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They sit in relative quiet, away from the hustle and noise of the rest of the party. She sips her wine and smiles at him with eyes hard and inescapable as she tries and tries and tries to name him. He says nothing. There’s nothing to say, not until she’s let him in on whatever private joke it is that pulls her lips back from her teeth like that.
He learns the joke over years, in bits and pieces. It weighs heavy on his shoulders and he can never bring himself to laugh at it. She crows louder with each passing day.
But that’s years and years down the line. That night there is only the two of them, a secluded table, the wine, and then, a corpse. Her smile is almost soft, then.
“I think I’ve got it. You’ll be...Reese.”
---
Before, before he was Reese, there had been options. It may not have seemed like it at the time, but they were there. Jail or the army; Jessica or re-enlistment; The Rangers or the CIA. After, it’s all just one slow inevitability after another.
She names him Reese and Jessica’s fate is sealed, Ordos a singularity pulling him in. Then drinking then Carter then Finch.
And then suddenly, he isn’t Reese anymore. Those first few months, undercover twice over, he felt unmoored, like his strings had been cut. He hadn’t realized how much he’d come to rely on the name Kara had given him as his one constant.
Well, one of two, once Finch came along.
It could have been worse; at least the Machine had kept him John R. It didn’t have to. He was well trained and could adapt quickly to any new alias. But he appreciated the gesture.
He settles Riley about his shoulders like a mantle and tucks Reese safely away. Riley is lighter than Reese had ever been in a way that makes him feel giddy and loose and maybe like he was just to the left of himself. And then the numbers start again, and he knows that the Machine hadn’t just kept him John R for sentiment.
“Wait,” it was saying. “Patience. Don’t go far. Don’t forget.”
As if he could forget.
---
If ‘Riley’ is a reminder and call to patience, ‘Grey’ is a stern warning. Fade out, remain neutral, wait wait wait and pretend to be normal.
John figures it can’t last long, he can see her starting to push back, trapped in this new skin. Sameen Grey can never quite give up being Sameen Shaw.
At least her new side job does provide something of a creative outlet. Being Nadya the wheelman perks Shaw up immensely. Plus, once she realizes that Samaritan, like the Machine, isn’t particularly interested in theft on any scale, well...who’s gonna miss a few errant eyeliner pencils?
John tries to give her a hard time about it, once, but it’s halfhearted at best. Besides, she tells him, what could possibly be more normal than stealing from your workplace whenever your boss pisses you off?
---
John doesn’t know what to make of Professor Whistler. He’s seen Harold dress down to suit a persona before, but there’s just enough cleverness about the suits, the patterns and colors and fabrics, that John can practically hear “you may call me Mister Finch” echoing back at him through the years.
But maybe it’s just John. Maybe he just can’t bear to stop seeing Finch in Whistler, because when John proposes that they resume their joint venture, the rejection feels like burning. It had been so long since Harold had slammed a door in his face in earnest, it took John longer than really befit a clandestine agent of the united states government to recover.
For John Riley, though, it was probably just about right.
---
They meet for meals, chess, to exchange the dog, and brief conversations. It isn’t much, but they can’t risk more.
Even before, knowing that either of them could die at any moment, neither of them had felt the need to pop the bubble of silent understanding between them. It had somehow always felt like there’d be time later. Or maybe, maybe if they were honest, they worried that if they resolved all the little mysteries, there’d be nothing to call them home again when straits seemed dire.
Instead, Detective Riley slips silently into one of Professor Whistler’s lectures. It’s not an intro class, and it’s late enough in the semester that attendance has started to drop off significantly, so there are plenty of available seats.
Harold sees him, of course, and quirks an eyebrow, but he doesn’t let the interruption disrupt the flow of his lecture.
He’s an engaging speaker, but then John already knew that. Apparently the students in attendance think so, too--of the screens that John can see from his vantage point (which is most of them), a solid majority seem to actually be taking notes. An academic miracle.
John thinks about teasing him for missing his calling when he decided to build an all-seeing superintelligence instead of going into teaching, but...no, too risky. Besides, Harold was too impatient for scholarly bureaucracy--he’d have hacked his own university’s servers for his own ends long before making tenure.
He shifts in the hard wooden lecture seat, the hinge of the collapsible desktop digging into his thigh. As he does, he can feel the shield clipped to his belt scratch across his hip. He knows it’s not rational, but he can’t help but think of it as Carter’s shield. She’d have laughed John Riley right back out the door of the 8th precinct.
The lecture ends and Harold meets his eyes before looking pointedly at the door as the students noisily gather up their things. A few of them give him odd looks on their way out. That’s fine, people come and go all the time in places like this; they’ll forget him in a manner of days, if not sooner.
Harold doesn’t look up again and for the first time John feels like he really sees Professor Whistler.
If the Machine designed Detective Riley and Sameen Grey as reminders, then Professor Whistler is, too, but not for Harold. Harold understood the full implications before Samaritan even went live. Longer, maybe, maybe from the moment he lost Nathan, or the first time he used an assumed name.
This moment was always coming for him.
No, Whistler is a reminder for John, too. A reminder that Harold’s wings have been clipped and that the best he can do for now is sing. A reminder that he’s only human.
John walks out of the empty lecture hall.