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He probably shouldn't have gone through the breach, but after the newspaper article Karen had found on him, he hadn't been able to help himself. It was a risk, but it was one he was willing to take just to find out what was on the other side, to see the world another John Reese had lived and died in, the man who had never been found by Finch, who had never been saved.

It hadn't seemed all that much different than this one. He hadn't felt the need for a disguise, expecting anyone who had known this world's John Reese would have known him at the man he'd died as. Homeless, bearded, his hair long and unwashed. No one would recognize him as he was now. He'd wandered through, observed the people who lived here, stopped in at the library to find himself a copy of the newspaper Karen had shown him, then headed out to pick up a coffee before returning to the Darrow where he'd found himself months ago.

Carrying the newspaper with him is perhaps a little dangerous, but there's a part of him that wants to show it to Finch. Everything he'd told Karen about Finch's role in his life had been the entire truth, but he knows he's never been particularly good at expressing his appreciation right to Finch's face, and he thinks the article might encompass everything he doesn't know he has the right words to say.

Without Finch he would be dead. He's long since thought so, but now he has all the evidence he'll ever need.

He's back in the Darrow he's been living in these past few months, reluctant it to call it his Darrow or the regular Darrow as he's heard others refer to it as. John wouldn't call himself settled, he'd been disappointed to find he wasn't able to orchestrate a way for him and Harold to head home through the breach, but he's more comfortable here. This is a city he's investigated, one he's searched, it's a city he's come to know. There's comfort in that.

John might be reluctant to say he's made friends, having never been very good at friendship before Finch, but at the sight of a familiar face ahead, he smiles and lifts one hand in a wave.

"Afternoon," he says when he's close. "How are you?"

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"Oh, I think we definitely have to find that out for ourselves," Karen says, laughing. There's a lot of good food in Darrow, sure — it continues to be one of the perks of living in an actual city — but having gotten used to New York pizza, she's sure there's nothing that could compare, no matter how good the people here say it is. She couldn't even determine what makes the difference, when it comes down to it, but as far as she's concerned, everything people say about the pizza in New York is entirely true. "You know, it's funny, growing up, I thought I'd had good pizza before, but after moving to New York... There's nothing like it, is there?"

She shakes her head. "Or, I don't know, maybe this place will prove us wrong." She's not sure she really cares one way or the other. It's not really about what they eat or where they go or how good it is, but rather the fact that they're doing it at all, stupid as she feels thinking so. All they're doing is getting lunch, something perfectly normal that people do all the time, but still, it's nice.

"There isn't," he says, shaking his head with a smile as he turns them in that direction. He's been all over the world and eaten in some of the nicest restaurants anyone would be able to find, but there's truly nothing like a slice of New York pizza, no matter what anyone else advertises. Kara had made certain they ate the best meals they possibly could whenever they possibly could, but she had been just as comfortable eating rations whenever necessary. Kara Stanton had been a strange and interesting woman.

Dangerous, but interesting.

"New York feels like the centre of the world in a lot of ways," he says. "And I've been to most of the rest of it, but there's still something about that city..." And it's arrogant, perhaps, but that city exists like so few others.

"Well, all I have to compare to is the middle of nowhere, so it's good to know that the same is true even when you've seen the rest of the world," Karen says, her smile wide. In some ways, it's hard to imagine, if only because of the way she grew up. As a child and a teenager, she used to dream about all the different places she could go, the countries she could travel to, the distance she could put between herself and home. Having set out for New York, though — obviously being here has changed that, since she had no say in it, but she can't see herself choosing to be anywhere else, even after all the shit she went through there.

Then again, it's not like it would have taken much to beat being at home.

"But there is, it's... It's hard to say just what it is, but there's something. I'm not sure anywhere else could come close."

"I grew up in the middle of nowhere, too," he tells her. "Colorado. It was beautiful." Even now he misses it, because for all he does love New York and so many of the other cities he's spent time in, his best memories are the ones he has of his childhood.

His parents had been good people. Kind and loving. They'd both died too young, far before John was ready to let them go, but at least he'd had them for a time. He knows that's more than a lot of people can say.

"But it wasn't New York," he adds as they arrive at the pizza place and he opens the door for Karen to go inside ahead of him. "And I certainly couldn't get sushi in the middle of the night or find someone still busking at three in the morning."

