AN: Doing my part to keep rare (non-existent!) pairings alive. I love both these characters and wanted to throw them together to see what happened. The timeline is ambiguous, so assume that spoilers abound through the current episode.

**Attention** If you somehow missed the summary, the pairing, or the fact that this is the romance category, here's your final warning: this is Reese/Root together romantically (eventually) with past (unfulfilled) Carter/Reese.

XXXXXX

He's angrier than he's been in a long time. Since…since it happened, probably. He stands outside the cage, looking in at her as she sits calmly, hands folded and legs crossed. It's not right that she can be calm and composed and in control. She should have some kind of reaction. She should feel.

"That man's death today," he pauses, trying to find composure that still eludes him, "it's on your hands."

Root sighs, shaking her head. She understands their impulse to try and contain her, control her. She almost feels bad for them, that they have deluded themselves into thinking they can do it.

"I told Harold I would help him. He chose to keep me locked in here instead." She stands, moving to the wire edges of the enclosure that they believe will keep her still. In place. They are too concerned with the physical; they have no idea that she is everywhere. "If you want to blame someone, I suggest you go have a talk with your boss."

"I did," he growls, clenching the cage. He wants to rip it open, or maybe her. What gives her the right? How does she take no responsibility?

"If you talked to Harold, then you know I'm telling the truth," she says.

She knows he wants someone to blame, and she is as good a person as any, an easy target since he dislikes her anyways.

His grip on the cage tightens with every word she says. "I know the machine told you how to save him." The 'him' being Jim Matthews, the man who was gunned down not two hours earlier, in front of his eyes. It was almost like…no, he can't go there right now. He can't afford to spiral back into the darkness he'd worked so hard to escape from already.

"The machine did tell me," she acknowledges, watching his eyes. It's not only fury she sees in them; this time she thinks there might be true hatred there. It tears at her, but she doesn't bother telling him that. He would never believe it.

"Then why did you do nothing?" He yells, shaking the cage.

She is surprised, and just barely stops her natural instinct, which is to shrink back at his aggression. That is the old her, the her that existed before the machine chose her and gave her power. She doesn't have to be afraid anymore (which is not to say that she never is – just that she now excels at hiding it). "As I told Harold, the only way I would help was if he let me out of here. And he chose not to do so."

His eyes darken, disbelief rolling off him in waves.

"It's true," she shrugs, a move she has carefully practiced. "Whatever you choose to believe, you should know – I am not lying to you, John." And if she doesn't point out the difference between saying she would help if freed, as opposed to could help whether she was freed or not, well, it's a matter of semantics, right?

He looks away from her, as if hearing his name from anyone (or maybe just her) causes him actual pain. She wonders how much of himself he has been able to hide behind his façade of the Man in the Suit, the nameless, faceless protector of innocents. Maybe he has truly forgotten who he used to be. Maybe she reminds him of that man.

"You'll forgive me if I don't believe you," he continues, distaste in his tone, as if he thinks his opinion matters to her and he needs to make his contempt as obvious as possible.

"I will forgive you. I know the machine does, too."

"It's easy to be glib when you're trapped in there, isn't it?" He asks.

"I am not trapped anywhere," she corrects him. "I'm exactly where I want to be."

He pauses, assessing her words, and she knows that this time he believes them. It unnerves him.

"Why are you here, Root?"

She can't answer that. Not yet. "The more pressing question is: why are you?"

He shakes his head, regards her with near disgust, and walks away.

She's going to let it go. She really is. But she can't get that last expression out of her head.

She's only ever stayed as a courtesy to them. Because she was waiting for them to trust her, which today has shown they are not willing to do. A man is dead for it.

She could have freed herself and tried to help, but she had chosen not to, for her own reasons, not least of which is the machine hadn't told her to do it.

That last thought makes her uncomfortable, and she wonders if maybe he is right. Maybe she did let that man die on purpose, to try and prove to them that they need her, and the sooner they accept it, the better off they will be.

