Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The folder of photographs looked thin lying on his desk, but it always felt heavy sitting in his hands. Harold added his latest acquisition to the top of the stack.

This was data and data was good, he told himself. Data moved him forward.

But that it always had to be data that looked like this.

John Reese was off to the far right in this particular shot, almost off camera entirely. He was rarely in the center of these pictures, but that was not surprising given they were never taken intentionally. These were a collection of hacked security camera stills that Harold obtained with no small effort from Mexico and a baker's dozen of American states, all printed, geo-located, and collated by date.

Most of them were from four months prior, on Mr. Reese's extended and meandering drive back across the country after abandoning Peter Arndt to a lifetime in a Mexican prison. A lifetime was something Arndt still had left to him at least, unlike his wife or the man who brought him to his fate. John Reese spared the murderer for his crime, but he did not spare himself.

The long drive back from the border was nearly enough to pull him under. Scattered among the various pictures of Mr. Reese staggering drunk into or out of cheap motel rooms were shots of him standing alone by the ledges of rooftops, bridges, and tall parking garages. These were almost always shots in some degree of profile or fully from behind, as he faced out into the distance in the darkest hours of the night.

Even caught in benign circumstances at gas stations and fast food drive-thrus, Mr. Reese looked grim and sick. The external wounds left from the catastrophic end of his CIA career in China had then yet to even begin to truly heal. The internal wounds he suffered from the needless and cruel loss of the love of his life likely never would.

They never did for Harold.

He traced the man and his shifting identities across the states and wondered every time he found him once more if this would be the last time. Fortunately, John Reese was remarkably difficult to kill, even when a consummate assassin like himself was the person trying. Actively killing himself would have brought a quick if ruthless end to his suffering and perhaps that was why he continued to resist it. To be sure, he would die if he continued drinking himself into oblivion and passively depriving himself of all his basic biological human needs. Nature would take its course with him eventually, that much was inevitable. But it would take its good time doing it, and that was the point.

When Mr. Reese arrived in New York again, Harold thought it would not be long before he could orchestrate a meeting with him. He would give the man time to physically heal, keep a watch on him locally, and then when they were both ready, he would make his proposal. That concept proved to be wildly overoptimistic. Mr. Reese became harder to track than ever, even so close. Especially so. He vanished into the lowest, darkest depths of the city leaving but the barest trace behind him. Only his first night back did he sleep in any kind of proper bed, a sleazy rented room for cash under the table. He disappeared into the streets for every night that followed after that.

It took Harold an anxious two weeks before he uncovered any evidence of his existence beyond just that initial arrival. Only then could he even begin to narrow his search with any confidence. With so little data to work with, progress was discouraging and slow. It was another month to bring his search down to a single borough, two more after that to narrow it to a four mile radius. The scant trail Mr. Reese left upon the world around him was a challenge to follow, all exactly as he intended. John Reese had been trained well on how to become and remain invisible. It just so happened that the person looking to find him spent a decade of his life perfecting systems to reveal the invisible.

Time passed, and Harold waited. Judging by the few cam stills he appeared in, Mr. Reese's body was healing, albeit slowly. His heart was not, as expected. Numbers came to Harold from the Machine in their standard steady and endless stream, and people died with no one able to help them. One unnecessary death after another, nine digits at a time.

The list grew longer by the day. Just today a woman was found drowned just off the coast in what the police quickly dismissed as a sailing accident. It was anything but, of course. Her number had come up two days prior, and Harold had been meticulously tracking her by GPS. He knew the moment she died to the minute because it was also the minute her cell phone died as it sank into the depths of the ocean in her pocket.

As he tacked her news clipping to the board to join the dozens upon dozens of others like it, Harold found himself hoping the woman did not suffer long. For every human being on the list and for all those who loved them or were loved by them, that bleak hope was all he had to offer. It was all he ever had to offer.

For now.

