Chapter Ten: Unity
_o\O/o_
"A little... macabre, aren't they?" he'd said, rotating on his heel in the middle of the gallery. "I was expecting more melting clocks."
"Salvador Dali's mother believed he was the reincarnation of her first son, who had died," Grace explained. "One night, she took him to his brother's gravestone and told him so. He was five years old. And he believed her. You might be a little macabre, too."
"Why would she think that?"
She shrugged. "Grief can do funny things to people. Superstition, too—it is interesting that the elder Salvador died the same month this Salvador was conceived."
"They gave him the same name."
"Yeah, they did. Like I said, you might be a little macabre, too."
Finch turned away from her to study a painting of a twisted, faceless figure with unruly dresser drawers for a chest.
"Well, from the looks of things, I'd say the idea didn't entirely agree with him."
She'd slipped an arm through his, pressing against him soothingly. "Maybe we'll skip the Bacon exhibit."
They'd gone to see Rothko, instead. He was unprepared for the purity, the impact, of the paintings in person. He found his breath hitching, his pupils dilating to absorb the flood of color. Grace's shape and warmth retreated subtly from his periphery: an artist's deference to a novice viewer.
One painting in particular drew him: it was only a study, smaller than the others, in an unassuming palette. He stepped even closer, until the long pale gradations were all he could see. It reminded him of Iowan winters, how the icy gray of distant snowclouds bled smoothly into frozen farmland, barely a smudge of delineation at the horizon.
Finch found himself thinking of those winter skies again as he dangled in Armstrong's trap. He felt the same swoop of giddiness, the same wavering limbo between earth and sky. Here, both the ceiling and floor were painted the same wan institutional color, and he'd already track of gravity's reassuring tug some time ago. In this room, Fgno longer equaled G(m1m2/r2). It was relativity beyond Einstein's wildest nightmares.
His older brothers — much older, already teenagers when he was born — had taught him during an early winter how to roll a perfect snowball; how to spit into the dry powder to pack it, make it stick. Merciless to each other, they'd been unfailingly — some might say unnaturally — kind to their puny little brother.
Except for that one impromptu swimming "lesson." A well-meaning if idiotic faux pas which was never repeated. Finch had told Detective Carter he'd been nine when his twin brothers, sparking on the feedback loop of each other's reckless energy, plopped him into the local pool to see if he could swim. That he'd actually been barely four at the time was hardly relevant to the point he was trying to make, and she might have misunderstood. After all, they'd pulled him right back out again. He didn't want her thinking they were monsters.
Besides, he had asked them how to swim. That he'd been interested in the theory rather than the practice had, understandably, quite escaped their notice.
"Not everyone's an athlete," their father had thundered afterward at his big, shamefaced boys. It was the only time Finch could remember seeing his father deeply, genuinely angry. "He's not like you two. He's different."
They had nodded and apologized, then dashed away to go punch each other over whose stupid idea it had really been.
Three years later, Finch's mother and father could only wonder whose stupid idea it had been to swim so far out into the river during a flood year. College juniors home for the summer, already tired from a day in the fields, they'd told their dad they were going to go cool off before dinner.
"Maybe Richie's bad knee went out," Dad had said to Mother as she sat in the kitchen, staring dry-eyed at two plates of cold beef casserole. He squeezed her shoulders. "And then, his big brother tried to save him..."
"Or maybe they were just bored," she'd replied, picking at loose flakes of yellow laminate tabletop. "Not exactly a carnival around here."
Fiercely competitive as they had been, Finch privately thought a reckless race to the opposite shore was more likely.
They'd never know for sure, of course.
_o\O/o_
John was sitting in the Library, reading and waiting for Finch to come back with dinner. Soft, warm leather against his back and in his hands. He'd chosen the book for its beautiful antique cover, but the story had turned out to be pretty good, too. Something about paleontology.
He heard footsteps on the stairs, smelled garlic and tomato sauce, and smiled. But the smile faded—the footsteps were wrong: too even, too long. And the smell: Finch knew John didn't like peppers on his pizza—
"Wake up, Detective," said a soft voice.