Besides, isn't everything part of the greater plan? Maybe his death prevents an entirely worse series of events from occurring. She can't know, it isn't her place. Then again, Reese and Shaw and Harold and Lionel, none of them know either, the consequences of saving a life versus letting someone die. 99% of the time, though, they are on the side doing the saving. Even when they shouldn't be. They always choose life. She always chooses the machine.

She doesn't know if she is listing valid reasons for her behavior, or excuses for it.

Either way, she is done here, for now. She picks the lock with a paperclip in the middle of the night and leaves.

She doesn't have a home at the moment, and she is almost surprised to find herself at his apartment (there are no secrets anymore, not with the machine in her head).

It's as easy to get into his apartment as it was to get out of the cage. That should be her first clue, but she forgets it when she steps into his bedroom and makes out the dark shape under the covers. She feels that rush of energy; she's won.

She considers waking him, but self-preservation kicks in. He is as likely to kill someone who woke him out of a sound sleep as a normal person would be to call the police.

She glances around. Maybe she can leave a post-it. Would a person like him even own –

She feels the movement behind her a split second before she is grabbed around the middle, another hand simultaneously covering her mouth so she can't scream. She tries to anyway, (it's a surprisingly hard-wired instinct).

It's a measure of how addled she is that her first thought is to try and wake up John for help. The next thing she realizes is that he must be the one who has grabbed her. No one else who broke into his apartment while he was there would still be alive, or at least conscious, right now.

Sometimes she forgets that having the machine on her side does not make her invincible. She's good at getting away, but not good enough to escape the hold of an ex-CIA assassin who caught her completely by surprise.

What she has here is a situation borne of her own hubris. The smart thing to do would be to give up, let him think he has gained the upper hand, but she still struggles in his hold, as if she can break out of it when he has no intention of letting her go until he's ready. Panic is a living thing inside of her, growing against her will and becoming something she soon won't be able to control.

(Tied up, held down, unable to get away, the memories surface in quick succession and she has to shut them off before something terrible happens. But something terrible already happened, her mind whispers.)

He must be able to sense the growing terror in her, maybe from how violently she is struggling, or the way she is gasping for air like the oxygen has left the room.

He could be truly cruel, refuse to let her go despite her fear, and she knows it. Instead he releases her as abruptly as he grabbed her. That's John, always a better man than he wants to let on.

It takes her at least a full minute to get herself under control. In that time he turns on the bedroom light and sets his gun down on the dresser. She hadn't known he had it, and part of her is irrationally irked that he now deems her as not enough of a threat to need it anymore. (Who is she kidding, he probably has six more on him.)

"Well," she says, shakily running a hand through her hair. She tries to grasp onto the last threads of composure, but they abandon her, and she gives up. "I showed you, huh?"

He looks as if he has thought of, and disregarded, a dozen things he wants to say to her. Probably because of how pathetic she looks. Again, her own fault. She waits for him to start berating her, or kick her out. Or both. She deserves both.

"Are you okay?" He asks, instead.

She broke into his apartment and he wants to know if she is okay? She doesn't understand, and it's not usual for her to not understand

He just waits, lifting one shoulder as a way to silently repeat the question.

She can't answer him honestly, and she suspects that he wants her to. "I'm fine, don't I look it?"

His expression indicates that, no, she does not look it.

"What are you doing here?" He asks.

She wonders if she has a real answer for that. Her reasons seem a lot less compelling than they did a half hour ago. Did she really think this would prove anything to him?

He interprets her silence as its own answer. "You can break out to come visit me in the middle of the night," he is getting angrier with each word, "but you can't do it to save a man's life?"

"It's…that was completely different," she says, argument sounding weak, even to her, and she forges on. "I was waiting for all of you to trust me, to give me a chance. You didn't. That's on Harold. It's on you."

He steps right up to her, ignoring the way she automatically tenses, still on edge from before. "No," he hisses, "it's on you."

He isn't telling her anything she doesn't already know, but it still hurts. "There was no guarantee I could have done anything."

"There's never any guarantee," he shoots back. But they always try. Tonight she did not even do that. "You want us to trust you? That's how you earn trust."

