A/N. I wrote this story under the impression and after watching the first season of POI. At first I completely melted after the episode where Finch and Reese were saving a six-month girl, changing her diapers and taking away a grenade from her hands, which they forgot to hide on the shelf above. And when in one of the last episodes Finch said about four years with Grace, both moments at once were united in my mind.

You can see in my LiveJournal (here patska78. / 297512. html ) gifs of the moments that inspired me to write this story.

Please don't be astonished at possible grammatical or punctuation mistakes - my mother tongue is Russian and I did this translation myself; don't have native English-speaking Beta.

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The universe and the characters belong solely to the authors of the show, I took them for a while just to play with.

Imperceptibly grimacing because of the constant pain in his mutilated leg, Finch slowly sat down on his favorite bench under the bridge, leaned back, rearranged his glasses and sighed wistfully.

Almost all the time when Reese was tracking another number issued by the Machine, he was sitting in front of monitors and not too often had to leave the library; does not considering way home and to Grace's home. And sometimes he began to feel himself not exactly like a human, but as a part of the monster that he once had created; something like a USB flash drive or external hard drive. In order not to forget that he is still creature from flesh and blood, Finch started to come to the bridge. He was listening to the noise of cars over his head, was looking at hasteless flows of the Hudson river water - he was not looking at the people over the bridge, oh no, he had seen enough of them on the monitors during all these years! - and it somehow helped him to remember that he had lived an ordinary life too.

Had.

Long ago he had learned to perfectly hide his emotions behind a impassive countenance; the maximum that he allows himself - to raise eyebrows or to smile subtly with an angle of his mouth. Probably, Reese thinks that he is absolutely cool-headed paranoid, who is incapable of any human feelings - only able to perform the tasks that issues the Machine.

If he only knew how wrong he was.

If Reese only knew what incredible heartache he feels every day for the last two years, when he comes to the square near Grace's house. And then, in the evening, hardly falling asleep, alone in the empty, silent and featureless apartment.

Reese did not even realised that not so long ago his incredible composure was very seriously shaken - it happened when he brought Leila to the library and then sent John to deal with the monsters, who decided to cause harm to a six-month baby.

Looking at Leila, who was playing with his tie - he had nothing else near at hand that could be safe to the baby - Finch suffered a sharp, almost physical pain. Long ago he and Grace have built far-reaching plans: he will finish work with the program, the firm will sell it, and then he finally will marry Grace, they will go away from New York to Italy, will buy a house somewhere in a small town, close to the edge of a wood, and begin to live like a normal family, they will have children...

Nothing of it did come true.

All his future without the rest was swallowed by the Machine.

Leila was enthusiastically chewing a silk tie, and Finch, looking at her blond head and chubby cheeks, silently cursed the day when he and Nathan thought about creating a special program, cursed all governments and intelligence agencies of the world, the Internet, computers, weapons, humans' malice and deceit; cursed everything that were reasons why he lost the opportunity to sit near the woman he love, and keep his child in his arms.

When Reese arrived, he had already returned usual impenetrable impression to his face. John will never know that his employer, always self-restrained, serene and unemotional, recently took Leila on his hands, took off his glasses, burrowed face in her little shoulder and froze, hunched. Baby girl soon got bored, and for a couple of times she quite significantly pulled his hair, but he did not pay any attention to the pain. Exactly for five minutes he allowed himself to imagine that this baby girl is his and Grace's child, that outside is not gray autumn New York, where every seventeen hours a human being is killed, but the hot summer somewhere far away from here; soon his wife will bring him ice tea, and then they will sit down on the porch and look how their daughter grows...

And then they handed back the baby to her legitimate grandparents. On the way back to the library Reese, who typically was reserved and taciturn, frankly rejoiced that the girl found the family and she will grow with relatives and not in an orphanage or foster family. Finch was silently turning the steering wheel, sometimes nodding in tact to John's speech, and his heart and soul were just torn to pieces from despair and unbearable anguish. He will never have a family, will not have children - his destiny consists of only a keyboard, monitor and numbers that will never run out, because that is a human nature.

It is such a terrible word - never.

Yesterday Reese at last tracked him down and even was a guest in Grace's house, pretending to be a detective who is checking the complaint about violation of peace. Now John knows why he buys so many issues of a same magazine, why he spends so much time on that square.

Yes, he told Reese that he did not regret about creating the Machine, but it was not quite true. Because of his reserved and secretive nature he could not admit out loud, even with a such close friend like John, that he unwittingly ruined his own happiness with his own hands. If he only knew what effect would arise after creation of the Machine, he would never touched the keyboard! But now this error could not be corrected.

There is no way back.

Finch knew that thinking about Leila is an arrant masochism, as if there was not enough pain in his present life - but could not resist. Formerly, when he was sitting on a bench on the shore of the Hudson, he thought only about Grace, now permanently remembers Leila too.

In literature, and not only in fiction, authors often mention that it is necessary to share your grief with another person, and then you will feel yourself a little easier. Well, now Reese knows what he had done for the safety of the woman he loved, but it did not become easier at all; a long time ago a nagging pain had settled somewhere in the region of his heart, and it will last forever, and nothing in the whole world can change it.

The one and only thought that sometimes - not often enough! - gives him a infinitesimal tranquillity - he and Grace had a whole four years of happiness.