John didn't flinch; he kept his limbs loose but poised, let his eyes fall open smoothly, already alert and focused. As if he'd never been asleep; as if Slim's presence meant nothing to him. But he couldn't help the reflexive swallows against a mouth suddenly brimming with saliva. He could feel the fragrant heat radiating from the flat white cardboard box held practically over his head.
Slim smiled at him and shook the box gently. "To celebrate," he said. Then he picked up the TV remote. "I think you'll really like this one, Detective."
_o\O/o_
At MIT, Finch had authored more than one anonymous op-ed for the school paper. Most buzz-worthy had been his treatise on thermodynamic entropy: an impassioned defense of the Gibbs equation against the older and more accepted Boltzman version. It wasn't just because Gibbs's was more relevant to machinery than Boltzman's, while applying equally well to physical chemistry. It was the elegance of the thing.
As it was in fashion, literature and art, so it was in science and mathematics, Finch had found: some people just had no taste.
If he could rewrite that article now, he would pull in a third application: entropy's implications on the philosophical, personal scale. Loss, impermanence, decay. The ancient, existential, human fear. He felt that now, he'd be uniquely qualified to do so.
He'd had the nightmares just like most people: teeth coming loose, skin flaking off, that sort of thing. The usual.
But after the surgeries, those nightmares had taken a rather more personal turn. As he slept he would feel surgical screws stripping their threads, his hip socket clanging like a poorly hinged door. Titanium plating shrieking loose, leaving his pelvic wing a mess of empty drillholes. Delicate pins expanding slowly like ice freezing in rock, spreading a fine network of stress fractures through stony blocks of vertebrae.
Now that it was all actually happening, bit by bit under Armstrong's hand, Finch was distantly impressed with his subconscious for rendering those sensations so accurately in the dreams. Hard, bony hands were currently at his lumbar region, squeezing in and tapping to gage how far the hardware had been worked loose.
Finch's glasses were working loose, too. The collar still held his head firmly in place, but his skin was a slick of sweaty tears over facial muscles bunching and hollowing to rhythm of Armstrong's touch. Inch by inch, the heavy round lenses had dragged the frames backwards over his forehead. Finally there was only a wayward tuft of hair between them and a perilous drop to the concrete floor. Finch tried not to breathe. He didn't think he could stand the sound of shattering glass just now. Right before they fell, Armstrong's hand appeared to save them.
And then, between one blink and the next, Finch must have fallen asleep. Because when he looked back up, the blurry figure had resolved into someone else entirely. Taller, stronger, darker.
Finch shuddered all over with shock, with relief.
"Mr Reese?"
_o\O/o_
"Look how he relaxes when he thinks it's your hands on him. What trust."
John ground through his second slice of vegetarian pizza, peppers and all. Energy, he told his stomach, which was roiling with garlic after days of a liquid diet. Just energy. To find him, take him away from there.
"I miss that, sometimes," Slim went on, wistfully. "The trust. The gratitude. I helped a lot of people, you know. Before. But then it turned out hurting paid much better than healing." He raised wet red fingers to his mouth and sucked. "It's a funny old world."
John had found himself kneeling on the floor a heartbeat after hearing Finch say his name. Fortunately the thick rug had cushioned the fall; the last thing John needed was a pair of swollen knees slowing him down. He slumped against the filing cabinet, his head echoing with the sound of his name, warmth and wonder suffusing every crack in Finch's hoarse voice. Slim had pretended not to notice, and politely handed him a napkin.
John hadn't bothered to get back up. He sat on the floor, neck craning up to watch the screen where Finch hung pliantly under skillful hands. Next to him, Slim sat cozily in the plump armchair, knees drawn up boyishly.
Pizza and a movie, John thought dully. Practically a slumber party.
"He tries so hard," Slim said. "Look how hard he tries to endure it—for you."