Harold looked down at the latest picture in the stack, taken just last night. He was lucky to have found it at all. John Reese was barely recognizable now, buried deep beneath layers of castoff clothing and unkempt hair. A faint shadow trailed behind him in the dim artificial light of a housing block roof. Mr. Reese kept his eyes low as he stepped forward away from the stairwell. His cheeks were shaded in red by days-long exposure to the cold. A small flat glass bottle dangled loosely in his hand.

This portrait of pain was data. The GPS coordinates for the housing block became a new entry in Harold's database, one more piece of information for his algorithms to chew on. There was a trail here to uncover, he knew that. He just had to keep working at it, refining his search metrics, honing the parameters. He tapped the enter key and Harold caught himself holding his breath.

May this point make a line.

The street map on his fourth monitor took less than a second to shrink from a space of miles to a space of merely blocks. Ten square, to be precise. For the first time since his search for this man began, Harold had his target down to a workable radius. This was walkable distance.

Human distance.

Finally, Harold had something he could be aggressive with. He fell to the keyboard and started typing. This would be no small task. This was still no small space. But it was possible now. There were security cameras in this area he could mine for video. There were cell phones he could tap for audio.

He was within arm's reach now. He knew he only had to keep trying. And he knew he had to keep trying faster.

In the picture atop the manila folder just beside Harold's hands at the keys, John Reese stood frozen in a single moment, alone. There was such desolate sorrow in his windburned face, absolute surrender in his slumped frame.

It was clear Mr. Reese knew the truth as well as Harold did.

One way or another, this was coming to an end at last.

Chapter Text

The sensation of the toe of a boot against his ribs was enough to wake John, but it didn't make him any less drunk. He kept his eyes shut, thinking if he did nothing maybe the boot would lose interest and go away. Or maybe it would decide to go ahead already and kick his splitting head in. He just hoped it would make up its mind one way or the other and get it over with.

Instead of either of those things, it just nudged at him, jostling him back and forth.

"Come on, John. Rise and shine. I've got breakfast."

Some breakfast. Considering when he passed out on this squashed refrigerator box, there was no way it was any earlier than late afternoon now. John peeked open his eyes only to be punished with golden daylight searing itself into his brain. When he could focus again, he saw it was Joan looming over him, a half-full bottle of orange juice swaying in her grip.

"Here. Put some vodka in it if you have to. You're drinking it."

John groaned. The thought of anything sloshing around in his stomach was revolting. The last time he was awake he threw his guts up behind a dumpster. All he wanted to do now was go back to sleep and stay there as long as he could. He squinted past her to see who else was around.

"Give it to Leland, he's as hungover as I am."

"Yeah, well, Leland's not about to carry a mattress three blocks for me. You are. There's a twin left outside one of the rentals by the old gas station, clean. The new girls are gonna come sleep up here with our group. Too busy for them down by the parking lot. Drink it."

It was worthless to keep arguing. It wasn't like Joan was going to give up on something she thought was best for the camp. Besides, she was right and John knew it. Someone strong enough had to carry that mattress, and it sure wasn't going to be old Leland or anyone else there right now.

John rolled himself to sit up and took his would-be breakfast from her. Lukewarm store brand OJ straight from the bottle didn't exactly hit the spot, but it did take the razor's edge off John's headache. He felt almost halfway alive.

Maybe more like a quarter. Enough to haul a mattress, anyway.

It took him longer than it should have to retrieve it but in that other universe he would have been doing it at all sober. He did as he was told and dropped it into place exactly where Joan wanted it. He tried to head back to his box, ready to close his eyes and not be there anymore, but she intercepted him.

"Where you think you're going?"

"To sleep. You asked for a mattress, there is a mattress."

"What about the girls?"

"What about them?"

"They're gonna stay up here, someone's gotta go fetch 'em."

