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st_aurafinaTitle: Buying the Time on My Knees
Fandom: Person of Interest
Rating: Explicit
Words: 7K (this chapter) 80K overall.
Characters/Pairings: Jessica/John, Jessica/John/Nathan, John/Nathan, John/Harold, John/Kara, Harold/Grace, Rick Dillinger, Mark Snow, Grace Hendricks, Lawrence Szilard, Daniel Aquino
Warnings/Content: Pegging, D/s dynamics, Dubious Consent, Domestic Violence, Infidelity, Light Bondage, Threesome - M/M/F, Canon-Typical Violence, Alternate Universe: Jessica lives, Alternate Universe: Nathan lives
Notes: Chapter 14 has the last act of non-con dentistry, I promise. (Only three more chapters to go!)
This fic is complete at 80K and will be updated weekly. All the ships mentioned do happen, but some of them not for a long while. (Harold/John doesn't happen for a long while, for example, but it gets there.)
Dubcon warning is for the Kara/John relationship, which gets dicey from time to time.
Thank you tolilacsigil and talkingtothesky, who both helped me get this behemoth finished.
Title is from Iron and Wine's song, House by the Sea
Master post with chapter links
Chapter Summary:
Mark arrives in Morocco to reassign John and Kara, but neither of them feel comfortable with their new orders. Jessica makes contact with John, and he struggles to find a way to help her.
Overall Summary:
After he joins the CIA, John stays in touch with Jessica as best he can without endangering her marriage or alerting the agency. He doesn't realise that these breaks from his professional life are as much a respite for Jess as they are for him.
Meanwhile, Jessica's number keeps coming up and Nathan has a plan to keep her safe.
Also at the Archive
Mark was jubilant, coasting high on his successes: snatching Nathan Ingram away from the intelligence community and bringing John back into the fold penitent and obliging.
"Let me tell you, they're chewing on their funeral shrouds back at the Pentagon," he said, practically rubbing his hands together.
It didn't seem to matter that they hadn't gotten any information from Ingram before his purported execution.
"We'll get more out of leveraging what they think we know than we ever would from actual intel." Mark passed folders to them. "Meanwhile, I'm sending you two off to Morocco, get yourselves back in the game. Get some sun, complete a relatively simple mission, drink some mint tea and get a tan. It's the closest you guys will ever get to a holiday, but Kara's earned it for the two of you."
Beside John, Kara preened, and dug her nails into John's wrist.
John dozed on the flight to Tangier, the first sleep he'd been able to catch since Kara had let Nathan go free. She'd made John bury the two fake FBI agents he'd shot.
"They'll buy the story if you're covered in dirt when we come in," she said, from her perch on the hood of the rental car. "Authenticity is everything, after all."
As he dug, John wondered who they were, what agency had really sent them, if they had families who would always wonder where they had gone. When he hefted the two bodies into the pit, he thought of Dillinger's grave and how it seemed like an impossibly long time ago that he had buried him. In reality, it had been less than eight days. John tried not to think about the weird camaraderie that had existed between him and Harold that night, but the juxtaposition of the two events made it impossible.
That night, cuffed to Kara's bed, he wondered at the difference between being tied up by Jess and tied up by Kara. Above him, lost in her own world of pleasure, Kara rocked back and forth on his cock. John wasn't in pain, and this wasn't even unpleasant, exactly, but it was so vastly different to being dominated by Jessica and examining that difference was a good diversion.
Kara worked herself towards an orgasm, shifting in minute movements against him, and watching her, John realised that the difference was joy. Jessica fucked him with a joyous abandon, but for Kara, it was some kind of competition.
"Come on, John. Don't just lie there. If I wanted to fuck a corpse I'd put a bullet in you." Kara reached behind her and gave John's balls a painful twist, then laughed as he bucked underneath her, hissing with pain. "God. Look at you. You hate this so much."
John didn't shut his eyes – Kara hated it when he shut his eyes – but he let his mind drift while his body did what it had to. He couldn't think of Nathan that way anymore, and Jess's face brought too much guilt to the forefront of his mind, so he idly imagined fucking around with Harold. It was enough of a novelty to spark his imagination: those fancy suits, that fastidious way he carried himself, the brightness of his eyes behind those glasses and how he didn't miss a single detail. He'd put that intense focus into fucking, John thought, and those hands would be precise and determined, stroking his cock, watching for his pleasure.
"Well," Kara said, as John moaned and thrust into her with more fervour. "I should grab those bad boys more often, if this is how you reward me."
She was so pleased, she let him come inside her, even if she made him eat her out afterwards.
Morocco was warm, and despite the situation, it did ease some of the aches in John's body. New York seemed a long way distant, cold and ice-blue compared to the bright colours and clamour of Tangier. John moved through the city on automatic, feeling like a stranger inside his own body, following orders without much consideration for the consequences. There was a numbness in knowing that this was his life now, and would be until Kara got bored with his existence.
There was no way to ameliorate the evil that he was asked to do now, not with Kara doting on every second of suffering it inflicted on him and the victim, and so, to survive, he switched off. He couldn't kill himself. Kara had explained in detail that if he ate a bullet, she'd go and find Jessica, and make sure her life was more of a misery than it already was. She was equally specific on dying in the field. The only person allowed to kill John was Kara, so he'd better make sure he made it home after each mission.
He still had the IFT news aggregator app on his phone, and it slowly gathered intel for him on Nathan Ingram's supposed death. The car carrying him and the arresting agents had tragically crashed, leaving all three people on board dead. Social media screamed conspiracy – and they were right, but not in the way they suspected – and IFT simultaneously put out an obituary and an official notice separating the company from Ingram's actions.
He read reports from the funeral, with photographs of mourners and pall-bearers. Harold was there with Nathan's ex-wife, the two of them sandwiching Nathan's son between them. John watched the boy, curious to know what he'd been told. He seemed grief-stricken. Nathan's ex, less so, but then John didn't know so much about their relationship. Nathan hadn't talked much about her, apart from admitting the marriage breakdown was his fault.
There was a puzzling link to IFT's newest audiobook app, to which John could see no relevance. He sent the article to trash, only to find it back again in the morning. This went on for a few days until he finally relented and installed the app on his phone. When he opened it, he found that it had come preloaded with Jane Austen's Persuasion.
"Who's doing the persuading?" he said to the app, but it made him smile.
The next time he went out for a run along the water, he plugged in some earbuds and switched the app on.
"I apologise for the book choice," Harold said in his ear. "I didn't have the chance to find out about your reading preferences, and Ms Arndt said that the two of you didn't really have time for reading." John could hear a smile in Harold's voice. "I think she was trying to shock me."
John laughed softly as he ran. He could imagine how that went down. Still, knowing that Harold and Jessica had been conversing gave him a sense of stability. There was a reason to all of this, and Harold had been true to his word.
"I should assure you that if anyone other than yourself opens this app, they will find you deep in the world of Anne Elliot. They can make of that what they wish, though if for veracity or interest you do want to listen to the book itself, you can access it through the bookmarks."
John had to stop then and load the actual book, just to see if Harold had gone so far as to record a whole book, but the narrator was a woman with an English accent. He listened for a minute or two, then changed back to the recording of Harold's voice.
"Nathan is recovering from his involuntary dental procedure," Harold said, as John ran on, dodging the construction crews that were constantly remodelling the beachfront in Tangier. "He is doing better than I expected with life in isolation, though I don't think his patience for it will last forever. For the present, he has been quite shocked by what happened that night, and the greater ramifications of his actions. There are court cases in motion. The government is trying to strip IFT of its defence contracts, and there's a chance Will may lose much of his inheritance." Harold paused a moment. "I do understand what Nathan was aiming for in making that broadcast, but I can't agree with his decision to take such a risk without considering the opinions of the other people involved. And of course, the personal cost to you has been excessive. I know he has a great deal of regret about the harm you may come to because of what happened on that road."
John was surprised to have reached the end of his run already. He walked in a circle, hands on his hips while his breathing regulated, then he started to warm down.
"I would like to say thank you," Harold continued in John's ear. "For protecting Nathan – and before you claim that it was a poor sort of protection, I want you to consider that he is alive now because of your actions."
John closed his mouth. Harold wasn't here, but he was doing a frightening job of predicting John's behaviour.
"You should be winding up your run now, and no, I am not prescient or using technology to spy on you. Much as it would make for a pleasant view, I don't retask satellites as lightly as that."
