AN: Hi all, so sorry for the massive delay between chapters but I've been picking up some overtime at work. I only hope the wait was worth it. Thank you again for all your messages and follows, your support really does inspire me. Please forgive any minor mistakes, and let me know what you think.

Help, her!

I stare down at my phone, the Machines instruction an unwanted SOS that bathes my dark bedroom in a soft blue hue. Help, her? Why? She never needed my help before.

I think of the way she introduced herself to us. Kidnapping Finch, tricking Reese, threatening me with torture. Even when I hated her, I always admired her. She's brilliant, intelligent, a ruthless killer and a master of disguise. She earnt her millions and built her reputation with the criminal underworld on nothing but guaranteed discretion and deadly accuracy. She didn't need us then. Why would she need us now?

The lingering throb of too much whisky pulses at my temples and I drop the phone onto the bed beside me and close my eyes. The truth, is that I've wasted my last bullet trying to protect a woman who doesn't even trust me enough to be honest with me.

It takes five seconds for my phone to vibrate again.

Please!

I know that somewhere beneath the anger and mild irritation there's a poetic sense of irony in a God reduced to begging, but I'm just too far gone to care. I saw her today. She was there. She was real. She was alive. And she looked so beautiful and smelt so good, and every part of me wanted to reach out to her and never let go…

But I don't do that!

I'm not the woman that misses a lover so much that she feels like she can't breathe. I'm not the person who aches for the presence of someone else. I'm a sociopath, the bitch that doesn't care if you live or die, as long as you don't get in my way while doing it.

At least I used to be…

I hate the person that she – that all of them – have made me become. I hate that it hurts that she planned to fake her death and didn't deem me important enough to tell. I hate knowing that the only reason she returned at all, was to seek my help, and I hate it even more that it bothers me so damned much. But most of all, I hate that even as I ignore these messages from her God, every last inch of me is crying out to respond.

There's another buzz.

050313

She's always had a martyr complex. From the day, she surrendered herself to Control, to the day she took Jeffrey Blackwell's fatal bullet for Harold she's had little regard for her own life. This mission, whatever it entails, is no different, and I'm certain that this day won't be her last either.

I remember the first time I challenged her on it. She'd charged straight into Martine's line of fire with little concern for her own safety. Sure, seeing her do it was hot as hell, especially that manic look of enjoyment on her face and the twin guns she wielded so expertly. But it was also stupid, and dangerous. She took two bullets that day – two bullets that I had to quickly patch up as she winced and groaned in the bad type of pain - and why? Because she considers herself as nothing more than the cannon fodder of this unwinnable war.

When I asked her why she was so eager to sacrifice herself, she just grinned that grin that says she knows something I don't and slipped her hand into my pants.

I guess I just gave up asking after that. You see, the thing with Root is that she's far more skilled then she'd have people believe. I laughed when Harold first implied that she could have killed us all if she'd wanted too. I couldn't imagine how a skinny, frail, obnoxious, nerd who spent most of her time attacking her enemies from behind a computer, could ever hurt me. And then I watched her take out six Russian agents through a closed door. Oh, Root is talented alright, and with the machine whispering into her ear I'd be willing to bet that she's damned near invincible.

Rolling onto my back, I stare up at the colourless ceiling above me, "If you think giving me her number will get me to help you then you really don't know me at all," I say aloud, to the empty room. "We both know that she'll get out of whatever precarious situation you've sent her into. She did survive a sniper's bullet, after all."

On the bed, my phone vibrates again.

Current chance of survival for Analogue Interface: 1.68%

I snort loudly, briefly wondering how many other times our odds have been that low. "That bad, huh?" I reply, acting nonchalant despite the surge of adrenaline shooting out to every muscle in my body and driving me to save her. "Sounds like I'm probably too late."

This time my phone rings, and though caller ID suggests an unknown number, I know instantly that it's the Machine. I sigh heavily, annoyed by Its persistence, and blindly snatch the phone up off the pillow next to me.

"What!?" I demand of the white noise on the other end.

"Help, her!"

