POI fic: Terra Incognita
Title: Terra Incognita
Rating: G
Source: Person of Interest
Characters: Iris Campbell, Lionel Fusco, Dani Silva
Summary: One of these days, Iris is going to have to deal with the fact that what she doesn't know about John Riley is just as important as what she does know. It'll probably have to wait until after he gets out of hospital, though.
Disclaimer: I own nothing and make nothing from this but my own entertainment.
Word Count: 2110
John’s not at his desk. His partner is. Iris hesitates, because she thinks she should probably walk straight on by and pretend she was only here to use the photocopier, but then Detective Fusco glances up from rifling through John’s top drawer and it’s too late. Lionel. Fusco’s first name is Lionel. John generally uses it when he mentions his partner, which is a bit unusual, Iris finds, among cops.
She makes a conscious effort not to hug her files. “Hello, detective,” she says. “I don’t think we’ve spoken since the gala. How have you been?”
“Me? Great. Yeah. Never better.” Lionel Fusco heaves a stack of paperwork from John’s desk to his own. He actually looks like he hasn’t slept for days. “You checking up on Wonderboy?”
“What, John? No, no, I... just had a spare moment, and he missed an appointment yesterday, so I thought I’d see if he was here today. He hasn’t returned my call.”
Maybe Iris shouldn’t have said that. She would have said it about any other patient, though, so she doesn’t think she’s giving anything away. And John doesn’t always keep his appointments, even now, but he does normally get back to Iris with some sort of belated explanation these days, so after the fourth unanswered text and the second call straight to voicemail she’d had to wonder if there was something going on.
She studies Fusco’s face. “Oh, right,” he says, studying her right back. “You didn’t hear.”
“Hear what? I haven’t heard anything from John.”
“Yeah, you wouldn’t. He was probably freezing to death at the time.”
“He was what?”
“He got shot,” Fusco says succinctly. “Chasing a psycho killer through the Catskills with no backup. So I get up there and find one dead guy, one unconscious suspect, and Mr. Good Team Player talking to ghosts outside in the car, because he’s too much of a big damn hero to tell anyone where he’s going.”
He seems personally aggrieved by this. Iris thinks she’s going to have to sit down. “Is he -? John’s not...?”
“Dead? Nah,” Fusco says, and Iris does sit down, rather abruptly, in John’s empty chair. The whole busy precinct blurs momentarily, light and colour and sound swimming together into something sickly. Iris clutches her files until it passes. “He’s at the New York General. He’ll be fine. This sort of thing happens to him every other week.”
“Almost dying?”
Fusco gives her another curious look. “He’s still seeing you, isn’t he?” he says. “What the hell else does he talk to you about?”
*
Iris cancels her next appointment. On the way to the hospital, she has time to resent how cavalier Fusco was about John almost dying and to wonder how well John gets on with his partner. Maybe Fusco feels threatened by John. Iris hadn’t picked up on any workplace related friction in John’s sessions, other than John’s rocky relationship with his paperwork, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there.
She’s moved onto the conversation she’s going to have with John once he’s up and about again, featuring familiar phrases like ‘hero complex’ and ‘death wish’ and ‘do you really think, John’ and ‘IA is still watching you’, by the time she pushes through the glass doors. There’s a map of the hospital by the elevators and Iris is examining it when a young woman steps out, moves past her, then stops and says, “Dr. Campbell? It is Dr. Campbell, isn’t it? From the Academy?”
Iris doesn’t recognise Dani Silva at first. “Yes, that’s me,” she says, since being name-checked by unfamiliar cops is one of the hazards of her job. The girl must have been in one of her classes. “How are -” and then Iris remembers following John down the street into a shootout, and afterwards locking herself into her office to drink a great deal of terrible precinct tea and think very seriously about whether it might be worth arranging some therapy for herself as well.
And calling John the next morning, after she’d heard about the undercover cop and the mole. Remembering it, Iris realises John never did explain exactly what he’d done there.
The cop who’d been in trouble, Dani Silva, says, “Good, thanks. You here to visit Detective Riley? He’s asleep. I left a card.” She must have seen Iris’s surprise; she adds, “I saw his file when I was with IA. Said he was one of yours.”
“Oh - I see. Is he...?”
