A/N: I know I promised a sequel, and I tried. I REALLY tried: I actually wrote about five chapters, but it was just ... lame. This epilogue was the only part that truly made sense in the end, so this is what I am going to present to you. I hope you like it. Please let me know your thoughts.

Fair warning: This chapter is still AU, and you will see why.

Disclaimers: Don't own. If I did, the series would still be up and running. Also, not making any money with this.

Epilogue: Free at Last

This was the end. He knew it, and he was calm about it. Everything his life had been about culminated in this one moment. It was right. It was right, and he had no regrets except for one.

The last thing he saw was his attackers closing in, raising their submachine guns to push him over the edge in a hailstorm of bullets. His last conscious thought went to Hannah, in a prayer: Please, God, keep her safe.

Then came a brief moment of pain exploding in his entire body, and then ... oblivion.

What he didn't see any more was all of them dropping dead where they stood, killed by precisely delivered headshots. What he didn't see any more were the two black-clad, armed figures running towards him. He didn't feel their arms locking around him, hefting him off the ground and on the ledge of the roof. He didn't feel the plunge off the building as they swung over to the opposite roof, where Finch had stood mere minutes ago. He didn't feel the blast wave of the rocket that shook the entire block.

Later, he wouldn't remember the ambulance ride to the hospital. He wouldn't even remember briefly waking up in the emergency room, screaming from the searing pain in his head because one last bullet had gone through his right eye, all the way through his brain, and was now stuck in the parietal bone.

The only thing he would ever truly remember from that day was the overwhelming sense of relief that it was done and over. They had succeeded. They had won.

*POI*POI*POI*POI*POI*

Nobody expected him to wake up, least of all John himself. Not this side of eternity, anyway. But he did. After five days in a medically induced coma to allow the swelling in his brain to recede, he woke up.

At first, there was confusion and painful sensory overload. With each return to consciousness, however, things became a little clearer. Touch came first – gloved hands moving his limbs, changing sheets and washing him, and warm, ungloved hands squeezing his fingers, stroking his cheek, gently massaging spasming muscles and rubbing warmth into cold feet. Then garbled sounds separated into voices and the usual hospital noise. The blinding mess of lights and colour blotches sharpened into shapes, then contours, then objects and people. Even smell and taste made themselves known again.

Finally, conscious thought returned. Hearing became listening, and seeing became watching. She was there, and so was he, the two people he loved and trusted most in the world. And then the day came when he was able to connect senses and knowledge and recognition. He weakly returned the squeeze of the slightly stiff, scarred fingers, and turned his face into the soft, gentle hand that was resting against his cheek, and, opening the eye that was not covered by a bandage, he breathed their names on the softest exhale.

Warm wetness slipped onto his skin as his sister dropped a tender kiss to his forehead, and the familiar deep voice of his brother-in-law was rough with emotion and exhaustion, yet full of affection and relief, when he said: "You've made it, John. You're going to be all right."

*POI*POI*POI*POI*POI*

The list of his injuries was seemingly endless. All too aware of the fact that they had been inflicted on a body that had already suffered through multiple near-fatal injuries throughout the forty-eight years of his life, John was not surprised when the doctors told him that some irreversible damage had been done.

They'd had to remove part of his lungs, his spleen, and several sections of his intestines. His left kidney was damaged as well. His right shoulder was shattered, rendering his right arm all but useless.

And then, of course, his right eye was gone. By some miracle, the brain injuries were not nearly as catastrophic as they might have been. His mental and intellectual faculties were intact, for which he was more than grateful. Some skills he would have to re-learn; others were probably lost for good. During one of the countless neurological tests John joked that at least with his handwriting no-one would know the difference between before and after. More frightening was the impaired spatial and positional orientation that rendered him prone to falls.

Fairly early on, John realised that he would probably never be going back to a fully independent life. Part of him wanted to be sad or angry about all that he had lost, but he found that he could not. Every day he woke up with the memory of his last moments on that roof, and the deep, comforting knowledge of what had been accomplished that day. The battle was won, and he was home.

Over the weeks and months that followed he graduated from round-the-clock care to the assisted living unit at the rehabilitation centre. Ben and Hannah had protested against his decision to remain there for longer than was strictly necessary, but he had insisted. He wanted to regain as much self-sufficiency as possible before they took him home – even if "home" was just a few hundred feet across the yard. He also wanted to be able to handle the staircase to his room, so he could get around the house without help.

Finally – though not soon enough for his sister and brother-in-law – John came to agree with the weeks-old assessment of his doctors and therapists that he was as ready to go home as he would ever be. Insanely proud, Hannah and Ben watched him as he gathered his toiletries from the accessible bathroom, meticulously placing them in his washbag and pulling the zipper closed using both hands. It was a feat that he had been working on for weeks, and he grinned smugly as he tossed the item to his brother-in-law to catch. It was also a new, if somewhat tragic, bond between the two friends that each had come to rely on the other to help each other out with their limited dexterity when Hannah was not around.

Then John stood in the doorway, looking around the room in the assisted-living unit that had been his for the past four months, and could not help thinking back to his army days. The structured routine, the physical training, the learning of new skills – all of it had been similar, and yet vastly different. Still, today he felt more excited than the day he had set out on his first mission. He felt ... free.

As if sensing his thoughts, Ben put an arm around his shoulders, and Hannah snuggled into his left side. "Ready to go?" she asked softly, smiling up at her big brother.

He returned her smile looking her in the eyes, something he now also was able to do without feeling self-conscious. The scars around his left eye were slowly fading, and the prosthetic eye was so perfectly similar to his natural one that, once the scarring was completely gone, nobody who didn't know would notice. He kissed the crown of her head and nodded. "Ready to go."

*POI*POI*POI*POI*POI*

The evening found the three of them sitting in the living room in front of a warm fire, socked feet on the coffee table and huddled together under a cosy blanket. Apart from the crackling logs in the fireplace, silence had fallen. Hannah sat nestled into John's right side, his weak arm carefully draped around her, her tear-stained face only just drying. Ben sat on the other side, rubbing shoulders with his brother-in-law, deep in thought about what John had told them about the events of the nearly two years he had been away.

Is it a good thing or a bad thing that you don't even realise half of the dangers you're in? And would you really want to know? Does knowing the truth mean liberty – or fear? And what exactly is the truth?

Benjamin wanted to say something, wanted to acknowledge what John had just told them, wanted to express his admiration and respect and sympathy ... but everything he came up with sounded trite and hollow even in his own mind. So he simply grasped his best friend's hand, squeezed it as tightly as he could and dared, and said the only two words that he thought appropriate.

"Thank you."

John slightly tilted his head so he could see his brother-in-law's face. "For what?" he asked, looking a bit puzzled.

Taking her feet off the table and turning to face him, Hannah sat up and gently cradled his face in both of her hands. "For everything you've done to keep us safe," she said softly. "But most of all ...," she continued, touching her forehead to her brother's with infinite tenderness, "... most of all for keeping your promise."

*THE END*