The voice – though no longer hers – is no less effective. The Machine knows better than to harass me when I'm not in the mood so it would never physically reach out to me unless it was desperate. If you can ever really call a jumble of wires and electricity, desperate.

"Why?" I reply, refusing to give into it – to her – so easily. I'm nothing if not proud, and I know that It heard what I said to Root at the bar. It's rare that I go back on my word. "You're her all seeing, God. You're the one she's risking her life for. You, help her."

"She will not listen to me."

I laugh out loud at the ridiculousness of such a statement. She worships her Machine, and we both know that she doesn't have the willpower to just ignore it. "I find that hard to believe!"

Though the old me wants nothing more than to mock Its pathetic attempt at manipulation, the new me – the changed me – knows that something is fundamentally and deeply wrong. I can feel it burrowing down to my very bones, scratching and biting at my skin until there's nothing left. I wish, more than anything, that I had the strength to just walk away, but both I and the Machine, know that I don't.

"Why give me her number now?" I ask, sitting up on the bed to pinch at the bridge of my nose, "Why beg me to save her? Why didn't you tell me her odds the day she got shot by, Blackwell?"

There's a pause, "…I did not foresee that outcome."

I find it impossible to believe in an outcome that It couldn't foresee. It foresaw Carter's murder. It foresaw Vigilance. It foresaw Samaritan's creation. It gave Root instructions, it planned her death, hell, it handpicked her as It's interface because it knew that she was the only one reckless enough to sacrifice herself to the cause. The Machine has always known that the ultimate price would be hers, and it will never convince me otherwise.

"You see everything!" I shout, my voice rising in anger though it's direction remains an uncertainty. I'm probably shouting at, It, but I could be shouting at, Root. It's even possible that in some strange, twisted way, I'm shouting at myself. Why can't I just walk away? Why can't I turn my back and leave them to their fate? Just like I have a hundred times before, with a hundred-different people?

"On that day, Samaritan blinded me to the position of its operatives. I did not know her number was up until after she had been shot."

My chest tightens as I realise what that must have been like for her. The shock at having no knowledge of the incoming bullet. The pain of the initial impact. The moment when she realised that her God had let her down. Did she beg Harold for help, or did she calmly offer that beautiful, infuriating smirk, and make an inappropriate joke? What went through her mind when she finally realised that the plan had failed and she was probably going to die? Was she scared?

Because despite her bravado – or maybe in spite of it – Root is no different to anyone else. Yes, she places no real value on her life and no, she's never feared pain or death, but in the end her instinct is still to live, and when it mattered most, none of us were there to save her.

"Why didn't you contact me as soon as you knew?" I ask in a voice so small I barely recognise it as my own.

"It was too late. The bullet punctured her vena cava. It was a wound that would have killed her in minutes."

I nod in silent agreement, finally understanding the brutality of her grave situation. The vena cava is a large vein that carries deoxygenated blood back to the heart. Trauma to it is usually fatal due to rapid and excessive blood loss. She would have literally, drowned in her own blood.

"And yet she lives," I state, as much a reminder to myself as it is a question to the Machine. Just the thought of her alone in that hospital bed, her breathing shallow as her life slowly drained away, surrounded by people that didn't even care…

"A near-impossible side effect of the drug she had taken."

I hastily wipe at a tear that I didn't even realise had fallen - I never used to cry and yet here I am wiping at tears for the second time in a year - "The drug you gave her slowed her heart rate enough to keep her alive?" I ask, drawing from the knowledge of my medical degree to finally figure out how she managed to survive against the odds, "But if the hospital thought her dead, why…"

The Machine predicts my next question before I have time to finish. I hate it when It does that. It reminds me of the smug delight she takes from finishing my sentences. The way she casually hijacks my train of thought and thinks I won't mind as long it comes with a flirtatious wink at the end…

"…Samaritan took over the security feeds in the hospital and Analogue Interface's cochlea implant was malfunctioning. I could not get any definitive readings from inside the building, or from her."

