She doesn't quite choke him, but she doubles down. Or she tries. She just looks perturbed when she can't force him back, but she stays. 

One perfect eyebrow quirks up in question. Little Miss Icy is back. 

Oh this is going to be so much fun. He looks down at her.

Total sincerity.

"Try to do what he said and find a way to work with me." He radiates sheer total professionalism. "Come and get a drink with me. Off the clock. See if we can get along a little better. For the sake of the mission." And so he can watch her fume some more. 

She does release him, then. Her teeth are nearly grinding. Patronising idiotic arsehole of a whore mother-

"It's Pakistan. The only places serving alcohol are unfavourable establishments like the one we went to yesterday." 

He smirks. "You need to get out more, Agent. And I didn't think you were uncomfortable with unfavourable. Would you rather get a milkshake?"

"If your palate is as juvenile as your mission plans, we can certainly go out for the world's most boring cold drink," she says, starting back to her office and the entrance to the coffeehouse.

"Lassi is the preferred drink here. Or falooda, or cold coffee, or really anything apart from that bland American shit."

She look she cuts him at the last part makes it clear that he is also included in that description. 

"Hey, don't knock it 'til you've tried it. If we drank enough for me to notice you'd be on the floor anyway, so why don't you pick your favourite."

There's a pregnant pause in the conversation. 

Then, haltingly, in a small voice he's not heard from her she says "Actually, I don't know. I've never had any before." 

Well that hits him like a punch in the gut. Nice going, Carter.

...Unless she's yanking his chain. Which she probably is. What works in both cases-

He shrugs, and this time it's a genuine smile. "I guess it'll have to be all of them, then."

She looks a little startled and horrified. She might be older than him, but she does have a little innocent glint in her eye he lost a while ago. 

Well. Only one way to find out, isn't there?

While she might have been lying about not having drunk before, her intoxication right now seems to track with that. She is leaning heavily on her arm across the bar, drawing curious looks from many of the male patrons here. She turned heads when she walked in wearing that red dress with the full sleeves. It's sort of western, in a weird tilted Indian way, that's trying hard to be western but ultimately lacks the simplicity of Western styles. Whatever. She looks nice, and they all look curious. She'll take it. 

She points a slightly off-centre finger at him. "Okay. So. First kill?" 

He leans heavily forwards, sleeves rolled up in the heat, jacket slung over a shoulder. 

Turns out there is actually enough to drink in Pakistan to get him buzzed. 

All right. 

"First mission. East Berlin. Holdout Nazi meetup, bigger than I thought, shit went south real quick - said some things I shouldn't - guy swings a pipe at me, I panicked and punched him and ran. Cracked his skull right open."

He takes a sip. 

"...I was sick afterwards." And nightmares for weeks.

Oh God why did he say that quickly-

He gestures at her. "You?"

She's looking at him with crinkles around her eyes. He's not seen this expression yet. She's regarding him, but not in a cold way. Perhaps the alcohol has loosened her up.

Just his fist? Interesting. The pieces are coming together.

She takes another sip. "I was twelve. There was a man following me and my friend home. He tried to grab her. I had a pair of scissors for embroidery."

She shrugs, taking another sip. "I continued on. She moved away without so much as a thank you." 

"So that's where you get it from." His voice is teasing but the look in his eyes is quite warm. "How - what was it like, growing up here? Apart from - that. "

She flutters her eyelashes at him, raising a hand to her brow dramatically. "Oh, it was terrible. We lived a simple, poor life out on the moors. We never had money to even buy a pakora from a street seller!" she cries, turning heads.

Raina gives him a flat look over the top of her glass. "We lived in the city and my stepfather was a diplomat." She takes a sip, savouring, before continuing. "Now you. Was your life the glorious comfort of the American dream, or the reality of the American scam?" 

He gives her a flat look. They never tell you sarcasm is the lowest form of wit?

"Dad came from nothing, some hillbilly town in the mountains, one bad winter away from starving. Didn't go to school, he still can't really read. Lied about his age to fight the Germans the first time round, got noticed, came back to knock Mr Hitler down, ended up helping start the Agency. By the time I was around he was getting beers with Fr- with the President. Dreams do come true sometimes, ma'am." He's looking at her quite intently all of a sudden, leaning a little towards her, and his gaze is so blue, a little wide and a little flushed with drink. "You don't like us much. Why is that?" 

She gives him a teasing smile. "My apologies. You see, I've learned to be careful of trusting a white man with money in his pocket when he says he's here to help. The last time someone made that mistake, we ended up..." she gestures lazily with her glass to a vague shape around them.

She has to try very hard to remember her words when he's staring at her like that. The pain of the last few years of her life are not as easy to forget, however. She can still hear the shouts and the riots from when she was ten. There were so many men with wild expressions on their faces, like animals released from their cages, like monkeys when they see the last few nuts on a tree. She will never forget chocolate-giving uncles becoming savages who sneered at her on the street.

