![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kindkitBy rights, this should be drawer-fic. I've only seen S1, so this story is pre-jossed. And I probably get some details of S1 canon wrong too, because I've only been able to watch each episode once.
But, well, I went looking around for fic about Harold's relationship with Nathan Ingram, and there wasn't any that seemed worth reading. (Not that was posted before S2 aired, anyway--I'm being very spoiler-avoidant.) So I did what we're always told we should do and wrote the fic I wanted to read.
If you can forgive it its canon noncompliance, or treat it as an AU or something, I hope it will be a fic you wanted to read too.
I'm not planning to post this to AO3, because I imagine an audience of strangers will be less tolerant of pre-jossed fic. (ETA: Yeah, my resolve not to post it on AO3 lasted about half an hour, so you can read it there if you would rather.)
Title: Timeline of a Partial Life
Fandom: Person of Interest
Characters/Pairings: Harold/Nathan unrequited, Harold/Grace sort of, Will Ingram, OFC (Nathan's wife)
Rating: Teen
Content Notes: Bad things that happened in canon happen here. Also unrequited love. Not really a happy story. Complete lack of Reese.
Word count: 7409
Summary: The story of Harold's life with(out) Nathan Ingram.
Harold kisses Nathan Ingram on Friday, December 21, 1983. It's some time between two and three in the morning. They're sitting under the trees in DuPont Court, celebrating the end of their first semester at MIT by splitting a six-pack of wine coolers.
Harold has never drunk alcohol before. He's never kissed someone before, either. In one sense, the kiss is a sudden impulse. He's just said that he'd like to work for Apple after he graduates, and Nathan has answered that he's too smart to work for someone else. It occurs to Harold then that almost a month will go by before he sees Nathan again, a cold month of never talking to the only person he's ever met who likes talking to him. He leans tipsily across the cardboard skeleton of the six-pack and kisses Nathan.
But although the act is impulsive, the kiss is thoroughly premeditated. Finch has been hoping since the second week of September that Nathan will kiss him. When he reaches out, it's a recognition that one way or another, he's got to stop hoping.
It lasts no more than a second of warm pressure and the overripe peach smell of the wine coolers. Harold drops back to the ground, dizzy with wine and audacity, feeling as though a daring stranger momentarily took over his body.
"What was that all about?" Nathan asks.
There's a sudden foul taste in Harold's mouth, peaches and sugar gone to rot, everything gone to decay and ruin. "Oh, God, I'm so sorry. I - I won't do it again. I'm sorry."
"Okay," Nathan says calmly and opens up the last two wine coolers. He hands one to Harold, who is so distressed he almost drops it. Later, Harold will understand this as the moment he falls in love with Nathan. Before, it was an infatuation that might have passed, but Nathan's kindness, his forgiveness, those are things Harold will never get over.
"So," Nathan says after a couple of minutes' silent thought, "does this mean you're gay?"
"I guess it does. Yes." 100% of Harold's sexual attractions have been to men, so yes, he is by definition gay. In fact, 100% of Harold's sexual attractions have been to Nathan Ingram. It's a small sample size, but as much as he needs. Nathan is as much as he needs for anything.
"Wow." Nathan swallows audibly and leans back on his elbows, staring up through the leaves at the starless sky. He's not as comfortable as he's trying to seem, Harold sees, and is amazed that he can see it, that Nathan makes sense to him when other people are so baffling. "Be careful, okay, Harold? Don't, you know, catch AIDS or anything. You're my best friend."
Harold promises to be careful. He would promise anything. He tells himself that the difference between "You're my best friend," and "I love you," is not terribly important.
***
In the summer of 1984, Harold spends a week with Nathan and his family at their summer house on Martha's Vineyard. Nathan's family are tall, blond, and confident; it's like falling among a tribe of very civilized Vikings. They wear beautiful clothes that look specially designed to be worn on islands, and they drink wine with dinner every night. Harold remembers the wine coolers and realizes that Nathan was making allowances for him.
"It's got to have practical applications," Nathan says one afternoon. They're sitting on the beach talking about fractals. "Beyond showing why it's impossible to accurately measure a coastline. I wish I understood the math better."
"The math is easy."
"Oh, it starts out easy. Then all of a sudden the coast of Martha's Vineyard is infinite and the universe is Sierpinski triangles all the way down."
"Well, implications, that's different. But the math is easy."
Nathan grins and flicks a few grains of sand at him. The sand is almost the color of Nathan's tanned skin, which is just a few shades lighter than his linen pants and a few darker than his loose white shirt. He looks amazing, and as at home as the sand or the waves. He belongs here. Harold, in contrast, is wearing a too-bright sweater vest and polyester-blend pants that make him look like a file clerk. Not once has he felt anything but alien, although the Ingrams have been welcoming in their casual way.
"I wish it wasn't too cold to swim," Nathan says.
"Me too." In fact Harold is relieved. He feels ugly next to Nathan even with all his clothes on. And his reaction to the sight of Nathan in swim trunks might be . . . well, Nathan's been wonderful about pretending that Harold never humiliated himself with that kiss, but some things are too much. Too obvious. "I read a poem about the beach. It says that the sound of the sea is the sound of all human sorrow."
"And that, Harold, is why you have no social life."
"Because Matthew Arnold wrote a depressing poem?"
"Because you go around quoting it. I think the sound of the sea is the sound of lobsters being caught for tonight's dinner. And a steamed lobster is the epitome of human happiness."
"Thank you, Socrates."
There is a single grain of sand caught in the hollow above Nathan's upper lip. Harold looks away, pressing his lips together like a trap, imprisoning the urge to kiss him again.
"Speaking of dinner," says Nathan, looking at his watch, "We should probably head back."
They starting talking about fractals again as they walk, but all the way, Harold has the sound of grief in his ears.
***
In August of 1984, just before the new school year starts, Harold goes to New York for the weekend. He's got a good fake ID, money he's saved from working all summer as a math and science tutor, and a new suit made of pure light wool. It's off the rack, but off a Macy's rack at least, and on his first day in the city he has it professionally altered while he watches, paying close attention to everything the tailor does and everything he says about fit, the width of lapels, the indispensability of cuff buttons that really unbutton. Afterwards Harold gets his hair cut at a salon that charges eight times what he's used to. On the way back to his hotel, he blushingly buys a pack of condoms.
That night he goes to a gay bar that he's picked out of the advertisements in the Village Voice. It costs him $20 to get in and he stays for fifteen minutes.
Back in the quiet safety of his hotel room, he searches for the error in his own expectations. He'd been picturing . . . what? Something out of the last century. Leather armchairs, single-malt scotch and crusted port, quotations from Oscar Wilde, subtle flirtatious glances. Instead there'd been sweaty mustachioed men grinding together to disco music played too loud for any conversation at all. He'd been the only one in the bar wearing a suit.
Perhaps his dismay is hypocritical. What he wants, after all, is sex; the plan was to have sex. When he thinks about sex in the abstract, as a body against his, as all the kissing he's ever dreamed of, he wants it so badly he could scream. But he doesn't want sex with any of the men he saw in the bar. What is sex to them? Something fast and crude, Harold supposes. Something they have every night and forget instantly, as significant as a slice of pizza. Harold wants sex in a bed, with someone who will be kind to him and want to talk to him afterwards.
He wants Nathan. That's the truth. Something in him flinches from the prospect of anyone else. He should have expected it, because everyone but Nathan has always made him flinch a little.
***
In 1986, in the fall of their senior year at MIT, Nathan starts dating a girl named Denise. Nathan has dated a lot of girls, but it's different this time. He's always singing her praises--she's beautiful, she's smart, she's the nicest person you could ever hope to meet--and when Harold finally meets her the next March, it all turns out to be true.
"Hello, Harold," she says, shaking his hand across the table of an Italian restaurant. "You don't look nearly as terrifying as I know you are."
"I'm terrifying?"
"Extremely. You're the only person whose opinion Nathan listens to."
Denise is an art history major at Harvard, but when Harold and Nathan inevitably start talking about computers, her eyes don't glaze over. She may not understand the technicalities, but the ideas interest her. And when she in turn talks about her interest in museum curatorship, Nathan listens to her, really listens without the affectionate eye-rolling Harold gets whenever he brings up unscientific topics.
By the time Nathan mentions that she'll be spending part of the summer on Martha's Vineyard, Harold has had time not to be surprised. He can picture here there, happy, already beginning to be one of the tribe. She even looks like them, with her tall athleticism and her light brown hair. She would wear a linen dress well.
On the subway back to campus, Harold wonders why he hasn't met her before now. Most people meet their friends' girlfriends, don't they? But then he hasn't met many of Nathan's. Since Nathan isn't the sort of person who naturally keeps things private, it must be that he doesn't want to hurt Harold's feelings. But Harold had to meet Denise, because with Denise, it's serious.
