry tags: | jane foster, red hood |
Who: Jack Corvus and Gabriel Reed
What: Catching up and taking back wild promises
Where: Gabe's favorite diner
When: Recently!
Warnings: N/A
The diner was in that peaceable moment between lunch and dinner service, too long in the day for anyone but stragglers to be seated around the tables and one waitress instead of three to manage them all. Gabe preferred places at the in-between times, where the coffee was fresh-made rather than a continually-topped-up pot and when the cook paused enough between what was on the grill that the grease was fresh. It was not, upon reflection, remotely conducive to being forgotten afterward. Diners that were slow were largely empty and waitresses might be working back to back shifts but they were the sharp-eyed that remembered an order several pages back in their notebooks, the keen-minded that knew how to work a room full of hungry people. When you wished to be forgotten, you came in the middle of the maelstrom and you ordered the same thing everyone else did.
But it didn’t much matter now. The cane he’d leaned up against the corner of the table out of the way and he sat, as relaxed as any other man in the diner, broad shoulders backed up against the solid wall of the booth - but he sat with his back to the corner, facing the door and Gabriel paid attention to his surroundings with a sharpness that was noticeable if you knew exactly what you were looking for - namely, another spook. There was coffee on the table in front of him, and a phone - blocky and old and patently useless for much other than simple things, a remnant from the last time he’d spent any length of time at ‘home’. He was watching those who passed along the street out front, and had a clearly established rapport with the waitress as he waved her off, smiling.
Jack was lines behind paragraphs of text in a file, a history that had never been formally set down and put into government computers. He was shadow, in the way all spooks who were good at the blood and the ambiguity and the death were, but shadow didn’t make for much understanding. Gabriel waited, and he thought of half a dozen conversations with Max that slid over into a kernel more of knowledge about Jack.
Jack had spoken to Gabe on the comms half a dozen times now, but the longest of their scant face to face encounters had been in the house for a few minutes before he'd run for the door. He forgot they hadn't actually sat down in person before until he was walking into the diner. It had been a long few weeks, and one or two things were bound to slip through. It felt too much like he knew Gabe well for his face to be nearly a stranger. But everybody was a stranger in the CIA, even the people he knew best.
He didn't have a lot of trouble spotting Gabe - a quick scan of the room found only a few people in it. Even if he'd never seen him in his life, the fact that he was sitting with his back to the wall, eyes scanning casual as could be, pinned him easily.
During his short stay at the house under Gabe's eye, Jack had been haggard and wild-eyed and just coming down from the manic sprint of the dangerously freeing drugs through the door. He didn't have the faintest idea of what Gabe expected from him today, now that things were back to something like normal, but he tended not to be what people expected a man capable of murder to be.
After Jason's run-in with the Lazarus Pit the scar on his face was gone. Jack was at the tail end of his twenties, and there were still a few holdouts from his old days as a musician. Vegas had proved too hot for him to wear the fingerless gloves he favored much, and he didn't have them on when he walked into the diner. But he still wore the same black jeans he'd worn before getting regular pay from the CIA, with a sage denim jacket and white t-shirt. Worn, worn, nothing new, from the boots on his feet to the collar of his shirt. Clean, sure, but it looked like he didn't remember what it meant to put on a suit and tie, if he ever had. He wasn't broad like the killer in movies, but he was dense enough that there was little doubt that he could easily murder without needing a weapon. He was all dark curls that needed a cut, sharp brows and jaw. There was a faint glimmer of metal at his neck - a long silver chain that followed under his shirt and disappeared, whatever was at the other end out of sight.
He looked like a man who hadn't slept, because he hadn't, and there was a faint bruise near his temple - Jason. "Hope I didn't keep you too long," he said, sliding in across from Gabe with a faint smile. "I practically ran over here just on the promise of pancakes."
He was a younger man than Gabriel had expected, young the way of men who moved through the world at a pace that lacked patience. Given the contents of the file, he had expected someone who looked malevolent, someone who bore the physical markings and indications of a man whose trade had been death before the government stamped him as their own. He looked young, and he looked as though he had little money despite the standardized government pay, and he looked wildly normal. Gabriel had taken little of the details of how his erstwhile agent looked on board the only prior meeting they had had, given the alarm and threat that was careering too close to civilians, calamity written out as strongly as the series of events in a file. Gabriel leaned back, shoulders relaxed and a give to his body that looked all civilian rather than career government man.