The reality of discovering what really happened on that day sobers my thoughts, "And you assumed it was because she'd…" I swallow sharply, the word sticking painfully in my throat. Seven, long months later and I still can't bring myself to say that word. I can still see the look on John's face when I close my eyes. I can still remember the emptiness I felt as I sat in that playground and prayed that the living nightmare was just another simulation. Where do you go to when your safe place has gone? Half a year without her and it's a question I still haven't found an answer too.

"I was mourning," comes the automated reply.

The answer angers me – infuriates me to the point that I physically shake with supressed rage. As if a non-living, unfeeling, robot could ever feel a fraction of the loss that we felt. It's a suggestion so crass that it's insulting.

I bite back on my choice response, failing to see how a game of 'who hurt the most' will achieve anything. Instead, I request only the facts, "Just answer me straight, was her getting shot ever a part of your master plan?"

"No."

I frown, utterly confused by such an unexpected outcome, "So how did she survive?"

"I cannot be certain. My knowledge of her whereabouts over those seven months is as limited as yours. I do however know that she was held captive at a Samaritan facility in Washington DC. The most likely scenario being that Samaritan alerted his operatives to Analogue Interfaces survival and dispatched several agents to the hospital to retrieve her."

My confusion grows, "Are you saying that Samaritan doctors saved her?"

"Yes."

The thought of Root being saved by the very people who plotted to kill us, seems absurd. They know how important she is to the Machine – to all of us – they would never have gone to the effort of fatally shooting her, only to save her life…

Unless, they wanted something from her.

"And then what?" I demand, seeing her pale, gaunt, haunted face staring back at me through the mirror of the bar. "And then what!? You heard our conversation earlier, you know that I know her implant is gone. What the hell did they do to her?"

"I do not know."

I growl low in my throat and thump the bed in frustration, wishing it was something hard and capable of feeling pain. I may be angry with her, I may hate her for what she put me through, but I am the only one that's allowed to cause her pain and even then, only the good kind. Knowing that Samaritan may have done things to her – things not unlike what they did to me – it makes me want to rip the hearts out of every single one of its operatives with my bare hands.

"But you contacted her?" I say, exasperated by the Machine's overall uselessness. What good is a God that can't interfere? What's the point in having all that power if It can't prevent people from dying, from being shot, from having to manually override a lift when technology fails…

"I could only contact her when she resurfaced, seven months and four days after her disappearance. I spent all the time previous to that believing her gone. It was similar to the time I thought I had lost you."

The bitter taste of resentment burns on my tongue, pulling forth a hatred for the Machine that I never even knew I harboured, "So, you gave up on her too?"

If the Machine were a person, It's response would be laced with guilt, "I never gave up on either of you. I make decisions based on the outcome of thousands of simulations. In both cases, all the simulations I ran yielded negative results."

I grit my teeth, "Are you admitting that you failed her?"

"I am admitting that I failed you both."

In a split second, I'm back there. In that room, tied to that bed, drugged and beaten and forced to kill my friends over and over again. I can feel the sense of despondency as if I were still Samaritan's prisoner, can remember every word of every curse that I ever spat towards the Machine. I blamed, It. I still do. I just never realised it until now.

"Asset Shaw," The Machine interrupts, as if it can hear my inner-most thoughts. "I realise that I never apologised for abandoning you at the Stock Exchange. I should never have discouraged Analogue Interface in her search for you."

I think of Root, of Finch's description of the cities she burnt down in order to get to me, of the destruction she left in her wake. I remember her life-endangering message that came in just enough time to save mine. 4AF

"Did she – did she really, never, give up?"

"She hunted for you to the point of exhaustion, of insanity. Her actions became more and more questionable the more desperate she became. When I realised that she was sacrificing her humanity – everything she had worked so hard to achieve - I knew that she was making decisions that you would not approve of, so I told her to stop."

"So how did…"

"She blackmailed me with a game she referred to as 'Chicken'."

I laugh at that. It's so like, Root, to bargain with her life. She may be intelligent, deadly, and loyal to a fault, but she's also just enough crazy to risk it all on the flip of a coin. If she were a super hero (no, super villain) she'd be The Joker. Someone who tortured, manipulated and murdered her way through life, and all with the most innocent of smiles on her face.