Harold can't get any work done that night. He tells himself he knew that this would happen. Nathan is straight, and there's never been any hope. But in the end all he can do is drink wine and lie in bed, helpless against this banal and predictable pain.
***
Harold doesn't go to work for Apple when he and Nathan graduate in 1987. They move to New York and start their own company. The capital is Nathan's; most of the tech work is Harold's. But then Nathan handles all the people work, using some instinct Harold lacks that lets him flatter and reassure clients in just the right ways. They make a good team.
***
"We wanted you to be the first to know," Nathan says. It's September, 1988, and they're in Nathan's office drinking champagne out of coffee mugs.
"Thank you. As it happens, I've known you were going to marry her ever since that night at Capriccio."
"And you didn't tell me?"
"I thought you knew."
"Yeah, well . . . the thing is, we weren't going to get married yet. Not until the company's a little more secure. But she's going to have a baby. We're going to have a baby."
For a year and a half, Harold has been expecting to be told about the marriage. He's been braced for it. But a baby is something else, something terribly irrevocable. "You're going to be a father," he says, and isn't at all sure that he's injected the right note of congratulation.
"I still can't really believe it. It's - it's unexpected."
"You don't sound happy, Nathan."
"I am. I really am. I love Denise and we both knew we wanted kids. Now is maybe not a great time, but I don't know, maybe everybody feels that way no matter when it happens." Nathan closes his eyes for a moment, looking tired and frightened, but when he opens them he's making a game try at a smile. "A baby. My baby. Me, a father."
"You'll be a good father," Harold says. Whatever that entails. But Nathan is good at nearly everything. If he can talk clients into buying innovative and expensive software systems whose principles they can't understand, surely he can teach a child to tie its shoes and ride a bicycle?
Harold wants Nathan to be a good father, because it's too late for him not to be one at all. It's too late for it to be just Harold and Nathan and the company, and maybe the occasional girl of Nathan's who doesn't matter very much. Nathan will be a husband and a father. It can't be wished away, so Harold wishes him success because failure would make him unhappy.
He refills their mugs with champagne.
"Harold, maybe I shouldn't ask, but are you . . . are you okay with this? Me and Denise getting married. You know . . . " Nathan, the man with the right word for everyone, shrugs helplessly.
"That was a long time ago, Nathan."
"God, it really was, wasn't it? Sorry, arrogant of me to think you might still be hung up on . . . on a stupid crush."
The penalty for half-truths is that people believe them. It was a long time ago, but the only change in Harold's feelings is that they've grown stronger. He smiles and ducks his head to cover the pain of hearing his love called a stupid crush. Nathan is only assuming that he did the adult thing, the rational thing, and got over it. From Nathan's perspective it makes perfect sense.
Asymmetry, Harold thinks. Nathan is the center of his world, but he is not the center of Nathan's, and with a baby coming he'll only get pushed farther out into the margins. There's nothing he can do about it. Nothing he ever could have done. It's not his fault, as he's told himself a hundred useless times. It's no one's fault that Nathan doesn't love him. Love is a system without causality.
" - meet someone," Nathan is saying. "I know we work crazy hours, but so do a lot of people. Maybe you could take out a personal ad?"
"I'll think about it," Harold answers, because Nathan has enough to worry about already.
***
Will Ingram is born on February 3, 1989. Harold gets a brief, jubilant call from Nathan in the middle of the night. A couple of weeks later, he drives up to Connecticut, where Nathan and Denise moved when they got married. He brings a dozen white roses and a bottle of Pétrus.
"You wicked man," Denise says, "bringing wine when I can't have any. And it's barely noon, too." She looks tired, and frankly like she could use a glass of wine, but also happy.
"It's not for you, it's for the baby." Harold shows her the label. "1988. By the time it's ready to drink, he'll be old enough to drink it with you."
"Oh, my. Wicked but brilliant. Thank you."
"Is he being brilliant already?" Nathan asks, emerging from the hallway with the baby, or what Harold presumes is the baby although all he can see is blankets, in his arms. "He just got here."
Denise shows him the bottle and Nathan adds his own thanks--"our days of wine and roses have come, I see"--before everyone drifts into the living room. "Do you want to hold the baby? Yes, of course you do," Nathan answers himself, "everyone wants to hold my fantastic son." Before Harold can protest that he's never held a baby in his life, Nathan has gently deposited the bundle in his arms. Luckily, Will is a placid baby who doesn't hold his inexperience against him. He looks muzzily at Harold for a moment, then subsides into blinking sleepiness.
"Isn't he gorgeous?"
"He's lovely."
Harold is treated to an account of Will's perfections for a few minutes before Denise rises. "I'm going to get changed, Nathan."
"She's is going to lunch with a friend," Nathan explains as she leaves the room. "I'm on baby duty, and you're my moral support."
"Ah."
"She's been looking forward to it. After I come back to work on Monday, it'll be just her and the baby all day every day."
"But I thought - "
"She's quit her job. Paying a nanny would eat up most of what she earns, and the commute from here isn't exactly short. In a few years, when Will starts school, we've talked about her maybe starting an antiques dealership or something."
A year ago Denise had been talking about graduate school. There've been times when Harold has envied her to the point of resentment, that because she's a woman she can sweep Nathan up and make him hers. He doesn't envy her at the moment. Though babies do seem to satisfy people more than one would expect. Even Nathan wears a look of slightly dazed joy that Harold has never seen before.
Denise reappears, wearing a green dress and makeup. "You have the restaurant's number, right, Nathan? And all the other emergency numbers are posted right by the phone." Her voice drops, and she murmurs something of which Harold can only hear " - in the fridge, just heat it to - "
"Denise," Nathan says at last, "go and enjoy your lunch. Everything will be fine."
"I know." She's smiling and fumbling nervously with her gloves. "And Harold? You look pretty natural holding the kid. Watch out, you'll start wanting one of your own."
When she's gone, Harold says, "She doesn't know, does she? About me."
"I figured if you wanted her to know, you'd tell her yourself."
"It's not that I don't want her to know. But it's an awkward conversation to begin. I keep waiting for the topic to come up naturally, which of course it doesn't." Harold has run scenarios in his head, possible ways of telling her, but in every one he has ended by letting his feelings for Nathan slip out. He's had to conclude that some part of him wants to confess (or is it brag? challenge?), so he's kept himself in check.
"God, Harold. You need to take a class or something. Talking to People 101."
"If there were such a class, I'd take it, believe me."
Nathan stands up and claps him on the shoulder. "Since you and Will seem to be doing okay there, why don't I get us some lunch? Then, although I hate the turn the conversation away from my fantastic son, we can talk about our baby."
He means the company, but he's never called it that before. Harold is mortified to find himself blushing. He looks down at the baby to hide it, and strokes Will's velvety cheek. "Listen to that, Will. He's abandoning us all on our own, like the babes in the wood."
***
The days of wine and roses last for twelve years. Harold and Nathan become millionaires, then, in the tech boom of the 1990s, billionaires. When the tech bust comes, the company is solid enough that it's only a little shaken up.
The unfolding potential of the internet absorbs Harold so much that he scarcely notices the years passing. He turns 25, then 30. He never dates, never has sex, though he ventures once onto a cybersex chatroom and flees it almost as quickly as he did that bar long ago. He never learns to love Nathan Ingram any less.
Will grows into a gentle boy, mingling his parents' intelligence and kindness with an introspection that is nothing like them. Far from pushing Harold out of Nathan's life, he gives him a way to stay in it. Will adopts him into the family, calls him "Uncle Harold," wants him to visit every weekend (Harold doesn't) and to come to Martha's Vineyard every summer (Harold does, usually).
It isn't a bad life, Harold decides, even if a lot of it is someone else's.
***
On September 11, 2001, Harold and Nathan are twelve blocks from ground zero.
Harold's memories of that day are never very clear apart from frozen horrific moments, but he remembers walking north, holding Nathan's arm to guide him because Nathan is on his cell phone the whole time, trying and failing to get through to Denise in Connecticut.
Eventually he talks Nathan out of trying to walk all the way home. They get a room in a hotel somewhere on the upper west side, where they sit in dust-covered clothes watching CNN. Nathan manages to reach Denise and Will on the hotel's landline. After a few minutes, Nathan passes the phone to Harold, and by the time everyone has spoken to each other they're all crying. The tears leave channels in the white dust on Nathan's face.
Eventually it occurs to them to take showers, and then they sit wearing hotel bathrobes, watching the news. They sit up all night and hardly say a word.
When it's dark and late and the city is grotesquely quiet, Nathan reaches out and takes Harold's hand. They sit like that, holding tightly across the space between their chairs, until morning.
***
Will calls Harold unexpectedly in April of 2005 and asks to come and see him that weekend. He won't say why.
Harold meets him at Grand Central and takes him to the Oyster Bar for lunch. At sixteen, Will is going through a shy phase that's peculiar in a boy who's always been happy as well as rich, intelligent, and good-looking. An uncomfortable silence stretches while they wait for their lunches, and finally Harold says, "Just tell me. Please. You're worrying me."
