Work Text:
Code.
Words.
Spoken words.
Sentences.
Each is derived from the same original selection of components - just letters, symbols, sounds, arranged into the right order.
It ought, by all rights, to be much harder to write code than to express straightforward emotions. And for most people, probably that is the case.
But though keystrokes fly from Harold's fingers faster than conscious thought, his words jam, confused, constrained on his tongue. He never knows when words are needed, half wishes they never were. Formality is one shield – it provides pleasing limitations, useful parameters. But sometimes formality is breached, and then...
“I, I'm... I’m glad, you must understand that I’m glad that you...”
And John Reese looks across at him with his usual ambiguous frown, giving nothing away, not the merest scrap of help as Harold flounders in the task of verbalisation.
They’re waiting in one of the private fitting suites in the small but prestigious atelier on the Via Palestra, alone until Gianni returns with the slightly darker wool-cashmere blend identified by Harold from the proffered swatches as that best suited to John’s colouring. John is still standing where he has been put, caught in every one of the three-angle mirrors, back and sides and chest, present in every dimension.
John has a way of always appearing to be awaiting orders. Projects a strange kind of docility, coldly passive.
That, Harold thinks, was where John’s previous employers made their most grave error. They saw that he chose to obey, and missed the part where on every occasion he made a choice.
Harold knows that John is standing here, now, waiting, with Harold, all and only because he chooses to be.
Wouldn’t that be enough to dry anyone’s mouth?
Harold is sitting in a wide leather armchair, ignoring his green tea in fine white china placed on the low table next to him. He can't seem to stop his fingers tapping on the chair's arm – trying to code, maybe, trying to find the familiar. He's experiencing a strange sensation - one he associates with small children or dogs - of being too happy to stay still.
After all, John is here, now - the idea circles and circles in his brain. John is with Harold. In this room, this space that smells of clean fabric and tailors’ chalk and coffee, with the merest hint of maleness – nothing as crude or animal as to be called sweat or musk, but something which nonetheless speaks of the personal, of the nakedness the air is privy to.
John has taken off his coat, and it has been carefully hung up by one of Gianni’s minions. Harold has kept all his own layers on, although the shop is well heated.
He feels warm. He feels absolutely perfect. Even the ache in the small of his back and down the side of his thigh is merely familiar, incidental, a straightforward anchoring of this moment in the time and space of reality; in Harold’s dreams, John Reese had chosen to come back. This, now, is not one of the dreams.
"I only meant, you see, that I..."
Probably, he has it wrong, as so often. Probably this is a time to keep silent; probably they said all that needs to be said earlier. Harold licks his lips, breathes, and holds in the pressure of words – he has nothing like sentences for John, nothing like meaningful, logical constructs. He can’t formulate the ideas or feelings in his mind, only feel this rising tide of verbiage that wants to spill from him.
He could say: I worry about everyone, Mr Reese, but when you were away from me I worried in a different way, on another level I was not previously aware of accessing.
He could say: I’ve lost people, and you’ve lost people, but we still have each other, and I can only hope my presence is for you anything approaching the solace that yours is for me.
He could say: This is not the time for personal things. We are not people who can allow ourselves to indulge. If I’d known I’d feel this way, I would have left you to your whisky and your gun because now my first priority is no longer what it ought to be, and I can’t seem to care.
“I mean, I think... I think it really is... a very good thing which we are doing,” Harold says.
John blinks. It may be imagination making him look a little downcast. “You're not wrong, Finch. The old suit was barely fit for the rag trade.”
“I’m not...” Harold can’t really speak, or breathe, not easily. He remembers the kick of morphine feeling a little like this, like the back of one’s head spinning up and away, like everything is a good idea and all doubts are foolish.
“You might call me ‘Harold’, while we’re here,” he says, because that’s the kind of sentence this wave of endorphins can make it seem perfectly possible to speak.
“Harold,” John repeats, carefully, as requested, and smiles slightly. His eyes seem darker than usual. He is, Harold notices, fidgeting a little himself, hands plucking at the fabric of his trousers.
“Excuse me! Sorry so much for delay!” Gianni sweeps in, fabric over his arm, minion at his side looking close to tears. “I ask for a simple task, I think, but no, no, no, almost fifteen minutes we are waiting! I am so sorry, Signor Featherstone, Signor Wells.”
“Everything is fine,” Harold says, and his voice is slightly hoarse, and he quickly lifts his tea and sips it.