Finch's face had gone white and calm—almost meditative with the effort of submitting to the slow erosion of his bones without struggling or crying out. Now and then a gasp would escape him.
"Sorry, Mr Reese," he whispered each time. "Sorry."
Sometimes he asked questions.
"This is a... test? Of some kind?"
"Or... are they listening, watching us, right now?"
"I told them too much, didn't I? I know I did. I couldn't... seem to..."
"Oh dear, did they find it? Is it all over? Are they... oh dear, are they all dead?"
But mostly he kept quiet. Or mouthed silent words.
"I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry."
Slim's cobweb-soft voice tickled in John's ear. "Maybe someday the world will be a better place, Detective," He heaved a sigh of contented melancholy, and reached forward toward the pizza box. "Not soon enough for you and me, though. Or for him."
Without taking his eyes from Finch's face, John lunged to a half-crouch, closing his fingers around the ulnar and radial nerves of Slim's wrist. The man yelped and jerked backward, only increasing the pressure and wringing out a louder yelp. John held him there while his other hand spread flat and possessive over the cardboard lid. He slid the box over the floor toward himself. The box, now darkening with spreading spots of oil, was still warm against his hip. Then he let Slim go.
Energy, John thought. Energy.
_o\O/o_
Before he'd left Iowa for good, Finch stopped at the graveyard. It seemed like someone should. His father wasn't going to be visiting there any more—even if he were to suddenly remember, the old folk's home wasn't big on field trips. It was possible his mother would at some point, but his latest round of electronic snooping (just one last time, he'd lied to himself) had placed her in Sarasota, working at a hospital. Not a lot of time for traveling.
Like most parents, Finch's father had sometimes mixed up his kids' names. Maybe a little more than most, but it never occurred to them to worry. They'd tease him about it. He'd laugh good-naturedly, call them by the cows' names on purpose.
But then the twins had died, and it got worse. Rapidly. It hadn't hurt Finch's feelings; he assumed being assigned lost siblings' names was merely proper procedure — just another of those strange grownup grief-things. It certainly hadn't seemed any more bizarre than putting his brothers in boxes down a hole under a rock.
So, he became three names. Then two—his original forgotten. His mother left before his father finally narrowed it down to one.
Finch didn't blame her. It had dawned on him gradually — year by year in the way of childhood realizations — that for people of his parents' generation a third child at the age of 41 was likely to have been... unexpected. Too risky, if nothing else, especially in the age of sock hops and poodle skirts. He imagined the pregnancy and birth would have been difficult. He didn't blame her.
He knelt on the frozen ground, wondering if maybe he should have brought flowers. They'd only have shriveled in the cold—but that was logic talking, and experience had taught him that when logic happened in places like graveyards, it was usually the kind of logic other people would call "heartless."
Not expecting the sudden (illogical) urge to see the names, Finch wiped away the powdered snow, then dug his fingertips into the grooved letters, picking out the ice. Forget flowers; he wished he'd brought gloves.
Under the ornate, stony scroll of the family surname, Finch read the carvings for the last time:
Rest in Peace,
RICHARD & HAROLD
1943-1966
"...and to godliness, brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness, love."
_o\O/o_
John had always had a gift for seeing things other people didn't. When he'd enlisted, the military fitness tests put him in the 99th percentile for visual acuity. But it went deeper than that. Seeing well wasn't much good if you didn't know where, when, or why to look. There was seeing, and there was watching, observing, understanding.
John's brilliance of perception was a big part of why the boys from Langley had come knocking in the first place.
So there was really no good reason for John to doubt what his eyes were telling him: that Finch's legs hadn't moved in the past forty minutes. Not a single shift, shiver, or twitch.
Forty minutes ago, there had been a noise. Slim had been rotating Finch's bad leg at the hip, and he'd pushed one palm by slow increments into the small of his back until there was a long, low, metallic creak. Slim held the position until Finch's reservoir of poise dried up and he'd screamed through a throat that shouldn't have been able to scream anymore. Then something slipped and he'd sagged, wandering away for a little while.
