A/N: Thank you everyone who read, reviewed and followed, especially the guest reviewers to whom I couldn't reply individually. Here's chapter 2. Starting with this one, the chapters will be episode tags or missing scenes. Really AU, and a teensy bit non-canon because I envisioned a somewhat more tragic death for John's father considering the depth of emotion displayed in 3x11 "Lethe". Also, disclaimer still applies: I don't own POI and never will, but I'm definitely having a lot of fun with this!

Stop Running (I/1 Pilot)

He had run. Like a coward, he had run – out of the room, out of the clinic, just away, as far away as possible, as quickly as his alcohol-impeded legs would carry him. He had heard her following him, calling his name, tearfully, desperately, but somehow he had managed to outrun her. Her voice, however, still rang in his ears. He needed to get rid of her voice, of her face, of ... her.

She was just another person he had failed. Oh no, he'd never had a shadow of a doubt that she was the girl in the picture, his baby sister Hannah. If nothing else, her eyes were a dead giveaway. Not dead. Very much alive. And in that, he had failed her even more.

Their parents had both died within weeks of each other: first their father – a decorated Marine – in a tragic training accident, and soon after their mother, from the grief that her damaged heart couldn't take. She had deteriorated quickly, leaving them orphaned at sixteen and eight years, respectively. There were no relatives, so both of them had landed in the foster system, separated. Keeping in touch was hard, but they managed. Their foster families were far from ideal, so on his eighteenth birthday, John had applied for guardianship for Hannah. It was denied, of course, but he tried again and again ... until one day, Hannah disappeared without a trace. Too soon, the case ran cold – not due to lack of insistence on John's part. He, the police and their father's teammates had left no stone unturned, but it was like she had fallen off the face of the earth. Finally, their father's best friend had managed to ascertain that she was alive but in witness protection, out of reach forever. He had also taken John under his wings, helping him find a place in the Armed Forces and make his way through officer training.

"Dear God, you're alive." The scene had been on repeat in his head ever since he had stumbled out of the door of that blasted free clinic.

Her arms came around him in a bone-crushing hug without the slightest hesitation, and his arms had reciprocated seemingly of their own volition. Holding his baby sister against his chest, feeling her hot tears seep through the thick layers of his tattered, less-than-clean clothing and warm his clammy skin, he had made the mistake of allowing himself to just feel. While she kept whispering his name, something took hold of his heart and squeezed, hard, painfully. Suddenly he couldn't breathe, couldn't see, couldn't think. Incapable of drawing a breath, his throat closing up more and more with every passing second, he just held on, drawing her a little closer to himself. When he felt like he might pass out, or double over from the pain in his chest, her name broke free from his lips in a harsh sob, and he could breathe again. Tears flooded his face, and sight returned. A phone rang somewhere in the hallway, and the sound kicked his brain into action. On a deep inhale he steeled himself and on the exhale gently pulled away.

"Forget me," he said in a low, rough voice that made his words a lie.

"What?" Hannah couldn't have been more hurt and confused if John had punched her in the face. "No!"

"Hannah, if you ever loved me, please forget that we met today." And with a tender kiss to her forehead, he had jumped up and run.

In a desperate attempt to stop feeling he'd got hold of a bottle of booze, and in an equally desperate effort to put as much distance as possible between his beloved little sister and himself, he'd boarded the subway. Unfortunately, neither was working out. The feelings brought more memories, of Hannah, but also of Jessica, and suddenly he found himself longing to be back in his sister's loving embrace. She had actually embraced him, filthy and smelly as he was, as if he wasn't. As if there weren't two decades between then and now. He took a long drink from the bottle, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. He had pressed a gentle kiss to her forehead, and she had let him, as if he wasn't as filthy and smelly as he was. The tears returned, and he squeezed his eyes shut against the unbidden onslaught.

The connecting doors opened and a group of well-dressed, ill-behaved punks entered his subway car ...

