Chapter Text
Harold gets lost in the work, and - the solitude. It's relaxing to have a space to himself when he has been so close to another human being for days on end. John doesn't call, so Harold continues working until he looks up and startles when he discovers how long has actually passed. Guilt and worry quickly set in, and he calls John before he calls for his car. There isn't any answer and Harold worries further but refuses to keep calling - he knows it will only rack his anxiety up further.
"John-" he's already asking as he swings the door open, but John is on the couch still, curled and watching the door. "Are - you didn't answer my call."
"I was being sick," John says, honestly and obviously frustrated with himself, but he gets up anyway to show Finch he's ready. "There's another number, isn't there?"
Finch doesn't ask how he knows about the first. He wants to lie and say 'no', but he can't. He owes John the truth he promised.
Finch answers, "Yes, but I'm going to handle it." He motions John to sit back down. He can see John's fingers, forearms, twitching from lack of phosphates and he makes his way to the kitchen. Pours milk and whey powder into the largest plastic drink container he can find.
"And how will you do that?" John asks, from the living room.
"Well, first I'm going to get a better understanding of the situation," Harold answers, wryly. "It's not a usual case - not that any of them are."
He shakes the mixture up - it smells like too-sweet chemical strawberries, and Harold thinks after this is over he'd never like to smell that again. He carries the container to to John and hands it over. There's a moment when John wants to refuse - out of exhaustion or stubbornness, Haorld isn't sure. Then he takes it and grimaces as he drinks it, pulling it through his teeth.
Harold begins to move away, and John catches his wrist. With some relief, Harold realizes that some of the flesh has filled out again and his grip has more strength in it. John finishes drinking - instinctively greedy now that he's started, but he doesn't drink very much. Only half, for all the urgent swallowing before he puts it aside. He hasn't let go of Harold, either, not giving him permission to move away.
"Who is it?" John asks at length, after swallowing.
"An old friend of ours-"
"Zoe?" He asks, too quickly and with too much worry.
"No, John. It's Elias."
Reese twists his mouth in disgust and Harold silently agrees with him. Elias had no idea of 'grace in defeat'.
"The question is really... who's left to target? His revenge is paid,a nd there's no one left to punish." Harold says, sighing at the difficulty of the question.
"How's he communicating?"
"I'm not sure. I've gone over some of the surveillance records," Harold finally surrenders to the steady, downward pull on his wrist and sits on the couch next to Reese. "It's not very exciting."
Reese lets go, but Harold can still feel the imprint of John's fingers on his wrist, feels that they're sitting entirely too close and that he's spent way too much time in this apartment. Reese's eyes aren't on him, but Harold knows he's being taken in anyway.
"Where did you go?" Harold asks, in a sudden fit of impulse. He is spurred by the tired agony in John's posture, the thin skin over his cheekbones, the still too-bright eyes.
John looks at him for clarification, the slow predator's swing of his head familiar, but just a hair too slow, a fraction too genuine for Finch to believe it's not an act.
"When they had you. When it was - bad. Where did you go?"
John's expression closes as he realizes the question. As it takes him back into too-recent memory.
"I went here, Harold." John says, looking ahead as if he were facing an interrogator. "Where I could do some good."
Harold is struck. "Not - not to Jessica?"
"No," John says, and the muscles behind his jaws tighten, his chin tips up. "I had to believe it." Then he gets up suddenly, urgently.
"If I didn't, it wouldn't have worked."
Harold wonders if that means there is now room for doubt. If John doesn't wonder, at times, if he's still there, still prisoner in a cell and in his body. There is nothing to say to that, and so Harold just keeps it, because he'd asked for it, after all.
"I would never have left you," Harold says after a long moment of thought, but it's to himself. John has disappeared into the bathroom, either to be sick again or to press his body against the cool, expensively tiled floor and will himself not to be.
-
Finch drags himself through hours of footage, learning the habits of Carl Elias when he's confined. It isn't terribly exciting, so much so that on occasion he finds himself reading along - he watches Elias read The Fountainhead over the course of two days, and All The King's Men the next day, and a dozen other American classics over the course of the month. He sleeps in precise eight hour blocks, and his meals are brought to him on plastic trays. Harold hasn't seen him write anything, hasn't seen him leave his cell except for inspection and when he's out he stands politely in the hall with his hands folded and under the eye of the camera.
John had passed by his research once, leaned down to see what Elias was reading (at the time, Captain Blood), and laughed in a way that was almost back to normal.
"Not 'The Count of Monte Cristo'?" he'd chuckled, and Harold was surprised at the depth of the joke. He'd hardly expected John to ever read it, but it shouldn't have surprised him when John did.
"No," Harold says, tapping keys just to still his ire at the extra proximity of John leaning over his shoulder. "But this is close enough."
