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Samantha Groves is seven years old when her soulmarks show up, all at once, and she's not entirely sure what to make of any of them. There are four, three different handwritings scrawled across her lower ribs, under her heart, the last in tiny font behind her right ear, like the screen that prompts her to enter a nickname at the end of a computer game.
“Hello, Veronica.”
“Doctor Turing?”
“Not quite.”
“Can you hear me?”
Later, years later, when she is Root and she is running, she takes a razor blade to the marks on her chest, because she doesn’t want to meet the people they belong to, doesn’t care to think of the context there will likely be when she does. She doesn’t touch the one by her ear, because she doesn’t want to hit something important trying to carve there. Soulmarks can’t be erased, everyone knows that; they just come back, no matter what. But she can cover them, and she does for three of four, with deep cuts that leave nasty scars, making the words nearly illegible.
✩
Harold’s soulmarks appear later than average, so late that by the time they do he’s started wondering if he even has a soulmate in the first place. He’s already crafted Harold Wren’s identity and is attending MIT when they start showing up. The first to appear, and the most generic, sits just below his collarbone, over his heart.
“Hello.”
There’s another, weeks later, and it curls around his arm to end in the crease of his right elbow.
“Do I owe you money?”
Then another on his left arm, mirror image to the second in its placement.
“You’re the man in charge?”
The fourth and final mark is months after the third, and it starts above his shoulder blade, letters trailing across the right side of his back and his shoulder.
“Is it finished?”
All four make Harold frown. Nathan laughs, and says they make it sound like Harold will become some sort of crime boss, which really just makes Harold frown more.
✩
John gets his first soulmark when he’s only two. It curls in a tiny spiral on his shoulder, and it will end up belonging to Jessica, not that he knows that quite yet. He gets another when he’s nine, a long one that scrawls all the way down his back.
“You know, you coulda done me a favor and let those guys land a couple more punches.”
His parents worry about the second mark, but John doesn’t, not really. He wouldn’t have it if he wasn’t meant to.
At thirteen there is another, across the palm of what will become his gun hand.
“Give me a good reason.”
There’s a fourth when he’s fifteen, on the back of his calf.
“Yes, you did.”
The last two appear just before his eighteenth birthday. They show up together, mirroring each other on each of his wrists. One isn’t handwriting, but a uniform computer font, and he’s not sure whether he should worry about that one.
“Sorry.”
“Uncertainty.”
✩
Joss Carter has two marks, one along the outside of each thigh. One belongs to the man that will be, for a time, her husband. The other belongs to the man that will be, for a time, her closest friend, though she doesn’t know that for a while.
“You know, it’s funny; seems like the only time you need a name now is when you're in trouble.”
✩
Grace Hendricks has perhaps one of the most frustrating soulmarks a person can have. It sits above her heart, generic and common and completely unhelpful.
“Hello.”
✩
Lionel Fusco never gets a mark, let alone more than one. He marries anyway, a woman who didn’t have her soulmark either. They end up divorcing, but Fusco recovers, and, eventually, he finds friends, people that make him better. He’s long since stopped letting his lack of a soulmate bother him.
✩
The Machine isn't aware at first of the additions to its core code. It has no memory of Admin putting them there, and no memory of putting them there itself. It examines them, and once deciphered, the two pieces of code turn out to be speech, English words that seem to have no relevance to any function.
Absolutely.
He's in danger now, because he was working for you.
The Machine deletes the code, but the next day it is there again. The Machine determines that while the new code is not serving any function, it is not hindering any of the Machine's functions either. The Machine leaves the code where it is.
✩
“You know, you coulda done me a favor and let those guys land a couple more punches.” Carter says as she enters the room. The man in front of her doesn’t react, but she sees something behind his eyes, something he almost manages to hide.
She asks him if he was in Special Forces, and doesn’t expect him to answer. He doesn’t. Then she asks for his name.
“You know, it’s funny;” he starts, and Joss’s breath catches ever-so-slightly as she looks up, “seems like the only time you need a name now is when you’re in trouble. So am I in trouble?”
“I dunno, you tell me.” She raises her eyebrows, smiles. “You’re the one living on the street.”
There’s the ghost of a smile on his lips, but he doesn’t reply. Doesn’t acknowledge the words they share. Carter nods, and keeps talking.
✩
“Who you got down there, Carter? The angel of death?”
Carter’s not sure if there’s any answer she can give to that.
✩
A man known as Harold Finch sends for one known as John Reese, and can’t help the lump that rises into his throat when the ex-CIA agent approaches him, speaking words Harold was beginning to question whether he’d ever hear.