"I'd never had sushi at all until I moved to New York," Karen admits, glancing over her shoulder at John as she steps inside, pausing once inside the door. "The town I grew up in had something like four hundred people in it, we didn't exactly have a lot of choice for food. It was one of the best parts of moving to the city, getting to try all these things I'd never had before." There's a lot more to it than that, too, of course, but the opportunity New York provided her, the fresh start, isn't something she wants to dwell on now, especially under the circumstances. It's just lunch, a perfectly normal way for two people to be spending the afternoon, but she doesn't want to cast a shadow over this, either. "It is nice to have all that here, too, at least, even if I doubt it's really going to compare."

"Let's find out," he suggests, touching his fingers to her back without thinking, holding one arm out in the direction of a free table. There's a waitress heading in their direction already, laying menus on the table John is moving toward, pouring water into the glasses already waiting for them and she's pretty, smiling at them both in welcome, but John's focus is on Karen.

It's barely a touch at all, just his fingers against her back, but he can't help but think how nice it is. He should know better, but sometimes he just can't seem to help himself.

"What brought you to New York?" he asks once they're seated, then smiles slightly. "You know I was trying to drink myself to death, but hopefully your draw to the city was a little more cheerful."

The way he touches her, his fingers against her back, seems so easy, so natural, that Karen doesn't fully register it until they're at the table and she's seated across from him, like it takes the absence of his hand there to draw attention to its presence at all. She's not sure why it matters, anyway — just like their being here, there's no reason why it should mean anything — except that it's nice to feel good like this around someone, at ease even in spite of the question he asks and the answer she knows she can't give.

Sometimes she thinks she could tell him everything and he would understand, unlike Matt and Foggy back home, who never would have. With what she knows about John, it almost doesn't seem fair to keep so much to herself. After so long, though, not even discussing with Ben and Ellison what they found out about her, she isn't sure how to, or where to start. Maybe some things are just better kept buried.

"I just needed a fresh start," she says, since it isn't like that's not true. People come to the city for all sorts of reasons, and she'd be willing to bet that that's chief among them. "To get out of the middle of nowhere and set out on my own somewhere. I always knew where I grew up wasn't where I wanted to stay, so... New York seemed like as good a place as any."

"It offers its share of options anyway," John says and he knows from experience it's a good city to disappear into. That might not have been what Karen wanted, a fresh start can mean any number of things, but he knows there are plenty of people who run to New York for the crowds, for the relative anonymity, for the ability of people to slip through the cracks and never be heard from again.

That had been his plan, after all. To sleep on the streets, to be homeless, nameless, entirely without identity until one day he just died.

"I had someone ask me once, if I wanted to be homeless why I didn't go somewhere warmer," he admits with a small smile. "And I think the truth is that I would have missed the snow."

"Oh, well, that really is cheerful," Karen says, a laugh bubbling out of her before she can stop it. It's really not something she should find any humor in, and if she stopped to think about it too hard, she knows she wouldn't, remembering the sinking feeling she'd felt when she found that obituary in the newspaper in the other city, but he's smiling, so it can't be too out of place. The important thing is that he's here now, that he didn't do what he'd originally intended and wound up like his counterpart in the other Darrow. "Honestly, I think I would have, too. Not that I was homeless, obviously, but I don't think I would have liked being somewhere it just felt like summer all the time."

"When you grow up surrounded by mountains, it's hard to imagine a world without snow or seasons," he says, shaking his head a little. He's glad to have made her laugh, even when the topic is something as decidedly morbid as his period of homelessness.

At least Finch has wrenched him out of that much in Darrow. He's no longer sleeping on the train and he officially has more than one suit to wear, which he imagines is a step up.

"You know, it wasn't so bad," he admits. "Being homeless. It's the safest I've ever felt."

"Right?" Karen asks, her accompanying smile a little surprised, though if she really stops to think about it, it isn't all that unexpected coming from John. As strange a feeling as she'd always found it to be, somehow it just makes sense that he would understand it, even if it's for different reasons. "I mean, not that I was homeless, obviously, but even with all the awful shit that happened... I always felt safe there. Something about being one of so many, I guess. Or just the way you come to know a place. Maybe a little of both."

She'd certainly felt safer there than at home, but saying even that much seems like opening a door that then there would be no closing, too close to too many truths. Besides, she would much rather enjoy this than get too hung up on the past now.

New York has a way about it other cities don't, there's no denying it, but it's really only understood by people who have lived there. John remembers the community of the streets, the way he'd felt every night, knowing he had somewhere to go, somewhere people would miss him if one day he stopped showing up. At the time the plan had been exactly that, eventually he would disappear.