John gazes off into the middle distance as he is measured, waiting to all appearances calmly. There is a fast pulse in his throat, though, and Harold struggles to keep from staring.
There ensues a fluttering of fabric and tape measures, the scribbling of pencil leads and a subtle input of figures into calculators, and it is some time later that the two of them are ushered back outside onto the cobbles, with the suit promised to be ready for the next day and the crinkling swathe of fifty-euro notes in Gianni’s pocket ensuring this will be the best, but the very best.
And then the street is quiet – tourists idling, a woman on a mobile, staccato tones and high heels, a street-sweeper shuffling.
Harold waits. John blinks.
This is where Bear sometimes... it is very easy to embrace a dog, and smile and laugh if someone else joins you, and all either of you are doing are petting an animal, even if your hands touch.
Moments such as these, Harold supposes, are the kind you learn the procedure for in college, providing of course that you aren't a computer genius who spends his downtime being secretly in love with his best friend and trying to convince himself he isn't.
The thought of Nathan hurts a little. He’d be sad if ever it didn’t. But somehow now, imagining Nathan – beautiful, magnetic, kind, untouchable Nathan – Harold can see him laughing, slapping Harold on the back and pushing him, ever-so-gently, forwards. Handing him words, the easy sort of words Harold never had a time or place to learn and telling him to say...
“Would you care to join me for some food, Mr Reese? I know an excellent place in the Testaccio rione, oxtail may not sound enticing but it is the dish, I believe, that best embodies...” He trails off, because for some reason his speech has provoked a frown, a look of vague pain.
Harold waits, and thinks, and formulates and rejects stratagems too quickly to be sure of himself, and Nathan-in-his-head laughs again and says it’s simple, Harold, my god, it’s the simplest thing two members of a species can ever do together, it’s basic DNA, Harold, it’s not complicated.
“John,” Harold says, carefully, precisely, and watches the smile form.
He’s reached into the inner sanctum of governments, in his time, but this feels like power.
Or helplessness, perhaps.
“John, would you have dinner with me?”
By way of reply, John takes a step forward, into his space. They are standing side by side, not closer than they've ever been before, perhaps, but this moment is different, qualitatively, and this is the problem with human observation because the observer bias, the colouring of each act and gesture with feelings, with biochemistry, is so profoundly... One cannot think, one cannot analyse, only be present, and, apparently, stammer:
“Because, you know, I’m... I mean, I would like, I...” Words faltering again - panic and triple-layered calculations, the fear of being misunderstood, the conviction of misunderstanding.
The expression on John’s face is soothing. Harold doesn’t have a name for what that expression is, except that it looks like a mirror of his own feelings, which he can’t identify beyond the warmth and the swirling and the random data point that when John reaches up and slips his cool, dry hand into Harold’s own, Harold barely even startles in response.
Harold waits a moment, and John blinks and says, “It’s OK if this isn’t what you meant, Harold.” He’s looking down at his feet, but still holding Harold’s hand, tight. “But this is how it is. For me. I realised that, last month. When you... I woke up in the apartment and you were there, you see." John is getting the words out more clearly, fewer gaps and deletions, but it's easy enough to see how hard he finds it, and in that moment Harold experiences an urge of tenderness that almost forces him to reach out.
"I was afraid, as much as anything." John is saying. "Harold. I want to come back to New York, but you have to want... You have to know that I... But then, perhaps," a short laugh, a half-smile, "perhaps I always did, right from the beginning."
Harold keeps his own grip strong. For a while that’s all he can manage.
And for another small passage of time it's quiet on the Via Palestra, and somewhere a phone beeps through Beethoven's fifth, and there's a gentle whir as a traffic camera readjusts, and the trill of an iPhone getting an email, and none of that matters at all, because the meaningful universe has been redefined to a very small space between their palms, and Harold lives there, and breathes.
“I’ll do whatever you ask, Harold.” John says, eventually. His voice is gruff, and his eyes are dark and sparkling. “Please ask me.”
Harold has no idea until he speaks that his voice is going to crack half-way, or stumble as he says the only thing he’s been thinking for weeks now.
“Then, please, stay with me.”
Somehow John’s grip gets even tighter, crushing, and John growls.
“You,” John says, half-whispered and like that’s all the words he needs.
And Harold finds that John is kissing him, right there in the street, gathering him up, holding on.
“You too,” Harold murmurs into his mouth, and smiles.