Harold Finch (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ornithologist) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
etrayalogs2025-03-22 10:05 am
ornithologist) wrote in etrayalogs2025-03-22 10:05 am
I won't run, the guilt is mine
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.
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.
no subject
It's more than Harold's ever gotten before.
He'd felt tears earlier, tears he knew he couldn't explain to John, not because words would fail him but because he thinks John is still so far from understanding what it's like to be overwhelmed with emotion in a way that doesn't cause damage. It hurts, of course it hurts, and Harold fully believes it always will hurt to have lost him. To know there is no way they can walk back from a movie in the rain down the streets of New York, a cautious hand fluttering lightly at his back and an umbrella overhead, and there is no way to have again the refracted-crystal clarity and focus of working on the numbers. All of that which had defined them before is lost to them now.
But this is so much more than he's ever known following any previous loss. Harold suppresses the tears now, and his smile falters tremulously as he takes a shaky breath. He doesn't want to be John's savior because his heart is too full with respect and admiration, and anything that implies a power imbalance creates a distance, and--
He's here, and he won't be a coward again, and he can be selfish at least in this one way. ]
Any mystery around the corner is one we can discover together.
[ If Harold remembers Nathan by treating no one as irrelevant, then he honors Grace with this lesson, that with real love it becomes effortless to be equal. ]