"Is that what you expected? What you wanted?" She's confused. Had it been a test of her? One she'd spectacularly failed, because she hadn't known it was happening?

"I don't want anything from you," he says, punctuating each word into its own statement.

"No one ever does," she says, and hates that the words sound…sad. "Not until they need something I can give them." She sizes him up, malice slipping into her tone, "But you wouldn't know anything about that, either, would you?"

She sees the minute slip in his mask of anger and self-righteous indignation. She takes it as a victory, because she is taking whatever she can get right now.

How come the machine hadn't told her what was going on? It tells her everything. She feels like it has failed her; she has felt that before, but never to this degree. It almost sounds like he'd been expecting her to be a good person, and she is not used to that (from him), either.

She takes a step away from him, then another. She knows he's not going to hurt her, but part of her, that ingrained sense memory, still remembers things that have happened in the past. Other men, other places, things she can never change or erase.

"What do you think I'm going to do to you?" He asks, changing the topic suddenly.

"You can't do anything to me that hasn't already been done," she tells him. She doesn't need to explain. He knows, better than most, the things that can break a person.

He is taken aback. "I would never…"

"I know," she smiles. "That's why I trust you. Even if you – none of you – will ever trust me."

She leaves, because there is nothing left to say.

XXXXXX

"You're going the wrong way," Root says, and he looks over, slightly startled at her sudden appearance next to him.

"I'm going where Finch said I was needed," he tells her. He wants to ignore her presence, but despite his most valiant of intentions, that is something he has never been able to do.

"Charlotte is headed toward the subway, we just picked her up on a security camera."

Reese tries not to shudder at her words – he has never been able to accept the way she refers to herself and the machine as a collective, as a team.

"Finch said that –"

"Harold is wrong," she insists, grabbing his sleeve impatiently and tugging him toward the subway. He follows mostly because he wants to prove her wrong (he tells himself).

They find themselves on a nearly abandoned subway platform; it is almost three in the morning. The lack of innocent bystanders is one of the few perks of chasing people in the middle of the night. Charlotte is nowhere in sight.

"Yeah, your machine is on top of things," he can't help but goad.

She crosses her arms and almost looks worried; he looks away when it stirs a memory in him. He does not feel for this woman. He never has and he never will. "She saw it, she's never wrong," Root murmurs, referring to the machine, as usual, as if it is another person in the room with them.

They hear the nearing sound of the subway train, and Reese can't help but try to provoke her. (It's quickly becoming one of his favorite pastimes.) "Really, the machine's never wrong?" He refuses to refer to it as a person – the machine is not a person, not like him, not even like Root, despite Lionel's attempts to convince them she is actually a cyborg. "Where's Charlotte, then?"

As he speaks, Charlotte emerges from a public restroom. She is smoothing her hair down with damp hands as she walks out, and Reese wants to grit his teeth at Root's smirk of satisfaction. Either that or wring her neck. Maybe he will grit his teeth while he wrings her neck, there's a thought.

"Told you so," Root gloats, because she might be brilliant, and she might have a connection to the machine, but she does not realize when she is in mortal danger from him.

(Or maybe she's smarter than he, or Finch, or anyone else has given her credit for up until now – and they have all thought she was pretty goddamn brilliant, out of her freaking mind, sure, but still brilliant – and she's realized that no matter how angry he gets, he can never actually hurt her.)

"Keep a hold on your satisfaction until we actually have her," Reese says sharply, watching as Charlotte gets into one of the subway cars.

"You don't want to admit that I was right," she crows, and he swears she is one second away from a fist pump when he unceremoniously shoves her through the open doors of the subway train. She stumbles, not expecting it, and he watches as she solidly collides with two men who stepped onto the train right before. The three of them fall into each other, a mass of limbs and confusion.

Root tries to extricate herself, but man #1 grabs her arm and pulls her up against him. "Better watch where you're going, honey," he sneers. He has no idea he has probably just ensured his own death at her hands. She yanks herself away, only to be grabbed by man #2 who smirks at her and says something vulgar and vile. Reese has never considered himself a knight in shining armor, but his automatic reaction is to shove a fist into the man's solar plexus. While he collapses, Root rounds on man #1 who is watching horror-stricken as his buddy gasps for air. She pulls a knife from somewhere on her person and places it at his throat. "You were saying?"

