Chapter Text
"How did I agree to this?" Harold mutters to John as they are nodded through the conference center doors.
John bumps him and said, "What's that? Can't quite–" and then begins striding forward to shake hands with the flunkie coming their way.
Harold taps his earpiece. "I said: this is a terrible idea and we should leave immediately." He watches John's shoulders crumple a little with laughter as he introduces them both to the woman with the clipboard.
Harold has successfully avoided places like this his entire life. He looks into the hall. Stations are set out in half circles, with computers in messy groups: here a group of boys crouch over laptops, there two sharp suited women are building lego cases round about a hundred Pis and arguing about something intensely; up on the stage two figures, hidden by the crowd around them, are coding something that is projected on the huge screen.
His earpiece pips. John's voice comes in, softly amused. "I do my best you know," he says. "But there's no way in hell I can take your cover at a hackathon." And then he is there at Harold's side as Ellie Higson (078-05-1120) from Kleiner Perkins walks straight toward him like a bee seeking honey.
Harold looks up into Ms Higson's face as she mouths to John "Is this the guy?" and he feels, rather than sees, John's slow, satisfied nod of confirmation.
He would be lying if he said he didn't like that.
Ms Higson is small; he looks down into her bright, heart shaped face, and says hello and how good to meet and all that. He is still mostly caught up in his overwhelming desire to walk right out the fire exit, but through the hubbub he hears "nonsequential insertions over the allocation" and "reindexing right through each aux" and Harold smiles. He grips Ms Higson's hand firmly. "Oh yes," he tells her. "I'm familiar with big data. Really big data."
He sits; there's a computer right there with a decent chair so he takes that one. He lays his phone on the desk and –he thinks pretty smoothly– flips the jammer he set up this morning so nothing is recorded. He runs his eyes over the file Ms Higson has flicked from her tablet onto the screen, blows out a breath, and starts diagramming.
He loves this part, always, and he dives down into the algorithm as he sketches out a tree in Processing, lets himself defocus and see the problem extend itself into four dimensions. Behind him, Ms Higson snorts and drawls, "Yeah, a B-tree, great inno–" and he can't help but feel a little thrill of pleasure as she falls silent. She reaches past him and flips on the display mirror and then all around them there are little noises: someone whistles, long and low, someone says loudly: "Yeah? What's the big deal?"
Mr Reese –Mr Rivera today– is standing by him, and he's got this smile on his face like he's won the lotto. Harold can see it in the reflection on the monitor and he really likes that smile. He feels like he'd maybe like to make John smile like that some more. Even though he knows this is just the cover– John is just playing his role – but he can't help but...Oh hell. He brings up another terminal and inverts the cameras on all the phones that are being held up recording him and there are startled exclamations and curses fanning out in a shockwave as each person realizes they are recording themselves instead of him.
He'd jammed them already. That, he admits to himself, was just showing off.
Up on the stage, the crowd is no longer watching the code battle; they're all fixated on the mirror of Harold's screen. Some smartmouth says, "Holy God I'm gonna come in my pants," and then John steps nearer, puts his big hand on the back of Harold's neck and murmurs, "Gotta hand it to you. Pretty much everyone in this room wishes they were allowed to touch you right now, Finch."
His voice still has that soft crackle of amusement in it but there's something else as well. An unsteadiness that makes Harold shiver a little. And then he realizes what John's words mean and says, "Who's not convinced?"
John steps back, deftly taking in the room in the most natural movement. He walks like he's stretching his legs and then taps open their line and says in an undertone, "Two women not paying attention to anything but this...I think they're legos? A whole bunch of people milling round booths not watching. Your six o'clock, guy in a suit, maybe thirties. He's watching the screen all right but he does not look happy about it. And he's moving."
Harold opens his mouth to respond but John is already there. "Yeah, I'm on him. Keep doing... whatever it is you're doing."
So he does that, and it's easy to keep their attention. It's not so much that the work is good, though it is that, he supposes; it's that it's so different. The habit of discretion has isolated him so completely his code is like Darwin's finches: a divergent species.
John taps in again and says, "I've got eyes on the suit but I can't bluejack his phone."
"Well I should hope not," he replies primly. But he thinks for a second– this damned display mirror is a cramp– then says, "Send a picture, Mr Reese, and I'll see what I can do."
He'd written the bots to cover Mr Finch while he sat in meetings as Mr Wren. Harold knows the value of at least the appearance of omniscience. He looks around surreptitiously, subvocalises to his phone, forwards the picture to an unlisted number. His bot hacks the ID card printer at the front desk, tracks back into the client list and runs that through Maltego. (Harold is inordinately fond of Maltego; he sometimes feels guilty for crippling it so comprehensively.)
The bot finds the weakness and sends back the exploit. He executes and John confirms, "I'm in." And then they both demonstrate their competencies, for hours, until Harold feels almost breathless from it.
When the evening rolls around they go into the ballroom arm in arm. John's tux slides over the gun at his hip and you can't tell at all unless you know precisely where to look. Of course Harold knows where to look because he'd chosen the jacket, he'd had it made to move in precisely that way and he'd held it out for John to put on this evening before they'd left. He dresses John these days; he's not sure when that began. Harold watches the tiny movement and, though he doesn't love the gun, he finds he loves knowing this secret. It feels like a secret about John's body, known only to the two of them, and that is, well, it's something.