When he wandered back, he seemed a little more lucid. And a little less pained. And his legs hadn't moved since.
"Mr Reese. John. If they're making you... oh God, if they've put one of those heinous things in your head... I want you to know—I want whatever part of you that might still be comforted by the knowledge, to know—that it's all right. Remember that. Whatever happens. It's all right."
...
"I knew what I was getting into. I knew what I was getting into."
...
"Or... if you are still there, John, and if you're trying to... to stall, for a chance to escape, for Detective Fusco or Miss Groves to find us... Please, I... appreciate the effort, I do, but... I'd really rather this be over now. If it's all the same to you. I would. Truly. John? Please." Finch closed his eyes. "You can end it. I know you can make it quick. I want it to be over. Please."
John closed his eyes, too. He didn't want to see any more.
Slim paused the footage, the frame happening to freeze just as Finch's eye opened and his gaze slid over the camera. John knew he wasn't really looking at it; at this distance he doubted his friend's naked eyes could detect the camera as even an anomaly of color. Still, it comforted John to imagine they were face to face. Finch was squinting, the pale rims of his eyelids rising steeply out of the deep shadows around them.
There was a strange expression there—something soft and... comforting, of all things. It took John a minute to place it: the freeze-frame had captured the very moment when shame gave way to relief. It was the face of confession.
"I want it to be over. I want it to be done."
"Do you know, I think this development is actually making the whole process easier for him?" Slim said brightly, profanely. "Him thinking I'm you. Didn't have the heart to put these back on."
A glint of reflected light drew John's eye: a beam through the thick lenses of Finch's glasses. Slim twirled them happily between his forefinger and thumb. Tiny dots of tomato sauce speckled one round lens.
"It probably wouldn't have any effect on the delusion — he's way too far gone for that — but just in case..."
John turned his head very slowly, centering Slim in his stare, his eyes still only half-lidded. Slim's smile twitched; he had time to fold one of the earpieces before they were gone and being tucked tenderly into John's breast pocket. John could see Slim breathlessly flexing his fingers, counting them—apparently he hadn't known John could move quite that fast.
Slim flushed and opened his mouth, then closed it again and began bouncing the remote control against his knee. He cracked his knuckles, then his shoulder, before pressing play again. John watched him out of the corner of his eye. A snaking vein was pattering fast and blue under the thin skin of his temple. Slim failed to contain his angry squirming, when he finally turned to glare at him, John met him with a water-bland expression. He raised his eyebrows in innocent inquiry. Slim flushed even redder threw a burning look at John's breast pocket.
John bared half his teeth at the other man—the slanted mock-smile that had never once fooled anyone.
_o\O/o_
Perhaps this was all much simpler than he'd imagined.
Mr Reese was of an exceptionally curious nature, but the ex-op had his pride; who are you? was a question he'd only allowed himself to vocalize once. After that, he'd only ever asked it with his eyes, with his smiles—and with the extraordinary efforts he'd made to unearth Finch's secrets.
Truth be told, private person though he was, inconvenient though it became, Finch had found it a little flattering.
But that had been in the very beginning. Finch rather thought their shared experiences since then would have eclipsed any lingering sense of inequity Mr Reese might feel. What was a false name (or twenty) between people who had risked their lives for each other a dozen times over? Surely John couldn't possibly feel that Finch didn't trust him now.
But perhaps that was heartless logic talking.
"Is it... is it me you want to know about, Mr Reese?" Finch asked timidly. They were taking a break from neck rotations, increasing slowly in diameter until the quivering metal pins felt ready to break through skin. He tried to look his friend in the face, but his eyes kept wanting to roll back into his head; they felt slippery inside their aching sockets. It was very disconcerting. "I assure you my past is not remotely interesting enough to warrant all this fuss. But if you really want to know..."
