Fic: Ghosts
Title: Ghosts
Author: litlover12
Pairing/Characters: Finch
Rating: PG
Summary: After the blow falls, what's left? A reflection by Finch. Set sometime after Carter joins the team.
Author's Note: No relation to the episode "Ghosts." (Need an author tag, please!)
Word Count: 438
It’s late, but Finch hasn’t yet left the library. He still sits before the glowing screen, focusing on three pictures he’s pulled up. Reese, Carter, Fusco. His team.
Team. Curious word. A dirty cop; an overworked homicide detective; an ex-CIA agent who spends half his time as a steely-eyed killer, and the other half teasing and pouting like an overgrown six year old. Two of them don’t even know about each other’s involvement in this little operation. Quite a team.
Finch removes his glasses and rubs his tired eyes.
He couldn’t do this without them. He knows that. At least, he couldn’t do it without John, and John seems to think he can’t do it without the other two. But there are moments-like this one-when he can see them only as three people to worry about, even more than he already worries about the rest of the population under the unblinking eye of his machine.
Settling his glasses back on his face, he peers at each one in turn. And now it’s as if his gaze shifts, deepens. There’s something else there, on all three faces, beneath Carter’s intent expression, Fusco’s harassed look, Reese’s slight smirk.
Some commonality he hadn’t seen before.
Suddenly his mind is running back over everything he knows of their stories. A photograph in Carter’s car. Fusco’s almost desperate desire to leave HR behind and become a good cop again (and hadn’t he said something once about an ex-wife, too?). And Reese, with his memories of all-too-brief joy, and his deep, gaping wounds that won’t heal.
Finch is leaning forward now, resting a hand on the table beside the keyboard, unaware that it’s trembling. His mind has come back to himself, to his own searing losses. His crippling injury. And Nathan’s death. And Grace.
Grace . . .
We’re ghosts, Finch thinks. All of us. Not life after death, but something worse-life after life. Going on with life when the best part of it is gone. After the blow falls, after happiness and security and normality are stripped away-what’s left?
Three people-Finch catches sight of his own faint reflection in the computer screen beneath their pictures. Four. Four people who have lost love, and innocence, and hope. Yet still living, still going on, for one purpose: to save others. (Granted, Fusco had been coerced into helping at first, but there’s more to his cooperation than that. By now, Finch can recognize a man grabbing a lifeline.)
Finch leans back in his chair, exhales slowly.
Yes. They are a team. And a stronger team than he could ever have envisioned.
Author: litlover12
Pairing/Characters: Finch
Rating: PG
Summary: After the blow falls, what's left? A reflection by Finch. Set sometime after Carter joins the team.
Author's Note: No relation to the episode "Ghosts." (Need an author tag, please!)
Word Count: 438
It’s late, but Finch hasn’t yet left the library. He still sits before the glowing screen, focusing on three pictures he’s pulled up. Reese, Carter, Fusco. His team.
Team. Curious word. A dirty cop; an overworked homicide detective; an ex-CIA agent who spends half his time as a steely-eyed killer, and the other half teasing and pouting like an overgrown six year old. Two of them don’t even know about each other’s involvement in this little operation. Quite a team.
Finch removes his glasses and rubs his tired eyes.
He couldn’t do this without them. He knows that. At least, he couldn’t do it without John, and John seems to think he can’t do it without the other two. But there are moments-like this one-when he can see them only as three people to worry about, even more than he already worries about the rest of the population under the unblinking eye of his machine.
Settling his glasses back on his face, he peers at each one in turn. And now it’s as if his gaze shifts, deepens. There’s something else there, on all three faces, beneath Carter’s intent expression, Fusco’s harassed look, Reese’s slight smirk.
Some commonality he hadn’t seen before.
Suddenly his mind is running back over everything he knows of their stories. A photograph in Carter’s car. Fusco’s almost desperate desire to leave HR behind and become a good cop again (and hadn’t he said something once about an ex-wife, too?). And Reese, with his memories of all-too-brief joy, and his deep, gaping wounds that won’t heal.
Finch is leaning forward now, resting a hand on the table beside the keyboard, unaware that it’s trembling. His mind has come back to himself, to his own searing losses. His crippling injury. And Nathan’s death. And Grace.
Grace . . .
We’re ghosts, Finch thinks. All of us. Not life after death, but something worse-life after life. Going on with life when the best part of it is gone. After the blow falls, after happiness and security and normality are stripped away-what’s left?
Three people-Finch catches sight of his own faint reflection in the computer screen beneath their pictures. Four. Four people who have lost love, and innocence, and hope. Yet still living, still going on, for one purpose: to save others. (Granted, Fusco had been coerced into helping at first, but there’s more to his cooperation than that. By now, Finch can recognize a man grabbing a lifeline.)
Finch leans back in his chair, exhales slowly.
Yes. They are a team. And a stronger team than he could ever have envisioned.