*POI*POI*POI*POI*POI*

Meanwhile Hannah stood in front of the clinic, trying to rein herself in. She had other patients to attend to. Any further thoughts – and feelings – about this incident would have to wait.

Compartmentalising like the highly capable doctor she was, Hannah took a deep breath, dried her face on the sleeve of her scrubs shirt and went back inside. Where she promptly bumped into Joan. How could she have forgotten about her?

"Are you alright, sweetie?," the older woman asked in a genuinely caring voice. "What happened? Why'd John run off?"

Hannah managed a semi-convincing smile. "I think I spooked him somehow. I'm sorry."

Joan shrugged. "Never mind. Don't take much to spook 'im. Kinda paranoid, even. Must be a leftover from his time as a soldier."

"Yeah, must be", Hannah replied half-heartedly. Then she forcibly shook herself out of her emotional haze and turned to the homeless woman. "Did you get something to eat, Joan? And a hot drink?"

"Sure did, sweetie. You got good catering." Joan's smile revealed surprisingly healthy-looking teeth.

An idea popped into Hannah's mind and she dug into her pocket, pulling out a few banknotes. "Here's thirty dollars. It's all I have on me right now. Could you please make sure you and John get a decent lunch today?"

Joan gave her an odd look. "D'you treat all your patients to lunch?"

Hannah smiled warmly. "Only the nice ones."

*POI*POI*POI*POI*POI*

At some point, he admitted defeat. Something – or someone? – had overridden and stopped his self-destruct sequence, and changed the access code in the process. Hannah, Detective Carter, Harold Finch ... it was all too much. Within seventy-two hours they had broken through his carefully constructed barricades with a bulldozer of love, care and concern. If he hadn't lost the faith he'd been brought up in somewhere along the way, he'd say God was out to get him. Maybe He was. If he remembered correctly, God's existence didn't depend on anyone's believing in it. Either way, at some point, fully sober now, clean and with some decent food in his stomach, John realised that he couldn't go back to where he had been. Nor did he want to.

This is how he found himself back at the clinic. More precisely, across the street from the clinic.

It was long past closing time, if the sign on the door was to be believed. And indeed, from his place in the shadows John had seen the stream of patients slowly run dry over the past hour. Now he was waiting for Hannah to leave.

The research he had done on her had turned up precious little by way of valuable information. Witness protection had done a good job, something John was thankful for. Whatever it was that had landed his little sister in the programme two decades ago, she seemed to be safe now. And he had no intention of endangering her by digging too deep. No need to raise any red flags.

Why he was here now, he wasn't exactly sure. It wasn't like he planned on approaching her again. That was much too dangerous. He told himself he was going to keep an eye on her from a distance, make sure she got home alright or something. Even if he could never speak to her again, he still wanted to know she was safe.

Hannah was leaving the clinic now, shutting and locking the front door. She had grown up to be a very beautiful woman, he thought with a brief spark of brotherly pride. Tall and pleasantly built, her almost feline movements hinted at a fair amount of well-trained muscle mass. He slightly smiled at the thought that they still seemed to have something in common.

His attention might have slipped for a split second, because suddenly he found her staring at him across the street. She held his gaze for several long moments before she turned and started walking. Bewildered by Hannah's reaction, John followed her at what he considered an inconspicuous distance.

They were almost alone in the quiet side street, so it was hard to miss the words directed at him. Without looking at him or outwardly acknowledging him in any other way, she asked him in an even voice: "Why did you come back, John?"

Scanning his surroundings for any potential onlookers and judging it safe, he closed the distance to a few feet behind her once they had turned onto the crowded main street pavement. "I found a job."

With the subway station in sight, Hannah slowed down just the tiniest bit. "When you've made up your mind, you know where to find me", she replied with nothing more than a very slight hitch to her voice. "Be safe." And with that, she left him standing in the middle of the crowd, where somewhere above him the emotionless eye of a camera was staring down at him, a little red light slowly blinking.

A/N 2: By the way, sorry for any Briticisms. I won't apologise for the BE spelling, though. Writing anything else looks just too weird to my eye ...