I won't run, the guilt is mine

[ornithologist]

WHO: Harold Finch & established CR
WHEN: Forward dated post-mission
WHERE: Around Etraya
WHAT: Harold canon updates to post-series and has a bit of a time. Closed starters below. There will be an open post for him after these are sorted through!
NOTES\WARNINGS: This whole post and all threads are full of descriptions of grieving and suicidal thoughts & ideation.

After it happens, after he recovers his memories of how everything fell apart, Harold questions his grip on reality. It would be appropriate if after all this time he finally met his limit. John is dead and Root is dead and Elias is dead and-- the Machine is dead-- and Grace is alive, but what right does he have to see her, how can he get a happy ending when he's the one who deserves it the least--

He's in the library they abandoned long ago and there's traces of his life here with John all around him. Rationally, intellectually, he knows where he is. This is Etraya. He can reread their text conversations, few though they were, and reassure himself that this is real and that this is happening. But there's no one here. It's eerie, everyone away on the mission; it's like Harold is in some kind of bizarre tortuous stasis. He's here but no one else is, survivor's guilt made manifest in its natural apotheosis.

He finds the remnants of all the projects he'd been working on so steadily what must've been a day ago, electronic pieces strewn around and multiple computers chugging test code, and stares at them. They seem so pointless now. Meaningless. Harold struggles to find an ounce of caring in his soul, for anyone, for anything. Surveillance? A covert encrypted network?

What does it matter? He's utterly alone.

Harold can't stay there. The numbness is getting increasingly punctured every time he finds something John left behind: washed dishes from making him dinner, a suit jacket left over the back of a chair, and then Bear himself. He has to leave the library or risk feeling things again and that's a tidal wave whose potential aftermath frightens him.

Mutely, he leashes Bear and heads out, and for hours he wanders the empty streets of Etraya, wondering how much longer he has to endure existence.

Comments

[ornithologist]

[ He hesitates. Who knows with Root? It's just speculation on his part, but Shaw seems interested, so... ]

Well... I don't like to put words in her mouth. I know she was often lonely, so perhaps just proof that she wasn't alone. Or it could be that your existence proves it's worth caring for others, worth saving them. She was adamant on that point by the end.

[ Which was a real turn of character for her from Harold's perspective. ]

Or maybe all of those things, or none of them.

[cactusy]

I wish I'd asked her. When she first brought it up, she was going on about Schrödinger and quantum physics during a gunfight, but, uh...

[She shrugs.]

I dunno. I just miss her, too.

[ornithologist]

[ Harold has to think that one through, pulled into the intellectual puzzle as always. He and Root differed slightly in their intellectual interests, but they overlapped enough... Hmm. She was always just more poetic than him. ]

Schrödinger was famous for redefining how we understand the position of electrons. He said they couldn't be measured as physical objects but by the shape they leave behind. We only know the truth of things based on the impact they have.

[ He shrugs, stiff and awkward with the motion, then smiles sadly. ]

Of course you miss her. I always will. [ Rueful, ] I've never had anyone challenge me so much. [ Intellectually and morally both, and she was absolutely relentless about it. ]

[cactusy]

Have you cried over her?

[Harold has never struck her as a crier; she won't be surprised if the answer is no. But she's asking because she's hoping it's yes: Root deserves to have someone mourn her in that way.]

[ornithologist]

... Not properly.

[ He's been too numb. He thinks he will, sometime.

He grows remote, resolute -- almost cold. ] But I promised to kill Samaritan for her. And I did.

[ From Harold, this means ten times the emotional impact that crying would. ]

[cactusy]

[Shaw nods, once; it doesn't change her opinion that Root deserves some shed tears, but on the whole, that is absolutely an even better tribute.]

Yeah. Thanks for that.

[ornithologist]

... I'm sorry, Sameen. For how long it took.

[ It's an achingly sincere apology; Harold can't meet her eyes. The chewed slipper twists in his hands and he feels every death, every loss, acutely. All because of his inaction. He hadn't listened to Root earlier, and she'd died because of it.

He hadn't done what he could have earlier, and Sameen spent almost a year being tortured in the grasp of Samaritan. ]

[cactusy]

It's on all of us, not just you. You're our boss, but working with you is what taught me that following orders is a choice. We could have gone against you--

[She pauses.]