John had to pause the app and re-listen to that part of the recording again. He wasn't sure, but it seemed that in between denying he had magical powers, and admitting he could hack satellites, Harold had made a gentle pass at him.
"…it is in fact a matter using the GPS function on your phone and averaging the distance," Harold was saying into his ear. "I'll talk to you again tomorrow, John. Please take care."
It made for a strange oasis of calm, but it served John well through the rest of the day, and that night when Kara went back to her own room, he did listen to the actual book. He wasn't sure that he was an Austen fan, but the lacuna of quiet reading helped him sleep better through the night.
The two of them were working out of an abandoned prison, and they received their subject, blackbagged and sedated, from a rendition team the day after they arrived. A few days later, interrogation of the subject was going nowhere, to the point that Kara had tired of making John hurt the subject and had taken it upon herself to make him speak. John waited outside the interview room with one eye on the screen and one on his phone, checking the news feed for articles on New Rochelle or IFT or any of the topics Harold used to direct his attention. Inside, the subject screamed again. John closed his eyes and thought back to this morning.
On his run, Harold had told him about the house in which Nathan was living, and how Nathan had decided to teach himself to paint.
"Grace is appalled at the idea," Harold said. "She said that the great masters hadn't suffered starvation and penury so that rich dilettantes on enforced vacations could call themselves artists. I know she is the one with the MFA from Yale, and I am no expert, but I believe that dilettantes have done precisely that for centuries."
These one-sided discussions showed up each morning on his phone, and each morning, John found they left a place in his mind untouched by the interrogation or by Kara's persistent need to fuck with him. Harold talked about all sorts of things: cryptocurrency, architecture, his feelings on the musical Tommy, where he'd eaten the night before, the effects of climate change on wine production. None of it was important, except in so far as it gave John a connection to someone outside of his own small, violent world. Harold made sure to mention Jessica at least every other day, and for that peace of mind, John was grateful.
Their subject continued to resist their methods. Mark berated them over the phone, frustrated with their lack of progress.
"Come on, guys," he said, his voice crackly on the encrypted line. "Don't eat up the good will you earned from the Ingram execution. You came out of that smelling like roses, which, after the heap of shit you dragged in from the Daniel Casey situation, was a fucking miracle."
Kara took great offense at this criticism. She didn't let it affect her work – her focus with a prisoner was always absolute – but she fretted whenever they had down time, picking at John, at her own performance, at Mark's perceived expectations.
"Calm down," John said, late that night. "We can't do anything else but keep working until the guy talks. It's no use if we kill him."
Kara stalked up and down beside their foldout bed. "I'll kill him when I'm good and ready to kill him," she said, jabbing a finger into his chest.
John caught her hand and put it on his throat. "I know," he said. "You're the expert here. Mark should watch and learn."
Kara closed her fingers around his neck, squeezing down on the carotid arteries. John sat still for her as the blood started to pool in his head with a thumping ache. When his vision started to go black, he swept her grip aside and threw her down on the bed. He caught the slap she swung at him with one arm, but missed the punch. Kara laughed in delight, and the fight went on into the night until she finally fell asleep.
The next morning, John woke with the headache and red blotchy eyes that come from blacking out too many times in succession. His lip was swollen fat and scabbed over where it had split, and wouldn't that make today's interrogation an interesting prospect? He pushed his fingertips into his eye sockets for a few minutes, thought longingly of rolling back under the covers and never getting out, then pushed himself upright. On the way to the beachfront for his run, he stopped at a café to buy a bag of ice for his face. Once the corner of his mouth was suitably numbed, John put in his ear buds and started his run. Harold's letter, as John had started to think of the messages, would get him through the day again.
"It's strange working the numbers without Nathan," Harold said, after a perfunctory greeting of "Good morning, Mr Reese." John found the energy for a grin despite the pain in his lip, twitched the volume up a notch and relaxed into his run, finding his pace quickly.
"Nathan and I do communicate, of course, and he has all sorts of suggestions, some of which are absurd and some of which are helpful. Still, when you consider the loss of Mr Dillinger and Nathan, I am lacking able-bodied people in the field. Grace, as you know, is very innovative when it comes to convincing people to let us help them, but there's only so much the two of us can do alone. Still, we persist. One of my identities has hired a number of excellent bodyguards. We'll see how that improves the situation."
John ran, lost in Harold's words and the rhythmic thump of his feet on the walkway. He doubted that the bodyguards were as good as Harold believed; it was easy to fake competence enough to fool a civilian. Dillinger was a prime example.
"Jessica is away for the week," Harold went on. "After some time with a marriage counsellor, she and Peter are taking a trip to a cabin in Vermont. I feel a little uncomfortable with her being so far from home, but at the same time, smothering her will do as much harm as neglect. And she has promised to call me if there are… problems. We spoke frankly about it before she left – yes, that was as uncomfortable as you can imagine it to be – and she told me that she and you discussed some other options for the future. I know you well enough by now to imagine you think those options closed off now. They are not, Mr Reese. There will come an opportunity for you to free yourself from your commitments to Ms Stanton and the CIA. Bear that in mind, as much as you are able."
John found he had stopped running – was standing in the middle of the strand listening to what Harold had said. His skin prickled with impossible cold at the idea of Jess alone with Peter in the middle of nowhere. Sweat dripped into his eyes, making them sting, and he turned the recording off, swiped across his brow. He cut his run short – his concentration was shot, anyway – and as soon as he could get a safe break, he'd call Harold, talk to him about his worries, ask him to make sure he kept in contact with Jess while she was away from home and cut off from her support networks.
Kara met him in the parking lot of the abandoned jail. Clouds cast shadows over the open space, scudding past the two of them. John's ears popped as the air pressure fell. It would rain soon.
"I was just coming to find you," Kara said. She flared her nostrils at the sight of him, plastered with sweat and obviously agitated. John thought for a moment she was going to drag him off to the cell they were using as a bedroom, but she shook her head in irritation. "Mark's gonna love this look on you, John."
A fresh wave of gooseflesh spread down his back. "Mark's here?"
Kara's expression was sour. "Showed up after you left, him and his little friend."
Inside, Mark lolled against the desk with the monitors. Beside him was a woman John recognised vaguely, someone he knew was high up in the NSA.
"This is Alicia Corwin," Mark said. "She's got a mission for you."
Kara gave Alicia a saccharine smile that the woman ignored. "But we already have a mission, don't we, Mark?"
Mark shook his head. "This takes priority. This is your last day – get the intel now, then consider yourself reassigned."
They were being sent to China, some industry town in Inner Mongolia, to reacquire or destroy stolen software. It was urgent, according to Corwin. John felt her gaze on him, kept his expression still and disinterested. The last thing he wanted was to attract her attention.
"One more thing, John." Mark gestured John closer with his head, and John stepped into the shadows with him. "We've got evidence Stanton's been dealing with Hezbollah – we've traced the payments to off-shore accounts. She's compromised. And you should have noticed. Look, I don't blame you, I've seen the way she's been treating you since you came back in."
"What do you expect me to do about it?" John said. This was dirty, he could feel it. Whatever Mark was driving this conversation towards, he wanted John to be grateful and appreciative. The dark, warm air was claustrophobic, there was so much wrong here. Every nerve screamed at him to run, run, get out of this hell. Go find Jess and get to a safe place.
Mark watched him in silence for a few seconds. "You know what you have to do. Stanton has to be retired. Complete the mission, put her in the ground, and come back home. We'll find you a new partner, someone you can rely on. Someone who won't to stab you in the back for a laugh."
Well, John could see why Mark thought he would be grateful. Somehow, though, he doubted that his life would be as rosy as Mark promised when John returned to the States.
While Kara took the last few hours she could to squeeze information out of their subject, he took the risk of swapping out his sim, hoping to call Harold while everyone was occupied. He checked the monitors: Kara was leaning in close to the man, her fingers moving quick and cruel. Mark and Alicia were smoking in the parking lot, talking, their faces obscured by hair and smoke so that nobody could read their conversation. Before he could dial out, though, he saw a notification that the voice mail he used for Jessica had a message waiting. John logged into his message bank with numb fingers.
"It's me," Jess said. John bristled, it was clear she'd been crying.