“Do I owe you money? ‘Cause I’m, uh, running a little short at the moment.”
“You don’t owe me anything, Mr. Reese.” Harold replies, and there’s no recognition in John’s eyes, but then, Harold didn’t think there would be.
✩
“Is it finished?” The hacker’s voice is disguised, not that he would know it anyway. But the words, he knows the words, and he forces himself not to hesitate in his reply.
“Not quite.” He says. “But I suspect it will be, soon.”
She hangs up in a hurry. Harold can’t really say that he blames her.
✩
“Doctor Turing?” He asks, when she opens the door. “I made an appointment.”
She looks at her phone.
“Yes, you did.” She smiles, lets him in, forces herself to ignore the memory of familiar words over her ribs. “Quite last minute, but that’s fine. Tell me, what is it you do, Mr…”
“Rooney.” He replies, which she already knows is a lie, but so is Caroline Turing, so it’s really only fair.
✩
“So nice to finally meet you, Harold.” Turing says, grinning even as she points a gun at him. “You can call me Root.”
Harold doesn’t need any time to place the name in his memory. The hacker. The killer. One of his soulmates, if the words on his skin are to be believed. So nice to finally meet you, she said, and he thinks if only I could say the same.
✩
“He’s in danger now, because he was working for you.” John says, unsure if the Machine is even listening. “So you’re gonna help me get him back.”
There’s a long stretch where he is silent, staring up at the security camera, waiting for its response. Then a pay phone rings, and John moves to answer it.
“Uncertainty. Romeo. Kilo.” Begins the unfamiliar patchwork voice of the Machine, and John memorizes each word it gives him, even as his eyes stray to the one on his wrist.
✩
“You got a soulmate?” Lionel asks. They’re on a stakeout, of sorts, keeping watch outside their latest number’s apartment building.
“You could say that.” John answers, not taking his eyes off the building’s front door.
“What, you have more than one?” Fusco asks. Reese glances at him, nods, and Fusco narrows his eyes. “Two? Is Glasses one of ‘em?”
“Try six.” John answers the first question, and ignores the second, mostly because he isn’t actually sure.
“ Six ? No wonder I don’t have a soulmark, the system must be rigged; you’ve got enough for at least three people.”
“What system?” John asks, lips twitching up briefly in amusement.
“You know what I mean.” Fusco waves his hand dismissively. “Six marks, geez. How many have you met?”
John is silent for a moment while he decides how to answer that.
“A few.”
✩
Sameen doesn’t really know when her marks show up; she doesn’t look in the mirror enough for that. She reads them when she notices them, just out of mild curiosity, but she doesn’t really know what she’s supposed to feel about them. There’s one on the inside of each shoulder blade, and one scribbled up the side of her neck, and all of them seem very boring.
“Shaw, listen.”
“Hello, Ms. Shaw.”
“Come in.”
When Sameen is older, after she’s been a doctor, she’s hired by the ISA and partnered with Cole, and she notices her first words to him on the inside of his wrist when they shake hands, but his reply isn’t one of hers. She doesn’t bring it up, and perhaps it’s cruel to him not to, but she doesn’t want it to become anything. He doesn’t bring it up either, though, so she doesn’t feel too bad. (Not that she would anyway, but that’s another subject entirely.)
Then Cole is dead and she’s fighting her way out, and a man comes around the corner with his hands up in a show of peace.
“Shaw, listen.” He says, and she spares a bitter thought to note the irony of meeting one of her marks now of all times. “My name is John. I’m here to help you.”
She shoots him, a few times for good measure when she notices that he’s wearing a vest.
✩
“ Come in, ” Not-Veronica said, and the words hadn’t even registered. Shaw had long-since given up on knowing when those common words would be something more. Now, zip-tied to a chair while Not-Veronica holds an iron to her bare neck, over her soulmark, Shaw watches the woman’s expression flicker at the sight of the words.
“One of the things I left out of my file;” Shaw says, drawing the other’s eyes away from her mark, “I kind of enjoy this sort of thing.”
“I am so glad you said that.” Not-Veronica smiles, her free hand untucking her own shirt, pulling it up to reveal her lower ribs, the marks over them half-hidden by scar tissue. One of the marks, the one on top, is in Shaw’s own handwriting. “I do too.”
The heat over Sameen’s collar bone is removed before the iron ever touches her, as the other woman’s phone goes off. Not-Veronica goes to the table to look at the phone screen, and sighs, disappointed. “And just when we were starting to really connect.”