John looked at her and she looked at him right back. It was hard to imagine what Joan did before she came to this life somewhere well past a decade ago. She never talked about it and John was certainly never going to ask. But she had a shrewd, practical intelligence about her. She was an immovable object when she wanted to be and she wanted to be when she was trying to help someone.

Maybe she had been a nurse.

He found the girls' barebones current setup behind a rusted out Chrysler. God, they were young. Just teenagers, barely at that. And sisters by the look of their wide brown eyes if John had to guess. He could tell they hadn't been out here on the street long.

"You're John? We're supposed to wait for John."

The older one was more assertive, but she couldn't have been more than fifteen. She looked up at John like she was looking up at a mountain, half in awe and half in terror. He'd gotten used to seeing fear in people's faces when they looked at him a long time ago. It still managed to hurt when it was a child.

"That's right. You must be Shrina and Lila. You guys want to follow me? I'll help you take your stuff up to the old shipping dock. It's quieter up there."

"That's... where Joan is?"

The younger one. She kept her hands in nervous little fists. John had heard enough.

"Yeah. Listen, why don't you two just run on ahead? I'll grab these bags for you, bring them up so you don't have to lug them. Joan'll be just up past the overhang there, back toward the big windows. You see them? Look for her shopping cart, you can't miss it. Just don't touch it, okay?"

The girls took him up immediately on the offer to get the hell away from him. Not that he blamed them. John tried not to think too hard about where they had been, what they had seen, what brought them to this place.

Given the way they looked at him, it may well have been some big intimidating man like him who ran them from their home into this desperation. Some drunk like him.

So much for not thinking about it.

Up at the dock, Joan had two bags of filet-o-fish she'd managed to talk another soft heart outside the McDonald's into buying for her and she was busy sharing the spoils. It gave John a welcome chance to drop his delivery off sight unseen while Joan's assorted flock in attendance gravitated inward toward her and dinner and the communal warmth of the fire burning in the barrel.

The shyer and more mentally ill among them took their food and retreated back to their makeshift tents. The girls ate close together, settled in as much as they could be with their bags and their bed in the protected space behind a pillar. They whispered to each other and watched the group. They watched him.

John sat by himself to stare at the sparking flames while he washed his only solid food of the day down with a start on a fresh fifth of whiskey. His stomach eventually stopped growling, but it kept right on aching.

Nothing in him ever stopped aching anymore.

Chapter Text

He passed out early that evening. Lucky.

He dreamed. Unlucky.

It was always her, of course. How could it ever be anyone else?

Jessica appeared in all the sweetest dreams he had. Tangled tipsy memories of Mexico and margaritas. The smell of spice and smoke and seafood. The humid air, the warmth of her squeezed up against him on one side of a cantina booth. The feel of her collarbone on his lips. The sound of her laughter when that tickled her.

He could live in those moments forever.

If he could only stay asleep.

But the only thing worse than waking up from a dream of Jess like that into the barren waste that was his life now was passing out in that barren waste into a nightmare of her instead.

That was the roll of the dice he got tonight. Snake eyes.

The nightmares always had one thing in common other than Jessica in pain, Jessica afraid, Jessica slipping through his fingers. They were lucid. He knew he was in a nightmare. He knew what was coming. And he knew he could never stop it.

That didn't mean he could ever stop trying.

He was still trying.

"Listen to me. He is going to kill you, Jess. You know it. It's going to happen. He's already hurt you. Please, you have to get away from him."

Jessica looked up at him under the suburban streetlights. She was so beautiful, fire and hope shining in her eyes along with welling tears. She reached for him and took his hand.

"Then come with me, John. Be with me now. Stop being afraid and I can stop being afraid too."

"I want that. God, more than anything in this world, you have to know I want that. But I... I can't, Jess. Please, I'm begging you, you have to protect yourself for me now. Don't go through that door. Don't leave me here without you."

A tear tinged dark from her mascara slipped down her cheek. She dropped his hand and all the heat drained from his body, all the breath from his lungs.