“They said he’s doing well. Hypothermia and blood loss.” Dani speaks through her teeth, like someone with something to prove. Iris finds it slightly off-putting. “I’m Dani Silva, by the way. Riley and his partner helped me out a couple of times. You probably don’t remember me.”
“No, I do,” Iris says. “You were the one at the Academy - well, there was all that shooting. I was there for that.”
“Oh yeah, and then Riley put you in a taxi,” Dani says, breaking out in a grin, as if she had just identified a shared experience that gave them something in common, rather than a brief and upsetting moment of unexpected violence that still keeps Iris up at night. This, Iris thinks, is why she took the therapist route after graduating from the Academy. “I guess you did sign off on him in the end, or he wouldn’t even have been on this case. Fusco said he got the guy, though. At least, they’re working on the assumption that the guy Riley shot did it until Riley or the other guy wakes up long enough to file a report.”
John shot someone. Of course John shot someone before or while or after being shot and almost dying of hypothermia. Iris would really like to lock herself into her office right now. Instead, she says brightly, “Good, I’m sure IA will take that into consideration.”
Dani laughs. “Hey, I gave him a clean report card,” she says. “To go with all the other fictions in his file.”
“Excuse me?”
“Oh, come on. The guy’s got special forces training. He said his instructor was ex-military, but his dog’s scuba-certified and he busted us out of a Trinitario base by blowing up a swimming pool with the grenade belt he brought along with him. There’s no way he hasn’t done that before. And that’s not in his file.”
Dani has clearly put some thought into this. Iris is seriously torn about what to react to first. She settles faintly for, “Dogs can get scuba certificates?”
“If you believe Riley,” Dani says. “Yeah, look, I didn’t put all that in my report, okay? Riley got me out of a really tough spot. He and Fusco are the good guys. You won’t tell anyone, will you, Dr. Campbell?”
Therapists are a lot like priests in some ways. Iris is used to people spilling secrets to her wherever she is; she thinks just knowing she’s a therapist makes people feel they have a right to the safe embrace of doctor-patient confidentiality, even when they are not in fact her patients. “No, of course not,” she murmurs, while terrifying visions of John Riley juggling grenades dance across her vision. Where would he even have got them? She’s sure grenades (grenades!) aren’t standard issue ordnance. “I’m sure whatever’s in John’s file, he had a good - he blew up a swimming pool?”
“Tight spot,” Dani says, with a meaningful twist of her mouth. “Sorry, I have to go, I’m on my lunch break. It was good to see you, Dr. Campbell. If you run into Fusco at the Eighth, would you tell him I said hi?”
Dani heads off. Iris steps into the elevator and stares at her reflection.
She feels unsettled. Talking to Dani has amplified the sense of discontinuity instilled by Fusco’s casual suggestion that John runs into near-death situations on a fortnightly basis. John is fearless, Iris knows, and ‘fearless’ can be another word for ‘reckless’, especially when written down in a report alongside a tally of injuries and property damage. IA didn’t send John to Iris on a whim. But Iris knows John Riley. She’s read his file. His shoots are all good shoots; there are too many of them, but his violence is under tight control. She’s heard about his childhood and his ex and Joss Carter, the cop he couldn’t save last year. John didn’t want to end up in Iris’s office and he was difficult at first, but a lot of cops are. Since then, he’s told Iris things she’s sure he never opened up to anyone else about before.
He never told her he had a dog. He might have said he was a dog person.
He never mentioned the swimming pool.
The thing is, they don’t talk much about what they do. Iris can’t talk about her work, for obvious reasons, and John, well, outside the therapy that’s not really happening any more, John’s typical conversational strategy is to ask Iris about herself, which works because it’s flattering and also because Iris is a therapist. She spends all day listening to other people talking about their problems. It’s nice to be the centre of someone else’s attention for once. And it’s unusual for a man to really listen to a woman, especially an older man. It’s what John did the first time Iris found him waiting in her office, when he brought Iris coffee and asked about her cat. Iris thinks she’d be happier if she hadn’t just realised that.
Iris knows the difference between someone looking for a quick way out of her office and someone honestly opening up to her. It did cross Iris’s mind once or twice that John might have realised the difference too, but only during their early sessions. It’s a long time since Iris last caught the momentary head-tilt that suggests John’s asking himself the undercover cop’s favourite question, “Who am I today?”