But he'd had people to take care of him. People with no reason to, people who had nothing themselves, people who would perhaps have been angry, but they'd never done anything but show him warmth and kindness, and at the time he had desperately needed both.

"And people care," he says. "New York has a reputation for being cold, but I think that's false. People... they care."

There isn't much more he can say about it, but it's the truth. There are cops like Carter and even Fusco. Men like Harold Finch. Women like Shaw and Root. They care, they work to make things better, even if only for a moment. Every gesture matters, even the smallest.

"Yeah," Karen agrees, a little softer, thoughtful, though still warm. "Yeah, they do. Even if sometimes you have to look for it, and sometimes it's where you least expect it." There have been times, sure, that everything has felt hopeless. The night she showed up here, hearing that gunshot echo through the woods, she'd been certain that there was nothing left, all the people who mattered to her gone in some way or another, making it so that she wasn't leaving anything behind when she showed up here. More often than not, though, no matter how awful things have gotten, no matter how much shit she's had to see and put up with, there's always something to balance it out, worth holding onto. She can't imagine she would have stayed if that weren't the case.

It's everywhere, though, no matter how hard it is to see, from the two lawyers who saved her life and turned everything upside down, to a mass murderer who somehow became one of her closest friends, to the Devil of Hell's Kitchen himself. Under everything is the fact that they cared. And she — well, maybe she's always cared a little too much. There are worse things than that.

"I haven't really found that here, not in the same way. I mean, I think people who aren't from here tend to kind of band together, but... It's not really the same."

At least John has Finch. In that regard he knows he's lucky. He had a friend here, someone who knows him better than nearly anyone else ever has, although he knows most people wouldn't call Finch particularly warm. He can be, in his own way, people just need to give him a shot and understand where the warmth comes from and how it's manifested.

Not everyone in Darrow has something like that. There are plenty who are without a friend from home and that can be lonely. He'd spent the first month in the same boat and hadn't particularly liked it much.

"It isn't," he agrees. "But it's something. And I hope you know you can trust me... count on me for... whatever you might need." Finch, too, he's no doubt of that. If he says he trusts Karen, Finch will trust that.

"I know," Karen says, something almost fond in her expression as she looks across the table at him, the menu in front of her temporarily all but forgotten. "And I do. I trust you." It's a simple enough statement, but for her, it's saying a lot, too. There haven't been many people of late she's been able to say that about. Even with the things he left out when they met, the false name he gave her, the things she suspects she still doesn't know, though, she thinks she trusts him maybe more than anyone else she's met here. It isn't like she doesn't have secrets of her own, after all. She won't begrudge him his, nor will they stop her from thinking that he would be the first person she'd go to if she needed someone.

That there's more to it than just trust, that she cares about him more than she ever could have expected when she found him that day on the beach, she doesn't think she needs to say. Chances are, it's apparent enough, anyway.

She laughs quietly, a way of deflecting a little, of not getting too serious. "Though you might regret saying that one day. I've been told that I... tend to attract trouble. Or the other way around."

"Or trouble attracts you?" he asks, the corner of his mouth lifting into another small smile. Somehow he feels like that might be the more likely option and it isn't as if he can hold it against her. John isn't exactly well known for keeping a low profile and he's sure Finch would be inclined to say the same thing about him. It isn't that trouble is attracted to him, it's that he goes looking for it more often than not.

It hadn't been that way before. While he was living on the streets of New York, he had done everything in his power to simply disappear, but things have changed since then. Since he started working for Finch, for the Machine, he'd learned something about himself and he knows he can't simply stand by when someone needs help. So perhaps he goes looking for trouble, but not without good reason.

"Even so, I don't think I'll regret it," he says honestly. "That just means you might need me more often than you think."

Edited 2016-10-26 18:40 (UTC)

"Yeah?" Karen asks, brow raising, and she can’t entirely tell how much they are or aren’t teasing anymore, but she can’t help playing along with it anyway. "And who says I need you?" She’d be fine, of course, if she had never met him. This place would be as weird as ever, but she wouldn’t have known the difference, because he would never have been here, their paths would never have crossed. The more time they spend together, though, the more he comes to mean to her. Need might be a strong word, but he’s unquestionably the closest friend she has here, the person she trusts the most, and that goes a long way in itself. She would be fine without him, but she’s much better off for the fact that she isn’t, that she has someone she can turn to.

She shrugs absently. "Just don’t say I didn’t warn you."

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