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John is in trouble.

Not that he would admit he's in trouble. It's true he's been stabbed and there's a great deal of blood trickling down his leg to pool in his shoe and soak through his sock, but nothing important in his thigh has been cut. If it were, he wouldn't be walking right now, he'd be face down and he'd be dead.

The only problem is that he's being followed and he's leaving a relatively easy to follow path behind him, consisting of that blood that keeps dripping down his leg.

It was supposed to be recon and nothing more. That had been his intention. Get into the warehouse, check out what was going on, see what he could when it came to the illegal weapons that were coming in and going out, then get out. Then call in an anonymous report and get the police out to the warehouse with something they can actually go on.

That had been the intention.

But then one of them had snuck up on him. He's not the sort of man who is easily snuck up on, but here he is, bleeding from a relatively deep wound just above his knee. And now they're following him.

All he needs to do is get closer to a more populated area of the city. He has his gun on him and he'll use it if it becomes necessary, but then he gets tied to all this as Detective John Riley and he'll have a fair bit of explaining to do.

Just a few more blocks, though. He can make it.

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"Be careful," John says, even though he's sure Daniel will be. Part of there being people in Darrow he cares about means he's worried about risking them in any way. But of course he's found himself with people like Shaw and Finch, people who have to help others, who feel the drive for it as keenly as they feel anything else.

"Peggy will have my head if anything happens to you," he says and although it's said with a small smile, he's entirely serious and he wouldn't blame her.

Of course he'd be careful, and of course John knew that. But it was something you said, and you meant, and so everyone let it go. He'd told men to be careful plenty of times. Sometimes they'd rolled their eyes, but they appreciated it. And sometimes they even were, and sometimes they even came back.

"She'll have my head first, for being what she considers to be stupid," he replied wryly. "If she's still mad after that, she'll have yours. Speaking of Peggy, has she told you her news?"

He didn't know if Peg would have told John they were engaged or not. He wasn't sure how much she told him in general.

John sits back in the chair, stretching his leg out carefully, testing how it feels. He might need to rest a little bit longer before he trusts himself to walk on it, but that's probably for the best either way. It gives him a little bit of time to make sure no one has followed him here and won't follow him home.

"I don't think so," he says, because when Daniel says it like that, that there's news, it sounds important. And John would remember something important. He and Peggy are friends, but being the people they are, there's still a limit to what they tell each other and how often.

He knew that move. It was someone trying to figure out whether they could walk or not, or whether they needed to wait a little longer. He'd done the same thing.

"If you turn your toes out slowly, it'll let you know how much movement you're gonna have in your hip right now," he suggested. He didn't have toes on that side, of course, but the motion was the same.

"I'll let her tell you then. She doesn't much like it when her thunder's stolen."

John nods and turns his toes, careful with his range of movement, waiting for the pain that might bloom. It's dull, but it's clearly present and he settles in for a little bit longer of a wait.

And if the news were pressing, he thinks Daniel would tell him now, so he nods again and says, "Then let's not steal her thunder. I can be patient."

He's not the sort to press for information either. There are all kinds of reasons why someone might not tell him something and he can respect that decision.

"You need any aspirin? I'm not even gonna offer you anything stronger since I'm thinking you prefer to keep your head clear as you can, but I have aspirin."

He'd hated how stupid morphine had made him feel sometimes, although he also appreciated how it made him not feel sometimes.

They often think along the same lines, John has found, and he nods at Daniel's offer. His own problems with alcohol aside, he tends to avoid anything that will alter his state of mind much more than a single drink tends to do.

"Thank you," he says. "Aspirin will be enough. I've had worse than this."

The scars are mostly hidden, littering his chest and his back, some on his arms and legs. To anyone who sees him as he regularly is, dressed in his suit, they would never know. But Karen has seen them, she knows what he's been through.

He pushed up from the chair almost smoothly and went over to the counter. He kept a bottle of aspirin in the drawer for days when his various aches and pains got to be a little much, and he brought it back with a glass of water for John.

"Kind of makes you rethink pain levels once you've been through something like that," he agreed. "Stubbed toes still hurt like hell, though."

John has to laugh at that and he nods, looking at Daniel in amusement. "My mother used to joke that if you cursed loud enough when you stubbed your toe, all the pain would come out your mouth with the word. I think I was eight the first time she told me that and I took it as an excuse to shout damn every time I could."

