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eden

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While he and Finch are still working on getting their team together, still moving toward having a suitable environment from which to operate and trying to tie up any odds and ends in the world -- like getting John Riley his proper and fake ID to replace the ID in the name John Reese that Darrow had supplied him with -- he still finds himself watching Darrow in the same manner in which he used to watch New York.

It'll be some days before he has the new ID and therefore a few days still before he can walk into a police precinct and speak to someone about getting a job as Detective John Riley, but it's still a hard habit to break. Watching people. Watching his surrounding to make sure he isn't being tailed. So far Darrow has done nothing to make him think Samaritan has followed them here and he's sure the system wouldn't lie this low for such a long time, but he hasn't entirely let down his guard. Not yet.

He doesn't break into their neighbours' apartments looking for bugs any longer, but he does occasionally walk by the other buildings he knows transplants to be shuffled into. It's interesting, as Jessica pointed out, that they're all in the same buildings and not spread out across the city.

It's easy enough, too, to act as if he's a prospective renter, and when a pretty young woman comes out of High Gate Terrace, he smiles at her, easy and curious, and asks, "How do you like it here?"

Then, appearing flustered, he laughs and says, "Sorry. I'm just... thinking about moving is all. I have a friend who lives here, but I think he might say anything to get me to move closer, so I'm just wondering what a stranger thinks of the place."

And if asked, he can easily cite Laurent as said friend. They have to be friends now, although the rest is a lie, Laurent having never asked John to move any closer.

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John nods, knowing he's much the same. On a daily basis, there are plenty of people he meets between working his cover job and the job he does for Finch, but even when he does befriend them, it's something built on a foundation of lies. Even here, he can't tell Eden who he really is or his real name, he can't tell her what he does or the things he's seen before.

"It gets harder as you get older, doesn't it?" he asks with a faint smile. "Work takes up more time, it's easier to find excuses to just head home at the end of the day." The people you love end up dying. John knows it sounds dramatic and so he doesn't say it, but he certainly feels it.

In a place like this, too, where people vanish all the time, Eden's found it's harder and harder to make the effort as the years go by. She has acquaintances, people she sees regularly, even people who know more about her than some of her friends do, because they go to the same AA meetings, but she's not meeting them later to hang out. She's lost too many people. Getting older has its charms when she never thought she would, but the passing of time only makes it harder to bounce back from all the losses.

"Exactly," she says. "And people disappear so easily here. Sometimes it's hard to put in the effort, when I could just go home and play with my cat." She laughs, knowing what a cliché that must make her sound. It doesn't matter. At least she still has Origami.

"Mine's a dog," John admits with a tilt of his head, looking amused. He doesn't want to dwell on the idea of anyone disappearing, because while he knows he would get along with Finch if it became necessary, he doesn't want it to happen and while he's sure most people don't want their friends to disappear, there's a little more to it than just regular friendship.

Looking out for Finch is his purpose. John owes him.

"His name is Bear, he was a military dog a drug dealer in New York had taken off a man he'd killed," he says. "He had no idea what Bear was, but I did and so it's possible I took Bear from him in... not an entirely legal manner."

"Bear, that's so cute," Eden says, lighting up at the probably inaccurate mental image of a big dog in uniform. She can't be entirely bothered by what John has said about how Bear was acquired; she's picked up more than a few things in a less than legal manner herself, though it's been quite a long time now.

"I didn't even know there was such a thing as a military dog. Mine's a little Scottish Fold named Origami." She quirks her fingers at the name of the breed, trying unconsciously to illustrate the way Origami's little ears lie flat.

"He's a Belgian Malinois," he tells her, smiling at the way she quirks her fingers, wondering if she's realizes she's done it. His feelings for Karen may be bigger than he's realized, complicated in ways he doesn't want to address, but it's hard not to see how attractive Eden is, too.

