Disclaimer: Person of Interest is not mine. I'm just borrowing the concepts and characters for a little while.

Spoilers: 2.21 Zero Day, including some dialogue from the episode.

A/N: Not sure I got John's voice right in this one…

ooooooo

And who is this man?

The man who sold the laptop in the first place, the man who is to blame for all of this – that man's name is…Harold Finch.

He felt a sharp pain in his side at the older man's declaration, which caused him to shift his stance, giving away his connection to Harold. Reese knew the pain wasn't real; that it was just a phantom pain from the bullet Kara had put into him in Ordos, but the accompanying emotional shock and hurt could not be denied.

John couldn't believe it; his mind reeled from the newly acquired knowledge. Then suddenly he didn't have time to believe it or not when the bullets once again started flying towards him.

On the way to the New York Public Library with Shaw, he had some time to think about what Decima's mouthpiece had said. Actually, it was nearly impossible to think about anything else.

It was Harold's code in the laptop; a laptop that was sold to the Chinese by Finch. He and Kara had been sent to retrieve that laptop, and as a result, his world had been forcibly turned upside down and inside out. That one piece of technology had ended up being his undoing in so many ways.

All in one night, he'd lost his job, his partner, and nearly his life. It was later on, after he'd returned to the States, that he'd learned that he'd also lost what mattered most to him – Jessica. His life had gone into a tailspin. Once he'd made sure Peter Arndt would never again terrorize another woman, he simply stopped caring about anything or anyone, including himself.

The multitude of his sins kept him drinking, stubbornly kept him alive, and then one day Finch had found him. The man with the penchant for bird-related names had offered him a job and a second chance – and he'd seized it.

But now that he knew about the laptop, he doubted Harold's motives. He'd always wondered why Finch had specifically chosen him, and now he thought he knew the answer to that question. It all made sense. His frie— No, his employer had chosen him out of guilt, an attempt to right one of his wrongs.

Harold had said that he would never lie to him, but hadn't the other man lied by copious amounts of omission? Could he ever forgive the fact that Finch had inadvertently destroyed his life, leading him to barely being more than a ghost amongst millions of people in a city that never sleeps?

To say that he felt betrayed would be a vast understatement, but he owed it to his employer to give him an explanation. He hoped Harold would finally tell him the whole truth, because right now he wasn't feeling all too forgiving.

There would be time for answers later, but first he had to help the Machine.

ooooooo

The end.

ooooooo

A/N: So much packed into one seriously awesome episode! Is anyone else looking forward to Finch and Reese having a little chat about Ordos?

Originally posted at Archive of our Own (AO3) on 4 May 2013.

Thanks for reading!