"I waited for you," she said, and she went inside the house without looking back.

And John did the only thing he ever could do at that point, watch the ending, their ending, that he knew was waiting for him. All that was left now was brutal inevitability, forever as seen through a kitchen window. His heart skipped beats, making him dizzy, making time slow.

Inside, Peter wrenched Jessica's arm, twisting her wrist as he pulled her to him, only to throw her back away hard. Jess cried out and fell backwards for a hundred lifetimes before her head hit the corner of the tile counter with a stomach-churning crack. Her body tumbled to the floor limp, empty of her.

The murderer of the only person John ever loved, the only person who ever loved him, stood above her and stared down at his handiwork. Then all at once he turned to face John through the window, locking him with his blank, remorseless eyes.

And only then was John able to scream.

He woke on the cardboard slab gasping. Coursing with adrenaline, he came up with his fists readied instinctively to fight, and he looked around for attackers.

There was no one around him, of course.

But at the same time, everyone was around him. The entire camp was turned his way watching him, and John knew he hadn't only screamed in his nightmare.

The men scattered about looked away from him quickly as soon as they saw John was not actually a threat, just a man drowning in alcohol and misery. Most of them knew that experience all too well.

The women knew it even better though, and they did not look away as quickly. They watched him out of the corners of their eyes with a mixture of wariness and pity.

The girls were too young to pity him. They had been badly startled by the noise and the sight of John aggressive and ready to hurt someone. He could see Joan with her hands out talking to them, reassuring them, but her words were lost in the hammering of the blood in his head.

His heart was still racing, jittering in his chest with off-rhythm beats. John slumped back against the bricks of the wall behind him to try to catch his breath. It wasn't going to be any time soon.

Joan wandered over his way slowly. Quietly, she settled her bones next to him on the cardboard.

Nothing at all was right with him and Joan didn't bother asking. She just sat back against the bricks with him and lit a cigarette. A few puffs in, she held it up for him, an offering of a little nicotine solace. He took the skinny menthol with shaking fingers and sucked a couple long drags. Eventually he calmed enough to be able to look over to her, to at least thank her briefly with his eyes if he was still too ashamed to bring himself to say it.

They passed the cigarette back and forth a few times until his breathing settled. Then she nodded over toward the girls, still huddled together.

"They told me they ran yesterday. Mom's new boyfriend gets mad easy. Likes the belt. The way they been eyeing you, starting to think you might look a little like him. Tall. Beard, maybe."

"Yeah, I figured as much."

"Sorry, John. Wouldn't have sent you to fetch 'em if I'd have known. I'm gonna have them meet Sister Susan at the kitchen tomorrow. They shouldn't be out here with us."

"They'll be more comfortable tonight if I'm gone."

"Oh, comfortable's not happening their second night out. If they get to sleep at all, it'll only be 'cause they're bone tired. If they don't, it won't be just 'cause you're here."

"I'll be part of it."

"Maybe. That don't mean you got to leave. Why don't you take Andy's tent for a while? He'll be out by the bars for hours. 'Til morning, probably. If he gets back early, has a problem with it, he can take it up with me."

John knew she only wanted him to sleep it off somewhere safe and out of sight, but he wanted to be out of everyone's sight, his own more than anything. He had no intention of taking what didn't belong to him, Andy's tent or the girls' peace. Those things were badly needed.

There wasn't anything in the world John needed anymore.

When he headed out walking from the camp, Joan looked disappointed, but she didn't try to stop him. This was for the best. They both knew it.

He took the first train that arrived at the first station he came across on his aimless walk. It didn't matter where it was going. It was going away.

This time of night, it wasn't much of a challenge to find a nearly empty car. The few people who came and went all deliberately ignored him. No one wanted to risk catching the eye of the wreck of a man at the back reeking of cheap rye and staring blankly into the empty space in the seat across from him.

All John had energy to do was drink. He let his eyes fall shut gradually, let his breathing shallow out and slow.