The elevator doors open. Iris walks down the wards until she finds John’s bed. He’s still asleep. There are several cards. One of them appears to be handmade. TO LURCH, it says, in rounded rainbow felt-tip letters. Iris doesn’t read what’s inside, although she’s tempted. She hadn’t known John had family in New York. He’d never mentioned it.
She wishes she’d stopped to get something for John now. She’d assumed he’d be awake. She’s got a notebook in her purse; she’ll leave a note.
First, though, she stands at the foot of the bed, watching John sleep. He looks exhausted and old and bloodless. Iris has never seen John without gelled hair before. Almost as much as the missing suit, it makes him look undressed.
She knows him. She’s sure he’s a good person. She wants to believe that’s what matters.
She knows it’s a problem that there are feelings involved, her feelings. She knows she should have insisted John actually saw the other therapist she’d referred him to. She knows it’s possible to be a good person who makes bad decisions, and if she thought about it she’d have to admit she really doesn’t know much about the decisions that led to John spending four years undercover in Narcotics before transferring to Homicide. She does now know that John’s partner considers John almost dying to be business as usual and that a former IA cop doesn’t trust John’s IA file. Also: dog, grenades, swimming pool. It’s so outlandish. It makes it harder to believe in the Detective John Riley who sits across from Lionel Fusco at the Eighth Precinct and complains about his paperwork. Although since John’s release from desk duty, of course, he’s only rarely there.
Iris has heard John say there are no good or bad people, only good or bad decisions. Some therapists, Iris knows, would take John’s fixation with making good decisions as an indication that he’d made a lot of bad ones at some point in his life.
She wants to smooth the white sheets under his white hands. She wants to have a very serious conversation with John about the underlying reasons why he just can’t stop himself from running towards danger. She wants to remind him he can’t save everyone. She wants to believe that who John is can be separated from the things John does.
She knows he can’t be. And she doesn’t know what to do with all the little details that don’t quite add up. She thinks about how she thinks she loves John, but sometimes she feels like she’s going to suffocate under the weight of all the things he hasn’t told her, especially on days like today, when everyone else seems to know more about John than her.
Rating: G
Source: Person of Interest
Characters: Iris Campbell, Lionel Fusco, Dani Silva
Summary: One of these days, Iris is going to have to deal with the fact that what she doesn't know about John Riley is just as important as what she does know. It'll probably have to wait until after he gets out of hospital, though.
Disclaimer: I own nothing and make nothing from this but my own entertainment.
Word Count: 2110
John’s not at his desk. His partner is. Iris hesitates, because she thinks she should probably walk straight on by and pretend she was only here to use the photocopier, but then Detective Fusco glances up from rifling through John’s top drawer and it’s too late. Lionel. Fusco’s first name is Lionel. John generally uses it when he mentions his partner, which is a bit unusual, Iris finds, among cops.
She makes a conscious effort not to hug her files. “Hello, detective,” she says. “I don’t think we’ve spoken since the gala. How have you been?”
“Me? Great. Yeah. Never better.” Lionel Fusco heaves a stack of paperwork from John’s desk to his own. He actually looks like he hasn’t slept for days. “You checking up on Wonderboy?”
“What, John? No, no, I... just had a spare moment, and he missed an appointment yesterday, so I thought I’d see if he was here today. He hasn’t returned my call.”
Maybe Iris shouldn’t have said that. She would have said it about any other patient, though, so she doesn’t think she’s giving anything away. And John doesn’t always keep his appointments, even now, but he does normally get back to Iris with some sort of belated explanation these days, so after the fourth unanswered text and the second call straight to voicemail she’d had to wonder if there was something going on.
She studies Fusco’s face. “Oh, right,” he says, studying her right back. “You didn’t hear.”
“Hear what? I haven’t heard anything from John.”
“Yeah, you wouldn’t. He was probably freezing to death at the time.”
“He was what?”
“He got shot,” Fusco says succinctly. “Chasing a psycho killer through the Catskills with no backup. So I get up there and find one dead guy, one unconscious suspect, and Mr. Good Team Player talking to ghosts outside in the car, because he’s too much of a big damn hero to tell anyone where he’s going.”