“You need the coffee,” he said confidently. Gabriel spoke slowly, the words accentless, neutral mid-America but with a slight emphasis here and there that suggested perhaps he had once had something a little less neutral entirely. “Coffee and then you can have the pancakes.” He looked at Jack very clearly and very obviously as if bothering to hide doing so would insult both men at the table, and he leaned over just enough to tap an item on the laminated menu flat on the booth top between them. “That’s what you want. Got to say,” he remarked, mild as talking about the weather, “You look better than the last time I saw you.”
People expected a lot of things from Jack they didn't get. It made more sense when one knew the story from start to finish - he hadn't exactly fallen into the life for any of the typical reasons. When he was in Seattle, it had all come down to one very simple focus, one reason only, and it had nothing to do with money or a lack of skill in anything else.
"I do," Jack said. His accent duly bore no trace of anything but the midwest, maybe the upper midwest if you had an ear for that kind of thing. "This is a multi-step process?" he asked, briefly running his fingers through his hair to get it out of his face, smiling crookedly in such a way that called someone very different indeed from the man he was in the field, someone he'd been.
Jack hadn't ever been in the military, and he hadn't trained to be in the CIA. He hadn't ever thought of it on a list of his life's aspirations, and he had in no way been prepared for the position when he'd been brought in. What he'd had was a history of death to qualify him, and to bind him into service for his country, whether he liked it or not. Thus, any front he presented had nothing to do with poker faced avoidance, or with pretending at being someone he wasn't. He watched Gabe tap the menu, his gaze bouncing up when Gabe's finger left the table again. "That's good," he said, with a touch of wry humor. "I'd be worried if I looked just the same."
The waitress sauntered up and offered coffee, which Jack accepted. He ordered the pancakes, as promised, and slid the cup of coffee toward himself, grabbing a packet of sugar, no cream. "Where are you from?" he asked, glancing up again. He tore the sugar packet, and his eyes went back to his pocket. "Originally," he clarified. "Unless that's a state secret of some kind."
Gabriel began adulterating his own coffee with liberal amounts of cream and then two sugar packets in a row, each corner neatly torn off and once emptied, folded into thirds and tucked under the edge of the mug. It looked like a routine, it looked as though he were absorbed entirely into it, until he lifted the dark-sweet brew and he grinned at Jack, as easily as if the diner stop were something between friends rather than coworkers. “It’s no state secret,” he said, amused, and he wondered how it had been that Max had familiarized herself with the contents of his file, expected him to know Jack’s and yet Jack did not -- the assumption of privacy was welcomed, there was not a great deal of privacy left to those who had a career in government. “It’s in the paperwork. I’m from Chicago.” In as much as he was from anywhere, Gabriel the kind of unanchored mutt, byproduct of a system that had regulated his childhood as attentively as it regulated the kind of ink cartridges in county courthouse printers.
“And then college, and then Virginia and then all over.” An expansive shrug, broad-shouldered. Gabriel had stretched out enough to be at ease, all rough-shaven and loose-knotted tie over a shirt that looked quietly expensive, something about the smoothness of the cotton and the tightness of the weave. “It’s good,” he tipped the mug in Jack’s direction, encouraging, and he drank with obvious enjoyment. “The pancakes are good, waitresses know when to leave you alone.”
"I'm from Detroit," Jack said, though he did assume Gabe probably knew that already. As the agent, he had no real reason to know his handler's file backward and forward, but Gabe had a good reason to dig into at least the general details. "So not too far." He hadn't been back to Detroit in at least five years. He'd made one stop after leaving Seattle to pay his respects to a few people already in the ground, and then he'd left the city behind. For the rest of his life, as far as he was concerned. He never wanted to go back there again.
"Didn't go to college," Jack said with a shrug. "I wish I had." There hadn't been money for that kind of thing, and he'd wanted to be a musician. You didn't need a BA to play rock clubs. He took a sip of the coffee and tipped his head in agreement. The coffee was better than the diner average, and it'd been a while since he'd had time to enjoy coffee at all. "I like that," he said, with a small smile. Any place where the staff knew when to walk away was good news. He was still fond of people, but the past seven years had left him with a distinct sense of when he wanted to be left alone.
He set his mug down, lowering his head a little. He took a breath. "I'm going to be honest with you, I barely remember what I came here to talk about," he said. "At the very least I owe you an explanation for my behavior at the house." He glanced up, but the waitress was clear on the other side of the room. "You know about the doors. The person that I have was through them trying to help with a major catastrophe, and he was drugged."
Ink on government-issued paper and computer screens that flashed up warnings every second and Jack was a chain of facts to rattle together, empty spaces a sway of expectation like beads sliding along on bare string. Detroit rang true, but it wasn’t dirt and oil and grease in Jack’s voice but the neutrality of a roamer, of someone nomadic. Detroit, but somewhere else after and a stretch of time in that somewhere else and Gabriel did not need to recall standardized facts and handler’s briefings to know that, as his hand wrapped around the mug of coffee, easy slope to the shoulders and a smile as free as anything.