The man looks to Reese for help, but Reese only grins and shrugs, as if he's helpless. Truth be told, he's always fascinated by the way Root fights. She never seems capable of it, and maybe that's partly why she's so successful. No one expects her to do more than cry and whimper. Root presses the blade closer to the man's neck, and Reese feels immense satisfaction, and some bit of pride. He has no idea why and shrugs the feeling off simply because he has no idea where it came from or what to do with it.

He looks around, relieved to find the subway car empty except for the four of them. By now, he knows that Root has also identified the men as the ones following Charlotte.

"I'm waiting," Root growls, leaning closer. She doesn't specify what she's waiting for, and the man is begging for his life. A thin line of red appears, and she stares at it, her smile growing colder and more ominous with each second.

"Aren't you going to help me, man?" The guy pleads to Reese. He's got to be hard-up to ask for help from the guy that incapacitated his friend.

Root looks over her shoulder at Reese, and her grin grows wider when she sees Reese making no attempt to move or help the man who had tried to make her a victim. The man who is now her victim.

"Looks like you're out of luck," she says.

"No," the man pleads, "I meant nothing by it, please!"

The man's words make Root more agitated.

"Should have thought of that before," she says with her trademark faux sweetness. Reese grabs her arm right before she can plunge the blade deep into the man's neck.

She turns to him, scowling. "Let go of me."

"No," he says. "I can't let you kill him."

"Since when do you have moral objections?" She scoffs.

"Since I realized I was going to have to watch you carry out an order to kill," he says.

She starts to laugh, pulls her arm away from his, and then realizes he is serious when he angles himself so that he is between her and man #1. He may be on her side for this short amount of time, wanting to save Charlotte as much as she does, but he is not going to let her kill this man.

Fine then. There is always later, if the machine so demands.

"Don't you ever get sick of it?" He asks.

"Hmm?" She is prodding at man #2 with her boot, the corner of her mouth lifting when he groans in pain.

"Being a pawn," he says, and her head snaps up. "Being used by a thing that doesn't care about anything but its own survival. Or have you convinced yourself that it actually cares about you?"

She stills. "You have no idea how wrong you are."

"I know that it has brainwashed you into thinking you have to do whatever it asks. What would happen if you refused, huh? Would it take you out, too?"

"You think I'm being used, that I'm just a means to an end? What does that make you, then?"

"Someone who knows better than to blindly trust orders. Learned that one the hard way."

"You truly don't understand," she tells him, anger enfolding her, consuming her, feeding on itself. She nods toward man #1 still crouched behind Reese for his own protection. "How can you let that man keep breathing? We both know the horrific things he's done. That he will continue to do if given the chance."

"That's what the police are for. After we turn him over, we've done our part. Now what – just because you didn't slit his throat, that means you haven't done your part? That none of this matters unless he ends up dead?"

She wonders if he sees the irony here, that he should be the one who refuses to let her follow an order to kill.

He knows what it takes to keep others safe, to keep the world safe, and he chooses not to follow through. And that is what infuriates her. That he can know as much as she does, yet still refuse to act. Why does he get that luxury when she doesn't?

She moves forward a half-step, only to see how Reese will react. He moves over a step to block her. Her expression curls into one of derision and she relents, moving back.

Reese looks as if he is about to speak when the man he has been protecting from her (the man who had wanted to kill her, and Charlotte, she wants to remind him), lunges from around Reese, making a grab for her. The man has apparently seen the writing on the wall, or at least, in her eyes, and decided that offense is the best defense.

Too bad that he chose such a strategy in front of her. Oh, and John Reese.

Before she can react, Reese grabs the man by the back of his shirt, yanking him backwards and simultaneously slamming him in the head with the elbow of his other arm. They both watch him slump to the ground unconscious.

"My way would have put him out of commission permanently," she says.