"You think he's planning on escape?" John asks, turning his attention to the other monitors to look for security gaps that someone like Elias might pass through.
"I have no idea what he's planning," Finch says, because there was no camera into Elias' mind. "But if it's anything, he's somehow - doing it without communicating. I haven't seen him so much as say three words or write anything down."
John makes an aggravated noise as he straightens up. They couldn't afford much more 'wait and see', after three days of watching tapes and they still had nothing solid to give to Fusco or Carter.
"If anything, it's too normal," John says, and looks sharply over at Finch. "Can you get me in there?"
Harold doesn't immediately process the full implication of the words, but he has a visceral and gut aversion to even thinking about it. He pushes back from his computer and looks up at John in a way that he hopes sufficiently expresses his current questioning of the man's sanity.
"You can't even eat solid food, John," he says, and is almost immediately sorry that he made that his first point because the anger that describes itself on John's features is closer to self-directed frustration. "Never mind that it's a prison and while I'm sure it would be shockingly easy to get you in - not even I could get you out again. There's no buying your way out of super-max."
"I ate toast this morning," John says flatly. His usual humor has gone acidic with impatience. "We can't understand the whole picture without someone in there, Harold."
"Well, it doesn't have to be you," Harold snaps, knowing he's arguing against his own past.
"Why else am I here?"
"Not to throw your life away, John. I never meant that," Harold says, because he hadn't. He rubs his eyes under his glasses, tired from staring at the monitors and so that he can break eye contact. Avoid seeing John's injury. "Yes, eventually it will probably come down to that - finality. But this is not that time. Not when I can so clearly see what a bad idea it is."
John doesn't let him escape that easily. When Harold's hands come away from his eyes, John has crouched practically at Harold's feet, hands together between his bent knees, waiting. He is still so thin that his wrists peeking from the cuffs of his suit are painfully defined and his suit seems to hang on him as if designed for a man two sizes bigger - it probably was. His hair is still painfully, irregularly short and that's almost the worst of all because it will have to be cut again - shaved practically - before it can start to regain normality.
"You know that this isn't just about Elias," John begins, and he is still John at least. "His plans have a lot of collateral-"
"Damage," Harold overlaps him, because yes- and he couldn't possibly be taking this threat any more seriously. "Yes, Mr. Reese. I remember. If I didn't, I wouldn't have watched two months of security footage."
"I know you are taking this seriously," John continues, patiently. Harold gets the impression that if he were anyone else, John would be angry by now. "But I also think you're trying to protect me."
"Of course I am, John," Harold answers, exasperated. There's no reason this should even be in question. That makes John a little angry, Harold can see it happen. "Why wouldn't I be?"
"You can't," John answers, his tone gone flat with anger. "It won't work, not if we let it happen now. When does it stop once it's started?"
And it stings, because John has just thrown Harold's own logic from the past - when he'd made Reese work a case in a wheelchair - back at him. And there's nothing to say against it, not really.
"I hardly think-"Finch begins, and his back is straight as it gets, tense and hurting, his hands coiled up into fists. "That waiting for you to be able to digest food is a dangerous precedent to set."
But he sees that he's being stubborn because he needs John. Because as much as he's shut John out, as much as even sharing this much space with him, his self-imposed vigil while he lived practically in Reese's apartment for nearly a week made Harold practically ready to crawl out of his skin with the proximity - he doesn't want to lose another person who has come to mean something to him. That as reluctant as he had been to allow that to happen, it had anyway.
"We're here to save people, Harold," And the tone should be angry but it isn't. "If that's not what I'm going to do then I'm not staying."
"It is what we're going to do. John, think of the bigger picture-"
"We aren't 'bigger picture' guys, Harold. Your machine is there for that."
And John is - right. "If you die, John - how will I save others? In the future, in all the years to come?"
"I don't know, Harold. Surely there are other possible assets out there. I know you probably already watch them. You always have a contingency-"
Harold actually starts to get up with the intent of walking away before John can anger him into revealing something personal. John catches his wrists and stops Harold's momentum.
"It's our unfinished business," John says, because he can't admit he needs it. Harold realizes that this is about John getting out of confinement, that this - fixing something - was the only way he knew to heal anymore. Harold had done that to him when he thought he was doing something for John instead.
He sits down again heavily, and it hurts his back, his leg, but he barely registers it.
"This is killing both of us," John says, seriously. "You're breaking your own boundaries and I see -"
"Yes," Harold says distantly, because of course John had sensed his anxiety over the enforced closeness.
Harold turns his hands to free them from John's grip and when John starts to pull his hands back, he doesn't let them go. Instead he just grips them around the backs, hides their thinness with his own hands.