Gabriel was man of masks and mirrors, of the deflection of expression that was learning to be someone else for long enough to make it easy, ghosting look of understanding, comprehension was vivid because he let it be so. “Drugged?” There were no drugs in Emma’s world of tea-parties and assembly halls, where the color of muslin was hot-debated, and the sky a steady and unstinting blue. He missed it, a world without conspiracies and other-worlds, without catastrophes that could tear apart the fabric of the world as tissue paper. “The kind that shows up this side of the world.” It was not skeptical. It was the methodical remark of putting together facts the way one might a jigsaw puzzle, slow statement aloud for clarification. “Your behavior makes a hell of a lot more sense drugged, sport.” A spread of hands, the coffee cup tipped a little, spilled a tar-colored streak down white china. “The doors explain a lot of things.”
"Something like that," Jack said, watching the wheels turn in Gabe's head. "But with the advantage of being in a world without all the same rules." He leaned back in the booth a little with his coffee cup, head resting against the back of the booth. "I wasn't afraid of anything," he said, wondering if that would make any sense to Gabe based on how he was behaving, what it would say that his first priority had been to leave the CIA, and leave behind all the people he spent so much of his waking hours worry about, with the exception of Max. "I wasn't worried about the consequences of anything. About me getting hurt, or anyone else. So I said some things I didn't really mean." His stare was long enough that it was hard to tell what was true in that and what was false, but it was important he say that to Gabe. He liked the other man, and he seemed like a consistent enough person not to hold Jack's general reluctance about working for the government against him. They ought to know that, by now, the people ranked above him. They'd brought him in with blackmail, after all. Worry kept him on a leash. Take it away, and he tried to run.
Click-tick-roll and Gabriel blinked and the whirring behind the eyes smoothed out, glassy-clear and the flitter of a smile that edged sympathetic. They all had ghosts, the men and women who were shadows in a system, the binary of dog-tags a glint at the throat beneath the sobriety of buttoned collars, suit jackets. That Jack might run, that he might walk away from threats and coercion and blood-on-hands, made a certain kind of bland sense - it was as clear as the history contained in manila folders, a history he had read carefully, the slow slide of another man’s story beneath the pads of his fingers. “Didn’t mean? Or don’t want to mean?” The smile was a careful, clear thing; he looked in that moment exceptionally old, old enough to have seen more than death and paperwork. To lack the passion of the young.
Gabe’s fingers tapped on his own coffee mug, he waved his free hand - signalling away a waitress before she’d approached, the half-step indicative of an awareness of the room, the space, the people who passed through it like chess-player predicting moves on the board. “You want to explain Main? There’s something that isn’t in the paperwork and I’d like to know if there’s anything that might pose a risk.” Mild. Too mild. The look in brown eyes was avuncular; Gabriel liked Jack, even when (If? Gabriel was uncertain, he looked steadfast back at Jack, all naked trust across a table) he lied to him.
Jack looked back at him in a way both measured and tired. "You know I can't say yes. Even if that is true." The waitress appeared to refill his coffee, which he'd drunk unthinkingly as they talked, and he gave her a small smile. "I'm under the impression that I'm not supposed to have doubts," he added, cryptic as could be until the waitress disappeared again, and he looked across at Gabe. "Cards on the table. I assume you know how I was brought on, and why." He wrapped rough hands around the coffee cup. A long time ago, those calluses had been from guitar strings. Now they tended to come from the repeated motions of loading and unloading magazines, the rough slide-recoil of pressed trigger against fingertip. "I'm committed, now, to doing the best job I can," he said. "I don't have much of a choice. I don't think that's the CIA's business, what I think of the work, so long as I do my job." It wasn’t harsh so much as it was tired. He had given much of himself to this job, including his participation despite his distaste. To ask him to police his thoughts, on top of it, felt like too much.
Of course it was, though, if they thought his doubts might make him less effective, or, worse, go rogue. He had far too much to risk by doing that, though. So there he stayed. He added a second packet of sugar to the fresh coffee, and when Gabe asked about Max, his gaze flickered forward across the table, but not all the way up. "We've known each other for a long time," he said. Some of the defensiveness from the moment before faded, but he was no less guarded. "You could say that she knows me better than anyone else." He glanced over at the kitchen. "She brought me on when she transferred to Vegas. I knew her when we both lived in Seattle, about six years ago now." He dropped the dead sugar packet wrapper on the table, close to the wall. "I hadn't seen her or spoken to her in the six years between, until she arrived here, and found me."