He seems personally aggrieved by this. Iris thinks she’s going to have to sit down. “Is he -? John’s not...?”
“Dead? Nah,” Fusco says, and Iris does sit down, rather abruptly, in John’s empty chair. The whole busy precinct blurs momentarily, light and colour and sound swimming together into something sickly. Iris clutches her files until it passes. “He’s at the New York General. He’ll be fine. This sort of thing happens to him every other week.”
“Almost dying?”
Fusco gives her another curious look. “He’s still seeing you, isn’t he?” he says. “What the hell else does he talk to you about?”
*
Iris cancels her next appointment. On the way to the hospital, she has time to resent how cavalier Fusco was about John almost dying and to wonder how well John gets on with his partner. Maybe Fusco feels threatened by John. Iris hadn’t picked up on any workplace related friction in John’s sessions, other than John’s rocky relationship with his paperwork, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there.
She’s moved onto the conversation she’s going to have with John once he’s up and about again, featuring familiar phrases like ‘hero complex’ and ‘death wish’ and ‘do you really think, John’ and ‘IA is still watching you’, by the time she pushes through the glass doors. There’s a map of the hospital by the elevators and Iris is examining it when a young woman steps out, moves past her, then stops and says, “Dr. Campbell? It is Dr. Campbell, isn’t it? From the Academy?”
Iris doesn’t recognise Dani Silva at first. “Yes, that’s me,” she says, since being name-checked by unfamiliar cops is one of the hazards of her job. The girl must have been in one of her classes. “How are -” and then Iris remembers following John down the street into a shootout, and afterwards locking herself into her office to drink a great deal of terrible precinct tea and think very seriously about whether it might be worth arranging some therapy for herself as well.
And calling John the next morning, after she’d heard about the undercover cop and the mole. Remembering it, Iris realises John never did explain exactly what he’d done there.
The cop who’d been in trouble, Dani Silva, says, “Good, thanks. You here to visit Detective Riley? He’s asleep. I left a card.” She must have seen Iris’s surprise; she adds, “I saw his file when I was with IA. Said he was one of yours.”
“Oh - I see. Is he...?”
“They said he’s doing well. Hypothermia and blood loss.” Dani speaks through her teeth, like someone with something to prove. Iris finds it slightly off-putting. “I’m Dani Silva, by the way. Riley and his partner helped me out a couple of times. You probably don’t remember me.”
“No, I do,” Iris says. “You were the one at the Academy - well, there was all that shooting. I was there for that.”
“Oh yeah, and then Riley put you in a taxi,” Dani says, breaking out in a grin, as if she had just identified a shared experience that gave them something in common, rather than a brief and upsetting moment of unexpected violence that still keeps Iris up at night. This, Iris thinks, is why she took the therapist route after graduating from the Academy. “I guess you did sign off on him in the end, or he wouldn’t even have been on this case. Fusco said he got the guy, though. At least, they’re working on the assumption that the guy Riley shot did it until Riley or the other guy wakes up long enough to file a report.”
John shot someone. Of course John shot someone before or while or after being shot and almost dying of hypothermia. Iris would really like to lock herself into her office right now. Instead, she says brightly, “Good, I’m sure IA will take that into consideration.”
Dani laughs. “Hey, I gave him a clean report card,” she says. “To go with all the other fictions in his file.”
“Excuse me?”
“Oh, come on. The guy’s got special forces training. He said his instructor was ex-military, but his dog’s scuba-certified and he busted us out of a Trinitario base by blowing up a swimming pool with the grenade belt he brought along with him. There’s no way he hasn’t done that before. And that’s not in his file.”
Dani has clearly put some thought into this. Iris is seriously torn about what to react to first. She settles faintly for, “Dogs can get scuba certificates?”
“If you believe Riley,” Dani says. “Yeah, look, I didn’t put all that in my report, okay? Riley got me out of a really tough spot. He and Fusco are the good guys. You won’t tell anyone, will you, Dr. Campbell?”
Therapists are a lot like priests in some ways. Iris is used to people spilling secrets to her wherever she is; she thinks just knowing she’s a therapist makes people feel they have a right to the safe embrace of doctor-patient confidentiality, even when they are not in fact her patients. “No, of course not,” she murmurs, while terrifying visions of John Riley juggling grenades dance across her vision. Where would he even have got them? She’s sure grenades (grenades!) aren’t standard issue ordnance. “I’m sure whatever’s in John’s file, he had a good - he blew up a swimming pool?”