The pain blared loudly, another crescendo, smothering his mind of thought. It came in waves now, the pain. Strangely, they seemed only vaguely connected to the rhythms of Mr Reese's continuing attentions. Ebb and flow, wax and wane, systole and diastole. In between the peaks, it didn't even hurt anymore, really; mostly he just felt cold there, in the valleys. A great relief, obviously, although something in the back of his head kept insisting this wasn't an entirely positive development.
The wave crested, then diffused into tingling foam.
"There now. Let's see. Whistler you know, of course. And Swift, Gull, Crane, Crow... and let's not forget Partridge or Burdett. Or Egret, much as I'd like to—Miss Groves didn't give me a hint of warning, no time to prepare. "Criminal mastermind" has never been a part of my repertoire; I won't be winning any awards for that performance, but looking back I suppose it was adequate."
Another swell; he felt his fingers curling into claws with the force of it. Afterward his left hand wouldn't open.
"Cardinal, Tern, Jay, Quail. Apologies if you know any of those... already... my memory... it's become a little... um. Sparrow. Plover. Piper. Lark. Oh, oh—Grebe! I was terribly fond of Grebe. He was a menswear tailor. A smidgen shy of bespoke, I'm afraid—I never could completely abdicate choice of color and fabric to the client. But the fit was always exact, I assure you. ...More than once I was tempted to adopt that identity permanently. Give up the Numbers, the Machine, the city, everything. But then we never would have met, John. And that would have been a shame."
_o\O/o_
"It's almost over now, Detective. I've kept you both too long. Sorry. I was waiting for... something. Something special, between me and Harold, there in that room. I don't know what. And I never will, now; we've gone overtime, and I'm sorry."
Slim rubbed at his head. He sounded weary and pained. His face was pale, clammy; his mouth pinched as if chewing on something sour.
"When that screen lights up again, it'll be a live feed. Now, the next part you're not gonna like. But I need to be sure you don't try to chase after me—or mess with my stuff upstairs. You won't want to waste any time getting to your friend. You understand?"
John swallowed. "I won't, I promise—you don't need to—please—"
Slim waved a hand. "I believe you, Detective. I do. Mostly. But it's too big a risk. You're too good at—well, everything." His thin lips curved into an affectionate smile. "You should take it as a compliment. Anyone else and I probably wouldn't bother."
"Please, don't. I'll go straight there—wherever you say. He's had enough. He's been—"
Slim's heavy forehead sank down over his eyes, casting them completely into shadow. His voice, still quiet, had gone tight as a tripwire. "Oh, there's no such thing as enough, Detective. That's the difference between you and me. You're good, but you're... utilitarian. Take my client: you got what you needed from him, and then you threw him away. But for me... there's no such thing as finished. There's only running out of time."
John hung his head and didn't answer. Slim had already heard him beg; he didn't need to see the tears, too. Slim withdrew to the stairs.
"When it's done, I'll show the camera an address. Then you're free to go. Goodbye, Detective. And thank you. It's been... well, I don't know how to describe it, really."
There was a loud creak as Slim paused on a bad step, nearly to the door. His breathing was a little wet, his voice trembling.
"Um. Take good care of him, okay?"
_o\O/o_
"Robin.
Weaver.
Warbler.
Drake.
Swallow.
Bittern.
Heron.
Thrush."
_o\O/o_
"No cologne, no Prince Charming shampoo, and definitely no fucking Old Spice. Smells are memorable; scent goes straight to the limbic system of the brain. Smells can sneak right around corners and give away your location. I lost a partner once because her Herbal Essences deodorant made her sweat smell like fruit salad on a hot day. Me, I like Arm & Hammer detergent; Vaseline lotion; Ivory soap. Simple. You're a spy now, Reese. Just because you're out of fatigues doesn't mean you're going to the prom."
Kara had run her eyes all over him, flashed him her shark's smile. "You wanna keep wearing all that hair gel? Just make sure it's unscented."
Of course, Slim would use an aggressively vanilla soap. (Finch probably wasn't going to be enjoying his ice cream cones any time soon.) And, of course, he had given John the same. John rubbed some toothpaste onto his shirt and hands to cover the saccharine smell, brushed a big minty dollop of it deep into his tongue and molars.
