Notes: Spoilers for 1.21. Beta'ed by PJTL156
Reality Check
John didn't understand why he was being swept up by a wave of emotion. He shouldn't be. He had been trained not to be. He swore under his breath as he realized that more and more he wasn't measuring up to what he had once been.
Was that such a bad thing?
He supposed if it meant he had to deal with these bothersome feelings—hurt, distrust, disdain, betrayal, sorrow—it was. Honestly, this was ridiculous. How had he allowed himself to become so weak, to feel such things about something so petty? How had he allowed himself to be so naïvely fooled?
Finch was just a person. All the joking in the world wouldn't actually make him a machine.
Humans lied.
Reese himself did it for the better part of his life and called it a career.
It still stung when he found out his boss had left him off the case, withheld information, deemed him unworthy of the truth.
And to think, Reese had been under the impression he was slowly breaking down the outer walls of Finch's impenetrable self. It was time to wake up. Finch was always going to have secrets, and this just showed Reese that he would likely never know more than a handful of them, and he'd only know them when Finch found it benefitted himself.
He had been dancing around the man's cryptic half hints thinking he was making progress. One step forward, two steps back held no ground now. It was more like one to twenty.
What hurt worse: being lied to or being considered a cold blooded monster?
He wasn't going to actually kill Jennings. Not that he didn't want to— he just knew better than to cheapen the bastard's suffering with an easy out. He wasn't that person anymore.
He could very easily be that person again, though. How could he blame Finch for simply acknowledging the possible? How could he honestly resent when his boss was simply trying to keep him from getting into the situation that would most likely bring that side of him out once more?
John could kill in cold blood. He didn't like it, but he could do it. Why was he hiding that from himself? Why was he letting the thought of all this vigilante day-saving dilute his mind enough to think he was working towards being something far better than what he had been crafted into?
"Shit." Reese shook his head, gripped the wheel tighter and blinked back something that stung at his eyes.
So Finch cared, alright. So he was no longer a murderer, alright. He still had a lot of blood on his hands. Finch couldn't keep him safe from his past, no matter how influential and powerful the man was. John had to face the truth and stop hiding from it.
Perhaps he could work toward washing some of the blood from his hands. Maybe working on these numbers, saving these lives would at least show someone, if only Finch, that he wanted to fix the unfixable, pay off his debt that had no way of being paid off.
John urged the car to go faster, praying Finch would give him his job back when he got back home.