"I spoke to Harold. He told me some of what happened with Nathan. What you did." There was a long pause on the line, and he could hear her breathing in little hiccupping gasps. "God, I had this call all planned out," she said, trying to get her voice under control. "I, uh, I just wanted to hear your voice, you know? So that if bad stuff happens, we both have something better as our last memory." She sighed. "Things here are… things are weird. I don't know how to explain it. It feels like just before a fire catches, like we're all waiting for it to start. Maybe this is the change Peter and I had to go through. Maybe it means we'll finally be good together. If not, then I just wanted to say…" She was crying again. "I wanted to say that you did right with Nathan. You never give up on people, and I love that about you. Be safe." Then she was gone.
John stared at the phone, panic rising in his gut. Jess was not okay. He had to call Harold now. For a moment, he didn't know what to do or which way to turn, then he realised that Kara was heading for the door. Behind her, the man in the chair lolled in his restraints, his head hanging. John had a few seconds to school his expression before the door to the interview room flew open, and Kara stormed out.
"That stubborn fuck has passed out again. Do we have any adrenaline left in the kit?" There was a little spray of blood across her cheek.
"Probably," John said, and opened the case to get it for her, since her hands were dripping red. His fingers fumbled with the clasp, and he forced himself to calm down, pushed the image of Jess from his mind so he could concentrate. He had to stay clear and focused now. If Kara got a whiff of this, if she suspected for a moment that he had been in communication with Jess, the deal would be off and Jess would be as good as dead anyway.
It was twilight by the time he could sneak off to the roof. The air was thick and humid, and heat radiated from every surface as he dialled one of the numbers he had collected for Harold over the months.
It only rang twice before it was picked up. "Yes?" Harold's voice was carefully non-committal, giving nothing away to this unknown number.
"It's me," said John.
"Mr Reese. What's happened?" Harold knew better than to assume this was a social call. John wouldn't be taking this risk for anything less than life-threatening circumstances.
John turned in a circle, taking in the scrubby landscape while he ordered his words. "I had a call from Jess, and she's not okay. You need to go to Vermont."
Harold sounded surprised. "But I've spoken with Ms Arndt every day this week, and there's been no indication that…"
"Then she doesn't trust you, Finch!" John said. Frustration seethed through him. "If she sounds all right to you, she's faking it. Please. Don't leave her alone up there. I can't go. You have to."
He heard the rattle of a keyboard. "Very well," Harold said, as easy as that. "I'm booking a flight right now. I will do my best to keep in touch." Before he hung up the call, he added, "I'll do everything I can to keep her safe. Please do the same for yourself, John."
John's nausea abated, and the tightness in his chest eased. Harold believed him, despite the evidence. Harold trusted him. Harold would make sure that Jessica had protection and support if she needed it.
He sat suddenly on the rusted casing of an old air conditioner, and stared at his upturned palms on his thighs. They shook a little with the aftereffects of the adrenaline required to make that call to Harold. It was okay to ask for help, he told himself. He couldn't expect Jessica to accept help, if he wasn't prepared to do the same. And whatever the situation, Harold would do his best to make sure Jessica was safe. John believed that implicitly, with the ease of a truth he felt bone-deep. As he left the roof, large raindrops started to fall, kicking up haloes of dust where they hit the roof.
Still, hours later as he packed for China, he had to quash the edginess crawling all over his body. Outside, a thunderstorm lit up the sky and the rain was a now constant roar. He'd buried their subject this afternoon, while the clouds grew heavy and low.
"This is bullshit," Kara said, stuffing clothes into her case. "And what was Mark whispering to you about? Are you keeping secrets from me, John?" She wheeled on him, and he saw the glint of a knife in her hand.
"You already know my secrets, Kara," he said. "That's how you hold all the cards, isn't it?"
Kara tucked the knife into a scabbard on her thigh. "Don't you forget it," she said.
The problem with China was that it was huge, and Ordos, the industrial city to which they'd been sent, was too remote and too secretive to approach directly. John and Kara landed in Beijing with a long list of flight transfers and train timetables before they even set foot in Inner Mongolia. Travel had not gone well: they'd been delayed in Hong Kong, their flight to Beijing had to make an emergency landing due to electrical malfunction, and all the while, John had the creeping feeling that this mission was cursed. He watched Kara in Hong Kong, thought about how it would be to put a bullet in her, and felt doubt bloom. All the horrible acts he'd completed, all the pain he'd caused side by side with Kara, and now he started to doubt? It was ridiculous.
Mark had given them new, supposedly secure phones before they left, and they were obviously effective, since no IFT software had yet shown up on John's handset. The paranoia between John and Kara was so great that while neither of them trusted their shiny new gear, neither of them could leave the other for long enough to go buy a burner. In that environment, there was no way John would imperil any of Harold's identities, not with Nathan's supposed death putting his associates under extra scrutiny. Jess would be okay, he told himself. Harold would do as he promised. All John had to do was get the mission done.
This was easier said than done. Even if the mission wasn't a set-up for John to terminate Kara, chances were he and Kara would tear each other to pieces before they ever set foot in Ordos. Kara took her misery out on John, and John took his misery out on a bottle, so by the time they entered China, he was bruised and nursing a constant hangover. This and the stress of travelling under cover left them both snappish and exhausted at the airport, which was very bad this early in a mission.
John hoisted his bag and had a brief argument with Kara about all of her luggage – she said it wasn't her fault, she needed cosmetics and clothes to fuck people so they could get travel documents and visas, whereas all he needed was a strong pair of knees – then they hauled themselves to the departure gate for Tianjin.
"Fuck this," said Kara, eying the list of cancellations, which included their flight. "We need to get moving faster or we'll be stuck outside Chifeng for months waiting for it to thaw. And I will have to fillet you and eat you raw."
John shrugged, ignoring the clench of his stomach, even though she was mostly joking. "If you think you can do better than Mark, I am fully prepared to support you." Even if he decided to refuse the order, he didn't relish hiking through sub-zero temperatures to escape the agency, either.
"Mark is doing this from an office chair, the fuck does he know?" Kara freshened up her lipstick, straightened her hair, and, now businesswoman-crisp, went to work, all the while keeping John in eyeshot.
John slumped down in his seat, gently aware of movement around him, picking up on conversations in different languages. Someone was reading a newspaper behind him; he heard it rustle as it was unfolded.
"Mr Reese, I'm sorry to appear like this without warning." It was Harold's voice, calm and quiet amidst the chaos of Beijing International.
John didn't react, thanks to training and long practice, but his heart hiccupped into clenching, stomach-dropping pain. "Jess," he said, and it was half a question, half a prayer. He watched Kara lean on the counter and joke with the clerk, and he forgot to breathe. He should have listened to his gut, he should have... He didn't know what he should have done, but this wasn't it. There were black spots dancing in front of his eyes. Jess was dead, he knew it. His stupid loyalty to this corrupt agency had gotten her killed.
"Jessica is fine," Harold said.
John rocked back in his seat, felt air rush into his lungs, felt the pulse in his head thump in time with his rocketing heart. He'd only ever flown at ultra high altitude once, on a hideous transport across the Arctic Circle in some highly classified plane made of tissue paper and spit. He'd spent the flight trying to stop his stomach escaping via his throat. This was a similar sensation.
"Did he hurt her? Is she okay? What happened, Harold?" John was as close as he could get to breaking cover, turning around and shaking answers out of Harold.
Harold didn't answer this onslaught. John heard the pages of the newspaper turn, and that was all.
He closed his eyes for a moment and rubbed his temple with two fingers. When he opened them again, he saw Kara at the counter watching him. She gave him a questioning gesture. John rubbed his chin, their pre-determined signal that he was fine. She narrowed her eyes but she went back to flirting with the clerk behind the counter. John made sure to keep his gaze firmly on Kara.
Harold turned the page of his newspaper with an audible crackle. "I think the details are for Jessica to divulge. I can assure you that she's safe, and that she has promised to stay in the city until I get home from my business trip. Right now, it's you I need to talk to."
"Talk to me about what?" he said, voice low, fingers still over his mouth to hide the movement. Whatever had happened to Jess, it hadn't escaped his notice that Harold no longer called Jess 'Ms Arndt'.
"You are being sent to Ordos," Harold said. "To retrieve stolen hardware. You've been ordered to execute Ms Stanton. She had been given orders to execute you. They're using you, John. They are sacrificing the two of you to cover up their mistakes."