Slim's hair was thin, coarse, buzzed short. John kept ruffling up his own, every so often wetting it just a little with some bottled water—he didn't want to keep making trips to the sink and risk missing even a second of the live feed when it started.
Slim always went to Finch in nothing but his green, short-sleeved scrubs. John didn't care if he had to sprint to Finch through New York's summer fever, or swim to him across the Hudson: he was going to keep his expensive suit intact and appear to Finch conspicuously layered in his customary white and black.
Slim had neatly trimmed, smooth fingernails. John's had gotten a bit long during his captivity; he used a corroded corner of the steel filing cabinet to roughen them up even further. He hated the idea of putting even the smallest scratch onto Finch's abused skin, but if it helped Finch's abused mind realize who he was—and who he was not—it would be worth it.
That he and Slim both had big hands, clever and strong, callused from hard work—well, there was nothing John could do about that.
_o\O/o_
"They were a lot flashier when I was young, you know. Peacock. Merlin. Oriole. Good lord, Parrot. Foolish of me. Hardly inconspicuous. The first—the very first—was Falcon. Nobody knows about that one. Nobody except you, now. You see? I do trust you, Mr Reese. ...Mr Reese?"
The room was silent. How long had it been silent? He opened his eyes. If Mr Reese was still here, he was hiding outside Finch's periphery. And being very, very quiet. Such subterfuge would be entirely consistent with his abilities and character. So Finch decided to keep talking. Just in case.
"I never lied to you about it. Remember? I only said to call me Mr Finch—the mister being a courtesy you never did extend, I might add—and then you followed me to my dreary cubicle, and you assumed... I never said my name was Harold. I never lied."
Finch closed his eyes again. He liked it better, imagining Mr Reese was there. It let the montage of memories play more clearly, too.
"It wasn't his fault. He loved me, I know he did—very much. And in the greater scheme of things, that makes me very lucky, doesn't it? He was so kind, so very dear. I've never known why he settled on Harry's name in the end. He called me Richard too, Richie sometimes, in the beginning. She didn't use my name much either, afterward; it just confused him. I was 'he' and 'him,' and 'our son' for a while, to her. And then 'your son.' And then she left."
His eyes snapped open; he was suddenly furious. This had gone quite far enough.
"It was so long ago. What can it possibly matter now? It doesn't mean anything. I don't know why you care—you shouldn't, because it's nothing, and it doesn't matter." He puffed out his chest as much as he could. "Not to mention it's none of your damned business."
He was bouncing a little in his straps. The metallic squeaks reminded him of seagulls. He snorted.
"Falcon, though. Imagine! Ah, the folly of youth. Although, in my defense, Star Wars had just come out."
_o\O/o_
Watching as the Rig's hydraulics slowly stuttered Finch down to the floor, John stood still and held his breath. Somewhere, at this very moment, Finch was blinking, and pursing his lips in that Finch way, and making little noises of surprise as his back and shoulders made contact with the floor. Somewhere, right now, Finch was breathing in and breathing out, pale, underweight, and damaged—but alive.
Right now, John thought, bouncing on the balls of his feet. Right now.
When his full weight was finally laid flat, Finch let out a long, guttural groan. The hum of the hydraulic cut out and the Rig's arms bounced to a stop, jingling. In the sudden stillness Finch's eyes were wandering, still fixed and hazy, a little frown between his eyes. John knew how utterly surreal solid ground felt after days of dangling.
Finch made no attempt to move, to shed the web of loose straps from his arms, or pull the sweaty collar from his neck.
Shock, John thought. It could just be shock.
Finch's hoarse voice, when he spoke, was still miraculously wry and crisp underneath the rasp.
"It's nothing against you, Mr Reese. It's nothing personal. You understand that, don't you?"
Slim had moved closer and squatted to unstrap the wrist cuffs, and Finch leaned toward him subtly, licking his white, chapped lips.