"Nehru was an interesting character. I have no words for the British. Suhrawardy is an idiot, Ghandi was ineffective, and Jinnah was misguided at best in these later years. But you..." she surveys him as one might see a snake taste the air with its tongue. "You Americans have one finger in many pies, if you will. I have yet to see where your chips and your bombs fall." 

He shrugs, suddenly a little uncomfortable for some reason. "Honestly, I'm just glad we're all still here - that's why I joined up really. Dad saw two world wars, don't want to make it three for three. Not sure we'd have a world left."

He stares off into the crowd. The world just has so many different people in it - he remembers people back home who've never left their own state. 

"I guess that's up to us," he says, raising his glass towards her a little. She's so close, he can breathe her in. 

She looks disappointed for a second, like he's failed some test he didn't know he was taking. 

Of course he sidesteps. There's no honour in a man who wouldn't acknowledge his country's wrongs. 

"It would be, if your country let any of us have a choice in the matter. It's really all up to Washington."

She drains her glass, thumps it on the counter, and stands to leave. 

He's met one of the guys who worked on the A-bomb. Not much more than a kid, really, and the look in his eyes... She knows damn well where the bombs fall. 

What, she thinks her people would do anything different? Where the hell does she think the name Khan comes from, exactly? Turko-Mongol term for "military chief", which is euphemism for "mass-murderer", if you want to play it like that.

He doesn't say that. 

He catches her wrist without thinking, too fast and too strong for her to pull away-

-a flash of a memory, some ice-cold-green steel room, burning in his veins-

-he can feel the bones of her arm, he could break them just with a twitch of his fingers now-

-knows now how to show restraint.

"Hey," he says instead of doing anything stupid, his eyes clear and so blue. "I'm not gonna pretend I like everything my country ever did. I don't think there's anywhere you could say that about. But that doesn't mean we can't make a difference. Do right by each other, for a change. I think that's what America is meant to be."

She can almost believe him, that's the thing. It's so very dangerous for a cocktail of happenstance: this drink, his grip on her arm like he wouldn't let go even if it scalded him, the blue in his eyes and the breaths that tip out of his mouth ever-so-slightly quicker if she's close to him, the way his voice rumbles in his chest so low she has to lean in to hear him.

Raina realises all at once why he's been in this job for so long. It's not even charm; that's not the word for it, his idealism stretches so far beyond a calculated persona. It's... Effervescence. It makes her want to believe. 

So she does. She allows one corner of her mouth to tilt up, allows herself to be drawn back to her seat. "I think I could believe in a world like that. I've always... I've always wanted to." 

"Make it happen, then." He really believes it. Says it like it's the most normal thing in the world. 

He grins. 

"You can start by getting us another drink."

She smiles again, shoves him back down to his seat, and heads to the bar. 

"Are you sure this is a good idea?" Khan whispered, her brows drawn into a furrow. She couldn't even see very well from here. 

He's slouched down behind the bushes, his large frame hidden - he knows how to make himself unnoticeable from a distance, to break up the shape of a man for prying eyes. 

"Of course I am," he says in a low mutter. "We get eyes on their operation, we maybe prove the commies are involved in this, which they totally are, we maybe work out where they're getting these girls from, and-" he smirks at her. "Even if we got caught somehow... well, I guess a fine upstanding lady like you wouldn't know, but there's only one thing we'd be doing in the bushes. So where's the risk?"

"Khan," he'd said to her crisply the last time they'd spoken, "I know it was hard on you at first, working with Agan. You've done good work. Don't screw it up."

"Don't do anything stupid."

Khan had barely bitten back her less-than-witty retort of 'it still is', but Shoaib is the kind of man that only really appreciates his own bad jokes. He's been good to her these last few years; never underestimated her, always pushed her. She trusts him enough to know this mission with the infuriating American is supposed to be part of her training and development.

But Ya Allah he is infuriating.

She cuts a look at him. "They recognise me or you and we end up blowing the whole thing."

She takes a breath in. Shoaib wants her to work with him, and really he's not bad; can be charming in the right light. He's handsome like a movie star, and occasionally has good ideas. She's trying to trust him and not dismiss everything he says. 

"Alright. We could split up and get inside from different entrances or go full stealth and take guards out to get inside. Or..." she looks him over critically. "Do you think you might pay for a girl like me as an escort?" 

He actually has a backup plan for if he gets caught or recognised - he's pretty sure he can bluff his way through, with Usmaan's intel - but he's keeping that in his back pocket, thanks. Miss Agent ain't as good an actress as she thinks she is. And it's somehow a lot more authentic when she really is off-guard and angry. 

And he likes impressing her.

He smiles widely at her. "There's things even the dollar can't buy, ma'am. I guess I wouldn't wanna think you were doing it for the money." His gaze flickers up and down, and without even realising it he bites his lip. "But sure. In theory. Absolutely."