From the booking desk, Kara gave him a surreptitious smirk, and he raised his eyebrows to show he was impressed with her negotiating skills. "If that's even true, what am I supposed to do with that information?" he asked Harold, surprisingly calm despite this revelation. Kara would do it. Even as angry as she was right now, she'd have no qualms. "If I go AWOL, they'll only send someone to finish the job." Probably Kara, he thought. She'd definitely volunteer.
For the first time, he heard frustration in Harold's voice. "I suppose you could consider not killing Ms Stanton, perhaps acting to preserve your own life. It's only fair to extend the same expectation to you that we have to Jessica, after all."
John frowned. "It's not the same at all," he said.
Harold sighed. "I don't imagine you'll see it that way, no. Unfortunately, as things stand, I don't have the luxury of time to change your mind."
"Why would they need to eliminate both of us?" John said. "It doesn't make sense." He was trying to see an alternative to this mission, but it was evasive. There had to be an answer. He couldn't just walk up to Kara and suggest they both defect.
He heard the soft beep of a phone, and then Mark's voice coming at low volume, barely audible even in the space between John and Harold's bodies.
"I'm sorry you're saddled with him," Mark said. "I can see you're struggling."
"Well," said Kara on the recording, sounding almost fond. "Polishing John into a civilised person has been always been a labour of love for me, Mark."
"Oh, I've seen that. But I'm afraid the agency's patience is at an end. John's a liability. I don't want to see him drag you down, so I'm giving the execution order."
There was a silence, and John could easily imagine Kara's nonplussed expression. Then she laughed. "And just when he was starting to get interesting."
"It's him or you, Kara," Mark said, sounding bored. "Frankly, I'd rather have you on my team than that sadsack."
The recording beeped off, and John sat there, elbows resting on his knees. Kara didn't agree with Mark, he could tell that from the tone of her voice. He knew her better than most people, and he could tell she was well aware she was being played. Still, John had no doubt that Kara would kill him to protect herself. She might even kill him just to see what happened next.
Could he stop, he wondered. He considered options. Could he and Kara get through the mission without executing each other? Subvert the mission, get it done well enough that the termination order was rescinded? They'd surely still be looking over their shoulders for the rest of their career, and sooner or later, they'd slip up and die.
Alternatively, if Kara could pull off his execution, if she could do that and make it back to the agency, he had no doubt she would leverage that into bettering her career: a promotion, a cushy posting of some sort. Whereas John would feel like shit, spend as much time beating himself up as he did watching his own back, and would sooner rather than later walk into a bullet.
It was an odd analysis, given the deal he'd made with Kara. He hadn't expected to live long past this year, and he wasn't sure he wanted to, either. As soon as he was certain Jessica was safe, really safe and free from that man, there wouldn't be much else left for John. They could never have the life Jessica wanted, not after what John had done.
John had seen a freight train crash on the tundra in Siberia, a long and icy track that ran in a straight line for miles, let the trains build up huge speed despite the loads they pulled. For a disturbingly long time after the impact, the freight cars kept coming at speed, sending repeated shockwaves up the line of the wreck until it shook itself to pieces. He'd been doing terrible things for a decade now, and suddenly, faced with the end of it all, he recognised the juddering in the tracks.
Harold had sat quietly all this time, occasionally turning a page of his newspaper. Eventually, though, it was clear that Kara was winding up her negotiations. John's posture changed in his chair, and in response, Harold spoke.
"I understand that you have a strong sense of duty. I know that it goes against the grain for you to consider not fulfilling this mission. Personally, I would prefer you try to extricate yourself," he said. "If only for selfish reasons: I enjoyed working with you very much, and your skills would enable us to save many more lives than Nathan and I ever managed."
"Work for you?" John felt a laugh build inside him, a bitter little bark of humour and cynicism, and had to suppress it, or Kara would have questions. He couldn't work for Harold. That was make-believe, as unreal as the fantasies he'd allowed himself while he was in Kara's bed. "I can't work for you."
At the booking counter, Kara took an envelope of boarding passes from the clerk, exchanged it for an envelope John knew contained a couple of hundred dollars.
"We all need a job, Mr Reese. Or at least a purpose. For what it's worth, I'm sorry for the way our country has treated you." John expected Harold to sound angry, but in fact his voice was gentle. "I have a plane prepping to fly to Hong Kong, and I'll be leaving this evening. You would be very welcome to join me, John. Whatever you decide, I hope to see you again." Then John heard him fold the newspaper into neat segments, stand, and walk slowly away. He was horrified to find himself leaning forward, getting ready to stand and follow Harold, to say something like, "Wait! Don't go!" Then Kara was walking back towards their seats, and he pushed that reaction down as far as it could go.
"Look!" she said, brandishing boarding passes for a private charter to Hohhot. "Got us tickets on a cargo plane!" She could barely conceal her triumph.
John stood, kissed her on the cheek like the dutiful husband he was supposed to be playing. "Good for you, darling," he said. Then, down low, he said, "We need to talk, Kara."
Neither of them trusted the airport hotels – the Chinese intel community used them to generate blackmail material, and it was nearly impossible to find one without cameras – and in any case, John wasn't sure he wanted to be alone in a hotel room with Kara when he broke this news. The best place they could come up with in the busy airport was a baby change room in one of the food courts. Kara locked the door and turned to scowl at John.
"They want me to terminate you," he said. "I'm not going to do it."
The moment he said the word "terminate" Kara drew on him, and in automatic response he on her.
"What I can't figure out is why they'd give us the same orders. If we're both supposed to execute the other, then…" He gave a little shrug to indicate his confusion.
Kara rolled her eyes, but didn't drop her weapon. "Then they finish off the one that walks out, you idiot. They're cleaning house."
John let out a breath. Kara always accepted unpleasant truths better when she could demonstrate her cleverness to John. "I guess you have ask yourself who you hate more: me or the agency," he said.
Kara's laugh was bitter. "I never hated you, John. Can you imagine how long you would have lasted if I really hated you?" She reached out to touch his face, and when he flinched, she caught him by the throat. She kissed him, her mouth hard and angry against his.
"I don't want to kill you," he said, against her lips. Then, because the danger seemed to have passed, he gave a little shrug and a smile. "I don't want you to kill me either."
She pushed him away with an exasperated hiss, holstered her weapon and prowled the tiny change room. "They won't let us walk free from this. They want two dead agents."
"Can't kill us if they can't find us," John said.
Kara's gaze was withering. "You really want to live on the run, John?"
"I want to live," John said simply, because suddenly it was true. He wasn't afraid of death; he understood he'd be taking a bullet eventually, but after talking to Harold, he realised that it should mean something. He shouldn't be thrown away to cover up embarrassing mistakes, neither of them should. He could see Kara understood that. She valued herself and her abilities more than the agency's good name. This wasn't about loyalty anymore.
"I really want to shove those words down Mark's throat," Kara said. "That asshole, he's probably so smug about how he played us."
They stared at each other, and for a moment John thought that he'd miraculously, unexpectedly gotten away with it. Then she shot him in the belly.
The impact threw him backwards, his body folding instinctively around the wound, which left his back vulnerable to the sharp kick Kara delivered to his kidney. He came up punching, despite the pain and the cold thumping chill spreading through his body. It wasn't enough though, and too slow: Kara caught his fist and pinned him to the wall with it, then forced him to his knees. He was headed down there anyway. Shock and blood loss was starting to kick in.
Kara kicked his gun to the other side of the room and holstered her own. "I was always going to win this one, John, admit it."
John threw himself at her, but his vision was greying out, and his arms were huge and heavy. He passed out, leaning against her body.
A sharp, bone-deep pain woke him, his mouth full of blood, running down his throat and choking him. He gagged on it and Kara's fist caught him across the temple. Blood loss and pain made his thoughts leaden, and he couldn't understand what she was doing. Why kill him like this when she could just put a bullet in his head?
Kara straddled him, fingers gripping his chin, holding him steady while she shoved a pair of pliers into his mouth, and then he understood.
"Hold still, you moron!" she said as the pliers rattled against his teeth. "I'm doing this for you too. It'll give me currency with the brass but it'll buy you a chance to disappear."
John's eyes streamed as she got hold of his other molar and started to wiggle it from side to side. When it finally let go and slipped free, his vision filled with stars and glowing lights surrounding Kara as she held the tooth up in triumph. He tried to move, but the messages to his limbs fizzled out somewhere around his gut. Breathing was raw, and there was salt and copper at the back of his throat.
His last memory was the slam of the door as she left.
