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The wet grass makes no sound under his shoes.
Which makes sense, because it’s grass and because John spent years of punishing training learning to do just this - to walk silently (to be invisible).
What makes no sense is everything else.
John knows, on some level, where he is (a rooftop) and what he’s doing (dying). And yet, he’s also here, in a graveyard. The sky is heavy with rain above him, and the people he’s walking towards are confused shapes, melting against each other like tongues of black fire.
John tries to focus on them - he shifts, only just, to check if he’s carrying a weapon, but, no, the familiar weight of the gun is not there; he keeps his eyes fixed on a man with a hat; on a woman now in profile, her grief betraying her age - but after the space of a heartbeat, the image shifts again.
This is dangerous.
(This is not real.)
When he gets closer, John’s vision suddenly sharpens. The hole in the ground - that, he can see clearly. As for the boy standing in front of it - he sees the flag, he can feel, in fact, the slightly rough texture under his own fingers. He looks down, his eyes hesitating over the boy’s shoes, and he finds he knows them, intimately. He knows there was a fight over them, because they are not the boy’s - no, they belong to the next door neighbour, a younger child, and they hurt the boy’s feet, and they look stupid, anyway, which is why -
“I was here only moments ago. I did not think you would want to be here as well,” says a voice from his right, and when John turns, he sees Root, looking as calm and collected as ever in her elegant black clothes.
It’s like she came for the funeral, and, in a way, that’s exactly what she did.
Or, well, what it did.
By now, John’s not even sure.
“I heard this is what happens,” he says, his voice weirdly distorted, like he’s speaking into fog. “But I never thought it would happen to me.”
“Entertaining notions of immortality, John? So not your style.”
“No,” he says, simply; and then he looks away and he adds, “I just assumed whoever killed me would know how to do his job right.”
Root - the Machine - is silent for a moment.
“Time is an illusion,” she says then, carefully. “You are very nearly dead, John, and those shots - they were accurate. Your brain is trying to make sense of what happened, and distorting your perceptions in order to do so.”
“I see.”
It makes sense, of course. John should have known that. Harold would have known. Harold’s probably told him once, come to think of it. John remembers a few quiet nights - moments when it was just the two of them (Harold with a book in his lap, because that’s what he always needed to feel comfortable, and John just happy to breathe and be there; content in the knowledge that nothing hurt and he was allowed to live one more day). Yes, Harold’s surely mentioned this vast, inconceivable thing.
Time is an illusion.
John was used to push back against metaphysical and theological speeches, because he’d never had time for them (because they scared him; they made him think and doubt and unable to do his job properly), but when it was Harold speaking - that was different.
“This is the moment that changed everything, you know,” Root says, and John shakes his head.
“No,” he replies. “I don’t think it is.”
“Then what are we doing here?”
John frowns. He tries to look at the people again, but, of course, he has no memory of them, because the day his father died, he hadn’t been paying attention. He remembers those whispers behind him (“He was a hero.”) and the flag in his hands, and the stupid shoes.
Suddenly, he turns around, walks away. He’s childishly curious to see how good his memory is, because he doesn’t remember one line from that sermon, but he does remember seeing a grave with a funny epitaph - the words are just tugging at his consciousness now, and as John retraces his steps, Root following him like an understated, confused angel of death, he sees it - just a humble, regular grave of grey and black and sharp angles - the names are blurry, because he hadn’t bothered to read them, but the verse is still there.
Your word is a lamp to my feet, it says, and John breathes out, amazed at his own foolishness, because, of course, they’re not as funny as he remembers. As a child, he’d frowned at them and then laughed at them - hours later, alone in his room - he’d laughed and laughed until the laughter had turned into dry sobs, and then a mess of pain and grief.
But now, well.
“Do you know the second half of it?” he asks, and Root walks a bit closer.
“Your word is a lamp to my feet, and a light for my path,” she replies, obediently.
John closes his hands into fists, then relaxes them at his sides again.
“Seems as good a goodbye as any,” he says, glancing at her sideways, and she frowns, only just, as she works it out, assesses how accurate his words are.
She probably has a scale for that. Also something for grading dry humour (gallows humour).
“If not here,” she asks, conceding his point without actually saying anything, “where would you like to go? What is meaningful to you?”
John has the strangest feeling he knows what the Machine wants him to say. If anyone knows about his life, after all, it’s her. She would know about everything - she probably has a list of all those moments which slowly defined John’s entire existence, pushed him into narrower and narrower choices. She’s probably reviewed his fight with Paul Connolly from thirty different angles, which is unfair, because John remembers only one of them (Paul’s face, red with blood, and John’s own hands, bruised and dirty with something he would never manage to clean off again). And the Machine would probably like him to see those milestones one after the other - she would probably stand at his side as he watched Paul being carried away; as he listened to the man with the square jaw telling him it was a damn shame, because the army could always use good lads like him - boys who were angry enough to get into fights for no good reason at all.
(Except there had been a reason, of course.
Not that anyone had cared.
Not until Harold.)
That’s not something John wants to do, though. If these are to be his last seconds - minutes, hours - on this Earth, he doesn’t want to spend them with bad memories.
“Would you like to be with Jessica?”
Root’s suggestion is uncharacteristically quiet. She was always so demanding, so sure of herself - John wonders if this sudden bout of doubt is caused by her dying, or if she’s only just realizing human beings are not, in the end, as predictable as Harold would have liked them to be.
“No,” he says, and he wishes he were strong enough for that to be the truth.
Just another kiss with Jessica - just another second with Jessica - he’s wished that for years, in a desperate, obsessive way - but he’s come to recognize there’s too much pain and guilt inside those memories for them ever to be relived.
