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With the eyes of love
John liked to watch. He was watching now, from his vantage point on the roof, eyes locked on their latest number in the viewfinder, body motionless. He seemed to be always watching. As a child he had been naturally observant, life having already taught him the value of looking before he leaped. But as an adult, his training had honed this natural ability into something more. Something that at times felt vaguely sinister to those on the receiving end of his gaze. Scanning his surroundings had become like breathing for him, something automatic, not something he consciously controlled. He watched constantly, almost without thinking, and when he did think about it, which was not that often, he had a sense that for the longest time, he had been standing slightly apart, watching, alone.
John really liked watching Harold. Carefully, without being caught, he would spend hours at a time sprawled in a chair, head bent over a book or cleaning one of his guns. Glancing sideways from eyes that were supposedly staring ahead, lost in thought or focussed on something Harold couldn’t see. He was good at looking without looking obvious about it. He liked this game. He could spend all day watching Harold while pretending to do something else instead. It was one of the reasons he spent so much of his down time in the library, knowing Harold would be there, busy enough not to notice him watching. John loved those quiet stretches of time in the sea of numbers. Hungry eyes could look their fill, absorb the dance of Harold’s nimble fingers on the keyboard, the slant of his arms resting on the desk, memorise the subtle play of breath pushing his dress shirt in and out. He knew Harold’s profile better than his own, knew the angle of his neck at the end of a long day. He knew each of Harold’s expressions, even the most hidden, furtive, fleeting snatches of something deep and guarded -so much so that he could imagine which face Harold was making even when on the other end of the phone. Yes, he liked watching very much indeed.
Listen with your heart
John listened all the time, listened to the soft sounds of traffic from random rooftops; listened to the quiet rustling of clothes or leaves or breathing, sounds signifying quarry moving in the dark. He was instantly alert to doors opening behind him in a crowded diner, footsteps leading nowhere on an empty sidewalk, the sharp intake of breath of a lover or a foe. Sometimes, finding himself blindfolded, in the middle of a hostile room, he would stretch out his listening like a net, pulling sound in, interpreting. Even when asleep, he was listening in some part of his sleeping mind, waking at the slightest unexpected noise.
He was listening now. He listened to Harold’s footsteps across the open coms line, could tell even from the distant rooftop the exact degree of pain the older man was feeling, based on the soft drag of his steps on the wooden library floor. John was familiar with the odd half-repressed sigh Harold would make when he moved too suddenly, the sudden intake of breath when confronted with something surprising, the low toneless hum or increase in pace of typing when he found something ‘interesting’. The constant murmur of the other man talking softly to himself while he worked had become a thread connecting John to life once more. All of Harold’s sounds had been catalogued with the same intensity and care that Harold used to catalogue his rare first edition books. They had been examined, interrogated for meaning, and categorised, before being locked away from prying eyes, each one precious beyond words.
Touch has a memory
John’s hands felt lost without something in them, giving them a purpose, a reason to exist. His long fingers were calloused from hefting his guns, knuckles often grazed and bruised from fighting. They were hands that could crush the life from a man and hurt without restraint. But they were hands that much preferred to stroke, to touch. John was keenly aware of the presence of his hands on Harold’s body. Later, alone, he would replay the shifting warmth of Harold’s shoulder beneath his fingers as he looked over him at something on the monitors, hand resting, barely there. He memorized the feel of the crook of Harold’s arm, guiding him as they walked Bear in the park. He knew, in the way only skin can know, the glory of his hand’s soft curl at the small of Harold’s back, vaguely protective, as he spoke quietly in the shorter man’s ear. In his dreams he felt again the sensation of his still fingers on the back of Harold’s neck after a long day typing, letting the warmth of his hands settle into Harold, offering comfort without words.
Sometimes he dreamt of being allowed to take impossible liberties with Harold’s body - to trail gentle fingers beneath the edge of the suits that denied the other man’s skin to his touch. He imagined the jolt of reverence he might feel, like the joy in unwrapping an unexpected gift, of how it might be to discover arcs and planes that so far remained maddeningly out of reach. He thought about moving his hands over the indulgent softness that he imagined lay behind the starch and tweed, the contrast of silk and steel. His fingers itched to trace the raised ridges he knew must bear witness to Harold’s accident and surgical interventions. He could almost feel the whisper of soft hair he was sure he would find on Harold’s chest as it ghosted across his own. John was maddened by the sense-memory of slow slide of skin on skin, the sudden throb of someone else’s desire hot and alive beneath his questing hands.
John missed touch the most, of all the things he had lost. He missed holding and being held. He missed the right to, tenderly and with passion, touch the ones he loved.
If heaven had a taste
John liked to taste. It wasn’t a food thing. Food was, for the most part, simply fuel. Yes he was partial to a steak dinner at the Grand, could enjoy the sharp sourness of a mouthful of whiskey on the back of his tongue. But he was not a connoisseur, not like Harold with his appreciation for fine wines and his fondness for expensive delicacies from far flung corners of the world.
No, when John thought about tasting, what came to mind was something far less obvious and so much more exciting. He craved the taste of the salty beads of sweat on a lover’s neck, to lap the long line of a sloping spine beneath him. He loved to immerse himself in the essence of a lover’s body, nothing out of bounds. Above all he longed to map the taste of Harold’s mouth, to learn the flavour that belonged only to Harold. He wanted, needed, to lick his way under the layers of stiffly buttoned clothing, to find the source of the faint hint of spicy musk that lingered underneath his expensive cologne. Sometimes in idle moments of fantasy he allowed himself to almost-taste the heavy weight of Harold in his mouth, imagining the bitter tang as he swallowed Harold down.