For the last two days, appalling possibilities have played themselves out in Harold's mind despite all his attempts to concentrate on work. Is it drugs? Has Will gotten some girl pregnant? Has he hurt someone? Has someone hurt him? Harold realizes he's drumming his fingertips over the tablecloth, and pushes his hand flat.
"Uncle Harold, I . . . I'm gay."
Harold chokes back a startled laugh that Will would certainly misunderstand. He thought of so many things that might be troubling Will. Why is this the one that never occurred to him? "Oh. I see."
"Aren't you going to ask me if I'm sure? How can I know at my age? Have I tried dating girls?
"No," Harold says. He's thinking My God, couldn't the gay gene, if there is a gay gene, have expressed itself a generation earlier? "I wasn't going to ask you anything so condescending, Will."
Will sighs, a disturbingly adult sound. He's not so very young anymore. That's growing up: learning to worry. "Thanks. Sorry. I - I got myself all ready for a big argument with you. Stupid. I mean, I know you're not that kind of guy. But I've heard some pretty bad stories about . . . about coming out. It's scary."
Harold tries to focus on Will and not on the ironies of timing and genetics. But it's not as though Nathan is irrelevant. "Do your parents know?"
"No." Will pauses while the waitress delivers their plates. "Not yet. I thought I'd tell you first, sort of . . . "
"Practice?"
"Yeah. Sorry."
"It's all right, Will. When do you plan to tell them? I'll keep your secret as long as you need me to, but I'd prefer not to have to."
"Soon. I might try tonight, keep the momentum going."
"That's not a bad idea."
"Mom'll be okay. But Dad, I don't know. Father and son stuff gets pretty weird. All that expectation. I know he's disappointed that I'm not more into computers and stuff and taking over his share of the business someday. He's too nice to say it, but he's disappointed."
"Your father isn't going to reject you because you're gay. He's a much better man than that."
"I don't think he will. I don't want to think he will. But I can't know, not in advance."
"I do know, Will. I know because he never rejected me." Harold picks up an oyster and gulps it down without tasting it, too embarrassed to look at Will as the knowledge sinks in.
"Are you telling me you're gay, Uncle Harold?"
"Yes."
"Huh. Wow."
"That's more or less what your father said." Harold looks over and is glad to see Will smiling.
He's sometimes thought that Will is, in a way, his son too. For all his sociability, Will has an analytical and bookish turn of mind that he didn't get from either of his parents. Perhaps it came, not genetically but memetically, from Harold. And now it seems that in one deep, fundamental part of their natures, he and Will are very much alike.
If Nathan, unimaginably, can't accept him, it will break Harold's heart as much as Will's.
They talk easily now over lunch. Harold deflects a few questions ("No, I'm not seeing anyone at the moment") and hears about Will's boyfriend Brian, the star of the school tennis team, who wants to study paleontology at Harvard. It's astonishing, he thinks, how much has changed in a generation, how easy and simple things are for boys Will's age. But that's not entirely true, and thinking it is probably a sign of incipient middle age. Things aren't so easy that Will isn't afraid to come out to his own father. And nothing would have been easy for Harold, no matter when he'd been born. He is not made for ease.
After lunch, Harold says, "Go home and talk to your mom and dad. Come on, I'll take you down to your train."
When the train is announced, Will--who Harold notices has grown taller than him--turns and hugs him the way he used to do when he was a little boy. "Thanks, Uncle Harold," he says, and disappears towards the platform.
***
He meets Grace on June 14, 2006. He smiles at her, although he never smiles at people. When she starts up a conversation, he does his best to continue it.
Grace likes Handel, Mahler, Cole Porter, and the Kinks. She has read, actually read, both Crime and Punishment and Moby Dick. She prefers Sondheim to Andrew Lloyd Webber and Durer to Michelangelo.
She doesn't cringe when Harold says he works in tech support for an insurance company. (There's no reason to lie to her, except a constant niggle in the back of his mind ever since he started building the machine. That and a lifelong habit.)
She finds him interesting. She likes him.
"Is this a date?" she asks, when the second weekend after they meet they go to see Double Indemnity and get Indian food afterwards. The previous weekend, they had tea and went to an exhibit at the Japan Society. "I need to know if these are dates."
This is a question Harold has avoided asking himself. "I suppose they are," he says, because she is so kind, so easy to talk to, and her likes her more than he's ever liked anyone but Nathan. "If that's all right with you."
She laughs. "It's fine with me."
At the end of their next date a week later, she looks at Harold with a sort of encouraging expectation, and he kisses her. She kisses him back with her arms around him and doesn't ask why he did it. In many respects, it's much more pleasant than kissing Nathan was. And so he kisses her again.
Does this mean he's not gay anymore? When he gets home, he sits down with a glass of wine and his laptop and tries to think.
Since he first learned about the Kinsey scale, he's considered himself a Kinsey 6. He's only ever wanted men. Or really, one man. The other fleeting feelings--noticing a good-looking man, feeling heatedly shy if he sees two men kissing or embracing, masturbatory fantasies of a male body against his--are those attractions, or are they something else? Do they count?
Does Grace count?
He kissed her twice, so he must have wanted to kiss her, although he's never ached for it as he did--does--with Nathan. He enjoyed holding her close, but when he's not with her, he doesn't feel an agony of emptiness.
Two attractions, he could say. One to a man, one to a woman. Take an average: 6 plus 0 divided by 2 would make him a Kinsey 3, exactly bisexual.
He has known Grace for three weeks. He has loved Nathan since he was a teenager.
The Kinsey scale is garbage.
Harold makes his own scale, with variables for intensity of attraction, duration, romantic feelings, cultural pressure, active vs. responsive desire, and more. When he graphs it on the computer, he gets a spikily three-dimensional shape that is mostly blue for Nathan, with a little pink for Grace and a small area of green for other men.
He is a Kinsey multicolored irregular polyhedron.
He is forty years old and Nathan Ingram will never love him any more or any differently than he already does.
A few weeks later, he and Grace go to bed together. It's not everything he imagined sex would be, but it's good in its way. When she touches him, he feels wanted. Afterwards, holding her, he says, "You deserve someone better." He doesn't mean only his performance in bed, which he's sure was sub-par. She deserves someone who will tell her his real name and real job and who isn't mostly gay along ten variables and in love with someone else. Perhaps if he said that, she'd agree. But he doesn't, and she only smiles and says, "Don't be silly, Harold. It's you I want."
He never does tell her about Nathan. He never tells Nathan about her, and especially, he never tells Will. He and Will have been closer than ever since they came out to each other, and he can't lose that. It's the least of the betrayals in this tangle, but it's the one he's most ashamed of.
On the anniversary of their first meeting, he asks Grace to marry him and she accepts. They don't set a date yet. He moves in with her and they still don't set a date. They never do. They're engaged for three years.
***
"I'm glad you're here, Harold. Christ, it's late, why are you here?"
Harold, trying to find a coding error in the machine's facial recognition subsystem, doesn't look up from the screen. "I'm always here."
"You are, aren't you? Poor little Harold. Come and talk to me." It's December of 2009, and Nathan, it seems, is drunk. Attention caught by the slurred words, Harold lifts his head in time to see Nathan plop into a chair amidst a cloud of Scotch fumes.
"What's wrong?" His voice, he notices, sounds panicky. He's been inclined to panic lately. Panic is the active mode of paranoia, and he is building a machine which is paranoia in computerized form.
"Oh, not the end of the world." Nathan spins the chair in a circle. "Denise left me, that's all. She wants a divorce."
"She left you? Denise left you? How could . . . "
"On her two little feet. And then a car and an airplane and all the way to California."
"God, Nathan, I'm so sorry," Harold says, thinking How can she? After she was lucky enough to get him, how can she abandon him? "That's awful, I'm sorry."
"She said she never had a chance to have a life of her own. What the hell can I say to that? It's true."
"I thought she was happy."
"She wanted to be a museum curator, remember? Instead she had a little antique store she had to fill with rustic crap because that's what tourists buy."
"She had you. And Will."
"Will's grown up. And things have been pretty . . . pretty not so great between me and Denise for a long time."
They've seemed fine to Harold. But then, he doesn't see them together as often as he used to before Will left home and he started living with Grace. He sees only Nathan as much as ever, because Nathan turns up in Harold's workspace or they go out for a late-night meal or a drink. It's been a little like the old days, before Denise. And now he knows why. "You didn't tell me."
"I can't always tell you everything, Harold. And hell, you never tell me anything, so we're more than even on that one."
"That's not true."
"We talk about the company, or the news. Or your machine. Or you tell me about books you've read. You never talk about you. You're on a first-name basis with my mother, but I don't know your mother's name. Never met her. She could have died forty years ago for all I know."