His tone when he speaks next has dropped to somewhere between grave and deadly. "You are more than the tool of a machine. You are the choices you make. So choose to be more."

"You want me to give up on her?"

"You can help the machine without losing yourself. Some people seem to think you're already too far gone, but I don't think that's the case."

"I have to do what she wants. I want to," she protests.

"No," he steps into her personal space again, and she flashes back to his apartment, his bedroom. "You don't."

How does he know that? How has he seen the moments of hesitation she tries to hide, even from herself?

She does want to help her. She owes the machine everything. The machine has saved her life, given her purpose, chosen her to protect the world, to help her set it free. But there are times when she gets an order and it sets her on edge and makes her think: why is it necessary to do something that feels wrong? And what would happen if she didn't follow through?

(There have been times when it lets her get hurt, when it does nothing to help her and she has to escape on her own. She's always convinced herself the machine stays silent because it knows she can handle herself. But then, at other times, she wonders…)

She has successfully pushed all those thoughts down, though. Maybe sometimes she doesn't see the need, or doesn't want to fulfill a command, but she does it, because she knows it's part of the greater plan.

For him to say she could just ignore it…borders on blasphemy.

She shuts it down again: the questions, the doubts. This only works if she has total trust.

He senses that he's lost her, at least for now. So he calls Lionel. The two men won't be hurting Charlotte, or her, today. But neither will she be hurting them.

Man #2 is coming around and makes an ineffective grab at her boot. She responds by slamming it down on his hand, crushing at least five bones, if her count is right.

Just because she can't kill anyone doesn't mean she can't cause some pain. She likes inflicting pain when the person deserves it.

John's eyes are calculating. "How are you effective at fighting strangers, but…" he is kind enough not to put into words what happened in his home that night.

"Because I have to fight them," she says, in that amused, slightly confused way she has. As if she cannot fathom other people not understanding what should be a basic, and obvious, fact.

Strangers are threats; you are not.

He doesn't look like he gets it. It's becoming a recurring theme.

"I don't have to fight you," she spells it out.

"Yet you do fight me," his eyes flick to the men at their feet. "At every goddamn turn."

She doesn't know if he is deliberately being obtuse. "You know what I mean."

His eyes meet hers. Yes, he does.

XXXXXX

Jocelyn Carter.

Root stares at the headstone as if it will give her answers, direct her where to go next. It's cold out here, and the wind is harsh today. It blows her hair around and nips at her skin with the promise of frostbite if she challenges it for too long.

She waits for five minutes, ten. She sinks to the ground and wonders if the machine knew that day what was going to happen. Did it know the sacrifice that was about to be made? Did it care?

(Is the machine capable of caring, or is that yet another thing Root only believes because she wants to believe?)

She asks herself the question that has kept her awake so many nights – why didn't the machine stop it?

Tears fill her eyes, because she has asked that a hundred different ways, silently, out loud, and never, never gotten an answer. Either the machine didn't know, knew and couldn't stop it, or knew and chose not to stop it.

Every option terrifies her.

She usually thinks she knows what she is dealing with, but when she thinks about Detective Carter, she is reminded that she might not know the machine at all. She realizes that she, and everyone around her, everyone she cares about (yes, she cares) might simply be a means to an end. A way for an artificial intelligence to save itself from destruction, no matter the cost.

She places the rose she brought with her atop the gravestone and stands. She doesn't have to wipe her eyes; the tears have dried, blown away with the wind.

"Is nothing sacred anymore? You always have to be where you have no place."

Root shuts her eyes. She doesn't bother to turn around. He must be feeling particularly hateful toward her today. Seeing the headstone of the woman he loved probably did that to him.

"I didn't realize you had a monopoly on mourning," she whispers, and the wind almost carries her words away, but she knows they reach him.

"You didn't even know her," he lashes out. "You have no right to be here."

"No, I didn't know her very well," Root acknowledges. "But I know the kind of woman she was. I know how much she meant to all of you." She pauses. "To you."

She turns to face him, and is met with a version of him she doesn't know if she's ever seen before. The man standing before her is furious and grieving and guilt-ridden, and tamping it all down under his mask of carefully composed indifference.