Chapter Thirteen // Master Post // Chapter Fifteen
Fandom: Person of Interest
Rating: Explicit
Words: 7K (this chapter) 80K overall.
Characters/Pairings: Jessica/John, Jessica/John/Nathan, John/Nathan, John/Harold, John/Kara, Harold/Grace, Rick Dillinger, Mark Snow, Grace Hendricks, Lawrence Szilard, Daniel Aquino
Warnings/Content: Pegging, D/s dynamics, Dubious Consent, Domestic Violence, Infidelity, Light Bondage, Threesome - M/M/F, Canon-Typical Violence, Alternate Universe: Jessica lives, Alternate Universe: Nathan lives
Notes: Chapter 14 has the last act of non-con dentistry, I promise. (Only three more chapters to go!)
This fic is complete at 80K and will be updated weekly. All the ships mentioned do happen, but some of them not for a long while. (Harold/John doesn't happen for a long while, for example, but it gets there.)
Dubcon warning is for the Kara/John relationship, which gets dicey from time to time.
Thank you to
lilacsigil and talkingtothesky, who both helped me get this behemoth finished.Title is from Iron and Wine's song, House by the Sea
Master post with chapter links
Chapter Summary:
Mark arrives in Morocco to reassign John and Kara, but neither of them feel comfortable with their new orders. Jessica makes contact with John, and he struggles to find a way to help her.
Overall Summary:
After he joins the CIA, John stays in touch with Jessica as best he can without endangering her marriage or alerting the agency. He doesn't realise that these breaks from his professional life are as much a respite for Jess as they are for him.
Meanwhile, Jessica's number keeps coming up and Nathan has a plan to keep her safe.
Also at the Archive
Mark was jubilant, coasting high on his successes: snatching Nathan Ingram away from the intelligence community and bringing John back into the fold penitent and obliging.
"Let me tell you, they're chewing on their funeral shrouds back at the Pentagon," he said, practically rubbing his hands together.
It didn't seem to matter that they hadn't gotten any information from Ingram before his purported execution.
"We'll get more out of leveraging what they think we know than we ever would from actual intel." Mark passed folders to them. "Meanwhile, I'm sending you two off to Morocco, get yourselves back in the game. Get some sun, complete a relatively simple mission, drink some mint tea and get a tan. It's the closest you guys will ever get to a holiday, but Kara's earned it for the two of you."
Beside John, Kara preened, and dug her nails into John's wrist.
John dozed on the flight to Tangier, the first sleep he'd been able to catch since Kara had let Nathan go free. She'd made John bury the two fake FBI agents he'd shot.
"They'll buy the story if you're covered in dirt when we come in," she said, from her perch on the hood of the rental car. "Authenticity is everything, after all."
As he dug, John wondered who they were, what agency had really sent them, if they had families who would always wonder where they had gone. When he hefted the two bodies into the pit, he thought of Dillinger's grave and how it seemed like an impossibly long time ago that he had buried him. In reality, it had been less than eight days. John tried not to think about the weird camaraderie that had existed between him and Harold that night, but the juxtaposition of the two events made it impossible.
That night, cuffed to Kara's bed, he wondered at the difference between being tied up by Jess and tied up by Kara. Above him, lost in her own world of pleasure, Kara rocked back and forth on his cock. John wasn't in pain, and this wasn't even unpleasant, exactly, but it was so vastly different to being dominated by Jessica and examining that difference was a good diversion.
Kara worked herself towards an orgasm, shifting in minute movements against him, and watching her, John realised that the difference was joy. Jessica fucked him with a joyous abandon, but for Kara, it was some kind of competition.
"Come on, John. Don't just lie there. If I wanted to fuck a corpse I'd put a bullet in you." Kara reached behind her and gave John's balls a painful twist, then laughed as he bucked underneath her, hissing with pain. "God. Look at you. You hate this so much."
John didn't shut his eyes – Kara hated it when he shut his eyes – but he let his mind drift while his body did what it had to. He couldn't think of Nathan that way anymore, and Jess's face brought too much guilt to the forefront of his mind, so he idly imagined fucking around with Harold. It was enough of a novelty to spark his imagination: those fancy suits, that fastidious way he carried himself, the brightness of his eyes behind those glasses and how he didn't miss a single detail. He'd put that intense focus into fucking, John thought, and those hands would be precise and determined, stroking his cock, watching for his pleasure.
"Well," Kara said, as John moaned and thrust into her with more fervour. "I should grab those bad boys more often, if this is how you reward me."
She was so pleased, she let him come inside her, even if she made him eat her out afterwards.
Morocco was warm, and despite the situation, it did ease some of the aches in John's body. New York seemed a long way distant, cold and ice-blue compared to the bright colours and clamour of Tangier. John moved through the city on automatic, feeling like a stranger inside his own body, following orders without much consideration for the consequences. There was a numbness in knowing that this was his life now, and would be until Kara got bored with his existence.
There was no way to ameliorate the evil that he was asked to do now, not with Kara doting on every second of suffering it inflicted on him and the victim, and so, to survive, he switched off. He couldn't kill himself. Kara had explained in detail that if he ate a bullet, she'd go and find Jessica, and make sure her life was more of a misery than it already was. She was equally specific on dying in the field. The only person allowed to kill John was Kara, so he'd better make sure he made it home after each mission.
He still had the IFT news aggregator app on his phone, and it slowly gathered intel for him on Nathan Ingram's supposed death. The car carrying him and the arresting agents had tragically crashed, leaving all three people on board dead. Social media screamed conspiracy – and they were right, but not in the way they suspected – and IFT simultaneously put out an obituary and an official notice separating the company from Ingram's actions.
He read reports from the funeral, with photographs of mourners and pall-bearers. Harold was there with Nathan's ex-wife, the two of them sandwiching Nathan's son between them. John watched the boy, curious to know what he'd been told. He seemed grief-stricken. Nathan's ex, less so, but then John didn't know so much about their relationship. Nathan hadn't talked much about her, apart from admitting the marriage breakdown was his fault.
There was a puzzling link to IFT's newest audiobook app, to which John could see no relevance. He sent the article to trash, only to find it back again in the morning. This went on for a few days until he finally relented and installed the app on his phone. When he opened it, he found that it had come preloaded with Jane Austen's Persuasion.
"Who's doing the persuading?" he said to the app, but it made him smile.
The next time he went out for a run along the water, he plugged in some earbuds and switched the app on.
"I apologise for the book choice," Harold said in his ear. "I didn't have the chance to find out about your reading preferences, and Ms Arndt said that the two of you didn't really have time for reading." John could hear a smile in Harold's voice. "I think she was trying to shock me."
John laughed softly as he ran. He could imagine how that went down. Still, knowing that Harold and Jessica had been conversing gave him a sense of stability. There was a reason to all of this, and Harold had been true to his word.
"I should assure you that if anyone other than yourself opens this app, they will find you deep in the world of Anne Elliot. They can make of that what they wish, though if for veracity or interest you do want to listen to the book itself, you can access it through the bookmarks."
John had to stop then and load the actual book, just to see if Harold had gone so far as to record a whole book, but the narrator was a woman with an English accent. He listened for a minute or two, then changed back to the recording of Harold's voice.
"Nathan is recovering from his involuntary dental procedure," Harold said, as John ran on, dodging the construction crews that were constantly remodelling the beachfront in Tangier. "He is doing better than I expected with life in isolation, though I don't think his patience for it will last forever. For the present, he has been quite shocked by what happened that night, and the greater ramifications of his actions. There are court cases in motion. The government is trying to strip IFT of its defence contracts, and there's a chance Will may lose much of his inheritance." Harold paused a moment. "I do understand what Nathan was aiming for in making that broadcast, but I can't agree with his decision to take such a risk without considering the opinions of the other people involved. And of course, the personal cost to you has been excessive. I know he has a great deal of regret about the harm you may come to because of what happened on that road."
John was surprised to have reached the end of his run already. He walked in a circle, hands on his hips while his breathing regulated, then he started to warm down.
"I would like to say thank you," Harold continued in John's ear. "For protecting Nathan – and before you claim that it was a poor sort of protection, I want you to consider that he is alive now because of your actions."
John closed his mouth. Harold wasn't here, but he was doing a frightening job of predicting John's behaviour.
"You should be winding up your run now, and no, I am not prescient or using technology to spy on you. Much as it would make for a pleasant view, I don't retask satellites as lightly as that."