There's never been anything worth saying about himself, except what he mustn't say. The unfairness of it stings. Harold takes off his glasses and presses at the corners of his tired eyes, blotting out Nathan for a few seconds. "I . . . Nathan . . . "
"Hey." He hears Nathan get up, setting the empty chair spinning again, and come over to him. "It's how you've always been, Harold. I'm used to it. It's okay." Nathan's hand settles on his shoulder, heavy and bathwater-warm. The urge to fall forward and finally be close to him is so powerful that Harold shudders, and in response Nathan squeezes his shoulder gently.
Harold sighs and puts his glasses back on, and Nathan lets go of him. "Of course you couldn't tell me. Denise has a right to her privacy. Was - was it today that she left?"
"Early this morning. We were fighting half the night and then talking the other half."
"And then you came to work?"
"What else was there to do? Anyway, this evening I got drunk in the office, which I've always kind of wanted to do, so that's a plus. It's okay, you can laugh. I can laugh. Because I'm pretty much okay, that's what I really need to tell you."
"Forgive me if I'm a little skeptical."
"No, it's . . . it's like a hurricane, I admit that. My life is blowing around in the wind. But from the minute we calmed down and she looked at me and she said 'We should get a divorce,' there's been a part of me that thinks this is for the best. I'll miss her. And it's going to be hard on Will. But, I don't know. Maybe it's not possible to love someone for a lifetime."
Harold doesn't answer that. There's nothing he can say.
Nathan yawns hugely and seems to sag. "Fuck, I'm tired."
"So I see. Come on, I'll drive you home."
"Oh, that's why I - I remember now. Could I stay with you for a few days? I can't face the house yet, and hotels are so . . . "
A staticky burst of shock comes over Harold as the edges of two of his incompatible lives rub together. Then he goes calm, remembering that there's a solution. He never gave up his brownstone after he moved in with Grace, although she doesn't know it. Most of his old furniture's still there, and some of his clothes. Towels, kitchen things, toiletries, even some frozen meals. A cleaning service comes in every two weeks to dust and keep the house aired out. It's a bolt-hole, though he's never wanted to think of it in those terms. It's a place to hide when--if--some nameless disaster overtakes him. He finds he's glad that he hasn't had to wait for a disaster to go back to it. "Of course," he says.
When they arrive, he quickly makes up a bed in the guest room and gets Nathan, groggy from falling asleep during the twenty-block drive, into it. Then he orders some Chinese food for his dinner and sets about making the place look lived in. Tomorrow--it's Sunday tomorrow, he won't bother going to work--he'll get some bagels, some coffee and cream for Nathan, some orchids or maybe a Christmas wreath to give the house a little vitality. He wants Nathan to feel at home here, for as long as he stays.
When he's sure Nathan's asleep, Harold calls Grace and tells her that he's had to go to Chicago to deal with a tech crisis at another branch (she doesn't ask what branch or what tech crisis) and he doesn't know how soon he'll be back.
***
They drink the Pétrus on February 3, 2010: Will's twenty-first birthday. Denise flies back from San Francisco and the four of them gather at Café Boulud. Nathan and Denise are exquisitely polite to each other, and everyone smiles a lot. Nathan retells funny and mildly embarrassing stories from Will's childhood. Will, for his part, is quiet, talking when prompted about medical school and the new boyfriend he hardly has time to see, but falling silent a lot and looking wistfully at his parents. The divorce, with so much money and so many lawyers involved, has gotten bitter; this is the first time Nathan and Denise have been in the same room since she left him.
After the meal, when Will has excused himself to the bathroom and Nathan has gone to double-check some detail of a special birthday dessert, Denise laughs unhappily and says, "God, poor Will. I knew this was a bad idea."
"Will wanted to have you both here."
"Will's still a little boy in some ways. He's half expecting that Nathan and I will fall in love again over the duck confit."
"Probably. But I think it would be worse for him if you weren't here."
"How's Nathan been?"
Harold refills her glass with the last of the Pétrus before answering levelly, "All right."
"For God's sake, Harold, I do still care about him. You don't need to defend him from me."
"Is that what I was doing?"
Denise shakes her head, well-styled hair gleaming. Leaving Nathan has agreed with her. She looks younger. "Pax, okay? I know you're on his side, but let's not fight. Not now."
"Pax. And he really is all right."
After a short silence, she says hesitantly, "You're incredibly loyal, you know that? God knows there were times in the last few years when I'd have given him to you if I could."
Harold feels his face redden and all the blood surge in his veins. He looks around to make sure Nathan isn't back yet. "You know. That I . . . "
"It took me a few years to realize. I was pretty naive, Harvard education or not. But then . . . we were at Martha's Vineyard, Will must have been two or three. Nathan was wading in the surf with him and you were watching Nathan. I thought about how you never dated anyone, never talked about women or even seemed to notice them, and I knew."
"Oh, God."
"Listen, Harold." Amazingly, she lays her hand on his and holds it for a moment. "I didn't bring this up to embarrass you. I wanted to say that, well, he's just a man. He's a pretty good man, and a brilliant one, but he's not the holy grail. You can't spend your life following him."
"If my life proves anything, it's that I can." He takes a couple of deep breaths. Will and Nathan will notice if he's upset when they come back. "Do you think I don't know that he's flawed? It doesn't matter. And I know how pathetic my life must look to you. How parasitical. But this is what I have."
"I didn't mean that. What I'm saying is, you've given him almost as much of your life as I gave him of mine, and you got a lot less in return." Quickly, because Will is returning to the table now, she adds, "Find your own life. It's worth it."
***
Nathan Ingram dies on April 24, 2010.
So does Harold Wren.
***
As far as he can figure out later (and it seems important to figure it out), Harold is in surgery during Nathan's funeral. He finds coverage of the funeral on every major news website, with photographs of Will and Denise looking blankly stunned. He couldn't have gone even if he'd been uninjured, of course, not safely, and it's not as though sitting in church or standing at a grave would bring him any closer to Nathan. Nathan is equally, infinitely distant from every speck of dust on earth. There is no reaching him anymore.
Harold is in the hospital for a very long time. Eventually he checks himself out against his doctors' advice. Later he sends an anonymous three million dollar donation that should more than cover the cost of treating a man whose name, or rather alias, has already disappeared from their records.
Since chance and medicine have conspired to keep him alive, he forces himself through the effort required to stay that way. In the last year of the machine project he laid the groundwork for multiple new identities; he made some for Nathan, too, which are not needed anymore. He buys a new house, the brownstone being off-limits because Grace knows he used to live there. He finds new doctors and creates a set of medical records to account for his broken neck and shattered pelvis. He hides his bank accounts under layers and layers of obfuscation. He arranges for Grace to receive a generous grant from an extremely little-known arts foundation. Harold Wren left her all his property, but there wasn't much of it; he was only in tech support, after all.
He calls Will Ingram from an anonymous cell phone and lets him know that he's still alive. Will seems to believe his ridiculous story of a car accident and amnesia, probably because Will believes that Harold is too unworldly to lie. Contacting him is a terrible risk, a stupid risk, but Will is the one thing left that Harold can't let go. Will is the only part of Nathan still living.
Harold sleeps, he wakes, he eats, he sees his doctors, he endures physical therapy, he learns to walk again, he thinks about the machine and the government and what happened. He is in pain all the time. Damaged nerves are constantly signaling: something is wrong, something is broken. And from his mind, the same signals: Nathan is gone, Nathan is gone, Nathan is gone.
All the while, through the backdoor that Harold built and then denied because he thought Nathan would be safer not knowing, the machine sends him the numbers of people he can't save.
When he thinks he can bear it, he travels to Connecticut to visit Nathan's grave. It's another foolish risk that he finds himself impelled to take.
He's long since lost track of dates, but it is fall. Red and gold leaves rustle under his halting footsteps in the cemetery. He finds a tasteful plain stone with a name and two dates. Nathan is under it.
Nathan is not under it. A coffin is under it, a corpse. Nathan is gone.
The advantage, Harold thinks distantly, of being a cripple is that it keeps him from making a spectacle of himself by lying on Nathan's grave.
He is sobbing. Time has passed. He's been sobbing for a while. Someone has put a hand on his elbow and is speaking to him gently.
"I'm sorry to intrude," says the man. He's a little older than Harold, with a round face and soft gray hair. "But I didn't think you should be all by yourself."
Harold gulps and wipes his face on his coat sleeve. He tries to speak but only croaks, and then he concentrates on breathing for a while. He'd thought over the last month or so that his grief was easing off a little, but now it's a physical pain to match the ones in his neck and leg, a weight and a clenching likes stones piled on top of him.
"He must have meant a lot to you," the man says.
"He - he - everything."
"How long were you together?"
"Twenty-seven years."
"That's a long time."
Tears are running down Harold's face again. For the lie, for the truth, because it is the truth of Harold's withered and inadequate heart whatever the facts. Twenty-seven years lie under that stone, buried, gone. All his life, all his truth are there, and what's left is a ghost and a lie. Harold Finch, creature of pixels and code, who has no past and loves no one.