Hell, I could have killed that senator and prevented everything; I had the opportunity. So, yeah, you messed up. But so did we. If this is on our shoulders, then it's on all of ours, not just yours.

[This is sincere too, if less aching. It doesn't matter that he's not meeting her eyes: she watches him steadily all the same.]

[ornithologist]

[ That he taught her following orders is a choice -- he'll keep that and hold it close to himself for as long as he remembers it. But...

He glances up sharply. ]

Killing the Senator wouldn't have prevented anything, [ Harold corrects, drawn in despite himself. He'd just spent so much mental effort miring himself in solving the problem of Samaritan, finally had free dialogue with the Machine for days at a time -- he feels an unusual retrospective clarity. ]

They would have found someone else, another avenue, to push their agenda. The mistakes I've made... go back farther than you know.

[ He's adamant about that, but he sounds calm, at peace with that acceptance. He's sad, he grieves so much more than just the recent deaths, but he's not distraught; he can feel the parameters of loss like mapping out the contours of a mountain with topography, marking the edges but unable to appreciate the full breadth from this vantage alone. ]

We share responsibility, it's true. [ He isn't egotistical; Harold realizes he had a greater role to play than anyone else, but it wasn't as if he was some scheming mastermind. He did always defer to individual choice, to agency. ] But for the part I played in what you suffered, I want you to know that I'm sorry. I never intended that. And I want you to know that I count you as one of my closest friends.

[ Having so many of them die on him recently has left Harold wanting, acutely, to tell those that are left what they mean to him. ]

[cactusy]

And I want you to know that I don't regret the fact that you made the Machine.

[It's the only long-ago "mistake" that she can think of. She wouldn't be surprised if there's more to it than just that, and she doesn't think he really regrets the Machine's existence, but she also suspects that anything he could be thinking of is tied in to that one crazy, complicated, monumental decision.

She crosses her arms more tightly around herself.]

And for what it's worth, if I could go back and undo what happened at the stock market, I wouldn't. It had to be me, and I'm fine with that.

[ornithologist]

[ It's extremely kind of her, in that way Shaw is where the tone doesn't match the content at all. Harold, being someone who now thinks of a computer as a full being with personhood and a grasp on caring, who had grown to love the Machine slowly, day by day, impossibly, doesn't find it difficult to look past her tone. ]

I don't regret that I made the Machine, [ he says somberly. That's not a trivial statement; it's something he'd wrestled with so hard and so long, and only the Machine herself reassuring him that the people he knew, the people he loved, are all better off for it ... that's what had eventually compelled him to make peace with his decision and his years of effort to make it. Harold would like to think knowing it was the only force powerful enough to stop Samaritan's inevitable rise would be enough to extinguish his regret, but that only leaves a hollow, echoing acceptance behind. Knowing John, Shaw, Root, Fusco -- knowing they were all better off -- that left a warmth in the hollowness, an ember he can nurture. ]

And I won't insult you by suggesting you didn't know the possible consequences when you decided to sacrifice yourself for us. [ That's what it was, and this new Harold is blunter, sharpened to a point in some places that had been soft and rounded before. ]

I'm not looking for you to comfort me, Sameen. Others keep paying the price for my mistakes -- I could have done more to stop Samaritan all along, and I didn't. What I did at the end was possible from the beginning. Because I didn't, you were captured, Root died... [ In a brittle tone: ] John died.

I won't make that mistake again. I'm saying that I'm sorry because you deserve as much from me as you give.

[cactusy]

[Shaw hadn't thought of what she'd been doing as comforting him, but - maybe it had been, in a way. But it certainly hadn't been blindly done, or done solely for the purpose of making him feel better, and so she feels the urge to do it again here: to tell him, completely truthfully, that she doesn't blame him, that they'd all fucked up in various ways, that the entire situation was too big and too complicated to lay at the feet of any one person. Not foreseeing a completely unpredictable consequence years or even decades in advance is not a personal failing.

But it's not as if he doesn't know that, and she doesn't want to get into a tortuous back-and-forth where she tries to convince him of a logic that he understands, but that his guilt won't let him accept. And though she doesn't have personal experience with guilt, she thinks that maybe it's an okay thing for him to sit with a little. Maybe it's not something to be excised, but something to be worked through.]