John had to pause the app and re-listen to that part of the recording again. He wasn't sure, but it seemed that in between denying he had magical powers, and admitting he could hack satellites, Harold had made a gentle pass at him.
"…it is in fact a matter using the GPS function on your phone and averaging the distance," Harold was saying into his ear. "I'll talk to you again tomorrow, John. Please take care."
It made for a strange oasis of calm, but it served John well through the rest of the day, and that night when Kara went back to her own room, he did listen to the actual book. He wasn't sure that he was an Austen fan, but the lacuna of quiet reading helped him sleep better through the night.
The two of them were working out of an abandoned prison, and they received their subject, blackbagged and sedated, from a rendition team the day after they arrived. A few days later, interrogation of the subject was going nowhere, to the point that Kara had tired of making John hurt the subject and had taken it upon herself to make him speak. John waited outside the interview room with one eye on the screen and one on his phone, checking the news feed for articles on New Rochelle or IFT or any of the topics Harold used to direct his attention. Inside, the subject screamed again. John closed his eyes and thought back to this morning.
On his run, Harold had told him about the house in which Nathan was living, and how Nathan had decided to teach himself to paint.
"Grace is appalled at the idea," Harold said. "She said that the great masters hadn't suffered starvation and penury so that rich dilettantes on enforced vacations could call themselves artists. I know she is the one with the MFA from Yale, and I am no expert, but I believe that dilettantes have done precisely that for centuries."
These one-sided discussions showed up each morning on his phone, and each morning, John found they left a place in his mind untouched by the interrogation or by Kara's persistent need to fuck with him. Harold talked about all sorts of things: cryptocurrency, architecture, his feelings on the musical Tommy, where he'd eaten the night before, the effects of climate change on wine production. None of it was important, except in so far as it gave John a connection to someone outside of his own small, violent world. Harold made sure to mention Jessica at least every other day, and for that peace of mind, John was grateful.
Their subject continued to resist their methods. Mark berated them over the phone, frustrated with their lack of progress.
"Come on, guys," he said, his voice crackly on the encrypted line. "Don't eat up the good will you earned from the Ingram execution. You came out of that smelling like roses, which, after the heap of shit you dragged in from the Daniel Casey situation, was a fucking miracle."
Kara took great offense at this criticism. She didn't let it affect her work – her focus with a prisoner was always absolute – but she fretted whenever they had down time, picking at John, at her own performance, at Mark's perceived expectations.
"Calm down," John said, late that night. "We can't do anything else but keep working until the guy talks. It's no use if we kill him."
Kara stalked up and down beside their foldout bed. "I'll kill him when I'm good and ready to kill him," she said, jabbing a finger into his chest.
John caught her hand and put it on his throat. "I know," he said. "You're the expert here. Mark should watch and learn."
Kara closed her fingers around his neck, squeezing down on the carotid arteries. John sat still for her as the blood started to pool in his head with a thumping ache. When his vision started to go black, he swept her grip aside and threw her down on the bed. He caught the slap she swung at him with one arm, but missed the punch. Kara laughed in delight, and the fight went on into the night until she finally fell asleep.
The next morning, John woke with the headache and red blotchy eyes that come from blacking out too many times in succession. His lip was swollen fat and scabbed over where it had split, and wouldn't that make today's interrogation an interesting prospect? He pushed his fingertips into his eye sockets for a few minutes, thought longingly of rolling back under the covers and never getting out, then pushed himself upright. On the way to the beachfront for his run, he stopped at a café to buy a bag of ice for his face. Once the corner of his mouth was suitably numbed, John put in his ear buds and started his run. Harold's letter, as John had started to think of the messages, would get him through the day again.
"It's strange working the numbers without Nathan," Harold said, after a perfunctory greeting of "Good morning, Mr Reese." John found the energy for a grin despite the pain in his lip, twitched the volume up a notch and relaxed into his run, finding his pace quickly.
"Nathan and I do communicate, of course, and he has all sorts of suggestions, some of which are absurd and some of which are helpful. Still, when you consider the loss of Mr Dillinger and Nathan, I am lacking able-bodied people in the field. Grace, as you know, is very innovative when it comes to convincing people to let us help them, but there's only so much the two of us can do alone. Still, we persist. One of my identities has hired a number of excellent bodyguards. We'll see how that improves the situation."
John ran, lost in Harold's words and the rhythmic thump of his feet on the walkway. He doubted that the bodyguards were as good as Harold believed; it was easy to fake competence enough to fool a civilian. Dillinger was a prime example.
"Jessica is away for the week," Harold went on. "After some time with a marriage counsellor, she and Peter are taking a trip to a cabin in Vermont. I feel a little uncomfortable with her being so far from home, but at the same time, smothering her will do as much harm as neglect. And she has promised to call me if there are… problems. We spoke frankly about it before she left – yes, that was as uncomfortable as you can imagine it to be – and she told me that she and you discussed some other options for the future. I know you well enough by now to imagine you think those options closed off now. They are not, Mr Reese. There will come an opportunity for you to free yourself from your commitments to Ms Stanton and the CIA. Bear that in mind, as much as you are able."
John found he had stopped running – was standing in the middle of the strand listening to what Harold had said. His skin prickled with impossible cold at the idea of Jess alone with Peter in the middle of nowhere. Sweat dripped into his eyes, making them sting, and he turned the recording off, swiped across his brow. He cut his run short – his concentration was shot, anyway – and as soon as he could get a safe break, he'd call Harold, talk to him about his worries, ask him to make sure he kept in contact with Jess while she was away from home and cut off from her support networks.
Kara met him in the parking lot of the abandoned jail. Clouds cast shadows over the open space, scudding past the two of them. John's ears popped as the air pressure fell. It would rain soon.
"I was just coming to find you," Kara said. She flared her nostrils at the sight of him, plastered with sweat and obviously agitated. John thought for a moment she was going to drag him off to the cell they were using as a bedroom, but she shook her head in irritation. "Mark's gonna love this look on you, John."
A fresh wave of gooseflesh spread down his back. "Mark's here?"
Kara's expression was sour. "Showed up after you left, him and his little friend."
Inside, Mark lolled against the desk with the monitors. Beside him was a woman John recognised vaguely, someone he knew was high up in the NSA.
"This is Alicia Corwin," Mark said. "She's got a mission for you."
Kara gave Alicia a saccharine smile that the woman ignored. "But we already have a mission, don't we, Mark?"
Mark shook his head. "This takes priority. This is your last day – get the intel now, then consider yourself reassigned."
They were being sent to China, some industry town in Inner Mongolia, to reacquire or destroy stolen software. It was urgent, according to Corwin. John felt her gaze on him, kept his expression still and disinterested. The last thing he wanted was to attract her attention.
"One more thing, John." Mark gestured John closer with his head, and John stepped into the shadows with him. "We've got evidence Stanton's been dealing with Hezbollah – we've traced the payments to off-shore accounts. She's compromised. And you should have noticed. Look, I don't blame you, I've seen the way she's been treating you since you came back in."
"What do you expect me to do about it?" John said. This was dirty, he could feel it. Whatever Mark was driving this conversation towards, he wanted John to be grateful and appreciative. The dark, warm air was claustrophobic, there was so much wrong here. Every nerve screamed at him to run, run, get out of this hell. Go find Jess and get to a safe place.
Mark watched him in silence for a few seconds. "You know what you have to do. Stanton has to be retired. Complete the mission, put her in the ground, and come back home. We'll find you a new partner, someone you can rely on. Someone who won't to stab you in the back for a laugh."
Well, John could see why Mark thought he would be grateful. Somehow, though, he doubted that his life would be as rosy as Mark promised when John returned to the States.
While Kara took the last few hours she could to squeeze information out of their subject, he took the risk of swapping out his sim, hoping to call Harold while everyone was occupied. He checked the monitors: Kara was leaning in close to the man, her fingers moving quick and cruel. Mark and Alicia were smoking in the parking lot, talking, their faces obscured by hair and smoke so that nobody could read their conversation. Before he could dial out, though, he saw a notification that the voice mail he used for Jessica had a message waiting. John logged into his message bank with numb fingers.
"It's me," Jess said. John bristled, it was clear she'd been crying.