But, well, I went looking around for fic about Harold's relationship with Nathan Ingram, and there wasn't any that seemed worth reading. (Not that was posted before S2 aired, anyway--I'm being very spoiler-avoidant.) So I did what we're always told we should do and wrote the fic I wanted to read.
If you can forgive it its canon noncompliance, or treat it as an AU or something, I hope it will be a fic you wanted to read too.
I'm not planning to post this to AO3, because I imagine an audience of strangers will be less tolerant of pre-jossed fic. (ETA: Yeah, my resolve not to post it on AO3 lasted about half an hour, so you can read it there if you would rather.)
Title: Timeline of a Partial Life
Fandom: Person of Interest
Characters/Pairings: Harold/Nathan unrequited, Harold/Grace sort of, Will Ingram, OFC (Nathan's wife)
Rating: Teen
Content Notes: Bad things that happened in canon happen here. Also unrequited love. Not really a happy story. Complete lack of Reese.
Word count: 7409
Summary: The story of Harold's life with(out) Nathan Ingram.
Harold kisses Nathan Ingram on Friday, December 21, 1983. It's some time between two and three in the morning. They're sitting under the trees in DuPont Court, celebrating the end of their first semester at MIT by splitting a six-pack of wine coolers.
Harold has never drunk alcohol before. He's never kissed someone before, either. In one sense, the kiss is a sudden impulse. He's just said that he'd like to work for Apple after he graduates, and Nathan has answered that he's too smart to work for someone else. It occurs to Harold then that almost a month will go by before he sees Nathan again, a cold month of never talking to the only person he's ever met who likes talking to him. He leans tipsily across the cardboard skeleton of the six-pack and kisses Nathan.
But although the act is impulsive, the kiss is thoroughly premeditated. Finch has been hoping since the second week of September that Nathan will kiss him. When he reaches out, it's a recognition that one way or another, he's got to stop hoping.
It lasts no more than a second of warm pressure and the overripe peach smell of the wine coolers. Harold drops back to the ground, dizzy with wine and audacity, feeling as though a daring stranger momentarily took over his body.
"What was that all about?" Nathan asks.
There's a sudden foul taste in Harold's mouth, peaches and sugar gone to rot, everything gone to decay and ruin. "Oh, God, I'm so sorry. I - I won't do it again. I'm sorry."
"Okay," Nathan says calmly and opens up the last two wine coolers. He hands one to Harold, who is so distressed he almost drops it. Later, Harold will understand this as the moment he falls in love with Nathan. Before, it was an infatuation that might have passed, but Nathan's kindness, his forgiveness, those are things Harold will never get over.
"So," Nathan says after a couple of minutes' silent thought, "does this mean you're gay?"
"I guess it does. Yes." 100% of Harold's sexual attractions have been to men, so yes, he is by definition gay. In fact, 100% of Harold's sexual attractions have been to Nathan Ingram. It's a small sample size, but as much as he needs. Nathan is as much as he needs for anything.
"Wow." Nathan swallows audibly and leans back on his elbows, staring up through the leaves at the starless sky. He's not as comfortable as he's trying to seem, Harold sees, and is amazed that he can see it, that Nathan makes sense to him when other people are so baffling. "Be careful, okay, Harold? Don't, you know, catch AIDS or anything. You're my best friend."
Harold promises to be careful. He would promise anything. He tells himself that the difference between "You're my best friend," and "I love you," is not terribly important.
In the summer of 1984, Harold spends a week with Nathan and his family at their summer house on Martha's Vineyard. Nathan's family are tall, blond, and confident; it's like falling among a tribe of very civilized Vikings. They wear beautiful clothes that look specially designed to be worn on islands, and they drink wine with dinner every night. Harold remembers the wine coolers and realizes that Nathan was making allowances for him.
"It's got to have practical applications," Nathan says one afternoon. They're sitting on the beach talking about fractals. "Beyond showing why it's impossible to accurately measure a coastline. I wish I understood the math better."
"The math is easy."
"Oh, it starts out easy. Then all of a sudden the coast of Martha's Vineyard is infinite and the universe is Sierpinski triangles all the way down."
"Well, implications, that's different. But the math is easy."
Nathan grins and flicks a few grains of sand at him. The sand is almost the color of Nathan's tanned skin, which is just a few shades lighter than his linen pants and a few darker than his loose white shirt. He looks amazing, and as at home as the sand or the waves. He belongs here. Harold, in contrast, is wearing a too-bright sweater vest and polyester-blend pants that make him look like a file clerk. Not once has he felt anything but alien, although the Ingrams have been welcoming in their casual way.
"I wish it wasn't too cold to swim," Nathan says.
"Me too." In fact Harold is relieved. He feels ugly next to Nathan even with all his clothes on. And his reaction to the sight of Nathan in swim trunks might be . . . well, Nathan's been wonderful about pretending that Harold never humiliated himself with that kiss, but some things are too much. Too obvious. "I read a poem about the beach. It says that the sound of the sea is the sound of all human sorrow."
"And that, Harold, is why you have no social life."
"Because Matthew Arnold wrote a depressing poem?"
"Because you go around quoting it. I think the sound of the sea is the sound of lobsters being caught for tonight's dinner. And a steamed lobster is the epitome of human happiness."
"Thank you, Socrates."
There is a single grain of sand caught in the hollow above Nathan's upper lip. Harold looks away, pressing his lips together like a trap, imprisoning the urge to kiss him again.
"Speaking of dinner," says Nathan, looking at his watch, "We should probably head back."
They starting talking about fractals again as they walk, but all the way, Harold has the sound of grief in his ears.
In August of 1984, just before the new school year starts, Harold goes to New York for the weekend. He's got a good fake ID, money he's saved from working all summer as a math and science tutor, and a new suit made of pure light wool. It's off the rack, but off a Macy's rack at least, and on his first day in the city he has it professionally altered while he watches, paying close attention to everything the tailor does and everything he says about fit, the width of lapels, the indispensability of cuff buttons that really unbutton. Afterwards Harold gets his hair cut at a salon that charges eight times what he's used to. On the way back to his hotel, he blushingly buys a pack of condoms.
That night he goes to a gay bar that he's picked out of the advertisements in the Village Voice. It costs him $20 to get in and he stays for fifteen minutes.
Back in the quiet safety of his hotel room, he searches for the error in his own expectations. He'd been picturing . . . what? Something out of the last century. Leather armchairs, single-malt scotch and crusted port, quotations from Oscar Wilde, subtle flirtatious glances. Instead there'd been sweaty mustachioed men grinding together to disco music played too loud for any conversation at all. He'd been the only one in the bar wearing a suit.
Perhaps his dismay is hypocritical. What he wants, after all, is sex; the plan was to have sex. When he thinks about sex in the abstract, as a body against his, as all the kissing he's ever dreamed of, he wants it so badly he could scream. But he doesn't want sex with any of the men he saw in the bar. What is sex to them? Something fast and crude, Harold supposes. Something they have every night and forget instantly, as significant as a slice of pizza. Harold wants sex in a bed, with someone who will be kind to him and want to talk to him afterwards.
He wants Nathan. That's the truth. Something in him flinches from the prospect of anyone else. He should have expected it, because everyone but Nathan has always made him flinch a little.
In 1986, in the fall of their senior year at MIT, Nathan starts dating a girl named Denise. Nathan has dated a lot of girls, but it's different this time. He's always singing her praises--she's beautiful, she's smart, she's the nicest person you could ever hope to meet--and when Harold finally meets her the next March, it all turns out to be true.
"Hello, Harold," she says, shaking his hand across the table of an Italian restaurant. "You don't look nearly as terrifying as I know you are."
"I'm terrifying?"
"Extremely. You're the only person whose opinion Nathan listens to."
Denise is an art history major at Harvard, but when Harold and Nathan inevitably start talking about computers, her eyes don't glaze over. She may not understand the technicalities, but the ideas interest her. And when she in turn talks about her interest in museum curatorship, Nathan listens to her, really listens without the affectionate eye-rolling Harold gets whenever he brings up unscientific topics.
By the time Nathan mentions that she'll be spending part of the summer on Martha's Vineyard, Harold has had time not to be surprised. He can picture here there, happy, already beginning to be one of the tribe. She even looks like them, with her tall athleticism and her light brown hair. She would wear a linen dress well.
On the subway back to campus, Harold wonders why he hasn't met her before now. Most people meet their friends' girlfriends, don't they? But then he hasn't met many of Nathan's. Since Nathan isn't the sort of person who naturally keeps things private, it must be that he doesn't want to hurt Harold's feelings. But Harold had to meet Denise, because with Denise, it's serious.
Harold can't get any work done that night. He tells himself he knew that this would happen. Nathan is straight, and there's never been any hope. But in the end all he can do is drink wine and lie in bed, helpless against this banal and predictable pain.
