Chapter Text
“Your three o'clock, Shaw. Samaritan operatives.”
John peered out from behind the crate he was using for cover, reloading his handgun before checking the contents of his pack. Two grenades and a cell phone. Not much to go on.
Gunfire sprayed noisily to his left.
“Three, my ass. Didn't anybody ever teach you how to read a clock?”
Shaw's deadpan response filtered through his headset and John smirked at the TV screen, watching her player character duck behind a shelf across the warehouse. “That's funny. I'll ask you the same thing next time you sneak into second period.”
The NPC (or the “Number”, as the game described them) quivered to the right of his own character. John ignored him for now. Sometimes the Number liked to make a run for it at inconvenient times, just to make the game harder, but this one seemed to be as wimpy as they came. He'd probably trail after John until the mission ended or they failed to keep him alive.
When Shaw lured the enemy agents to her side of the room, John turned to the NPC and pressed the interact option. Keeping them calm was just another part of the mission. If they didn't like you, they were more likely to cause trouble, which was probably why Shaw left this part up to him as much as possible. She had about as much patience with NPCs as she did real people.
The dialogue board flashed up, and John stuck to the usual platitudes. Stay down, Larry, we're here to help you. No, you can't have a gun. Yes, you can hide behind me. Blah, blah, blah.
The mood bar rose steadily, and Larry's face turned a lighter shade of red. That would do.
“You done making nice over there? I could use a hand.”
John moved his character away from the Number, clicking to stand him back up so he could resume the gunfight. Four agents had Shaw crowded against the far wall with only a stocked shelving unit for cover. She took out one of them as John gunned down two more from behind.
The last one made a run for Larry when his head peeked out from behind the crate, but Shaw's bullets caught him in the back of each knee and he fell, groaning, not far from the other three. Extra points were awarded for kneecap shots; they were the “good guys” after all.
Shaw's score jumped his just as the Mission Accomplished sign flashed over the screen, and John sighed in defeat.
“That's twice now, Reese. Must be pretty embarrassing for you.” She was a smug winner, as usual.
“Best three out of five?”
So far he was down by two days’ worth of chocolate pudding from the school lunch menu, but the school year hadn’t even started yet. John had a whole semester of dessert to bargain and his pride on the line.
Shaw snorted into her microphone. “Fine. But if there's another date involved, you're biting the bullet. I know Harold's all about realism in these things, but those middle-schoolers that hit on me at Gen's birthday party had better moves.”
John didn't feel the need to remind her that Harold hadn't built the whole game by himself, and things like that were almost definitely someone else’s job. His guardian was a genius, but he only had one pair of hands and, well, he wasn't exactly a ladykiller. Since Grace had left the picture, Harold didn’t seem to consider dating of any form an option.
Sometimes, John worried that the man was throwing himself into his work to avoid reality. As much as John enjoyed the results of it – they made good money, and Person of Interest was the most popular game on the market – Harold was the closest thing he had to a father, and he valued the man's happiness.
But he was a smart guy, John rationalised, and he knew what he was doing. Harold was just a very private person.
“If you don't move in five seconds, I'm taking all the good weapons first.”
The game had finished loading up while he was distracted, or at least the home-base portion of it. Shaw's character loped around the subway station in front of him, picking up equipment while a familiar Belgian Malinois trotted after her. He couldn't help but smile when he saw Bear's video game counterpart. That had been his idea.
“John, could you come in here, please? We have something to discuss.”
The request came from a room down the hall – Harold’s library. The man didn’t talk very loud but his voice really travelled, and he sounded worried. John shot up, throwing a speedy “Gotta go, Shaw,” into the microphone before switching off his console amidst her complaints.
The library was actually more of an office, in size and usage, but Harold being Harold had managed to cover every wall with bookshelves from floor to ceiling. At the centre of the room sat the man in question, looking with distaste at the computer on his desk. Its screen was turned away from the door, so John couldn’t see what was so upsetting as he stepped into the room.
“Everything alright?” he asked.
The older man adjusted his glasses with both hands. “That remains to be seen.”
“You’re being cryptic again, Harold.”
John dropped into an armchair in front of the desk, picking up one of the books lying scattered around Harold’s computer. It was an old tome he didn’t recognise, but he flicked through it anyway so Harold had time to get his words together, mindful of the carefully marked page somewhere around the middle.