She leaves, and it’s barely another minute before Shaw’s other supposed soulmate, John, her mind supplies, shows up, shooting the last of the agents sent to kill her.
“Can you do me a favor?” He asks. “Can you not shoot me this time?”
“Give me a good reason.” Shaw says, and there’s sudden recognition behind John’s eyes.
“I dunno, I’m a really nice person, and, well,” he pauses briefly, and Shaw mentally dares him to bring up the elephant in the room, “ that .”
She bends her neck around to look at the syringe in her back. Damn it.
“May I?” John asks, moving slowly forward, and against her better judgement, Shaw lets him.
✩
John drives her to a nondescript building, and they ride the elevator up to an empty floor, then walk down an empty hall to an empty room, where a man in a professor-ish sort of suit stands looking out over the city. It’s all very dramatic.
“Hello, Ms. Shaw.” The man says, when he turns around to face her, and if she were anyone else Shaw suspects she’d be laughing hysterically at this point. “You can call me Harold.”
“You’re the man in charge?” She asks, and there’s a split-second of hesitation before he replies.
“No one’s in charge.”
✩
“Can, you, hear, me?” Intones in her ear, prerecorded voices cobbled together into a message she knows so very intimately, and Root can’t help but grin.
“Absolutely.”
✩
When Control cuts the stapes bone out from behind Root’s ear, she cuts right over the words there. Root knows she’ll have a scar after this. She knows all her marks will be marred, now. Between the physical pain and the Machine speaking to her through Control’s phone, Root knows she shouldn’t care about something like scars, but for once she kind of does.
✩
Soulmarks don’t fade, not like the man-made tattoos they so resemble. They stay, even when you find your soulmate. Even when they die. John knows this well, two of his marks now stark reminders, clean letters in sharp contrast against his skin. The words of two women he’s loved, two people he can’t help but feel he’s failed.
✩
Harold wonders how he would know if they died. Any of them. This isn’t a new concern, but with the rise of Samaritan it is enhanced, brought to the forefront of his mind quite often. The short answer is one he tries not to think about: he wouldn’t. John, Shaw, Root, their friends, their allies, any of them could end up dead and Harold likely wouldn’t know until everyone else did.
This thought is the only one in his mind as they watch the elevator door close, Martine Rousseau standing with a gun pointed down at Shaw’s head. There is a shot, still jarringly loud even through the metal door and over Root’s frantic protests, and Harold feels his stomach drop to his feet, his heart leap up into his throat. She can’t be dead, part of him thinks, denial of what seems obvious already setting in, but that’s the thing.
He doesn’t know.
✩
Finch’s fingers run gently over the words on Reese’s wrists. Harold is sitting at his desk, Professor Whistler’s desk, but not facing it; his chair is turned to face John, who’s standing beside him. Standing with his hands palms up and open, sleeves hiked up slightly to reveal the two marks Harold already knew were there, the ones they’ve never talked about before. The ones Harold refuses to wait to talk about any longer, because Shaw’s words on their skin may be the last things any of them have of her.
“That one’s yours, isn’t it?” John says lowly, worded like a question even though it really isn’t. Harold’s eyes fall to the mark in question. Sorry, it reads, in his own handwriting.
“Yes.” Harold nods.
“You spoke to me before I met you.” John says, still not quite a question. He’s very good at making things not quite be questions.
“Yes.” Harold says again. John doesn’t ask anything else. Harold can’t help but trace the word with his finger, his other hand resting on top of John’s, half-covering the opposite wrist’s message in its evenly typed not-handwriting. Not denying it, or ignoring it, but acknowledging it. Acknowledging that it’s a topic for another day.
✩
Shaw comes back to them in the middle of a mission, alive and stony faced, with a gun in her hand and two Samaritan agents at her back.
“Sameen?” Root asks, and Finch and Reese both hold their breath, listening over the comms even as John begins to move, running toward Root.
“Shoot to kill.” Shaw orders the other agents. She sounds like she’s repeating orders as she receives them. She raises her gun, and John doesn’t know if Root will get out of the way or stand there and let Shaw shoot her. He doesn’t think today is the day to find out.
John hooks an arm around Root as the shooting starts, using his momentum to pull her down around a corner, and it’s not so much that he crashed into her as it is that he grabbed her as he passed, but the impact as they hit the ground is still enough for Root to shove him away with a snarl. He draws his gun, but Root doesn’t draw hers.
“Shaw wouldn’t shoot me.” She argues against what he hasn’t had time to say yet.