It made his jaw ache with wanting, made his heart ache in loneliness at being denied this most private thing.
Summoning the scent of roses
John relished his sense of smell. He loved to immerse himself in the sensuous seduction of his early morning coffee, the smell rich and earthy and binding him instantly to this moment in time, promising the intense pleasure of that first satisfying sip. The scent of metal and gun oil that lingered in air when he cleaned his arsenal was familiar, reassuring, solid with warm heavy pleasure in his craft. He revelled in the strong canine tang of Bear’s wet fur on a rainy afternoon, or the moist aroma of living earth beneath his feet as he ran. Nothing could trigger a memory like the sudden assault on his nostrils of a long-cherished scent, a pang of nostalgia rising alongside random wafts of lavender soap and cooking oil, long-lost flavours of his childhood home. Or the cool scent of linen mixed with lemon shampoo and faint traces of summer-sweat that would forever remind him of Jessica’s golden smile.
John loved the scent of Harold’s familiar, subtle, cologne. It had the power to instantly balance him, bring him home to himself in moments of gut-aching need. It meant that Harold was near. Sometimes when he leaned over the other man to reach for a file or read a screen, he could catch other scents underneath that one, like peeling back layers, each lighter than the one above. He knew the soap Harold preferred, plain, honest-smelling, and that hint of almond hand cream that he sometimes used, each layer interleaved with an aura of expensive fabric warmed by the soft heat of Harold’s body underneath. But John was also intimately aware of the smell of Harold the man, the raw stench of sweat and grime and fear on the days of fighting and running, days when things went bad. The smell reminded him of a hundred different things: Harold lying on the floor of a railway station, two day old body odour mingled with relief flooding hotly at the knowledge that he had not been shot; Harold propping him up, fear seeping from every pore, as he helped him into the waiting car; Harold pale and trembling, leaning into John as the ex-operative helped the older man run from yet another bullet, yet another bomb – it became the overriding smell of afterwards, of relief.
John did not often let himself think about Harold’s other scents, the ones he was not allowed to experience, only imagine. But there were moments when he longed to bury his nose in the other man’s collar, behind his ear, to catch the elusive Harold-smell that he knew would reside there. He wondered in vague moments of wanting how the other man would smell as a lover, lying spent on high-thread-count cotton sheets. He thought he would like that one most of all, the essence of everything about Harold that he could never have, the smell of intimacy, of desire. He imagined that he could drown in that scent, wallow in it, sweeter than any perfume. John loved to smell things. It was how you knew something was real. A man could see something that wasn’t there or hear things in his imagination. But you could never re-conjure a smell. Perhaps, he thought, it was better this way, better not to know how Harold would smell, sprawled loose and hot beneath him, since they both knew there was only one way this thing would end. Sometimes it was better not to build yet another sense-memory to stoke the painful fires of loss and of regret.
Not a Fragrant World
Harold Finch had known even before he met John that the man’s senses would be highly attuned, honed by his training until almost painfully sharp. He understood, in a way that few were able, how John experienced his world so immediately through the things he saw, heard, touched, tasted and smelled. Harold knew that John watched him with a fervour that approached devotion, was horribly aware of the necessity of the open line that bound them to each other in sound, when out of sight. He felt every one of the small touches that John seemed to need as proof they had made it through another day. And somehow he knew that when John leaned in, he was reaching out with sense of smell to find the familiarity of Harold’s scent, his anchorage in a fickle world. This morning he had watched John lick the sugar from a donut, relishing the sweetness in a rare moment of unclouded joy, while Harold choked down a sudden bitterness, haunted by his knowledge of what this life was doing to the sensual man who had become his world.
Because Harold knew what John saw every day; he listened on the line as his friend’s sensitive soul absorbed sights that should not be seen, knowing he drowned each time in the overwhelming smell of blood and dust and sweat, the stench of death and horror. He saw the haunted, pinched look on John's face when he returned from some new scene of destruction. He knew that John relived what he heard and saw in his nightmares, the voices that howled with pain, the last gasps of innocents and perpetrators alike, the snarled abuse, the evil muttering of the deranged, the sharp crack of a shot that was always, always, too close for comfort. John had done despicable things with those sensitive hands, had shattered bone and obliterated faces of a thousand foes. He had tasted the bitter tang of fear, of his own blood, of despair.
Harold’s heart cracked in a million pieces every day that he sent this good man out on a foray into darkness that he knew full well would steal another piece of what tried to make him whole. Harold Finch always knew the price this life, this mission would demand of him, and had long since accepted his fate. What he hadn’t reckoned on was how he would feel about having John, dear John, bear a share of the cost. And so he gave John what scant comfort he could. Allowed the looks, the touches, gave what minute pleasures were in his power to bestow: fine suits and linens to soothe the touch-starved skin, soft gauze to wrap the injuries, fine foods and scented soaps and a loft with expansive views. A calm and comforting presence in his ear so that he would not feel alone. But all the while knowing that he must withhold the one thing they both needed more than life itself: the sweet solace for the senses that each longed to find in the other's soul.