"I'm not accustomed to letting people into my life, John. Maybe this is selfish, this time, but I just don't feel like letting another person out of it now that I've made the effort," Harold says, and that's not quite right. It sounds selfish and childish, but the emotion is that way, and it would be a lie of a different kind to express it any other way.
John understands anyway. He half-smiles at the admission and understands yet another secret of Harold Finch's: that he's not very good at being in love.
"I'm not going anywhere," John says, making it a promise. "Get me in and I'll get out again. It only looks impossible from this side."
Harold wants to refuse again, but he can feel John's pulse - real under his fingertips, and steady. He thinks of John standing tall with a gun in his hands, John stopping a moving car with a well placed shot while standing right in its path because he could almost make himself successful just by sheer confidence. He thinks of these things instead of the sounds of John in agony, or his silent miserable eyes, like a beaten dog. He tries not to think of John sinking slowly down in the kitchen, not wanting to surrender to his own body of all things.
He sighs and tries to regain objectivity, but even his greatest strength is useless against proximity of this sort. John is right, to an extent, and Harold wishes the number had come up a week - two - later.
By then the constant observation would have driven them both into readiness -
The thought jolts through Harold, startling him. When he realizes what he had been missing, he feels like a blind fool.
"What?" John asks as Harold pulls his hands away and turns back to the computer.
"I've watched nearly a month of footage, and not once has Elias been totally off-camera," Finch says, rewinding and re-checking. "In fact he deliberately stays on..."
John makes a comprehending noise as Harold continues.
"So what if we're wrong about this? What if Elias isn't the danger, but he's about to be in danger?" Harold sits back and actually considers aloud, "Since he's in jail - maybe it's hardly our place to intervene."
"I thought we were aiming for a higher standard, Harold."
"I know," Harold sighs. "But it's nice to dream."
"You don't mean that, "John says, getting up. Harold lets the joke drift along on silence. "How do we stop it?"
"It would be nice to know what the danger exactly is," Finch says, and begins pulling up prison personnel files, trying to cross reference where and how the access would happen.
"We never do," John says, and disappears from Harold's peripheral vision for a while, giving him space to work and think. He returns with hot green tea - it's not sencha, but it's good enough given that it came from John's kitchen and Harold had never seen the man drink much of anything except coffee and water.
Harold has just lifted the cup absently to his lips when he finds it - and were he not so familiar with Elias' past, he would have missed it.
"Oh - it's the guards," he says, and sits back to digest the information. "Some of our friends in HR have some long reaching ties it would seem. A holdover from the good-old days of mob rule - there's a cousin strategically placed who seems to be the leader of this effort."
Harold looks up at John, who considers the information, then he pulls out a chair on the other side of the dining room table where Harold has set up shop and settles into it. Then Harold dials Fusco - because he knows that this is why John keeps such a dangerous pet, and history will be handy here, to get the information that they need: how and when.
-
They are waiting again and it makes them more aware of each other. John deliberately eats a bland and small meal for Harold's benefit. Harold suspects he intended it to be larger by the crusts and crushed remains on the plate, but has run into the barrier of a body that over reacts to anything but empty.
Harold watches him do it, watches him toy with the last bits of crust and reaches out a hand across the space to lay it steadyingly on John's shoulder. To give him permission to stop. John looks up at him, eyes strange, and Harold - knows that this moment could turn any number of ways. That there's an opportunity here, the same as many he's had in the past. He won't take it right now, but - in the future, when John is well again -
"I have an idea, John," Harold says, because it's been forming in his mind since he realized that it wasn't Elias who was the threat. John doesn't look like he's open to ideas, but Harold thinks he might warm up to this one. "I think we know someone who would be interested - personally - in seeing to Elias' safety."
John sees it immediately and doesn't like it just as quickly.
"Him? You want to reunite Elias and his most dangerous weapon?"
"They'll both be in prison already, John. The possible damage is minimal, and surely he'd want the risk," Harold says, keeping is tone mild. "He's just as capable as you with the right motivation - you've said so yourself."
It was offhanded - a distantly respectful comment made when Finch had explained - with as much camera footage as he had - how Reese had been rescued. Heat of the moment or not, John had still said it.
John ceases arguing. It's as close to an agreement as Harold is likely to get. He digs through the desk drawer until he comes up with the phone John had brought home. Harold had, of course, carefully inspected it for anything that could endanger them but had found it disappointingly mundane before he'd broken it down into components that could not function separately. His backtracking on it had been unsurprising - the name on it was fake. It was one of those easy-setup go phones that he and John lived with.
But Harold just bet - and when he reactivated it carefully, there was one anonymous text of ten digits.
"What makes you think he'll be willing-" John begins, but Harold displays the text before he can finish.
"Because even stray dogs need exercise, Mr. Reese."
-