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Finch had an odd sort of accent.
John hadn’t noticed it at first, caught up in his own misery and the strangeness of the situation as a whole, but once he’d had a chance to think over the details of the past few days—with a good meal in his belly and a good night’s sleep to clear the head—he’d come to realize that he couldn’t actually place Finch’s accent.
True, pinpointing accents had been more of Kara’s thing, but John could usually tell at least which continent an accent stemmed from. Not with Finch.
Of course, a few grumpy syllables weren’t much to go on; Finch communicated more with gesture than with voice, another oddity about the man. When John arrived in the morning, he’d find the board set up with faces and names; Finch would tap at a folder on the desk and then go back to his laptop, fingers dancing across the keys, as John went over the case. Once John had grasped enough to ask questions, he got his answers in grunts and burbles and shrugs. Honestly, Finch was quite expressive with just a sigh, or the particular slump of his body.
When John was in the field, Finch sent texts (ignoring John’s suggestion of a microphone and earpiece). When they were both in the field… well, it was intriguing how people seemed to pick up Finch’s intentions even as they admitted that his accent was hard to decipher. They guessed at it, too: German, Norwegian, Honduran, maybe Indian? Brazilian? Finch shrugged off each guess, maintaining his mystery.
Other details that would normally have given John a clue were similarly opaque. Finch’s taste in tailory was nothing to go by; rich guys often wore fancy Italian suits. The man’s choice in tea was similarly lacking in information; the only unusual note was that he added a pinch of salt to each cup, but John knew of no particular culture that took their tea that way, so that, too, had so far been a dead end.
By the time Finch opened up enough to tap the menu next to one of his favorite dishes (ceviche) and, later that week, offer John a taste of the nori he was snacking on, John had given up on digging too fervently for the connections. It was enough, he thought, that he’d been invited into the private circle of such a secretive man, and that they’d found a way to do good together.
Still, his curiosity got the better of him, and he did eventually track down the man’s residence, or at least one of his safe houses. Waited until he was certain the man would be asleep, and ghosted his way in to get some answers.
Only to be brought up short by the sight of a large aquarium sitting on the kitchen counter, and Finch quietly burbling in his sleep, submerged entirely beneath the water, his suitless body a mass of softly pulsing, navy-blue tentacles.
As John stood there gaping, one of Finch’s eyes opened slowly, halfway, conveying in his deeply irritated expression everything he thought about having his privacy intruded upon in such a way. Then, when John evidently wasn’t leaving, Finch wearily heaved himself out of the tank, slithered down the counter and across the tile floor, leaving a wet trail down the hallway until he slid under a closed door.
By the time John reached the door and flung it open, Finch was already upright, pulling his suit into place around the clump of tentacles that formed his body. Two tentacles came out of each pantleg, two out of each sleeve; one of the pseudo-hands reached out and snagged a scarf from the dresser, wrapping it haphazardly around his pseudo-throat.
John finally found some words. “You’re… you’re an octopus?”
Finch grumped, and his tentacle-shoulders gave a passable impression of a shrug.