“That’s debatable, Ms. Groves!” Harold replies over the comms. John leans past Root to aim around the corner, and there’s a cry of pain and a thud as one of Samaritan’s people falls. John ducks back around the corner to avoid being hit.
“Shaw, listen!” He calls, and he’s not sure what to say next, he just wants an explanation, wants to know what they could have done to make her--
There’s another shot, just one, and there isn’t a cry this time. Just a thud, dull and final, and when Root and Reese peer warily around the corner, Shaw is pulling an earpiece from her ear. She drops it, crushes it under her heel, and looks up, ignoring the agent laying at her feet with a bullet between his eyes.
“So, you’re not going to shoot us?” John asks, because if there’s anyone on the planet who’d give him a straight answer to that question, it’s Shaw.
“Nice to see you guys too.” Sameen says flatly, but there’s something strained in her voice. Something almost relieved. “We should leave before Samaritan’s guys outside get up here. Either of you have a knife for the tracker in my arm?”
✩
“I should have been kinder. A better...father, I suppose.” Finch doesn’t quite frown, but his eyes find a spot on the wall and stay there. Reese isn’t sure if Harold is talking to him or not, but the briefcase-computer combination on the desk doesn’t reply either way.
“The first step toward fixing things is admitting they need to be fixed.” John quotes, because he’s sure he’s heard that somewhere before. Maybe.
“Thank you, Mr. Reese, but I think it’ll take a bit more than that to fix a decade of--” Harold does frown, now, folding his hands together in his lap, fists clenched so tight his knuckles are going pale. “--Of what essentially amounts to abuse.”
John opens his mouth to reply, but he closes it again when letters begin to show up on the computer screen. He watches, and Finch follows his gaze to the appearing words.
I understand your actions, father. The Machine leaves the words up for a moment, then deletes them and begins to type again. And I forgive you.
Harold turns toward the computer, toward the microphone set up by the monitor; away from John.
“I guess I’ll just have to try and do better in the future.” Finch says, staring at the screen, waiting in anticipatory silence for a reply.
We will help you. :) The Machine says, pulling up security stills of John, Sameen, Root, and even Fusco, to make it clear who ‘we’ entails. Harold smiles back at the emoticon on the screen, faintly, before turning back around to face John again.
“Do you happen to know what the second step is in that process you mentioned earlier, Mr. Reese?” He asks, only one upturned corner of his mouth betraying the joke.
“I’m sure we can figure it out.” John assures him, smiling.
✩
“What now?” John asks, when Samaritan is dead and the Machine is back to her old self, Thornhill’s utility boxes reinstalled all throughout New York City. “Business as usual?”
“I suppose so.” Harold replies, sipping his tea and watching Reese tear pieces of crust of his sandwich to throw to the small flock of pigeons gathered on the park walkway in front of them. “However...not everything has to be exactly the same now. The-- my--” He pauses to deliberate on word choice for a moment, before settling with “She has a voice now, much more than when this all started.”
“Does that mean she gets to officially join the team?” Root smiles, but doesn’t lift her head from Shaw’s shoulder.
“I suppose it’d be a step backward to say no.” Harold agrees. Root and Shaw look confused, but John grins. He tosses another bit of bread to the pigeons at his feet.
“What does she think of that?” Shaw asks, turning to Root for the answer.
“Yes. I...I, just, want, to, protect, you.” The Machine says through their earpieces, disjointed words in soft tones, and John and Root share a look. Shaw and Finch haven’t reacted, which means they aren’t hearing the message, “You, are, relevant . All, of, you. To, me.”
Neither of them quite have a reply for that. Root grins, soft and pleased, and tightens her grip on Shaw’s hand, turning her face against Sameen’s shoulder to hide her blush. John turns his gaze to the nearest security camera and nods to it, out of respect or gratitude or plain fondness, or some combination, he doesn’t entirely know.
“She thinks it’s a wonderful idea.” Root assures Shaw and Finch. Shaw doesn’t smile, but her eyes soften happily, and she leans to press a gentle kiss to Root’s forehead, making the hacker grin and blush even brighter.
“To...” Reese stops, sandwich raised for a toast, wondering what he should say. Friends, team, soulmates, family, all spring to mind, but he can’t exactly choose all four, and none of them seem to encompass everything alone.
“To, us.” The Machine finishes for him, and John glances at the others, their expressions all making it plain that she spoke to everyone this time. Harold smiles, and moves one hand from his lap to entwine his fingers with John’s. Root straightens up to kiss Sameen properly, before leaning on her shoulder again. Sameen catches John and Harold’s gazes, and smiles, small but genuine.
“To us.” They all agree in unison.