Okay.

[She says, knotting her fingers together as she studies him.]

Okay, thanks.

[ornithologist]

[ That's it, then? It's that simple? Harold hasn't spent a lot of time personally with Shaw one-on-one, so he hadn't known what to expect here, but this was much easier than he had hoped for. Painful and difficult for him, but no more than it was by its nature -- no more than it had to be. He has to live with this guilt in order to learn from it. Harold finds the idea of someone living on in memory a cold comfort, but he won't disrespect their memories nonetheless by ignoring them entirely. Refusing to grow, to change, as a result... is to refuse them wholesale. ]

... Would you let me stay here for a while? [ It's a bit abrupt, but he doesn't see a more graceful way to exit that conversation. ] John and I-- [ Harold stops to find the right word. It's not a true argument, not to his mind, not a disagreement. Maybe it's best to just recite the facts. ]

He kept trying to tell me it was a good death, and it makes me want to scream at him, [ Harold says in a perfectly even tone.

Needless to say, Harold would prefer not to scream at anyone. ]

[cactusy]

[It probably was a good death, but that's an opinion that Shaw decides to keep to herself. She can imagine the scene: Harold being annoyingly guilt-ridden, and John being annoyingly broody in turn. It's no surprise that they can't reassure each other when they're both probably wrecked in their own way.]

You can have the bed; I'll take the couch.

[He's taller and has chronic pain, and she can curl up anywhere to sleep. It's an easy decision.]

While you're here, can you name my kestrel?

[It's a bit of a non-sequitur, but if he's going to be sleeping here, he'll likely see a lot of the bird; it usually comes in at dusk to roost.]

[ornithologist]

[ It's wise for Shaw to keep that opinion to herself, because Harold has about had it up to here with other people trying to tell him how to process his grief. Okay, it was just one person, but it coming from John made it unbearable.

He wants to protest putting her out of her bed, but he sees the sense in it and swallows the discomfort of needing accommodations with a grimace. ]

... You haven't named her already? [ He's drawn into this question despite himself. Harold rifles through some possible literary references in his mind at high speed, and lands on one that amuses at least himself, if not Shaw. ]

Are you familiar with the works of John le Carré?

[cactusy]

No.

[This is a response meant to encompass both questions.]

I suck at naming things, and I don't read a lot of fiction. Are you naming my kestrel after a book character?

[ornithologist]

Perhaps. How do you feel about a scathing indictment of Cold War era espionage by a former member of MI6?

[cactusy]

[Shaw, who has never in her life considered how she feels about scathing indictments of Cold War era espionage by former members of MI6, shrugs.]

Fine, I guess.

[ornithologist]

Splendid. May I suggest Karla? It's the code name of the main antagonist, a loyal Soviet intelligence officer who machinates almost entirely behind the scenes.

[ Appropriate for a bird that will mostly spend its time spying, he assumes. Though, is this too oblique as a reference? Maybe he should explain. Harold levers himself to his feet, feeling the seriousness of the conversation start to mercifully fade. ]

It amuses me to think that Greer would have known the reference and absolutely hated it.

[ Normally he doesn't speak ill of the dead, but if anyone's earned the exception, it's Greer. What an insufferable, infuriating, smug man. ]

[cactusy]

[That addition is absolutely the right call; it gets a little smile out of her.]

Spelled with a C, or with a K?

[Karla-with-a-K is absolutely a stripper name, a sentiment that she won't express to Harold but will express to John.]

[ornithologist]

It's Russian, [ he says, like that's sufficient answer. Then he belatedly thinks to add, ] So it's a K.

If that's all, I think I'd like to hide alone in a darkened room denying existence for a while.

[cactusy]

[Shaw nods, waving a hand towards the bedroom; by all means, Harold.]

You can dump the sheets from the bed on the floor; there's fresh ones in the bottom drawer of the dresser. Don't open the top drawer unless you want to be embarrassed.

[ornithologist]

Please, Ms. Shaw. I'm far more scandalized by violence than by evidence of a sex life.

[ It's the weapons that freak him out, seriously. There's a whole annoyed rant somewhere inside him about the movie ratings system treating sexual content more severely than it does violence. Absolutely absurd.

Harold doesn't wait for an answer, just limps out of the room. ]