The show he'd put on in the conference hall had done its work. People were looking at him like, like–
John murmurs, "Not enjoying the attention, Finch? Shoulda held back a little this afternoon." John's voice changes a little. "Hey, what did you pull in there anyway? We can't attract too much–"
Harold smiles tightly. "It's nothing. It's old actually–a decade old idea I had; it looks impressive but it's flawed; it won't scale. They'll see it eventually."
John is shaking his head. "Well I'd say Mr Rivera is the envy of every investor here." He presses a hand to the small of Harold's back and guides him to a table. "Let's hope they don't see it too soon. I think I kind of like having the biggest brain in the trophy cabinet."
Ms Higson taps him on the shoulder and Harold turns with a smile to speak with her. He likes this woman; she has a sharpness of thought he admires. They're close to neutralizing the threat against her and he will probably never meet her again, so he takes the time to talk. She has interesting ideas about fractal trees. Wrong, but interesting.
The ballroom fills up. At least half the people here wear their tuxedos like sweatpants. The other half wear their ball gowns like sweatpants. It's a little disheartening. People incessantly interrupt them to praise him, and to test him, which he dislikes and does not know how to deflect. Harold answers their questions after a fashion: heavy on the jargon, vague on the details. His role here is to be a trophy geek, to be the brains on the arm of the software tycoon, to support John's cover with his, he rolls his eyes, mad skills. He should not deflect.
He should shine. Oh he feels too old for this.
The lights overhead are colored; they shift hues according to some pattern he can't quite follow. Ms Higson notices him looking and says, "They're complimenting the gowns, do you see?" She points to the tiny red on-lights; there are cameras fitted into the lightbulbs. "They sampleImage and generate harmonic triads."
"Well, every little helps," he says blandly. In his head he idly begins calculating the data load of that many new video inputs. Behind Ms Higson a man is approaching with a grin like a shark. Harold suppresses a sigh. He really doesn't want to be here.
He turns his head; John is across the floor engaging in some kind of pissing contest with four men old enough to know better. Frankly, Harold thinks, their suits are old enough to know better. John is smiling, but it's a fake: his lips are pulled across his teeth; his teeth are almost bared. It's so intensely yet covertly aggressive that Harold jerks upright and makes his way over before he even thinks about it. He walks as quickly as he can, cursing the polished ballroom floor, then hesitates. Harold puts a hand out and touches John on the arm. He says, "John?"
He doesn't normally touch John. Touches flow all one way between them. Harold watches with interest the way John relaxes minutely into the contact.
"Are you ready to go?" John says, and he's dragging Harold off the dance floor before he has a chance to reply.
"Good to meet you," Harold calls drily over his shoulder.
To John he says, "Has there been a development? Is Ms Higson in danger?" They've reached the thick carpets of the lobby now and Harold's heel drags a little across the pile. "John, slow down."
John does; he stops in fact, and punches the elevator button with his thumb. He looks tight about the mouth still.
Harold says mildly, "And here I thought you liked being the one with the arm candy for once."
"You didn't like it," John explains.
They stand in the elevator like strangers going to different floors.
He can sense there's a charge in the air. He can see the tracks of anger and arousal in John's face. But Harold isn't so great with whys. It's not an instinct he has. He perceives the face value, the whats of people, pretty well: if you can graph it he can grasp it, but motivations aren't always so easily captured. He built the most advanced system in the world to put a glass to these mysteries but he's no closer to the answer. Harold can predict almost perfectly what people will do so he, perhaps more than anyone, knows exactly how little he knows about why they do anything.
He's really interested in why.
The elevator opens at their suite and John opens the door for him. The suite has huge windows, floor to ceiling, and in the corner of his eye he sees their reflections as they stand behind the couch, sees more clearly the unhappy set of John's shoulders.
"What is the matter?" he says. His voice rings oddly in his ears. He sounds cold, he thinks. Peremptory.
John says only, "They shouldn't have looked at you like that. You're not a toy."
Harold shrugs. "I don't much care how these people look at me. They're strangers. Their opinions are–"
"Irrelevant?" John says.
"I don't care for that word," Harold says after a moment. "But I suppose so, yes."
"And what about my opinion?" John mumbles it. He looks out past Harold, and Harold follows his gaze into the view of the city laid out and lit up like a fabulous fantasy circuit board.
"I do care for that," Harold says firmly. "Very much."
And he's said that before; they've had these exchanges before where there's a charge in the air that could only be resolved in one way. But Harold has never allowed...has never dared to allow the resolution. He knows that John will never make this move. He has always known the way this power is balanced, though he can't begin to understand why.
So Harold touches John on his jaw, where the tightness is; his hand is shaking a little but he presses onward. "What would happen, Mr Reese, if I kissed you now?" Harold says it like it's a puzzle he's been turning over and he thinks in a way that's right. Yes: that's the problem he's been graphing out since they met.