A/N: Since it aired all of two days prior to the date on which I'm posting this, I'll reiterate: Anything after the end of this sentence may contain spoilers for pretty much literally every single thing that happened in The Day the World Went Away (Season 5, Episode 10).
My first, last, and only foray into the POI fandom up 'til now was the lighthearted The Second Team. It was fun to write, and came together quite easily, even though lighthearted is not even vaguely my norm. Usually my stories are more along the lines of 'angst verging on psychological horror'. And now, years later, this. damn. show. has once again given me the level of obsessive inspiration needed to write, and it did so by forcefully shoving Harold Finch across the Despair Event Horizon. So this time it seems I'm back in my mildly-disturbing métier…for better or worse.
After experiencing a shock, it seems there are two possibilities where memory retention and recall are concerned. Harold has heard of both of them, heard variations on each theme from so many people, so many numbers.
It all happened so fast; it's just a blur.
I can't get it out of my head.
I barely remember a thing…
I'll never be able to forget.
Harold doesn't think he wants to remember, and yet he can't bear to forget; his father's fate had taught him that remembering is a precious thing, not to be taken for granted, and the people he's so tempted to just forget deserve so much better. But memory isn't a voluntary thing, and he is only human. And if this war has served only one purpose—
("—you need a purpose. More specifically—")
—it's to remind him that to be human is to be fallible.
He's remembering, whether he likes it or not. But he's remembering the wrong things, and worse, he's not remembering them right. Does that make sense? He turns the convoluted phrase over and over in his mind and concludes that it both does and does not. A false binary. It would seem he's been improperly coded. The thought is almost amusing. Amateur work. Sloppy.
"I make a mean puttanesca"—had that been it? The gist, certainly, but maybe not the exact words—almost certainly not, the more he thinks about it, yet that's how he remembers them in all their pointless entirety, the best he will ever remember them—"even in a kitchen that's only ever had meth cooked in it."
Harold is a man of words, but he cannot hold onto these words; they are slipping, they have slipped, and what remains in his mind are inane, paraphrased snippets. Snippets and a crystallised image of blank eyes, crooked glasses, and a raw, ragged hole that never had a chance to bleed.
"Get me the .338." The .338 is the big one. This fact had been important for less than five seconds of his life. It had neither required nor offered context; it was exactly enough information for that exact moment. He should have discarded the information, made room to hold onto something more significant about the woman who forced him to open his eyes and gave his daughter a voice. "And a hair scrunchie."
"I'm in your corner to the end." That's better, a more fitting set of last words (though there had been so many words that came after) to attach to one of the greatest and worst men Harold has ever known. A man who had continued to call him friend long after the veneer of irony had worn away. Harold only wishes he could be certain they were the correct words, but even the greatest hacker can't crack into their own mind, only endeavour to understand it.
Harold understands well enough to know that the human brain never really outgrows the habits of childhood, and bright colours and loud noises are still the best way to get its attention. They're what catch the eye best, lodge most easily in the mind. He hopes desperately that such a simple explanation will serve to excuse the unforgiveable—how his clearest memory of Samantha Groves is the moment he saw she was red all over, dying or dead. Red on her chest where a bullet meant for him took her instead, red in her eyes as her overwrought body finally broke and tried to weep. Red in her hair as the afternoon sun set rich brown aflame and muddled his last sight of her with thoughts of Grace.
Thoughts of Grace are what have killed at least two of his only friends, his most precious people. Thoughts of Grace are a liability he can't afford and a luxury he has never deserved.
He remembers—just barely, by now, and it had been a blur at the time, just a blur—a handful of moments when Ms. Groves had attempted to comfort him with existential philosophy of all things, waxing eloquent on the subjective nature of reality and the infinity of being. These words, too, are beyond him now, but he can still envision the concepts behind them and they are wrong, they fly in the face of reality itself at its most basic level because death is pure objective finite fact.
Harold has never been more glad to acknowledge that, for now it's the only solid thing left in a world gone vague. He needs that, needs something to stand firm upon as his thoughts turn bitter and twisted, and what little sense of black and white he's retained disintegrates into greyscale.
"…underneath all that intellect, you're the darkest of all of us…"
Is it time or conscience distorting these old words, these new recollections? Or is the perception of distortion all in his head, and he's remembering exactly as he should? But there he goes again, fixating on the details. Ignoring what's important. He is the man who built a Machine and taught it his mission. He is the man who created God and took on Her crusade. He doesn't deal in certainties but there is no room, no time, left for doubts, and the knowledge makes him want to scream. But his chest is cold and heavy, and all down his scalp and spine is numb and his head, the parts that aren't frantically scrabbling to cobble together the final moments of the people he's lost, is so, so clear. He is stone. He is ice. He is beyond rage—he is hatred, and he is methodical, and he is patient. He is—well, surely someone had dropped the ubiquitous Oppenheimer line at some point in either Machine's creation? It would be pretentious to repeat it. Tacky.
He is, has only ever been, code, and his buttons have been pushed in every sense of the phrase. His code is executing, he is executing and it's a hell of a time to play the headsman.
"…just bad code, Harry…bad code…"
Reinvention is easy as breathing, taking who and what he is and moulding a new person into being. Harold has had many names, many lives, throughout the years, but only three have mattered since the first.
Wren. Martin. Finch.
Wren and Martin had been hard to lose—but Finch? It hurts to say goodbye to Finch; he's become precious in a way Wren and Martin had never been, because Wren was Nathan's Harold and Martin was Grace's Harold, but Finch had been real. Harold had hoped to die as Finch. He had expected it, and been oddly comforted by the notion. But now all of a sudden it is time for Finch to die, and when Harold performs the subtle mental reshuffling it takes to kill him, lets go of any sentimental attachment to the name, it doesn't hurt anymore. It doesn't feel like anything anymore, and with an alarming degree of detachment Harold realises that he has just committed suicide, and yet is alive despite himself.
He feels no need to take up a new name, nor to revert to an old one. His names have been his lives. Now that he's without one, Harold wonders, is he still human? He honestly hopes the answer is no. It will be easier that way.
Perhaps Ms. Shaw will be impressed by what he is becoming, if grief hasn't pried open the cracks on her unpractised heart and shattered her. Detective Fusco, he thinks, will be horrified, disgusted beyond even the crudest words in his expressive vocabulary. And Mr. Reese…
Oh, John will be so very disappointed in his Mr. Finch.
But now there is only Harold, Harold who doesn't really know or care who he is anymore, who can't let himself care, and Harold is angry. Harold has a target, and a task, and the only ally he'll allow to walk this path with him. Root's voice echoes its former owner's words, precise, infallible, and Harold agrees. There is bad code. It must be eliminated to save the system as a whole. There is no room for error in this. No fallibility. No humanity.
The world has changed. There are no more rules.