"I spoke to Harold. He told me some of what happened with Nathan. What you did." There was a long pause on the line, and he could hear her breathing in little hiccupping gasps. "God, I had this call all planned out," she said, trying to get her voice under control. "I, uh, I just wanted to hear your voice, you know? So that if bad stuff happens, we both have something better as our last memory." She sighed. "Things here are… things are weird. I don't know how to explain it. It feels like just before a fire catches, like we're all waiting for it to start. Maybe this is the change Peter and I had to go through. Maybe it means we'll finally be good together. If not, then I just wanted to say…" She was crying again. "I wanted to say that you did right with Nathan. You never give up on people, and I love that about you. Be safe." Then she was gone.
John stared at the phone, panic rising in his gut. Jess was not okay. He had to call Harold now. For a moment, he didn't know what to do or which way to turn, then he realised that Kara was heading for the door. Behind her, the man in the chair lolled in his restraints, his head hanging. John had a few seconds to school his expression before the door to the interview room flew open, and Kara stormed out.
"That stubborn fuck has passed out again. Do we have any adrenaline left in the kit?" There was a little spray of blood across her cheek.
"Probably," John said, and opened the case to get it for her, since her hands were dripping red. His fingers fumbled with the clasp, and he forced himself to calm down, pushed the image of Jess from his mind so he could concentrate. He had to stay clear and focused now. If Kara got a whiff of this, if she suspected for a moment that he had been in communication with Jess, the deal would be off and Jess would be as good as dead anyway.
It was twilight by the time he could sneak off to the roof. The air was thick and humid, and heat radiated from every surface as he dialled one of the numbers he had collected for Harold over the months.
It only rang twice before it was picked up. "Yes?" Harold's voice was carefully non-committal, giving nothing away to this unknown number.
"It's me," said John.
"Mr Reese. What's happened?" Harold knew better than to assume this was a social call. John wouldn't be taking this risk for anything less than life-threatening circumstances.
John turned in a circle, taking in the scrubby landscape while he ordered his words. "I had a call from Jess, and she's not okay. You need to go to Vermont."
Harold sounded surprised. "But I've spoken with Ms Arndt every day this week, and there's been no indication that…"
"Then she doesn't trust you, Finch!" John said. Frustration seethed through him. "If she sounds all right to you, she's faking it. Please. Don't leave her alone up there. I can't go. You have to."
He heard the rattle of a keyboard. "Very well," Harold said, as easy as that. "I'm booking a flight right now. I will do my best to keep in touch." Before he hung up the call, he added, "I'll do everything I can to keep her safe. Please do the same for yourself, John."
John's nausea abated, and the tightness in his chest eased. Harold believed him, despite the evidence. Harold trusted him. Harold would make sure that Jessica had protection and support if she needed it.
He sat suddenly on the rusted casing of an old air conditioner, and stared at his upturned palms on his thighs. They shook a little with the aftereffects of the adrenaline required to make that call to Harold. It was okay to ask for help, he told himself. He couldn't expect Jessica to accept help, if he wasn't prepared to do the same. And whatever the situation, Harold would do his best to make sure Jessica was safe. John believed that implicitly, with the ease of a truth he felt bone-deep. As he left the roof, large raindrops started to fall, kicking up haloes of dust where they hit the roof.
Still, hours later as he packed for China, he had to quash the edginess crawling all over his body. Outside, a thunderstorm lit up the sky and the rain was a now constant roar. He'd buried their subject this afternoon, while the clouds grew heavy and low.
"This is bullshit," Kara said, stuffing clothes into her case. "And what was Mark whispering to you about? Are you keeping secrets from me, John?" She wheeled on him, and he saw the glint of a knife in her hand.
"You already know my secrets, Kara," he said. "That's how you hold all the cards, isn't it?"
Kara tucked the knife into a scabbard on her thigh. "Don't you forget it," she said.
The problem with China was that it was huge, and Ordos, the industrial city to which they'd been sent, was too remote and too secretive to approach directly. John and Kara landed in Beijing with a long list of flight transfers and train timetables before they even set foot in Inner Mongolia. Travel had not gone well: they'd been delayed in Hong Kong, their flight to Beijing had to make an emergency landing due to electrical malfunction, and all the while, John had the creeping feeling that this mission was cursed. He watched Kara in Hong Kong, thought about how it would be to put a bullet in her, and felt doubt bloom. All the horrible acts he'd completed, all the pain he'd caused side by side with Kara, and now he started to doubt? It was ridiculous.
Mark had given them new, supposedly secure phones before they left, and they were obviously effective, since no IFT software had yet shown up on John's handset. The paranoia between John and Kara was so great that while neither of them trusted their shiny new gear, neither of them could leave the other for long enough to go buy a burner. In that environment, there was no way John would imperil any of Harold's identities, not with Nathan's supposed death putting his associates under extra scrutiny. Jess would be okay, he told himself. Harold would do as he promised. All John had to do was get the mission done.
This was easier said than done. Even if the mission wasn't a set-up for John to terminate Kara, chances were he and Kara would tear each other to pieces before they ever set foot in Ordos. Kara took her misery out on John, and John took his misery out on a bottle, so by the time they entered China, he was bruised and nursing a constant hangover. This and the stress of travelling under cover left them both snappish and exhausted at the airport, which was very bad this early in a mission.
John hoisted his bag and had a brief argument with Kara about all of her luggage – she said it wasn't her fault, she needed cosmetics and clothes to fuck people so they could get travel documents and visas, whereas all he needed was a strong pair of knees – then they hauled themselves to the departure gate for Tianjin.
"Fuck this," said Kara, eying the list of cancellations, which included their flight. "We need to get moving faster or we'll be stuck outside Chifeng for months waiting for it to thaw. And I will have to fillet you and eat you raw."
John shrugged, ignoring the clench of his stomach, even though she was mostly joking. "If you think you can do better than Mark, I am fully prepared to support you." Even if he decided to refuse the order, he didn't relish hiking through sub-zero temperatures to escape the agency, either.
"Mark is doing this from an office chair, the fuck does he know?" Kara freshened up her lipstick, straightened her hair, and, now businesswoman-crisp, went to work, all the while keeping John in eyeshot.
John slumped down in his seat, gently aware of movement around him, picking up on conversations in different languages. Someone was reading a newspaper behind him; he heard it rustle as it was unfolded.
"Mr Reese, I'm sorry to appear like this without warning." It was Harold's voice, calm and quiet amidst the chaos of Beijing International.
John didn't react, thanks to training and long practice, but his heart hiccupped into clenching, stomach-dropping pain. "Jess," he said, and it was half a question, half a prayer. He watched Kara lean on the counter and joke with the clerk, and he forgot to breathe. He should have listened to his gut, he should have... He didn't know what he should have done, but this wasn't it. There were black spots dancing in front of his eyes. Jess was dead, he knew it. His stupid loyalty to this corrupt agency had gotten her killed.
"Jessica is fine," Harold said.
John rocked back in his seat, felt air rush into his lungs, felt the pulse in his head thump in time with his rocketing heart. He'd only ever flown at ultra high altitude once, on a hideous transport across the Arctic Circle in some highly classified plane made of tissue paper and spit. He'd spent the flight trying to stop his stomach escaping via his throat. This was a similar sensation.
"Did he hurt her? Is she okay? What happened, Harold?" John was as close as he could get to breaking cover, turning around and shaking answers out of Harold.
Harold didn't answer this onslaught. John heard the pages of the newspaper turn, and that was all.
He closed his eyes for a moment and rubbed his temple with two fingers. When he opened them again, he saw Kara at the counter watching him. She gave him a questioning gesture. John rubbed his chin, their pre-determined signal that he was fine. She narrowed her eyes but she went back to flirting with the clerk behind the counter. John made sure to keep his gaze firmly on Kara.
Harold turned the page of his newspaper with an audible crackle. "I think the details are for Jessica to divulge. I can assure you that she's safe, and that she has promised to stay in the city until I get home from my business trip. Right now, it's you I need to talk to."
"Talk to me about what?" he said, voice low, fingers still over his mouth to hide the movement. Whatever had happened to Jess, it hadn't escaped his notice that Harold no longer called Jess 'Ms Arndt'.
"You are being sent to Ordos," Harold said. "To retrieve stolen hardware. You've been ordered to execute Ms Stanton. She had been given orders to execute you. They're using you, John. They are sacrificing the two of you to cover up their mistakes."