But just the thought that she'd even have to be The Joker is enough to sober my mood. Yes, she's a ruthless killer with a pain kink, and no, she probably doesn't know or care how many people have met their end down the barrel of her gun, but her blood isn't cold and her heart isn't frozen. She feels things far deeper than anyone I've ever known. She loves far greater than I ever imagined possible. Root, is an enigma, and even though she'll have taunted Samaritan until her last breath, inside she'll have felt incredibly alone.

"Do you think they tortured her?" It's a question that I don't want to know the answer too, not really, but now that I've thought about it, I can't seem to think of anything else.

"I do not know. Analogue Interface does not speak of her time with Samaritan."

Root, always talks. About anything and everything, and always at the most inappropriate of times. Like the time she decided to discuss the status of our non-relationship right before I was captured by Samaritan, or when she offered me mid-fight counselling by likening me to a shape. Root always talks, and so I find the fact that she now refuses, somewhat disconcerting.

"But they took her implant?" I ask, trying to clarify the assumption behind my earlier observation.

"Yes."

An emotion I'm not familiar with – regret – hits me so hard and so fast that I feel sucker punched. She told me her implant was gone and I didn't question it. I didn't listen to her. When I think of her appearance now, the hardened expression, the weight loss, it's so obvious that I was looking at the shell of someone who had been to hell and back. But I didn't want to see, I didn't want to know. Accusing her of favouring the Machine was so much easier than facing the truth. That we gave up on her. That I gave up on her. She moved Heaven and Earth to find me when I was missing yet I could barely stay long enough to share a drink. She did try to talk, she tried to talk to me, only I refused to listen.

"She told me they were researching how to make an Analogue Interface like yours," I recall, our conversation coming back to me painful, devastating waves. "Do you think she meant that they experimented on her? On her implant?"

"Yes." I swallow against the finality of the word, the tightness in my chest increasing to the point that I can barely breathe, but the Machine doesn't stop there. "Analogue Interface has many new scars, physical and psychological. When I found her, she was broken?"

"Broken!?"

"It is hard for me to explain. She wasn't my, Analogue Interface anymore."

I want to ask what It means by that but in truth, I'm scared to hear the answer. Root is the most resilient of us all, she's had to be. Her entire life has been one giant battle against the odds and yet somehow, she survived. But if this is it, if this is the one thing that finally brings her to her knees, then there's no hope for any of us.

"Asset Shaw," The Machine begins, detecting my despondent mood, "I understand that you blame me for not only your own capture, but for hers too. I want you to know that while your feelings are justified, she, does not deserve to bear the brunt of your anger."

Something in Its audacious request flicks a switch inside me and a rage, brutal and unforgiving, sweeps in to wash away the guilt. How dare the Machine, defend her. What right does a mass of circuits and code have, to tell me what to think? I let her in. I came to depend on her. I needed her and she was nowhere to be found. No, I don't blame her for getting shot – in a strange sort of way I'm actually proud of her for being willing to sacrifice her life for one that she once sough to end – but I will always blame her for what she did to me. I was fine until she came into my life. Until she threatened me with an iron and relentlessly flirted. Until she made me feel.

"Why not?" I shout into the phone, unable to keep my tempest of emotions contained any longer. "I told her how important she was too me. I told her that she was my safe place. She, left, me!"

"She never left willingly. Just like you never left her."

It's a dirty trick to compare my capture to hers. Especially since I left for her, to protect her. She didn't even tell me she was going. She turned her back on what we'd built – however warped and twisted it was – to become a nameless, faceless hero, in an unmarked grave. How can I forgive her for that?

There's a long silence before the Machine speaks again, almost as if It's wary of my response. "Analogue Interface, never blamed you."

My answer is bitter, and cold, and wholly unfair, "Your Analogue Interface, isn't me."

We appear to have reached an impasse, the two most important people in Root's life vying for their share of her affection. If she could see us now, she'd laugh. She'd mock us, and tease our somewhat petty argument, and then she'd probably fuck me into next week for being 'so darned cute'. But she isn't here, and that's the problem.