“Tight spot,” Dani says, with a meaningful twist of her mouth. “Sorry, I have to go, I’m on my lunch break. It was good to see you, Dr. Campbell. If you run into Fusco at the Eighth, would you tell him I said hi?”
Dani heads off. Iris steps into the elevator and stares at her reflection.
She feels unsettled. Talking to Dani has amplified the sense of discontinuity instilled by Fusco’s casual suggestion that John runs into near-death situations on a fortnightly basis. John is fearless, Iris knows, and ‘fearless’ can be another word for ‘reckless’, especially when written down in a report alongside a tally of injuries and property damage. IA didn’t send John to Iris on a whim. But Iris knows John Riley. She’s read his file. His shoots are all good shoots; there are too many of them, but his violence is under tight control. She’s heard about his childhood and his ex and Joss Carter, the cop he couldn’t save last year. John didn’t want to end up in Iris’s office and he was difficult at first, but a lot of cops are. Since then, he’s told Iris things she’s sure he never opened up to anyone else about before.
He never told her he had a dog. He might have said he was a dog person.
He never mentioned the swimming pool.
The thing is, they don’t talk much about what they do. Iris can’t talk about her work, for obvious reasons, and John, well, outside the therapy that’s not really happening any more, John’s typical conversational strategy is to ask Iris about herself, which works because it’s flattering and also because Iris is a therapist. She spends all day listening to other people talking about their problems. It’s nice to be the centre of someone else’s attention for once. And it’s unusual for a man to really listen to a woman, especially an older man. It’s what John did the first time Iris found him waiting in her office, when he brought Iris coffee and asked about her cat. Iris thinks she’d be happier if she hadn’t just realised that.
Iris knows the difference between someone looking for a quick way out of her office and someone honestly opening up to her. It did cross Iris’s mind once or twice that John might have realised the difference too, but only during their early sessions. It’s a long time since Iris last caught the momentary head-tilt that suggests John’s asking himself the undercover cop’s favourite question, “Who am I today?”
The elevator doors open. Iris walks down the wards until she finds John’s bed. He’s still asleep. There are several cards. One of them appears to be handmade. TO LURCH, it says, in rounded rainbow felt-tip letters. Iris doesn’t read what’s inside, although she’s tempted. She hadn’t known John had family in New York. He’d never mentioned it.
She wishes she’d stopped to get something for John now. She’d assumed he’d be awake. She’s got a notebook in her purse; she’ll leave a note.
First, though, she stands at the foot of the bed, watching John sleep. He looks exhausted and old and bloodless. Iris has never seen John without gelled hair before. Almost as much as the missing suit, it makes him look undressed.
She knows him. She’s sure he’s a good person. She wants to believe that’s what matters.
She knows it’s a problem that there are feelings involved, her feelings. She knows she should have insisted John actually saw the other therapist she’d referred him to. She knows it’s possible to be a good person who makes bad decisions, and if she thought about it she’d have to admit she really doesn’t know much about the decisions that led to John spending four years undercover in Narcotics before transferring to Homicide. She does now know that John’s partner considers John almost dying to be business as usual and that a former IA cop doesn’t trust John’s IA file. Also: dog, grenades, swimming pool. It’s so outlandish. It makes it harder to believe in the Detective John Riley who sits across from Lionel Fusco at the Eighth Precinct and complains about his paperwork. Although since John’s release from desk duty, of course, he’s only rarely there.
Iris has heard John say there are no good or bad people, only good or bad decisions. Some therapists, Iris knows, would take John’s fixation with making good decisions as an indication that he’d made a lot of bad ones at some point in his life.
She wants to smooth the white sheets under his white hands. She wants to have a very serious conversation with John about the underlying reasons why he just can’t stop himself from running towards danger. She wants to remind him he can’t save everyone. She wants to believe that who John is can be separated from the things John does.
She knows he can’t be. And she doesn’t know what to do with all the little details that don’t quite add up. She thinks about how she thinks she loves John, but sometimes she feels like she’s going to suffocate under the weight of all the things he hasn’t told her, especially on days like today, when everyone else seems to know more about John than her.