If his heart gave out on this train tonight, who would find him? At least here he knew it wouldn't be Joan. At the camp, she would make the effort to check on him at some point and she'd find out what happened. She'd be upset.

But here on the train? How long would his body sit here? How far would what was left of him ride before anyone cared enough to bother to look at him, let alone touch him to see if he was still alive?

It didn't make any difference.

It's not like John would ever know.

Chapter Text

Harold jerked awake to the deliberately startling noise of a system alarm notification.

He tended to wake up hard now. At some point he would get used to that, surely.

It hadn't happened yet.

He peeled his cheek away from the skin of his bare arms past his rolled up sleeves and he winced as he pulled himself straight in his chair. Falling asleep at his desk was a mistake he made frequently and he was punished for it every time.

While he fumbled his glasses back on with one hand, he canceled the alarm with the other. The clock in the corner of his screen read 3:32 AM. A police scanner transcript text file along with its original audio recording cued up to play were waiting for his attention just above.

All that night he had worked, studying video feeds, scrolling through audio transcripts in search of the right description, the right behavior in his freshly narrowed search radius. What he could not go through with his own eyes, he set up algorithms to process, scanning video for facial recognition and transcripts for word combination parameters, all geo-fenced to the proper location.

He created a system to address the task, but that did not necessarily mean that it worked. What had started as anticipation when he woke was quickly dissolving into anticipatory disappointment instead. The GPS lock on this police report was well outside his location specifications. Almost certainly a false positive then, and more than probably one due to a bug.

Great. Harold chided himself internally for the error and the further work and delay that careless imperfection would require.

But if it was a strong enough signal to trigger the alarms he'd set, he'd have to at least take a look at it and determine what went wrong. He was awake now anyway.

The transcription came up on his screen to accompany the haphazard drawl of a tired cop recorded over emergency radio playing through his speakers.

THE HOMELESS GUY? YEAH, WHITE MALE, 40 MAYBE, 6'2". WON'T LET US NEAR HIM BUT HE HASN'T GOT A SCRATCH ON HIM I CAN SEE. THE FIVE GUYS WHO JUMPED HIM DIDN'T GET SO LUCKY. IF THEY WEREN'T SUCH PUNKS, I'D SAY TO SEND OUT A SQUAD.

Harold sat up and adjusted his glasses, all of a sudden feeling significantly more awake. That was indeed the right description, and fending off five attackers singlehanded without so much as a scratch was surely the right behavior. Where was this again?

And it was then that Harold realized his mistake. The GPS lock was correct, and the point was indeed well outside his search zone in the city. Ordinarily, it should have never triggered an instant alarm. At best, it should have been flagged for later.

But this transcript was not a standard NYPD scanner intercept. It was MTA Police. Transit.

This fight happened below ground on a subway train. A train with not one but two stops inside Harold's circle.

Of course. He chalked his obliviousness up to sleep deprivation and immediately fell to the keys.

It was possible.

The MTA security footage was unsurprisingly both barely secured against illegal tampering and barely even in color, let alone high definition. Yet more public resources starved of funding and left to rot, just like the library Harold sat in now. He zipped through silent grainy video to find what he was looking for.

And there he was, the disheveled man who triggered this alert and woke him, riding the train in the middle of the night for the quiet and warmth. He sat toward the back of the car, slouched and unmoving. The ragged clothes and beard were plausibly the same as those in the last picture in Harold's collection, but it was impossible to conclude anything at this resolution.

Or it was until five strong young men looking for trouble entered the frame and found it. The boys stole the man's alcohol and continued to antagonize him, the ringleader leaning down to get in his face and taunt him. It was a series of dramatically poor choices on their part, but immature macho idiocy tended to do that.