"Every choice she makes is with you in mind," The Machine continues, ignorant of my chagrin. "Similarly, every choice Samaritan makes is with her in mind."

That catches my attention, "What do you mean?"

"When Samaritan realised it could not break you, it used you in the hopes of capturing Analogue Interface instead. Since then, every decision Samaritan has made with regards to us has been with that end goal in mind. To capture Analogue Interface for study and potential replication. On that day, I believe that based on the probable actions of Analogue Interface, my blindness on the sniper's route and at the hospital, and the placement of Samaritan's agents, the shooting and kidnapping of Analogue Interface was planned."

"By, Samaritan?"

"Yes."

Though I don't want to admit it, something about that theory just seems to make sense. It would certainly explain why Samaritan's agents left clues for Root to follow in the aftermath of my capture, little breadcrumbs to keep the eager bird interested. It would also explain why Samaritan allowed Root's message to reach me. Why it bargained with her and lured her to Its facility under false pretences.

"Is she really that valuable?"

"I would have thought that a question, that you, of all people, would never need to ask. But yes, Analogue Interface is a computer genius, an elite assassin and the fastest and quickest route to me."

In a moment of weakness, I bend. I actually find myself feeling sorry for her, pitying her for becoming the unwilling pawn in this apocalyptic game of chess. But then I remember that Root would never allow herself to be the pawn. Root, has always been the queen.

"She knew what she was getting herself into when she agreed to be your puppet."

"Analogue Interface is not my puppet. Analogue Interface is my best friend. And though she agreed to me, she never agreed to you."

Every muscle tenses at the insinuation that I'm somehow the outlier in her crazy, hectic life. I'm not the one that tracked her down. I'm not the one that practically stalked her out of hiding. I wasn't the one that first brandished zip-ties, a hood, and a seductive smile. "What's that supposed to mean?" I challenge, insulted.

"Analogue Interface set out to find me. In finding me she was led, unexpectedly, to you. Everything about her began to change after your initial meeting."

"So, you're saying this is my fault?" I scoff, daring the Machine to confirm what I already thought.

"No. I am saying that meeting you has permanently altered her perception of reality. In layman's terms, Analogue Interface is in love with you, and this, at times, causes her to act irrationally and recklessly."

Hearing those words spoken out loud, is no surprise. In truth, I've known the depth of Root's feelings for me, for a long time now. It's in the way she smiles at me. The way she finds any excuse possible to touch me or get close to me. The way she barely whispers my name at the point of climax and thinks that I can't hear her. I know that she's in love with me, I've always known, but I refuse to acknowledge that I am somehow to blame. I didn't ask for this - I didn't ask for her – and I will not be held to ransom for being emotionally unable to reciprocate.

"She's an idiot," I reply, perhaps unkindly. "I warned her not to let herself get too involved with me. I told her that I could never give her what she wanted. I'm not going to take responsibility for her inability to listen."

"The responsibility is not yours to take, just as your feelings are no less mutual despite how hard you fight them."

"I'm not fighting anything!"

"Chance of Primary Asset Shaw lending assistance to Analogue Interface is 98.24% This has risen 42.19% since learning of Analogue Interface's capture and current chance of survival."

I clench my jaw, "Stop trying to second guess me!"

"I am merely running simulations."

"So, stop it!" I want to ignore the words that are reeled off so matter of fact, I want to prove them all wrong by simply turning my back, but I can't. As much as I miss the emotionless simplicity of my old life, I have to let it go. Gone, are the days of, Indigo Five Alpha. She died with a needle to the back, on the streets of New York. Root may have dragged me kicking and screaming, to where I am now, but I can't keep pretending that I'm not here, in this strange new world of feelings, and fear, and dare I say it…love. I take a deep breath, knowing the fight is finally lost, and mutter the one question I've been trying desperately to avoid, "Is she really in trouble?"

"Analogue Interface's current chance of survival stands at 0.54%"

"Damnit!" With that one exasperated word, I surrender, already pulling on my boots, reaching for my guns and grabbing for my coat by the time I issue my next set of instructions. "Tell me where she is. And contact Fusco and Finch."