People say at some point grief dims and fades, and you can smile at what once hurt you.
People lie.
“I failed her,” John says, unnecessarily, because Root’s eyes are still on him, and then he feels her look away.
“Very well. Where to, then?”
“I was happy where I was,” John says, and it’s the truth.
He bows down slightly, presses his hand on top of the stranger’s grave in front of him (Your word is a lamp to my feet, and a light for my path) and then he stands up again, looks at the sky.
John thinks it’s only just started raining when the colours shift above him, deep grey dimming into a bright summer blue as he blinks his way back to the rooftop and smiles at Harold, who looks as breakable as a toy as he stands alone on the other rooftop; and yet Harold will be okay.
He must.
“Goodbye, Harold,” John says, and then he stands there and watches as something changes on Harold’s face - pain and guilt turning into determination, because, of course, Harold is smart, ten times smarter than any of them, and he understands the situation - he knows there is nothing he can do to help John (to save John) - knows that without the Machine, his only option is to be human.
And humans love each other.
Which is why Harold will respect John’s choice, will accept John needs him to survive (to be happy). Which is why Harold walks away.
“What do you think will happen to him next?” John asks softly, and he can’t help but frown in endearment and exasperation at the way Harold’s carrying the gun - how many times had John tried to teach him?
And Harold had always -
“Are you asking for a statistical approximation, John?”
Harold has reached the door now. He puts his hand on the handle, almost turns back.
John knows he won’t.
Despite his protestations and his greater good attitude and a life spent in near isolation, Harold’s the softest of all of them. He knows he can’t look back one more time, because, like that hero he once told John about (John had been sitting down on the floor, his trousers still wet after washing Bear, and when Harold had started to talk, randomly, about myths and stories as the room around them descended into darkness, John hadn’t been able to help it - he’d leaned to the side, just a bit - he’d given up and asked for comfort by pressing, very, very slightly, against Harold’s leg; and Harold, of course, had understood) - well, John doesn’t remember what happened to the guy, but he knows it was nothing good.
You never look back.
That’s rule number one.
“You know Harold. He loved you. I want your opinion, not a calculation.”
John is still looking at Harold - he will look at Harold until Harold opens the damned door and walks through it and makes it to safety - but he can almost feel Root’s unhappiness.
“I don’t have opinions, John. That’s not how I was coded.”
“Like that means anything. There were a lot of things you were not coded for.”
“I’m afraid you are mistaken. I may look like your friend, but I am not human, John. I do not think like you do.”
Harold opens the door, the gun still hanging uselessly by his side, and then - then he steps over the threshold, disappears into darkness - he’s so slow it’s agonizing - John watches as Harold’s head is engulfed into the darker space, and then his shoulders, his torso - it’s like watching someone drowning, and John finds he has to turn away.
Maybe he’s more similar to Harold than he always assumed.
“You took the deal,” he says, forcing himself to smile as he looks at Root, because they’re both achingly familiar by now - the face staring up at him and the consciousness hiding behind it.
(Harold’s creations, both of them.)
There is a second when the boundary blurs, and John can see Root through the cracks - there is a mere suggestion of pain, devastation, almost, because Root would have hated this - to make the irrational choice; to be made vulnerable (to love) - and yet she did all those things, over and over -
(Because Harold asked her to.)
- and by the end, John wants to think she was okay with that.
She certainly seemed happier, even if John can’t imagine that loving Shaw would have been easy.
But maybe the books were right, and loving is its own reward.
“Harold will look for Grace. He will be happy,” Root says, and now she’s not Root at all, but that other thing John still doesn’t understand.
(And also: a friend and an ally.)
John can feel the pain now, spreading just under his ribs. John brings his hand up, cleans blood from his mouth, because he’s been here before, he knows that pain comes from his lungs, and knows what will happen next.
Except that there is no next, because now he can almost see them, the men closing down upon him. He’s done this long enough to know they will empty their magazines in him - he can almost glimpse that look of fear and stubbornness and self-hatred that flashes on a man’s face when he’s about to kill.
He welcomes it, really.
The pain is getting unbearable, and his mission is done.
(Without Harold, he would have had no mission at all.
Without Harold, he would have been dead a long time ago.)
“That’s good,” he says, and finds he’s standing up again, smiling down at Root.
“I cannot be sure,” Root says, carefully. “I was never built for this purpose.”
“That’s what happened to all of us. We all had to do things we weren’t built for. Harold doesn’t look like much, but he’s a hard man to say no to.”
It’s getting harder to stay where he is; harder to tell apart what is real and what it’s not. John is there on the rooftop, and also everywhere else - he remembers the first time he was asked to kill, and the first time he decided he was not okay with it and was worth more than that and walked away. He remembers Harold finding him. He remembers a crowd of people smiling up at him, their panic melting and draining like dirty water once they realized things were fine, and they were not going to die, because the man in the suit didn’t say much, and never smiled, but wouldn’t let them down. He remembers, most of all, Joss’ smile, warm and loving (“You did good, John.”); fancies he can hear her add, “You can rest now”.
“John?”
John blinks himself awake again. Root is no longer a real person - just something beautiful and strange and only half there, the black of her dress fading quickly in the bright light of day.
“He loved you too, you know,” she says, and John smiles.
I know, he thinks. I know.
What he means to say is that he knows he was as much Harold's creation as the Machine itself; what he means to say is that it's okay, because there is comfort in the thought. After all, he didn't always like himself, but he likes what Harold made of him.
What he means to say is, I loved him too.
The sky above him is almost too blue, now. Too bright, and too beautiful for his heart to bear.
I know.