Harold doesn't go to work for Apple when he and Nathan graduate in 1987. They move to New York and start their own company. The capital is Nathan's; most of the tech work is Harold's. But then Nathan handles all the people work, using some instinct Harold lacks that lets him flatter and reassure clients in just the right ways. They make a good team.
"We wanted you to be the first to know," Nathan says. It's September, 1988, and they're in Nathan's office drinking champagne out of coffee mugs.
"Thank you. As it happens, I've known you were going to marry her ever since that night at Capriccio."
"And you didn't tell me?"
"I thought you knew."
"Yeah, well . . . the thing is, we weren't going to get married yet. Not until the company's a little more secure. But she's going to have a baby. We're going to have a baby."
For a year and a half, Harold has been expecting to be told about the marriage. He's been braced for it. But a baby is something else, something terribly irrevocable. "You're going to be a father," he says, and isn't at all sure that he's injected the right note of congratulation.
"I still can't really believe it. It's - it's unexpected."
"You don't sound happy, Nathan."
"I am. I really am. I love Denise and we both knew we wanted kids. Now is maybe not a great time, but I don't know, maybe everybody feels that way no matter when it happens." Nathan closes his eyes for a moment, looking tired and frightened, but when he opens them he's making a game try at a smile. "A baby. My baby. Me, a father."
"You'll be a good father," Harold says. Whatever that entails. But Nathan is good at nearly everything. If he can talk clients into buying innovative and expensive software systems whose principles they can't understand, surely he can teach a child to tie its shoes and ride a bicycle?
Harold wants Nathan to be a good father, because it's too late for him not to be one at all. It's too late for it to be just Harold and Nathan and the company, and maybe the occasional girl of Nathan's who doesn't matter very much. Nathan will be a husband and a father. It can't be wished away, so Harold wishes him success because failure would make him unhappy.
He refills their mugs with champagne.
"Harold, maybe I shouldn't ask, but are you . . . are you okay with this? Me and Denise getting married. You know . . . " Nathan, the man with the right word for everyone, shrugs helplessly.
"That was a long time ago, Nathan."
"God, it really was, wasn't it? Sorry, arrogant of me to think you might still be hung up on . . . on a stupid crush."
The penalty for half-truths is that people believe them. It was a long time ago, but the only change in Harold's feelings is that they've grown stronger. He smiles and ducks his head to cover the pain of hearing his love called a stupid crush. Nathan is only assuming that he did the adult thing, the rational thing, and got over it. From Nathan's perspective it makes perfect sense.
Asymmetry, Harold thinks. Nathan is the center of his world, but he is not the center of Nathan's, and with a baby coming he'll only get pushed farther out into the margins. There's nothing he can do about it. Nothing he ever could have done. It's not his fault, as he's told himself a hundred useless times. It's no one's fault that Nathan doesn't love him. Love is a system without causality.
" - meet someone," Nathan is saying. "I know we work crazy hours, but so do a lot of people. Maybe you could take out a personal ad?"
"I'll think about it," Harold answers, because Nathan has enough to worry about already.
Will Ingram is born on February 3, 1989. Harold gets a brief, jubilant call from Nathan in the middle of the night. A couple of weeks later, he drives up to Connecticut, where Nathan and Denise moved when they got married. He brings a dozen white roses and a bottle of Pétrus.
"You wicked man," Denise says, "bringing wine when I can't have any. And it's barely noon, too." She looks tired, and frankly like she could use a glass of wine, but also happy.
"It's not for you, it's for the baby." Harold shows her the label. "1988. By the time it's ready to drink, he'll be old enough to drink it with you."
"Oh, my. Wicked but brilliant. Thank you."
"Is he being brilliant already?" Nathan asks, emerging from the hallway with the baby, or what Harold presumes is the baby although all he can see is blankets, in his arms. "He just got here."
Denise shows him the bottle and Nathan adds his own thanks--"our days of wine and roses have come, I see"--before everyone drifts into the living room. "Do you want to hold the baby? Yes, of course you do," Nathan answers himself, "everyone wants to hold my fantastic son." Before Harold can protest that he's never held a baby in his life, Nathan has gently deposited the bundle in his arms. Luckily, Will is a placid baby who doesn't hold his inexperience against him. He looks muzzily at Harold for a moment, then subsides into blinking sleepiness.
"Isn't he gorgeous?"
"He's lovely."
Harold is treated to an account of Will's perfections for a few minutes before Denise rises. "I'm going to get changed, Nathan."
"She's is going to lunch with a friend," Nathan explains as she leaves the room. "I'm on baby duty, and you're my moral support."
"Ah."
"She's been looking forward to it. After I come back to work on Monday, it'll be just her and the baby all day every day."
"But I thought - "
"She's quit her job. Paying a nanny would eat up most of what she earns, and the commute from here isn't exactly short. In a few years, when Will starts school, we've talked about her maybe starting an antiques dealership or something."
A year ago Denise had been talking about graduate school. There've been times when Harold has envied her to the point of resentment, that because she's a woman she can sweep Nathan up and make him hers. He doesn't envy her at the moment. Though babies do seem to satisfy people more than one would expect. Even Nathan wears a look of slightly dazed joy that Harold has never seen before.
Denise reappears, wearing a green dress and makeup. "You have the restaurant's number, right, Nathan? And all the other emergency numbers are posted right by the phone." Her voice drops, and she murmurs something of which Harold can only hear " - in the fridge, just heat it to - "
"Denise," Nathan says at last, "go and enjoy your lunch. Everything will be fine."
"I know." She's smiling and fumbling nervously with her gloves. "And Harold? You look pretty natural holding the kid. Watch out, you'll start wanting one of your own."
When she's gone, Harold says, "She doesn't know, does she? About me."
"I figured if you wanted her to know, you'd tell her yourself."
"It's not that I don't want her to know. But it's an awkward conversation to begin. I keep waiting for the topic to come up naturally, which of course it doesn't." Harold has run scenarios in his head, possible ways of telling her, but in every one he has ended by letting his feelings for Nathan slip out. He's had to conclude that some part of him wants to confess (or is it brag? challenge?), so he's kept himself in check.
"God, Harold. You need to take a class or something. Talking to People 101."
"If there were such a class, I'd take it, believe me."
Nathan stands up and claps him on the shoulder. "Since you and Will seem to be doing okay there, why don't I get us some lunch? Then, although I hate the turn the conversation away from my fantastic son, we can talk about our baby."
He means the company, but he's never called it that before. Harold is mortified to find himself blushing. He looks down at the baby to hide it, and strokes Will's velvety cheek. "Listen to that, Will. He's abandoning us all on our own, like the babes in the wood."
The days of wine and roses last for twelve years. Harold and Nathan become millionaires, then, in the tech boom of the 1990s, billionaires. When the tech bust comes, the company is solid enough that it's only a little shaken up.
The unfolding potential of the internet absorbs Harold so much that he scarcely notices the years passing. He turns 25, then 30. He never dates, never has sex, though he ventures once onto a cybersex chatroom and flees it almost as quickly as he did that bar long ago. He never learns to love Nathan Ingram any less.
Will grows into a gentle boy, mingling his parents' intelligence and kindness with an introspection that is nothing like them. Far from pushing Harold out of Nathan's life, he gives him a way to stay in it. Will adopts him into the family, calls him "Uncle Harold," wants him to visit every weekend (Harold doesn't) and to come to Martha's Vineyard every summer (Harold does, usually).
It isn't a bad life, Harold decides, even if a lot of it is someone else's.
On September 11, 2001, Harold and Nathan are twelve blocks from ground zero.
Harold's memories of that day are never very clear apart from frozen horrific moments, but he remembers walking north, holding Nathan's arm to guide him because Nathan is on his cell phone the whole time, trying and failing to get through to Denise in Connecticut.
Eventually he talks Nathan out of trying to walk all the way home. They get a room in a hotel somewhere on the upper west side, where they sit in dust-covered clothes watching CNN. Nathan manages to reach Denise and Will on the hotel's landline. After a few minutes, Nathan passes the phone to Harold, and by the time everyone has spoken to each other they're all crying. The tears leave channels in the white dust on Nathan's face.
Eventually it occurs to them to take showers, and then they sit wearing hotel bathrobes, watching the news. They sit up all night and hardly say a word.
When it's dark and late and the city is grotesquely quiet, Nathan reaches out and takes Harold's hand. They sit like that, holding tightly across the space between their chairs, until morning.
Will calls Harold unexpectedly in April of 2005 and asks to come and see him that weekend. He won't say why.
Harold meets him at Grand Central and takes him to the Oyster Bar for lunch. At sixteen, Will is going through a shy phase that's peculiar in a boy who's always been happy as well as rich, intelligent, and good-looking. An uncomfortable silence stretches while they wait for their lunches, and finally Harold says, "Just tell me. Please. You're worrying me."