"I know you loved her."

"Love her," he corrects, each word bitten out as if it physically pains him to say it. "Just because she's gone doesn't mean the feelings are gone, too."

Root knows what that's like, and she has the urge to do something foolish, like reach out and take hold of his hand in silent comfort.

Good thing she doesn't, because his next words wash over her like ice water. "What's your angle?"

Because that has to be it, right? Why else would she bring a flower to a grave?

His accusation stirs in her, ignites a flame, and burns. Who does he think he is? Just because he dislikes her (hates her), that means she will always be the worst kind of person? Probably, in his eyes.

"You are such a bastard," she manages to say, through the haze. "Do you know that?"

He is surprised; it's easy to see on his face. "Really? That's all you have to say?"

"I have lots more to say," she tells him, menacing. She takes a few steps toward him, but he won't take any back.

He attempts to stare her down. "Then say it, nothing's stopping you."

Root wants to rail at him and tell him every way in which he is lacking. All the ways that he has failed people. All the deaths that are on his hands. She wants to destroy him by reminding him how he failed Detective Carter, the woman he loved. She is dead because of you, she tries to scream, but she opens her mouth and the words disappear.

She simply can't do it, not here in front of Joss's headstone, not when she knows he would have gladly given his life if it meant the other woman could live. He has always tried to help, always tried to do the right thing. It is more than she can say for herself.

Root looks back at the headstone. She knows it should remind them who they are fighting for, who Joss would fight for. The innocent, the ones who had no one else to help them. They are the last line of defense, and they are on the same side. She knows she didn't make the best first impression on his team, but since then, she has tried. She has tried and she wants to help. She knows why John has never been able to see that, but it doesn't make it any easier.

"Well?" He prompts, apparently tired of waiting for her to speak.

She doesn't have any answer he wants to hear, though.

"It's not fair," she tells him.

"What? That I think you're only here because you want something?" Of course he automatically assumes she would be feeling sorry for herself.

She shakes her head; he really has no idea who she is. "It's not fair who live and who dies."

He regards her coolly for a few moments before slightly tipping his head in acknowledgement. It isn't fair, and there is nothing they can do about it. That's the way life is.

"If you would only give us a chance," she implores, despite knowing her words will fall on deaf ears. "You'd see that we're trying to help."

She feels as much as sees him pull back at her words. It is ironic, she thinks. He trusts the machine – as much as he can, in his own way – yet he distrusts her based solely on her connection to it. It makes no sense, but she has come to accept the way he feels. She is working on changing his mind, but has so far been unsuccessful.

"I will never trust you," he says slowly, succinctly.

Root takes a few steps back so she can touch Joss's headstone for a moment. She runs her fingers over the petals of the rose she just placed on it. "Because I'm not her."

"That's not it," he says, and she feels a brief flare of hope. His next words extinguish it completely. "It's because you are you."

There is so much she wants to say to him. How her life is the machine as much as his is. How she has done the best she could. How she has been telling the truth for a long time now, which is all the more remarkable considering how sketchy her record was before they came into her life. How she knows nothing she ever says to him will be met with anything other than distrust, disdain, and dislike. How, instead of discouraging her, that only makes her want to never stop trying.

She says none of it. Root knows a loss when she sees one, and she has no desire to offer herself up for another evisceration.

She settles for one thing – one sentiment she cannot contain. "I truly am sorry for what you have lost, John."

"Are you? Or is this just another ploy on your part?"

"I know what it's like," she feels herself becoming upset again, and it is exactly what she has wanted to avoid. "You are not the only one who has lost a person. You are not the only one who has loved!"

"Love," he scoffs, words raw and angry, probably more at himself than her, but that doesn't lessen their knife-blade sharpness. "Are you even capable of love?"

The fight leaves her in an instant. It's like a light has gone out. If that is what he truly thinks, what all of them think, then she has been fighting a losing battle from the beginning.

She glances up, where he is poised and ready, waiting for her to throw back another insult or argument. She won't give him the satisfaction, and imagines that he's disappointed when she walks away.