From the booking desk, Kara gave him a surreptitious smirk, and he raised his eyebrows to show he was impressed with her negotiating skills. "If that's even true, what am I supposed to do with that information?" he asked Harold, surprisingly calm despite this revelation. Kara would do it. Even as angry as she was right now, she'd have no qualms. "If I go AWOL, they'll only send someone to finish the job." Probably Kara, he thought. She'd definitely volunteer.
For the first time, he heard frustration in Harold's voice. "I suppose you could consider not killing Ms Stanton, perhaps acting to preserve your own life. It's only fair to extend the same expectation to you that we have to Jessica, after all."
John frowned. "It's not the same at all," he said.
Harold sighed. "I don't imagine you'll see it that way, no. Unfortunately, as things stand, I don't have the luxury of time to change your mind."
"Why would they need to eliminate both of us?" John said. "It doesn't make sense." He was trying to see an alternative to this mission, but it was evasive. There had to be an answer. He couldn't just walk up to Kara and suggest they both defect.
He heard the soft beep of a phone, and then Mark's voice coming at low volume, barely audible even in the space between John and Harold's bodies.
"I'm sorry you're saddled with him," Mark said. "I can see you're struggling."
"Well," said Kara on the recording, sounding almost fond. "Polishing John into a civilised person has been always been a labour of love for me, Mark."
"Oh, I've seen that. But I'm afraid the agency's patience is at an end. John's a liability. I don't want to see him drag you down, so I'm giving the execution order."
There was a silence, and John could easily imagine Kara's nonplussed expression. Then she laughed. "And just when he was starting to get interesting."
"It's him or you, Kara," Mark said, sounding bored. "Frankly, I'd rather have you on my team than that sadsack."
The recording beeped off, and John sat there, elbows resting on his knees. Kara didn't agree with Mark, he could tell that from the tone of her voice. He knew her better than most people, and he could tell she was well aware she was being played. Still, John had no doubt that Kara would kill him to protect herself. She might even kill him just to see what happened next.
Could he stop, he wondered. He considered options. Could he and Kara get through the mission without executing each other? Subvert the mission, get it done well enough that the termination order was rescinded? They'd surely still be looking over their shoulders for the rest of their career, and sooner or later, they'd slip up and die.
Alternatively, if Kara could pull off his execution, if she could do that and make it back to the agency, he had no doubt she would leverage that into bettering her career: a promotion, a cushy posting of some sort. Whereas John would feel like shit, spend as much time beating himself up as he did watching his own back, and would sooner rather than later walk into a bullet.
It was an odd analysis, given the deal he'd made with Kara. He hadn't expected to live long past this year, and he wasn't sure he wanted to, either. As soon as he was certain Jessica was safe, really safe and free from that man, there wouldn't be much else left for John. They could never have the life Jessica wanted, not after what John had done.
John had seen a freight train crash on the tundra in Siberia, a long and icy track that ran in a straight line for miles, let the trains build up huge speed despite the loads they pulled. For a disturbingly long time after the impact, the freight cars kept coming at speed, sending repeated shockwaves up the line of the wreck until it shook itself to pieces. He'd been doing terrible things for a decade now, and suddenly, faced with the end of it all, he recognised the juddering in the tracks.
Harold had sat quietly all this time, occasionally turning a page of his newspaper. Eventually, though, it was clear that Kara was winding up her negotiations. John's posture changed in his chair, and in response, Harold spoke.
"I understand that you have a strong sense of duty. I know that it goes against the grain for you to consider not fulfilling this mission. Personally, I would prefer you try to extricate yourself," he said. "If only for selfish reasons: I enjoyed working with you very much, and your skills would enable us to save many more lives than Nathan and I ever managed."
"Work for you?" John felt a laugh build inside him, a bitter little bark of humour and cynicism, and had to suppress it, or Kara would have questions. He couldn't work for Harold. That was make-believe, as unreal as the fantasies he'd allowed himself while he was in Kara's bed. "I can't work for you."
At the booking counter, Kara took an envelope of boarding passes from the clerk, exchanged it for an envelope John knew contained a couple of hundred dollars.
"We all need a job, Mr Reese. Or at least a purpose. For what it's worth, I'm sorry for the way our country has treated you." John expected Harold to sound angry, but in fact his voice was gentle. "I have a plane prepping to fly to Hong Kong, and I'll be leaving this evening. You would be very welcome to join me, John. Whatever you decide, I hope to see you again." Then John heard him fold the newspaper into neat segments, stand, and walk slowly away. He was horrified to find himself leaning forward, getting ready to stand and follow Harold, to say something like, "Wait! Don't go!" Then Kara was walking back towards their seats, and he pushed that reaction down as far as it could go.
"Look!" she said, brandishing boarding passes for a private charter to Hohhot. "Got us tickets on a cargo plane!" She could barely conceal her triumph.
John stood, kissed her on the cheek like the dutiful husband he was supposed to be playing. "Good for you, darling," he said. Then, down low, he said, "We need to talk, Kara."
Neither of them trusted the airport hotels – the Chinese intel community used them to generate blackmail material, and it was nearly impossible to find one without cameras – and in any case, John wasn't sure he wanted to be alone in a hotel room with Kara when he broke this news. The best place they could come up with in the busy airport was a baby change room in one of the food courts. Kara locked the door and turned to scowl at John.
"They want me to terminate you," he said. "I'm not going to do it."
The moment he said the word "terminate" Kara drew on him, and in automatic response he on her.
"What I can't figure out is why they'd give us the same orders. If we're both supposed to execute the other, then…" He gave a little shrug to indicate his confusion.
Kara rolled her eyes, but didn't drop her weapon. "Then they finish off the one that walks out, you idiot. They're cleaning house."
John let out a breath. Kara always accepted unpleasant truths better when she could demonstrate her cleverness to John. "I guess you have ask yourself who you hate more: me or the agency," he said.
Kara's laugh was bitter. "I never hated you, John. Can you imagine how long you would have lasted if I really hated you?" She reached out to touch his face, and when he flinched, she caught him by the throat. She kissed him, her mouth hard and angry against his.
"I don't want to kill you," he said, against her lips. Then, because the danger seemed to have passed, he gave a little shrug and a smile. "I don't want you to kill me either."
She pushed him away with an exasperated hiss, holstered her weapon and prowled the tiny change room. "They won't let us walk free from this. They want two dead agents."
"Can't kill us if they can't find us," John said.
Kara's gaze was withering. "You really want to live on the run, John?"
"I want to live," John said simply, because suddenly it was true. He wasn't afraid of death; he understood he'd be taking a bullet eventually, but after talking to Harold, he realised that it should mean something. He shouldn't be thrown away to cover up embarrassing mistakes, neither of them should. He could see Kara understood that. She valued herself and her abilities more than the agency's good name. This wasn't about loyalty anymore.
"I really want to shove those words down Mark's throat," Kara said. "That asshole, he's probably so smug about how he played us."
They stared at each other, and for a moment John thought that he'd miraculously, unexpectedly gotten away with it. Then she shot him in the belly.
The impact threw him backwards, his body folding instinctively around the wound, which left his back vulnerable to the sharp kick Kara delivered to his kidney. He came up punching, despite the pain and the cold thumping chill spreading through his body. It wasn't enough though, and too slow: Kara caught his fist and pinned him to the wall with it, then forced him to his knees. He was headed down there anyway. Shock and blood loss was starting to kick in.
Kara kicked his gun to the other side of the room and holstered her own. "I was always going to win this one, John, admit it."
John threw himself at her, but his vision was greying out, and his arms were huge and heavy. He passed out, leaning against her body.
A sharp, bone-deep pain woke him, his mouth full of blood, running down his throat and choking him. He gagged on it and Kara's fist caught him across the temple. Blood loss and pain made his thoughts leaden, and he couldn't understand what she was doing. Why kill him like this when she could just put a bullet in his head?
Kara straddled him, fingers gripping his chin, holding him steady while she shoved a pair of pliers into his mouth, and then he understood.
"Hold still, you moron!" she said as the pliers rattled against his teeth. "I'm doing this for you too. It'll give me currency with the brass but it'll buy you a chance to disappear."
John's eyes streamed as she got hold of his other molar and started to wiggle it from side to side. When it finally let go and slipped free, his vision filled with stars and glowing lights surrounding Kara as she held the tooth up in triumph. He tried to move, but the messages to his limbs fizzled out somewhere around his gut. Breathing was raw, and there was salt and copper at the back of his throat.
His last memory was the slam of the door as she left.
Chapter Thirteen // Master Post // Chapter Fifteen