"They're used by the Secret Service, something about the breed is just exceptional at being able to sniff out bombs, narcotics. I knew the man who trained them for the American military and I knew he'd trained them using exclusively Dutch commands, so I may have used that to my advantage." He smiles again. "Origami. That's a cute name."

"I think it is," Eden says, smiling wonderingly at what he's said. "You stole a dog by speaking Dutch? Now that's a story." Not a false one, she's pretty sure, she doesn't get the feeling he's lying, but an interesting one. It makes her wonder what other kinds of stories he has, what kinds of misadventures he's gotten into in his line of work. "I barely speak English most days. I did try learning Japanese, but I never got to practice it, so I don't even know if I remember it anymore."

"I speak a few languages," he admits with a small smile. "My parents spoke Spanish when I was growing up, so I learned that from them, but I picked up the others during my time in the military. My Dutch is mostly limited to being able to give the dog commands and only because I was friendly with the man who did the training."

John doesn't generally think of himself as being intelligent. He follows orders, he does what he's told, he does it well, but sometimes he surprises himself and the fact that he speaks several languages fluently and others conversationally says something about him he's never quite known what to do with. "I think I just have a knack for it," he says. "I'm fairly good with Portuguese and Arabic as well."

"That's a nice knack to have," Eden says. Lots of people do. She's not sure she's ever been or ever could be one of them, but it's nice for him that he is. Everyone has their talents. Hers involve a lot more lying and acting than languages, though, she thinks, maybe her power counts toward that end. It's certainly a skill, at least, albeit a rusty one.

Hearing her name called, she turns to take her coffee from the barista. "Thank you," she says, picking it up, and glances back to John. "And thank you, too. It's sweet of you."

"Of course," he answers with a smile, taking his own drink when it arrives. "And it isn't always very difficult to pick up pieces of a new language. Dutch is easy if all you need to do is order a dog around." Having an entire conversation would be beyond John, but luckily Bear is the only one in his life who knows even a little bit of Dutch besides Finch and they're perfectly capable of conversing in English.

Stepping away from the counter, he says, "If you meet Bear and want him to come, all you need to say is Bear, komen. Sit is just zitten, so it's mostly simply. Although telling him to stay would mean you'd have to say verblijf."

Eden laughs, wending her way between people to find a table for two. "That's a mouthful," she says. "I'm not sure I even dare to try. Komen, though, I think I can remember that. Komen. Zitten." She laughs again, wrinkling up her nose self-consciously at the new words. It's probable she'll just forget them before she ever has a chance to meet Bear, if she ever even does, but she likes to try. It's fun to feel the way new words sit in her mouth.

Verblijf might be well beyond her, though.

"That's really the extent of my Dutch," he says with a laugh of his own as he sinks into a chair once they've found a table. That's not truly the entirety of it, he knows how to tell Bear to attack, but somehow that feels like taking it all just a step too far. Bear is a sweet dog, but he's trained for a very specific purpose.

Even though he's said Bear is a military dog, he knows most people don't like to think about attack dogs or what they can do.

"German, though, I learned all the curse words when I was a kid," he continues. "So we're much better off there."

Eden laughs, shaking her head as she takes her seat. "I only have English for that," she says. "I get the impression German must be a wonderful language to curse in, though." It seems like the kind of language that would have a lot of very colorful and highly descriptive turns of phrase to describe exactly just how infuriating people are. Maybe it's just because she knows of a couple highly specific German phrases as it is. Or maybe it's just the way the language sounds. Either way, she's sticking to it. "So why German?"

"The words just sounded so much angrier and their direct translations were always more creative than I expected them to be," John admits with a small smile. "When I was twelve, I had a friend who told me die Arschmade means son of a bitch."

He pauses to take a sip of his coffee, then looks at Eden with another small smile. "When I got a little older, I looked up the translation and discovered that while they use those words to convey a feeling similar to son of a bitch, the direct translation was actually ass maggot. You have to love such a creative language."

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