For the last two days, appalling possibilities have played themselves out in Harold's mind despite all his attempts to concentrate on work. Is it drugs? Has Will gotten some girl pregnant? Has he hurt someone? Has someone hurt him? Harold realizes he's drumming his fingertips over the tablecloth, and pushes his hand flat.
"Uncle Harold, I . . . I'm gay."
Harold chokes back a startled laugh that Will would certainly misunderstand. He thought of so many things that might be troubling Will. Why is this the one that never occurred to him? "Oh. I see."
"Aren't you going to ask me if I'm sure? How can I know at my age? Have I tried dating girls?
"No," Harold says. He's thinking My God, couldn't the gay gene, if there is a gay gene, have expressed itself a generation earlier? "I wasn't going to ask you anything so condescending, Will."
Will sighs, a disturbingly adult sound. He's not so very young anymore. That's growing up: learning to worry. "Thanks. Sorry. I - I got myself all ready for a big argument with you. Stupid. I mean, I know you're not that kind of guy. But I've heard some pretty bad stories about . . . about coming out. It's scary."
Harold tries to focus on Will and not on the ironies of timing and genetics. But it's not as though Nathan is irrelevant. "Do your parents know?"
"No." Will pauses while the waitress delivers their plates. "Not yet. I thought I'd tell you first, sort of . . . "
"Practice?"
"Yeah. Sorry."
"It's all right, Will. When do you plan to tell them? I'll keep your secret as long as you need me to, but I'd prefer not to have to."
"Soon. I might try tonight, keep the momentum going."
"That's not a bad idea."
"Mom'll be okay. But Dad, I don't know. Father and son stuff gets pretty weird. All that expectation. I know he's disappointed that I'm not more into computers and stuff and taking over his share of the business someday. He's too nice to say it, but he's disappointed."
"Your father isn't going to reject you because you're gay. He's a much better man than that."
"I don't think he will. I don't want to think he will. But I can't know, not in advance."
"I do know, Will. I know because he never rejected me." Harold picks up an oyster and gulps it down without tasting it, too embarrassed to look at Will as the knowledge sinks in.
"Are you telling me you're gay, Uncle Harold?"
"Yes."
"Huh. Wow."
"That's more or less what your father said." Harold looks over and is glad to see Will smiling.
He's sometimes thought that Will is, in a way, his son too. For all his sociability, Will has an analytical and bookish turn of mind that he didn't get from either of his parents. Perhaps it came, not genetically but memetically, from Harold. And now it seems that in one deep, fundamental part of their natures, he and Will are very much alike.
If Nathan, unimaginably, can't accept him, it will break Harold's heart as much as Will's.
They talk easily now over lunch. Harold deflects a few questions ("No, I'm not seeing anyone at the moment") and hears about Will's boyfriend Brian, the star of the school tennis team, who wants to study paleontology at Harvard. It's astonishing, he thinks, how much has changed in a generation, how easy and simple things are for boys Will's age. But that's not entirely true, and thinking it is probably a sign of incipient middle age. Things aren't so easy that Will isn't afraid to come out to his own father. And nothing would have been easy for Harold, no matter when he'd been born. He is not made for ease.
After lunch, Harold says, "Go home and talk to your mom and dad. Come on, I'll take you down to your train."
When the train is announced, Will--who Harold notices has grown taller than him--turns and hugs him the way he used to do when he was a little boy. "Thanks, Uncle Harold," he says, and disappears towards the platform.
He meets Grace on June 14, 2006. He smiles at her, although he never smiles at people. When she starts up a conversation, he does his best to continue it.
Grace likes Handel, Mahler, Cole Porter, and the Kinks. She has read, actually read, both Crime and Punishment and Moby Dick. She prefers Sondheim to Andrew Lloyd Webber and Durer to Michelangelo.
She doesn't cringe when Harold says he works in tech support for an insurance company. (There's no reason to lie to her, except a constant niggle in the back of his mind ever since he started building the machine. That and a lifelong habit.)
She finds him interesting. She likes him.
"Is this a date?" she asks, when the second weekend after they meet they go to see Double Indemnity and get Indian food afterwards. The previous weekend, they had tea and went to an exhibit at the Japan Society. "I need to know if these are dates."
This is a question Harold has avoided asking himself. "I suppose they are," he says, because she is so kind, so easy to talk to, and her likes her more than he's ever liked anyone but Nathan. "If that's all right with you."
She laughs. "It's fine with me."
At the end of their next date a week later, she looks at Harold with a sort of encouraging expectation, and he kisses her. She kisses him back with her arms around him and doesn't ask why he did it. In many respects, it's much more pleasant than kissing Nathan was. And so he kisses her again.
Does this mean he's not gay anymore? When he gets home, he sits down with a glass of wine and his laptop and tries to think.
Since he first learned about the Kinsey scale, he's considered himself a Kinsey 6. He's only ever wanted men. Or really, one man. The other fleeting feelings--noticing a good-looking man, feeling heatedly shy if he sees two men kissing or embracing, masturbatory fantasies of a male body against his--are those attractions, or are they something else? Do they count?
Does Grace count?
He kissed her twice, so he must have wanted to kiss her, although he's never ached for it as he did--does--with Nathan. He enjoyed holding her close, but when he's not with her, he doesn't feel an agony of emptiness.
Two attractions, he could say. One to a man, one to a woman. Take an average: 6 plus 0 divided by 2 would make him a Kinsey 3, exactly bisexual.
He has known Grace for three weeks. He has loved Nathan since he was a teenager.
The Kinsey scale is garbage.
Harold makes his own scale, with variables for intensity of attraction, duration, romantic feelings, cultural pressure, active vs. responsive desire, and more. When he graphs it on the computer, he gets a spikily three-dimensional shape that is mostly blue for Nathan, with a little pink for Grace and a small area of green for other men.
He is a Kinsey multicolored irregular polyhedron.
He is forty years old and Nathan Ingram will never love him any more or any differently than he already does.
A few weeks later, he and Grace go to bed together. It's not everything he imagined sex would be, but it's good in its way. When she touches him, he feels wanted. Afterwards, holding her, he says, "You deserve someone better." He doesn't mean only his performance in bed, which he's sure was sub-par. She deserves someone who will tell her his real name and real job and who isn't mostly gay along ten variables and in love with someone else. Perhaps if he said that, she'd agree. But he doesn't, and she only smiles and says, "Don't be silly, Harold. It's you I want."
He never does tell her about Nathan. He never tells Nathan about her, and especially, he never tells Will. He and Will have been closer than ever since they came out to each other, and he can't lose that. It's the least of the betrayals in this tangle, but it's the one he's most ashamed of.
On the anniversary of their first meeting, he asks Grace to marry him and she accepts. They don't set a date yet. He moves in with her and they still don't set a date. They never do. They're engaged for three years.
"I'm glad you're here, Harold. Christ, it's late, why are you here?"
Harold, trying to find a coding error in the machine's facial recognition subsystem, doesn't look up from the screen. "I'm always here."
"You are, aren't you? Poor little Harold. Come and talk to me." It's December of 2009, and Nathan, it seems, is drunk. Attention caught by the slurred words, Harold lifts his head in time to see Nathan plop into a chair amidst a cloud of Scotch fumes.
"What's wrong?" His voice, he notices, sounds panicky. He's been inclined to panic lately. Panic is the active mode of paranoia, and he is building a machine which is paranoia in computerized form.
"Oh, not the end of the world." Nathan spins the chair in a circle. "Denise left me, that's all. She wants a divorce."
"She left you? Denise left you? How could . . . "
"On her two little feet. And then a car and an airplane and all the way to California."
"God, Nathan, I'm so sorry," Harold says, thinking How can she? After she was lucky enough to get him, how can she abandon him? "That's awful, I'm sorry."
"She said she never had a chance to have a life of her own. What the hell can I say to that? It's true."
"I thought she was happy."
"She wanted to be a museum curator, remember? Instead she had a little antique store she had to fill with rustic crap because that's what tourists buy."
"She had you. And Will."
"Will's grown up. And things have been pretty . . . pretty not so great between me and Denise for a long time."
They've seemed fine to Harold. But then, he doesn't see them together as often as he used to before Will left home and he started living with Grace. He sees only Nathan as much as ever, because Nathan turns up in Harold's workspace or they go out for a late-night meal or a drink. It's been a little like the old days, before Denise. And now he knows why. "You didn't tell me."
"I can't always tell you everything, Harold. And hell, you never tell me anything, so we're more than even on that one."
"That's not true."
"We talk about the company, or the news. Or your machine. Or you tell me about books you've read. You never talk about you. You're on a first-name basis with my mother, but I don't know your mother's name. Never met her. She could have died forty years ago for all I know."