“You remember Alicia, don’t you?” John nodded.
He’d met Harold’s sister, Alicia, only a couple of times in his life, and the most recent of those times must have been about five years ago, at Nathan Ingram’s funeral. Harold and Alicia’s relationship had been pretty rocky since then. John didn’t lose any sleep over that; she was a kind woman, but always tense, and her daughter…
“It seems Alicia has taken up on a very promising job offer, and will soon be leaving the country. By soon, I mean in little over a week. This really is all very sudden. But Samantha is adamant about finishing her education over here, leaving her—” Harold looked up at John over the rims of his glasses, “—in need of a place to stay.”
John dropped the book.
“No.”
Samantha Corwin, or Groves, or whatever her name was now, wasn’t staying in their house. Not unless they could fasten a lock to his door, an electric fence even. That girl was bad news.
“Based on the timing of this, I’d say we’re something of a last resort.”
“I hear the park is nice this time of year,” John offered.
Harold sighed just as Bear wandered into the room, nosing at them both until one of them gave him the attention he was after. It was Harold who took pity on him in the end, as John was too busy listening to the alarm bells ringing in his head.
He was eleven years old when Samantha Groves first came into his life. They were the same age, but she was taller than him, more confident too, and when you’re young things like that create an immediate pecking order. John was a rough kid, but Samantha was the boss.
She and her mother stayed at the house one weekend, and Harold had left it up to him to show her around. John was proud to be given such an important job – well, he was eleven, and he really wanted to impress his new father-figure – so he did his best to be entertaining, even if Samantha wasn’t much of a talker. At first, John just thought she was shy.
“Don’t you have a computer?” she asked, as he led her through the back yard.
John shrugged, picking up a stick from the ground and batting at his palm with it. “Yeah, but we’re not allowed to touch it. Harold says it’s for grown-ups only.”
“We’re not babies,” Samantha huffed, crossing her arms. “He won’t even know we were there.”
“I don’t know…”
“What are you, scared?”
She made a convincing argument for an eleven year old. John thought about it; he was curious about the machine, having never been allowed anywhere near it. Harold was nice, but it wasn’t really fair of him to treat John like a baby, or like some bulldozer that was going to break his fancy things.
“Okay,” he agreed.
They crept back into the house, past the kitchen where Harold and Alicia were having a whispered conversation at the table, and upstairs to the library. The door was unlocked, and looking back John would feel even worse about what happened, knowing that Harold had trusted him enough not to lock it.
Samantha went straight for the computer while John shut the door quietly behind them. She didn’t ask for any help from him, just climbed into the wheeled office chair and reached for the power switch. The computer booted up slowly, and Samantha tapped her fingers on the desk while they waited.
“What are you going to do with it?” John asked, resting his elbows on the desk beside her.
She smiled down at him then, but it wasn’t a nice smile. At the time, he remembered being more than a little creeped out by it. “Just watch.”
As soon as the desktop finished loading, Samantha’s hand flew to the mouse and the cursor was a blur of activity. Window after window, John couldn’t keep up with it, but it looked like she knew what she was doing well enough. He wanted to ask what was happening, but kept his mouth shut to avoid looking as stupid as he felt, watching her work so confidently.
To this day, he couldn’t remember much of what had flashed across that computer screen. What he did remember was Harold bursting in minutes later, and Samantha slamming her thumb into the off button as he entered the room.
Harold was frustrated but forgiving, at least until later that night when he saw the state of his bank account.
They were well-off, even back then, but whatever Samantha had been doing had somehow taken a pretty fierce chunk of his money. There were numerous murky websites in the internet history, and she later admitted that some kids from school had told her about them; apparently curiosity had gotten the better of her. Harold’s computer was flooded with viruses.
It was a long time before Harold trusted him near the library again.
He didn’t see Samantha much after that, but he was always wary of her. Because of that incident, followed by the cold shoulder she gave him afterwards, like she no longer had a reason to be nice to him – and sometimes she was outright cruel – he didn’t trust that girl. Maybe she had changed these last five years, maybe his memory was exaggerating how weird her behaviour had been, but John wasn’t optimistic.