He hadn't been very creative even as a child. Damn had been the worst curse word he was capable of thinking of at the time.

He takes the aspirin and water with a smile, downing a few of the caplets and then sitting with the water glass resting gently against his uninjured thigh. "Strange how memories like that come back at times like this."

"I tried to convince my mother that it didn't count if I cursed in a different language. There must have been five languages spoken just in a two block radius, so I had a lot to choose from," he replied, and settled into the chair again. He was keeping an eye on the street but so far no one suspicious or familiar had come walking by. Suspicious was harder to pin down since people could look one way and act another, but there was a sense to it, and he wasn't getting it.

"Didn't work."

Edited 2018-05-28 00:08 (UTC)

"Our poor mothers," John says with a soft breath of laughter. In his case he means it much more sincerely, since his own mother had to put up with his awful behaviour until he was arrested. Until he joined the military.

And then she died and luckily never had to see the person he became. She would have liked the man he was when he was with Jessica, but she wouldn't have recognized the man he was working with Kara. Maybe not even the man he was when he was working for Finch. They were doing a good thing, helping people, but his methods had remained brutal.

"Mine had a lot to put up with especially," he says. "My father was killed in action when I was young."

"Korea or Vietnam?" Daniel didn't know exactly what time John came from, but he knew the other man was pretty modern, so those seemed like the two logical choices. It probably wasn't World War II or John would have reacted differently to Daniel saying he'd been in that one.

"Vietnam," he answers. "I was only eight. It hit my mom pretty hard."

It had hit John harder. He had worshipped his father, had wanted nothing more in his life than to be exactly like him and his death had been a brutal blow to him at such a young age.

He'd never been the same. He can't blame his father's death for the way he'd turned out, but he certainly has to think his life would have been different if he had lived.

Daniel nodded. He'd known of plenty of wives who became widows, mothers who were suddenly alone. It was rough on everyone.

"Those telegrams, they turn your world upside down about as well as an exploding shell," he agreed.

John nods his agreement and he doesn't look directly at Daniel's leg, but he knows exactly what he's thinking. Their lives, both of them, had been irreparably changed by war and he can't speak for Daniel, but he knows he wouldn't be the man he is now without them. Without having lost his father. Without ending up in Iraq.

"And now we're here," he says. "Where the closest thing to war seem to be against vampires."

And even that hasn't gone to the extremes he's sure he and Daniel have both seen.

"This place screws with your head," he agreed. "Sometimes I think this place does weirder things to my head than the ETO did. I mean, sure, the Jerries were shooting at me all the time, but I didn't wake up and suddenly realize I was eighteen again."

He'd had two legs for that week, which had been a lot of fun but also something that made him sad since he knew that wasn't going to be the way it was forever.

John laughs softly and says, "Now that would be an experience."

He has no idea what he would do with something like that. Eighteen wasn't exactly a proud year for him, he'd done some awful things, gotten into a lot of trouble, and caused his mother a fair bit of grief. It had been a time before he'd had the choice of jail or the military, a time when he'd still been so angry about his father's death. Not really a time he has any interest in repeating.

"How was that?" he asks. "Did you have your memories of Darrow?"

"I did. Peggy didn't," Daniel replied, smiling a little ruefully. "She was a little younger than me and a totally different person. She wasn't always the brawler she is now. War changed her too."

As far as he could tell, Peggy'd always had the strength of spirit, but she'd cared more about society then. She'd been the kind of girl she was supposed to be rather than the one she really was. The war and the SSR had let her be free of that.

John nods and says, "I can see that."

And he can understand why that would happen. Being active in war times does something to a person, it changes the way they see the world around them. There's no way to explain that to someone who hasn't experienced that and he knows Daniel probably feels that as well.

"I hope that doesn't happen to me," he says. "I can't imagine trying to repeat that again."

"Yeah, better hope if it does, you remember it. Then you can just enjoy not having all the aches and pains you have now, including your brand-new one," Daniel ribbed John.

"You think you're good to go home or you need to wait a little longer? Colin won't care either way, so you stay as long as you need."

"I think I'm okay," John says, stretching his leg out again before he carefully gets to his feet. "The aspirin is kicking in."

And he can grit his teeth and move through the pain without too much effort. It's not much further to a place where he can get himself a cab and he's fairly confident he hasn't been followed at this point, which means he and Daniel aren't in any danger.

"Thank you," he says, stepping away from the chair. His leg takes his weight easily enough. "For all your help."

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