"And I'm sorry that I lost my temper," he said conspiratorially. "The truth is... it's not a question of secrecy, of privacy, at all. I just... don't like talking about it. More accurately, I haven't talked about it. Ever. I don't know that I can, you see. It hurts," he gasped. "It hurts."
Slim released Finch's ankles, then delicately unhinged the collar and lifted it away, revealing pink, puckered skin. Finch whimpered at the loss; suddenly exposed, the fragile skin broke out in goosebumps. A shudder rolled from Finch's head to his arms and down to his hips—where it stopped short. Slim was rocking him back and forth to ease the flattened body sling out from under him. Finch squirmed at the shoulders a little, but John couldn't detect any flex in his legs. They flopped back and forth, at once flaccid and stiff, like an old garden hose unspooled. When he was entirely free of the Rig's restraints he lay inert with an unnatural liquid flatness on the floor. He wasn't even trembling anymore.
Slim packed up the Rig and rolled it out the door. When he returned, Finch reached for him. For a split second Slim stood still, a mix of surprise and hesitation on his face. Then he took the offered hand and knelt, gathering Finch up in his arms. He sank into a full sit to pull Finch's weight more securely into his lap, the tableau like some sort of blasphemous Pietà. Finch's head fell to the side, forehead pressing into Slim's thin chest.
"Please, don't make me say it," he whispered into Slim's shirt. "I haven't said it since he forgot... he loved me. He loved me. That's all that matters. Don't make me say it. Please."
With his free hand Slim petted his hair. Those gaunt fingers were now impossibly gentle, ghosting along the aching seams in Finch's skull, pressing into knotted jaw muscles. Gradually the tears dried, and Finch sighed.
"Does it really mean so much to you, John?"
Slim froze, and then his arms loosened abruptly; he pushed Finch out of his lap and onto the cold floor.
"No," Finch keened. "No, don't leave." His fist latched weakly onto Slim's sleeve. "Don't leave. Please."
Slim gently detached Finch's fingers, and pushed off the floor into a crouch.
"Oliver!" Finch burst out. "Please, John!It's Oliver!"
Slim froze.
"Oliver. Oliver Man... Manson. My name is... my name was Oliver Manson. My name... my name..."
Glowing with triumph, Slim stood over Finch, watching with reverence as his secrets flowed out of him like blood.
Then he bent over and rolled Finch onto his side with clinical efficiency, slipping a hand between Finch's ribcage and the floor. He threw a dark look up at the camera as he hooked his fingers into the softness under the bones and palpated firmly, searchingly. Then he stilled for a split second before his whole arm stiffened and he drove his hand like a spade, deep into Finch's abdomen. He rotated at the wrist sharply, like twisting a stubborn door handle, and withdrew. Finch gave a dull grunt and then quieted again, unmoving.
Slim stayed on his knees for a moment, rubbing at his own ribs where John had bruised him to the bone. Pulling a piece of notepaper out of his pocket, he rose stiffly to his feet. As he unfolded the note with shaking hands, John could see dark slashes of ink bleeding through the back of the paper. It looked like Slim had terrible handwriting. John blinked, ready to take a snapshot of the address.
Suddenly there was a crackle of static and sound cut out. Slim's head whipped around toward the door just as it burst open. Two men marched into the room, the shorter man with a gun trained on Slim; his mouth spat a few brusque words. The taller, younger man wiped his nose and tossed his shaggy blond hair. He sauntered to Slim's side, strong-armed him effortlessly out the door, and slammed it shut behind him—hard enough to send vibrations up to the camera.
Finch started at what must have been a tremendous noise. His mouth was all but mashed flat against the floor; John could just barely see the edges of his lips moving, a stripe of spit spreading onto the concrete. Whatever he said made the gunman smile. He lowered his weapon and turned to face his companion, glancing at the camera and jerking his head toward it. The blonde took a small black switch out of his pocket and aimed it straight at John's eyes. The gunman moved to hover Finch's prone form. He stuck out his foot and rolled him onto his back.
The screen went dark.
_o\O/o_