Work Text:
Cho sits down as heavily as ever, but he doesn’t turn to his computer right away. Instead he fidgets with the neat pile of papers on his desk, pulling a file out, closing it almost as soon as he’s opened it, and then adding it back into the middle of the stack before pulling it out again less than a minute later. Wylie watches, fascinated. His search program will be running for another ten minutes anyway, so he really does have nothing better to do than watch his sort-of-boss and sort-of-mentor have some kind of low-key nervous breakdown.
Cho clears his throat eventually. Wylie holds his breath.
“Rook starting tomorrow.”
Wylie perks up immediately. Vega’s photo was attached to the in-office email Abbott sent around earlier in the week.
“Yeah. Vega, right? It’ll be great to have a… uh, I mean, another agent. In the team. Cause we could use her. I mean, use the help.” He bites his own lip hard. No way Cho didn’t notice that.
“Yeah.” Cho rustles his papers some more.
“…Everything OK?” Wylie ventures, after a few more minutes. Should he get Abbott? Lisbon’s still out on leave, or he’d have gotten her already.
“Yeah.” Cho shuts the file with a small grunt, and shakes his mouse to wake his computer up. “Got to give the rook the Jane briefing. Tomorrow.”
Wylie blinks. “Uh, the what?”
Cho stares very hard at his email. “You know. The briefing on Jane. How to not get fired. Or killed.”
Wylie can’t particularly think of anything to say. “Did Abbott ask you to do that?” he ventures, eventually.
Cho snorts. “No. Just… Somebody has to.”
The word on the street is that Jane drove Fischer stone crazy, and all the way from Austin to Seattle to boot. Somehow she could never seem to get it through her head that she couldn’t make Jane play by the rules, and he never stopped finding it fun to prove to her that she couldn’t. She’s still got her job, though. Although there are a couple disciplinary notes in her file that didn’t used to be there. Or so Wylie hears.
Wylie kind of wasn’t sure he liked her anyway. She tended to look straight through him, or else as though he were some kind of alien species that disgusted her a little bit. Not like Lisbon. Or Cho, even. Or Abbott.
“You never gave me the Jane briefing,” he says, after a moment’s thought.
Cho snorts again. “You never got hired. You just got yourself on the team with that satellite image stunt. And you never went to the Academy. Trust me, they do not prepare you for Jane at the Academy.”
Wylie lights up excitedly. “Oh, maybe I could help? ‘Cause, you know, I’ve worked with him. Like, a lot now. I could help Vega know what to expect.”
Cho merely clicks the mouse in reply.
“…And he likes me? I think?” Wylie shifts uncomfortably. That was more than he meant to say.
“Yeah, he does,” Cho says simply.
Wylie glows.
Cho swivels around after a long minute. “Fine. Let’s do it. What goes in the Jane briefing?”
“His cup,” Wylie says immediately. It will be some time before he forgets what happened when Armstrong took that cup for a Homeland Security cross-agency briefing. Abbott’s yells nearly made the whole bullpen rattle.
“Got it.” Cho writes it down.
“Oh, and that anything he asks you to do will probably not be all the way on the level, but it will totally catch the bad guy. And also be awesome.”
Cho stares at him. “Seriously?”
Wylie wriggles ecstatically. “Are you kidding? Since I joined, I’ve gotten to, like, pretend to be a cab driver and follow a serious bad guy! And get a fake tattoo. And pretend to be murdered! Where else would I get to do all of that shi- uh, stuff?”
“I think,” Cho says bluntly, “that this is the part of the briefing that I’m gonna write.”
Wylie looks at his lap. “You do the stuff he says,” he can’t help muttering mutinously. “You pulled a gun in that bar in the art case.”
Cho sighs. “I’ve done worse than that for Jane. But I know what I’m doing and why. I’ve made my choices. There’s no way a kid fresh out of the Academy should be pitched into that.”
Wylie studies his keyboard some more. Some bad stuff went down in Cali, he knows. Lisbon and Cho and Jane all went pretty far outside the lines to get the Big Bad. But they had each other’s backs and they got him. And he’s not a kid. He knows what he’s doing too. “But how’s she gonna work with Jane if she can’t be part of a Jane plan?”
Cho sighs again. “We’ll figure it out. Oh. The flirting.” He writes that down.
Wylie blinks hard. “Uh, the what?”
“The flirting. He flirts with everybody. Like… everybody. It’s just his way. It doesn’t mean anything.” Cho pauses for a long moment. “Except with Lisbon.”
Wylie quietly stores that one away for later. He hasn’t not noticed that Lisbon reversed her transfer, and that Jane has been out for the last two weeks too. Also that Abbott had a weird secret little smile when he announced those two things. Looks like the mystery of those two might be solved.
“Got it.” He racks his brain for a second. “Oh. Poker?”
Cho nods sharply. “Right. Poker. And all forms of gambling. Do not ever, ever gamble with him. Unless you know what the con is and you’re in on it. Quarter bets only.”
“So… what is the con?” Wylie ventures, while Cho notes that down.
“If you have to ask, you aren’t in on it. Also: pool.”
“Uh, pool?”
“He’s a pool shark. Didn’t you know?” Cho jots a period at the end of his line definitively. “If you could learn to scam people with it while growing up carnie, he learned it. Seen him clean cocky assholes out of their cash a dozen times.”
Wylie’s jaw drops. “Jane is a carnie?”
“Grew up carnie, yeah. Where do you think he learned to fake psychic skills?”
This conversation gets more fascinating by the minute. And Cho is rarely this talkative. This could be Wylie’s best day ever in the unit.
A few things join up his brain in a little flash of lightning. “Is that where he learned to pick pockets?”
“Oh, he got you already? Yep.” Cho adds that to the list. “I refused to pay up on a bet once because he rigged it, and he picked my pocket while we were running an interrogation. Got the guy to confess, too. What’d he do you for?”
Wylie flushes. “Uh. I had this photo thing in my wallet, and I didn’t think he knew about it, but… uh. Yeah.”
“It won’t be the last time. Roll with it.” Cho doesn’t bother looking up. “That goes on the list too. He knows stuff about you. He can’t help it. Don’t push him, and he won’t push you.”
“Right.” Jane likes to have his fun, but he only really goes to town on pompous jackwads. Wylie is starting to be able to recognise the type.
“He’s the best liar you’ve ever met,” Cho says, not looking up from the notepad. “He will lie to you, and you will believe him. But you won’t be able to lie to him.”
“Cho?”
Cho keeps writing. “Yeah.”
“Why did you stick with him? If you think that?”
Cho finishes his sentence, but he doesn’t look up. “Because he gets it done. Because he’s better than he pretends to be sometimes. Because he had my back.” Very quietly, he says to the notepad, “Because I would have done it too.”
Wylie holds his breath for a long moment, not daring to jostle his – his friend – out of his mood.
“I think we covered the major points now,” Cho says, after a moment. He turns back to his computer.
“Uh, yeah. That’s totally going to help Vega out. Let me know if you want me to, uh, help. With the delivery. Of the briefing.”
“I think I got it.”
“Okay. Yeah. I know you do. Oh!”
“What?”
“Shouldn’t we put in something about the clothes?”
The corner of Cho’s mouth curls up in that way he has. “I’m not touching that one."
Wylie grins. Probably best.
"Hey. Wylie."
"Yeah?"
"Thanks.”
This is definitely Wylie’s best day ever. “Anytime.”