There's never been anything worth saying about himself, except what he mustn't say. The unfairness of it stings. Harold takes off his glasses and presses at the corners of his tired eyes, blotting out Nathan for a few seconds. "I . . . Nathan . . . "
"Hey." He hears Nathan get up, setting the empty chair spinning again, and come over to him. "It's how you've always been, Harold. I'm used to it. It's okay." Nathan's hand settles on his shoulder, heavy and bathwater-warm. The urge to fall forward and finally be close to him is so powerful that Harold shudders, and in response Nathan squeezes his shoulder gently.
Harold sighs and puts his glasses back on, and Nathan lets go of him. "Of course you couldn't tell me. Denise has a right to her privacy. Was - was it today that she left?"
"Early this morning. We were fighting half the night and then talking the other half."
"And then you came to work?"
"What else was there to do? Anyway, this evening I got drunk in the office, which I've always kind of wanted to do, so that's a plus. It's okay, you can laugh. I can laugh. Because I'm pretty much okay, that's what I really need to tell you."
"Forgive me if I'm a little skeptical."
"No, it's . . . it's like a hurricane, I admit that. My life is blowing around in the wind. But from the minute we calmed down and she looked at me and she said 'We should get a divorce,' there's been a part of me that thinks this is for the best. I'll miss her. And it's going to be hard on Will. But, I don't know. Maybe it's not possible to love someone for a lifetime."
Harold doesn't answer that. There's nothing he can say.
Nathan yawns hugely and seems to sag. "Fuck, I'm tired."
"So I see. Come on, I'll drive you home."
"Oh, that's why I - I remember now. Could I stay with you for a few days? I can't face the house yet, and hotels are so . . . "
A staticky burst of shock comes over Harold as the edges of two of his incompatible lives rub together. Then he goes calm, remembering that there's a solution. He never gave up his brownstone after he moved in with Grace, although she doesn't know it. Most of his old furniture's still there, and some of his clothes. Towels, kitchen things, toiletries, even some frozen meals. A cleaning service comes in every two weeks to dust and keep the house aired out. It's a bolt-hole, though he's never wanted to think of it in those terms. It's a place to hide when--if--some nameless disaster overtakes him. He finds he's glad that he hasn't had to wait for a disaster to go back to it. "Of course," he says.
When they arrive, he quickly makes up a bed in the guest room and gets Nathan, groggy from falling asleep during the twenty-block drive, into it. Then he orders some Chinese food for his dinner and sets about making the place look lived in. Tomorrow--it's Sunday tomorrow, he won't bother going to work--he'll get some bagels, some coffee and cream for Nathan, some orchids or maybe a Christmas wreath to give the house a little vitality. He wants Nathan to feel at home here, for as long as he stays.
When he's sure Nathan's asleep, Harold calls Grace and tells her that he's had to go to Chicago to deal with a tech crisis at another branch (she doesn't ask what branch or what tech crisis) and he doesn't know how soon he'll be back.
They drink the Pétrus on February 3, 2010: Will's twenty-first birthday. Denise flies back from San Francisco and the four of them gather at Café Boulud. Nathan and Denise are exquisitely polite to each other, and everyone smiles a lot. Nathan retells funny and mildly embarrassing stories from Will's childhood. Will, for his part, is quiet, talking when prompted about medical school and the new boyfriend he hardly has time to see, but falling silent a lot and looking wistfully at his parents. The divorce, with so much money and so many lawyers involved, has gotten bitter; this is the first time Nathan and Denise have been in the same room since she left him.
After the meal, when Will has excused himself to the bathroom and Nathan has gone to double-check some detail of a special birthday dessert, Denise laughs unhappily and says, "God, poor Will. I knew this was a bad idea."
"Will wanted to have you both here."
"Will's still a little boy in some ways. He's half expecting that Nathan and I will fall in love again over the duck confit."
"Probably. But I think it would be worse for him if you weren't here."
"How's Nathan been?"
Harold refills her glass with the last of the Pétrus before answering levelly, "All right."
"For God's sake, Harold, I do still care about him. You don't need to defend him from me."
"Is that what I was doing?"
Denise shakes her head, well-styled hair gleaming. Leaving Nathan has agreed with her. She looks younger. "Pax, okay? I know you're on his side, but let's not fight. Not now."
"Pax. And he really is all right."
After a short silence, she says hesitantly, "You're incredibly loyal, you know that? God knows there were times in the last few years when I'd have given him to you if I could."
Harold feels his face redden and all the blood surge in his veins. He looks around to make sure Nathan isn't back yet. "You know. That I . . . "
"It took me a few years to realize. I was pretty naive, Harvard education or not. But then . . . we were at Martha's Vineyard, Will must have been two or three. Nathan was wading in the surf with him and you were watching Nathan. I thought about how you never dated anyone, never talked about women or even seemed to notice them, and I knew."
"Oh, God."
"Listen, Harold." Amazingly, she lays her hand on his and holds it for a moment. "I didn't bring this up to embarrass you. I wanted to say that, well, he's just a man. He's a pretty good man, and a brilliant one, but he's not the holy grail. You can't spend your life following him."
"If my life proves anything, it's that I can." He takes a couple of deep breaths. Will and Nathan will notice if he's upset when they come back. "Do you think I don't know that he's flawed? It doesn't matter. And I know how pathetic my life must look to you. How parasitical. But this is what I have."
"I didn't mean that. What I'm saying is, you've given him almost as much of your life as I gave him of mine, and you got a lot less in return." Quickly, because Will is returning to the table now, she adds, "Find your own life. It's worth it."
Nathan Ingram dies on April 24, 2010.
So does Harold Wren.
As far as he can figure out later (and it seems important to figure it out), Harold is in surgery during Nathan's funeral. He finds coverage of the funeral on every major news website, with photographs of Will and Denise looking blankly stunned. He couldn't have gone even if he'd been uninjured, of course, not safely, and it's not as though sitting in church or standing at a grave would bring him any closer to Nathan. Nathan is equally, infinitely distant from every speck of dust on earth. There is no reaching him anymore.
Harold is in the hospital for a very long time. Eventually he checks himself out against his doctors' advice. Later he sends an anonymous three million dollar donation that should more than cover the cost of treating a man whose name, or rather alias, has already disappeared from their records.
Since chance and medicine have conspired to keep him alive, he forces himself through the effort required to stay that way. In the last year of the machine project he laid the groundwork for multiple new identities; he made some for Nathan, too, which are not needed anymore. He buys a new house, the brownstone being off-limits because Grace knows he used to live there. He finds new doctors and creates a set of medical records to account for his broken neck and shattered pelvis. He hides his bank accounts under layers and layers of obfuscation. He arranges for Grace to receive a generous grant from an extremely little-known arts foundation. Harold Wren left her all his property, but there wasn't much of it; he was only in tech support, after all.
He calls Will Ingram from an anonymous cell phone and lets him know that he's still alive. Will seems to believe his ridiculous story of a car accident and amnesia, probably because Will believes that Harold is too unworldly to lie. Contacting him is a terrible risk, a stupid risk, but Will is the one thing left that Harold can't let go. Will is the only part of Nathan still living.
Harold sleeps, he wakes, he eats, he sees his doctors, he endures physical therapy, he learns to walk again, he thinks about the machine and the government and what happened. He is in pain all the time. Damaged nerves are constantly signaling: something is wrong, something is broken. And from his mind, the same signals: Nathan is gone, Nathan is gone, Nathan is gone.
All the while, through the backdoor that Harold built and then denied because he thought Nathan would be safer not knowing, the machine sends him the numbers of people he can't save.
When he thinks he can bear it, he travels to Connecticut to visit Nathan's grave. It's another foolish risk that he finds himself impelled to take.
He's long since lost track of dates, but it is fall. Red and gold leaves rustle under his halting footsteps in the cemetery. He finds a tasteful plain stone with a name and two dates. Nathan is under it.
Nathan is not under it. A coffin is under it, a corpse. Nathan is gone.
The advantage, Harold thinks distantly, of being a cripple is that it keeps him from making a spectacle of himself by lying on Nathan's grave.
He is sobbing. Time has passed. He's been sobbing for a while. Someone has put a hand on his elbow and is speaking to him gently.
"I'm sorry to intrude," says the man. He's a little older than Harold, with a round face and soft gray hair. "But I didn't think you should be all by yourself."
Harold gulps and wipes his face on his coat sleeve. He tries to speak but only croaks, and then he concentrates on breathing for a while. He'd thought over the last month or so that his grief was easing off a little, but now it's a physical pain to match the ones in his neck and leg, a weight and a clenching likes stones piled on top of him.
"He must have meant a lot to you," the man says.
"He - he - everything."
"How long were you together?"
"Twenty-seven years."
"That's a long time."
Tears are running down Harold's face again. For the lie, for the truth, because it is the truth of Harold's withered and inadequate heart whatever the facts. Twenty-seven years lie under that stone, buried, gone. All his life, all his truth are there, and what's left is a ghost and a lie. Harold Finch, creature of pixels and code, who has no past and loves no one.