In the present day, Harold shook his head.
“Whatever your feelings towards Samantha may be, I’d hate to see a young woman lose her chance at an education over this. I’ve already said we’ll take her in.”
“Harold—” John’s voice bordered on a whine.
“She’ll be transferring to your school at the start of the semester, and I’ll be picking her up next Saturday.”
John ran a hand down his face, dropping his head against the back of the armchair.
“I think this could be a good opportunity for all of us,” tried Harold, and Bear’s tail swiped loudly across the floor beside him. “We’re not the most sociable of… families.”
The word “family” warmed his insides up an embarrassing amount, but John still felt like someone had knocked him sideways with a blunt object.
-
Shaw, ever reliable, found the whole thing hilarious.
“So you’re basically living in a Lifetime movie now, huh?” She smirked at him, eagle-spread over a beanbag in his room a week later.
From face-down on the bed, John scowled at her. “I’m glad you’re enjoying yourself. You can have this pillow when she’s finished smothering me with it in my sleep.”
“You were eleven, and she broke your computer. Doesn’t exactly scream ‘budding serial killer’ to me.”
“You weren’t there,” he insisted, sitting up to face her, “She knew what she was doing. That money didn’t just disappear, and neither did the scar I got when she pushed me into a fence the next day.”
Shaw rolled her eyes. “Kids are idiots, John. One time I got dared to jump out of a tree for a twinkie, and I did it.”
“What, last week?”
He ducked, and the baseball she’d levelled at his head bounced off the wall harmlessly behind him. He caught it on the rebound, and tossed it between his hands.
“I was eight. Messed my leg up pretty bad for a while. Didn’t even get the twinkie.”
“Talk about childhood trauma.”
“My point is: she’s probably not some nutcake with a chip on her shoulder. And even if she is, what’s she going to do, put spiders in your bed? Lock you in the basement?” Shaw gestured at him with both hands, exasperated.
“Beat me to death with a lamp?”
“Not with your fat head,” she snickered. The ball smacked into her palm when he threw it back.
It was true, he’d had a pretty big growth spurt since then, and the baseball had really helped with his physique. Not that he could ever really be intimidated by Samantha, but knowing that he would almost definitely have a size advantage on that blonde demon made him feel a little better. She wouldn’t be pushing him into anymore fences, at least.
“So, today’s the day?” Shaw moved to sit upright, dislodging Bear who’d been dozing comfortably across her stomach. The dog whined at her until she rubbed his ears in apology and let him gnaw at the baseball. John leaned over to snatch it away, putting it on a shelf out of reach from both of them.
“Yeah,” he said, settling back on the bed.
Harold was due back anytime within the next hour. There had been an air of foreboding hanging over the house that day, or maybe it was just him. Still, he felt a lot better after Shaw climbed through his window—he’d prefer that she use the door, but Shaw liked to think she was some kind of super spy and every activity was a test of her skills.
Frankly, he blamed the video game for that.
Bear’s head snapped up and seconds later, they heard the front door clicking open and then shut. The dog barked cheerfully and darted out of the room, tail wagging in excitement. With less enthusiasm, John got to his feet and followed, Shaw trailing after him.
Snippets of conversation reached them as they neared the stairs. John could just make out the words, “Really Harold, I’d be honoured if you would show it to me sometime,” before he and Shaw reached the top of the stairway. The top step creaked beneath them, and the two figures at the bottom turned at the sound.
If John didn’t know she was coming, he wouldn’t have recognised the girl looking up at him. Gone was the short blonde hair of the Samantha Groves who once terrorised him, and in its place was a perfectly-curled wall of long, brown hair, framing a face that was, at least, familiar.
Maybe it was ridiculous of him to expect some kind of evil smirk to cross her face at this unwelcome reunion, but the innocent smile she directed at him kind of threw him for a loop. She looked… normal. Friendly, even.
Beside him, Shaw made a disgruntled noise and elbowed him none too gently. Samantha tilted her head, eyes sliding from John to Shaw with noticeable interest.
“You didn’t mention she was hot,” Shaw muttered, like he could have known.
John frowned at her and, from downstairs, Samantha stared with one hand still wrapped around the handle of her suitcase. Bear circled Harold’s legs, oblivious.