The job demanded many things; unthinking loyalty and fingers pressed around a trigger, the grip slack in palm until the job commanded it be raised. Gabriel had a marriage lost to the CIA, had a woman who had been smooth-cool palms over the job’s bruises, over the scars that the job had carved - tracery-map of where he had been taken, summoned and dismissed summarily like old dog tail-wagging for master. Gabriel did not think of thoughts to be policed, he looked across the booth-table at a man seemingly too young for guns and death and paperwork and he smiled, slow and without weight to it, as though all they had between them was coffee and breakfast.
“There a reason for six years’ worth of difference?” Gabriel was feeding more sugar into the dregs of his own coffee until it was noxious-sweet, a swirl of tar-thick liquid absorbing so many granules. A look, as serious and calm as sunny days. The questions were not the gossip-bubble-effervescence of wanting to know but rather the more ponderous queries of noting weaknesses, stress-points. People and places that could be abused by someone - by trouble. “Or do you lose touch with people that know you, sport?” The brown eyes were sober-clear. Gabriel looked as though he saw things beyond surface-deep; “I don’t want to ask a lot,” he said, flatly, “But I figure trust is something we gotta have if I’m in your ear at the worst of times.” A grin, broad - brilliant, for just a beat of a second. “Think of me as your sponsor. One of those Anon programs.”
Six years had felt like a long time, even as it had slipped past. He'd thought about visiting Max so many times, over and over, but kept convincing himself it was better to leave it alone, let her live her own life, be with Thomas, be with the man she'd chosen, and her daughter. At the mention of anon programs, Jack smiled a little. "Now you sound like Max," he said. "She sees me the same way, kind of. She's mentioned 'relapse' more than once." Relapse back into the bad old days, into seeing nothing but red and killing anyone who presented themselves as a target, anyone who Jack witnessed doing wrong, or could find enough evidence to feel for himself that they had done. Relapse back into the vicious cycle of cathartic death and the emptiness that came after.
"We decided to go our separate ways after Seattle," Jack said, haltingly. The waitress brought pancakes, and he offered her a small smile. He poured syrup over them and cut in with his fork - he hadn't realized until smelling them just how hungry he was, how long it had been since he'd had a real meal. "She had a daughter, and someone she cared about, and they were going to New York." He hesitated, just a hitch. "I thought it was best if I left her alone. It was...Seattle was a nightmare.” The words were grim enough, tired just in memory, that it had to be true. He took a bite of pancake and shrugged. “We fought a lot then, not much different from now, and we were both worn through. I felt as if all I brought her was trouble.” He picked up his coffee, took a breath, and admitted, “The man she was with hated me, and I hated him right back. Honestly, it drove me crazy to see them together.” An understatement. Thomas had made his blood boil. If the other man hadn’t been trying to put him in jail, he’d been trying to brick up a wall around Max to keep Jack out. Jack thought him self-righteous and cold to the point of cruelty to a woman he hardly deserved. Thomas, Jack expected, thought he was a murdering psychopath. “It had already been such a long year. I didn’t visit her because I knew it couldn’t go well. I think she’s still angry that I couldn’t get over that, go see her anyway.”
Gabriel listened to the words and he let go the coffee cup, his hands gone slack on the table top with a casual ease that looked more restful than the careful gaze trained on the man across the table would belie. It sounded - beneath the exhaustion, beneath the look of Jack that was gone thin at the seams - like something more than the kind of rubbing-along friendship. It was something bullet-graze tense, something that was more men-and-women and something at the back of it that was anger, more than he’d thought before. The CIA nursed many quickened hearts, jump-started pulses - the push-pull of commands tugged people together who weren’t meant to be so, Gabriel had thought perhaps it had been that. But it wasn’t that either. It was substantial, brick-and-mortar built rather than the husk of would-bes with ghosts.
He watched instead, the clatter of cutlery on the plate, and the clear expanse of white that was the pancakes steadfastly disappearing. Gabriel didn’t say that he knew now what lay behind Jack’s words, what he thought lay beneath them. It made Max difficult - a presented concept, a weak point to work at, if Jack were to have someone set out to find the cracks. “It sounds like a mess,” Gabe said, and his voice was rough-warm, friendly. “But you’re not just trouble, Corvus.” The coffee was abandoned, a murk of cooling liquid in the bottom of the cup. “Fighting - hell. Sometimes it’s just the way you talk when talking doesn’t work.” He sounded perhaps a little like he was wincing at the words.
