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His hands haven't stopped shaking since he let go of the knife.
"You didn't have a choice," John says, as Harold tries to conceal the trembling by wrapping his hands around his mug. Tea sloshes over the edges, glistens on his skin, pale sencha catching the light as it drips down his fingers and pools on the dark safehouse table, and for an instant, he is holding the knife again and plunging it in, then blood is shining on his hands...
Something dabs at his hand, something soft and white and gentle—a handkerchief. His own handkerchief. John is holding his hand, cradling it as he wipes away the tea that's flushing Harold's skin pink with heat. When did John take hold of his hand?
"He was going to kill you."
Harold opens his mouth to protest, to say, I did have a choice, Mr. Reese, but his voice cracks before he can say a word. He did have a choice. Surely he must have had a choice.
Except he'd been acting on instinct. The man—good heavens, he doesn't even know the man's name. He knows so many things about so many people. He's the one who digs into their lives, identifies them and lays their deepest, darkest secrets bare before himself and his team, the one who built a system that can find the darker, deeper ones. How can he not know this? The man was going to kill him, or, at the very least, hurt him badly. He was bigger than Harold, bigger than John, even. Young—oh, god, he looked so young. Muscular. Fully able-bodied, unlike Harold. The outcome seemed obvious.
How can Harold not know who he was? How can he not know something so important?
There was a knife on the counter. Just a perfectly ordinary kitchen knife the number had been planning to use to slice a perfectly ordinary tomato for her turkey sandwich. Harold grabbed the knife—he'd only meant to stop him. But as soon as the blade went in, he knew what he'd done. It went in too deep, too far, at just the right angle to—good heavens, the sounds the man made, the stunned and pained look in his green eyes before he fell down in a swift, noisy sprawl like a marionette whose strings had been severed.
And Harold doesn't even know his name.
"Harold," John says, "you didn't have a choice."
"I killed him."
"You did." John takes hold of his other hand and dries it as well, then lays it gently on the table, palm flat, next to the other. "I'm sorry." He looks away briefly, blinking hard, and shakes his head. Almost a whisper, he adds, "I never wanted you to know what it's like."
Harold lets out a small, choked sound that might be the ghost of a sob, and John reaches for Harold's hand.
"The first time's hard," he says, placing his hand atop Harold's. His skin is dry and rough, his touch painfully kind—far kinder than Harold deserves. "The first time you put your own survival over someone else's like that, especially up close. It's hard." John glances down at their hands, a faraway, haunted look in his eyes. "I'll never forget it." His gaze meets Harold's again. "And neither will you."
With a sharp breath, Harold recoils. And neither will you. The words seem so cruel. But there is no cruelty in John's eyes, no malice in his ever-quiet voice. Just...concern. Compassion. Understanding.
"No," Harold says. "No, I don't suppose I will, will I?" His voice is shaking as much as his hands were. "I didn't intend to...I didn't want to kill him, but I—surely there was another option."
"There wasn't."
"But surely there must have been!" Just because logic says there wasn't doesn't mean that it is true. "How can there not have been another way for me to defuse that situation? How can—"
"Harold," John says, softly. "Either you were going to kill him in self defense, or I was gonna kill him for him killing you. This option's better. I know it hurts." John lets out a mirthless laugh. "Believe me, I know exactly how much it hurts. And it's going to hurt for a long, long time. It's going to haunt you for the rest of your life.
"But you did what had to be done. There was only one way that moment was going to go, and I'm betting deep down, you know that, don't you?"
Harold doesn't answer—doesn't need to, really—and John presses on. "I'm proud of you. You saved a good man's life today: your own." Harold opens his mouth to protest, but John cuts him off. "You're someone the world can't afford to lose. The world needs people who try to save lives. People who feel it when they take one. People like you.
"You're not a killer. There's a difference between someone who's killed and someone who's a killer. I'm a killer. Pretty sure that guy was a killer. But you're not. You're someone who was trapped, and who had to make a tough decision that no good man should ever have to make. And I'm sorry I didn't get in there fast enough to help. To keep you from having to make that call."
"So, how do I—" The question gets caught in Harold's throat. He takes a long, slow sip of his tea to dislodge it, barely tasting the warm drink, and tries to find the right pattern of words for what he needs to ask, discarding possibility after possibility as John sits silently, patiently waiting for him. Finally, he stumbles upon, "How do I cope with this?" his tongue half-tripping over the statement.
He and survivor's guilt and self-recrimination are intimate bedmates already. He has spent so long blaming himself for Nathan's death like he was the one who set off the bomb, blaming himself for the deaths of the many, many people—so many people—who occupied the Irrelevant List at the ends of their lives. But this is different. The blood is on his hands—was literally on his hands just a short time ago, thick and red and shining and dripping, filling the air with a harsh, metallic reek he's not sure was real or imagined, covering his fingers and oozing under his nails as he tried in vain to stem the flow, to undo his latest mistake...
This is different.
"Where do I go from here?" he asks.
John doesn't answer immediately, considering the question. Harold waits, trying to focus on John's face instead of the thoughts running through his head, the memories. If it wasn't for him, that man would still be alive. Or—no. John is likely correct. If tonight had turned out differently, that man would still be dead, and so would Harold.
That knowledge changes nothing. He took a man's life. That man mattered to someone. Thanks to him, somebody's loved one has stopped breathing, their heart has stopped beating, their blood is staining cloth and rags that were hidden away to be incinerated like garbage, like that man didn't matter, like all that mattered was protecting scared and shaken and insignificant Harold Finch, not the man whose life he'd terminated. How the hell is he supposed to be okay with this? How can anyone still call him a good man after this, when he was responsible for so much death already, and is now directly responsible for one?
But...he still thinks John is a good man. John has taken many lives—in far less humane ways than a quick death from a fortuitous strike of a knife to something vital and bloody. John was doing what he had to do, on most occasions. Tonight, so was Harold.
No, that thought doesn't help, either. With a frustrated groan, he takes off his glasses and runs a hand over his face. None of his rationalizations seem to help, leading him to his next conclusion, stated as he slips his glasses back on: "Or is the answer to simply...keep going?"
"For you, I'm not sure," John says. "But for me?" He shrugs. "That's as good an answer as any."
Harold expects that to be the end of the conversation, but then John speaks again. "When it stops being so hard," he says, "when it doesn't hurt to take a life—that's when you need to take a good, long look at yourself. I don't think you'll ever have that problem.
"I wish there was something I could say that fixes this," John continues. "But there's not. So I just...if it means anything, I still think you're a good man, and I think you did the right thing."
"It does," Harold says. "Your regard is...it's important to me." On any other occasion, it would be immensely helpful to hear of it. This time... "However, I just...John, I don't think I'm quite ready to hear that yet, I'm afraid. I'm sorry."
"Yeah, I know," John says, with a grim half-smile. "So I'll make sure I say it again when you are."