If the man was deathly still before, he was pure kinetic violence after. He wrenched one of them forward to hit a pole hard and he kicked another away. Standing, he knocked a third in the throat and elbowed a fourth in the face when he tried to attack him from behind. Finally, he took the ringleader by the throat and stared him down. He didn't kill him, although it was obvious to Harold and everyone in the video that he easily could. Instead, he dropped him to the floor choking and coughing.

It was an extraordinary scene, just seconds but intense and brutal. Few people on Earth possessed anything approaching fighting prowess like that.

When the man finished annihilating his opponents, he realized what he had done and turned away from their writhing on the floor. His face, full of shock and shame and regret, was visible to the camera for only a few short frames.

And then John Reese hid his distraught eyes away again with his hand.

When was this? Harold's focus darted across the video text in search of the timecode. There.

0255.

It took over a day to find the image of Mr. Reese on the roof that sat out now on Harold's desk. His adjusted algorithms caught this one in just 37 minutes.

Which meant Mr. Reese was still in police custody right now. His precise location at that very moment was known.

Twenty seconds more and Harold could see the exact precinct on his screen in map and street view form.

At last.

There was much to be done. All the groundwork was laid already and had been for months. It was now only a matter of setting Harold's plan into motion.

Arrest by the police was always one of the most likely ways he would find Mr. Reese. He had lawyers on call for just that purpose, subcontracted through a proxy. He had expensive and discreet bodyguards awaiting word to work as his procurers, and if need be, his kidnappers.

This was it, all or nothing. The last part of the plan was always going to come down to Harold.

Harold saving a single life by himself.

If he could find a way to do it, to preserve just this one man's life today, it was distinctly possible that he – they – could go on and save so many more in the days, months, perhaps even years to come.

Untold numbers of numbers yet untold.

He was compelled by the immense hope of it, the promise. He had to be. He had to believe that he could do this, that he would do this. Because if he failed...

If he failed, they would die. Everyone on the irrelevant list. John Reese by his own hand or his own neglect. And Harold day by day as these lives fell through his fingers like sand and he and all the world were diminished by their loss.

So he would succeed. There was no other way.

The only path forward was humanity. Decency, rationality, compassion. Harold would give John Reese what he had been consistently denied. He would simply tell him the truth, or at least as much of the truth as he needed. Everything he knew of Mr. Reese was that the man was decent, rational, and compassionate himself. He cared a great deal for others, but had been far too long without any necessary care of his own, from himself or anyone else. For years, Mr. Reese had known only those who used him, who manipulated him, who abused him as nothing more than a violent tool for their ends.

There would be necessary manipulation involved here in Harold's intervention, and hiring the man for this task did mean utilizing him if not precisely using him in that sense. But at no point would Harold ever abuse him or treat him as a weapon to be simply aimed and discarded at will.

He would offer Mr. Reese humane employment, basic life needs and structure, and above everything, a real opportunity to help people, to protect them. All that the man ever needed. All that he ever wanted as far as Harold could tell, and with his information, he could tell everything.

He set the wheels of his plan in motion and waited. Tonight's image of John Reese in pain lingered on his screen, its pair from just days prior out on display on his desk. These were the last moments of this man's suffering that Harold would have to stand by and passively witness. And if he could accomplish what needed to be done now, these could be his last moments of helplessly watching the suffering of the irrelevant list too.

All those lives from just this one.

It was possible.

There was hope here. Harold could feel it burning inside him, sparking along every nerve in his body and up through his spine, its electricity overpowering every thumping beat of his heart.

It was nearly dawn by the time the procurers acquired Mr. Reese from the police station. Under the looming architecture of the Queensboro bridge, Harold stood and readied himself for their arrival.

The icy wind bit at his cheek as the sun rose. A car pulled up behind him, and he listened to the tires kick up loose gravel. Harold sank his hands down into his pockets and pulled his coat tighter around him.

He did not look back. Instead, he took a deep breath and focused himself on the imminent horizon that lay before him, on the frigid river running fast and deep, on the formidable bridge that stretched across it, on peril overcome by connection.