OBITUARY
Harold Dashwood
Died peacefully in his sleep
7th July 2042
Aged 88
John sighed as he read the small obituary he'd placed in the paper. Harold Dashwood was unknown to most people, but there were a few who knew him by other names. Over the years Harold had used many different aliases, as had he. Necessary for going undercover, some were used only once and some like Wren, Martin and Finch had taken on their own lives. Throughout his life Harold had done his utmost to maintain these and other aliases so that no one would ever suspect they weren't real people. He'd only told John that his name was Dashwood after they had left New York and the numbers behind.
Harold Martin died in 2010 aged 58. His demise was caused by the ferry bombing which had also taken the life of his business partner Nathen Ingram. At the time Harold was engaged to Grace Hendricks and though he wasn't actually really dead, he let her believe that he had also died in the blast. No on queried why his was the only body never recovered.
Grace grieved and moved on. She met a fellow artist and fell in love. Though she didn't know it the initial meeting was due to Harold. He had engineered a prize in a competition she couldn't remember entering, a meeting with an artist had led to romance and eventually they married. But though she loved her new husband she always remembered Harold Martin with affection.
And Harold had continued to love her from afar.
Harold's most important alias was that of Harold Wren. He'd co-founded IFT with Nathen Ingram. They'd been friends since meeting at MIT, and both had become very rich in the few years between leaving MIT and Nathen's death in 2010. After the terrorist attacks on 9/11/2001 he had begun his greatest work, to build a machine that would one day save the world, though he didn't know it at the time. The machine would watch everyone, every day, all day. It would find the suspected terrorists and they would be eliminated. They handed the machine over to the government, who called it Northern Lights. Nathen put in a back door, a way to find and help those people who were in danger but who were not terrorists. The machine had two lists, the Relevant and the Irrelevant. Nathen had tried to save some of them; Harold had tried to stop him. But in the end after Nathen's death he recalled Nathen's words, 'everyone is relevant to someone'. And out of guilt or obligation he continued trying to help people. Harold Martin and Harold Wren were important, to Grace and to Nathen.
But Harold's favourite alias was that of Harold Finch. All of his aliases were named after birds, a fascination formed when his father used to take him outside as a small child and tell him all about them. It became a sort of homage to him. He tried to continue Nathen's work but because of his injuries he found it impossible to do little more than ruin them financially.
After several attempts at saving people that had ended in failure, Harold had used all of his resources, and with the machine's help, found someone who could do what he couldn't. Eventually, after several failed attempts with other men, he had found John Reese.
Their partnership started off on a rocky footing, Harold had zip tied a passed out John to a bed in a hotel room and forced him to listen to the sounds of a woman being murdered, trying to impress on him the kind of work he wanted him to do. Somehow Harold had convinced John that working for him was better than slowly drinking himself to death.
Theirs was an unlikely partnership that had lasted for 35 years. They saved a lot of people; but sometimes when they'd been too late, it weighed heavily on them both. And when they had battled Samaritan they had lost people close to them.
Over the years, while they were actively working the numbers they grew closer together. They became good friends, partners and eventually lovers. The nature of the work they were doing meant that there was a high probability that one or both of them was going to end up dead, really dead. So they took every opportunity however small to be together. Sometimes their lovemaking was nothing more than a quick mutual masturbation session in the library, stolen kisses in the dark on a stakeout, a touch of hands as they went about their jobs. Other times they had whole evenings to take their time to explore each other and the room would be filled with the soft sounds of their lovemaking.
After they narrowly survived the battle with Samaritan they retired from saving the numbers. Shaw and Fusco, with some others they had recruited along the way, took over and Harold and John left New York.
In the intervening years they had travelled around the world. John took Harold to places he'd never been, places where John had worked undercover, in the CIA or in the black ops before it, told him stories about various operations. He told him how he became John Reese, and told him his real name. Harold took John to his favourite places around the world. They went to Italy for the bespoke suits, France for the wine, China and Egypt for the history. Gradually all of their secrets were shared between them. The time came though when neither of them really wanted to globe trot anymore and they had slipped into a quiet life away from everyone.
And then Harold had died and John's world fell apart.
After Harold's funeral John went into decline. They had been together for so long that he couldn't imagine life without him. He lost interest in the world around him, shutting himself away in the house they had shared.
But in the end, as far as John was concerned, without Harold there was no point to anything. He stopped exercising, what was the point in keeping the body fit if there was no one there to appreciate it? He started drinking again, some days he passed out from the booze. He welcomed those days; it meant he didn't have to remember that once more he was all alone. He stopped eating regularly, preferring the alcohol. He lost weight. Days passed in a drunken haze.
Shaw came and visited, tried to get him to see that drinking wasn't the answer. John had agreed that it wasn't, there were quicker ways to end it all. She had reluctantly left him a few hours later, she promised to come back soon.
John sat on the bed he'd shared with Harold, a drink in one hand, a bottle of pills and some water on the nightstand. His favourite sig sauer was by his side. He caressed the gun, it hadn't been fired in years but even so he'd cleaned it and it was loaded.
He piled all of Harold's pillows on the bed behind him, settling back he sighed, raised the glass in silent salute to Harold and swallowed the last of the alcohol. He reached for the pills; they were some pretty powerful painkillers of Harold's. Quickly before he changed his mind he swallowed them. He was so tired, tired of the house, tired of New York, tired of being alone, tired of life. He was 74, older than he'd ever thought he would be given the kind of work he'd done in his life.
Soon he would be reunited with the love of his life. He closed his eyes, tears running down his cheeks. Harold's name was on his lips as he sank into oblivion.