Jack looked up at Gabe, and he smiled, just a little, almost fond. He saw what Gabe was trying to do, and whether it was kindness for a pathetic guy eating pancakes or just a handler doing his job feeling his way around his agent's weak spots, he was trying. Jack could appreciate that. "I am trouble," Jack said, knowing as anything. He'd seen firsthand what kind of trouble he was, what sort of misery he could bring into someone's life. All someone needed to do to find that out was go talk to Cerise, for all he'd tried, when they'd been travelling together, to help.
"Max and I have been fighting since the second I met her," Jack said. He paused, glanced up for the waitress, and looked back down at his pancakes. "I killed a man who was going to attack her," he said, picking up his coffee. "I didn't know then that she could have taken him just fine on her own."
Gabriel was many things but he wasn’t trouble. The lines were strictly observed - where Max was wild blood-red spillover, the lines noted only as something that could be seen governing all that lividity and temper, Gabriel was shade and shadow, the lines the only vivid things about him. He smiled now, the generous calm of a man at breakfast, with nothing concerning him but pancakes on his mind instead of the calm statement of death, of men who murdered off the books. “Main does fine,” he said now, mild as milk and he finished his coffee and sat, his fingers loosely looped together.
“And you’ve got more to you than trouble, sport. Although if you’re going to try to run off into the sunset with Main, we might have a problem.” It was warm, it was almost apologetic, it was a man standing behind the things he knew were so, rather than those he had made. “We both know that can’t happen. The running. Not Main.” A grin.
Jack smiled, faintly, because he wasn't a fool. He knew what Gabe was implying before he'd bothered to imply it. "I know," he said. "I wouldn't have so thoroughly recanted my wishes while drugged if I didn't." There was an abrupt transparency to that, and he sliced off another edge of pancakes. This was what his life had become - death, counter-terrorism, and breakfast food.
"If I tried to run off with Max Main," Jack said, "I would be running off by myself. She only agreed to meet me to get me somewhere that you could keep an eye on me and keep me from leaving. She'd never go." He glanced toward the door, and there was a flicker of something tired, not the least bit casual. It was an old wound, now, so old that he barely even felt it anymore. "She loves her job. And she wouldn't go even if she didn't. Not with me. You understand."
There was something about the agents who were die-hards that blunted them. They were knives in the hands of the wrong people, sharp - Gabriel recognized something of Max when he looked in the mirror, and he looked at the man across from him with the kind of smile that held an echo of understanding. There were casualties, when you held a knife too close. “I do,” Gabriel said, and he said nothing else but he smiled like faded white skin circling his ring finger, like photographs that would never be put on display.
“I can’t make it easier,” Gabriel said, and there were years of service in the submission to orders, to government that made decisions unsoftened by humanity, by the needs of people, “But for as long as I’m the voice in your ear, you can trust me, kid.” A smile, for the waitress who swung by with full coffee pot, who flirted without speaking with the young man eating pancakes in the booth whether he noticed or not. “It’s hard. That kind of thing.”
Jack didn't notice. He'd never been good about that sort of thing, and his mind was a thousand miles away. It was no doubt to his detriment, being hung up for so long on someone who he would probably never be right for, but that was just how things were. And it wasn't as if he felt right bringing his secret baggage to anyone else's doorstep who didn't know it already. He would never be good at living a double life, and a relationship with someone who had no idea what he did or what he'd done didn't sound like much of one.
"I believe that," Jack said, at last, because he did, and it was maybe the most positive thing he could think of in that moment to say. When the pretty waitress swung by one more time he gave her a small smile and took the check, because he wasn't about to let Gabe pay for his pancakes. One of the few blessings from this job - the first steady paycheck he'd ever had in his life. "You sound like you speak from experience," he said, because he hadn't missed that.
Gabriel laughed. It was a warm, strong sound in a place not much given to them; the waitress was busy two booths along but she turned and she looked. Gabriel’s eyes creased when he laughed as if the whole of him could not contain mirth, and his big hands were relaxed but they bunched now in the napkin, tossed it aside with good humor. “Sport,” Gabriel said and if there were war wounds a plenty, carved out in scar tissue and thin silvering lines like a map of all the missions he’d been sent on, the worst was thin line of pale skin wrapped around his finger like a tattoo, “I wrote the book.” Maybe Jack didn’t notice, didn’t know women - the passing glance of the waitress said he wasn’t looking, and maybe that was Main and maybe that was Jack himself, but Gabriel knew his own faults, knew his own failures.
“The job takes a lot,” he said carefully, and the viscous black liquid in the mug swirled once. “I don’t know many with a happy marriage, kid.” And the eyes were sad, behind the crinkles, behind laughter-lines carved over the years. The laughter faded. “Happy relationships don’t last all that damn long.”