Voices in my head

Real life has been keeping me quite busy recently, but then an episode of Person of Interest ("The Crossing") came and punched my muse in the face. "The Crossing" followed such a fabulous episode ("Endgame," oh my god, "Endgame" was so awesome) and was pretty good itself except for one plot point which was so idiotic that it was either one of the characters (Reese) flipping out and having a break from reality or the writers completely going off the rails. Thus, I decided that it needed to be corrected into one of the characters flipping out.

Thus, I added another chapter to Holidays for the Not-Really-Dead, a collection that had previously been fairly light-hearted, but now takes a turn for the angst-ridden, and once more I essentially reformat a rant into a fanfic, and give you: 

Winter Solstice
On the longest night of the year, in the dark and cold, Finch hopes for the coming days, Reese fears where he went wrong, and Joss has reached the end of both hope and fear.

A couple of ficlets:

Prompt: Harry Potter, author’s choice, magic responds to desires; the reason so many muggleborns have trouble using magic after learning about it is that they don't really believe they can do it

A/N: This one came out a bit angstier than I had originally intended, but here goes: 

Ficlet: Belief in Magic



Prompt: pofinterest-fic (Person of Interest) tweet challenge

Ficlet: Pattern Recognition

So Person of Interest is my current TV show obsession. It's so very cheesy and yet so very perfect. I love it.

Anyway, one of the characters the brilliant and wealthy and secretive Harold Finch. He has a dozen aliases at least, all of them with the first name Harold and last names that are bird-related. And he's been living under various aliases for the vast majority of his life, going back at least as far as college.

So I've been thinking to myself: under what circumstances would someone that young possibly need an alias and know how to acquire one? 

My first thought:

1. He's from a wealthy/famous family and he wanted to make his own way in the world and thus had to attend school under an alias.

2. He's from a mob-type family and he needed to escape their expectations and plans for his future.

3. He's straight up paranoid, for no good reason at all. At least not at that point. (He's still paranoid now in his middle age, but he's acquired a suitable number of reasons for it.)

But then came the realization that I knew of another TV character who is brilliant and secretive and uses hundreds of aliases that all maintain the same first name: Jarod.

I think Harold is a pretender. Or, at least from the Center's pretender program. Somehow he managed to escape and he's been hiding from the Center ever since.

Given this premise, there are a variety of possible plots:

  •  The number that The Machine provides is for someone being threatened by the Center. And Harold has to decide whether to try going up against his own personal demons and thereby giving them the opportunity to find him again, or to let the number go. He can't just let the number go and so it's John Reese against the Center, with Harold trying to help him, knowing more than he should possibly be able to know, and yet trying desperately to stay distanced from the whole process.

  •  Alternately, it has nothing to do with the Machine, the Center has just been trying to find Harold for years and finally managed to track him down. Now he needs to escape them again.

  •  Jarod comes to visit Harold. Maybe it's for a case or maybe it's just to say "hi." Reese is suspicious.

"This is my..." Harold looked uncertain for a moment, before continuing, "my physical therapist, Jarod." 

Jarod smiled brightly at Reese. "It's great to meet you." Then turned towards Harold. "Before our next session, do you have some books I could review?"

He'd been a doctor, a masseuse, an acupuncturist, and a sports trainer before, but somehow never a physical therapist. Harold had just the reference manuals he needed, though, so he'd be ready to give his first session soon enough.

Reese watched him leave the room with suspicious eyes. "And is he a good physical therapist?" He spoke in his usual soft manner but it was pretty obvious he thought he was calling a bluff.

In a sense it was a bluff, but in another sense it wasn't. With Jarod, Harold could introduce him as whatever he felt like. "He's the very best." 

So I’ve been watching Person of Interest regularly as it is currently the love of my TV-watching life. The two main characters are:
Harold Finch, the secretive rich guy who was seriously injured not long ago and now has metal pins in his neck so he can’t turn his head, a limp, and chronic pain. He has a machine that identifies people who are central in some way to a violent criminal conspiracy.
John Reese, the former black-ops agent who did vicious things for his country, had a crisis of faith and desperately needs the purpose that Finch and his machine provide him.

The show is awesome!

More specifically, it uses about a dozen of my favorite tropes, which means that it, admittedly, uses a lot of standardized tropes, but they are great ones and well done, so it’s all awesome!

You can watch episodes streaming from the CBS website.

Anyway, no show can have completely invaded my psyche until I have an idea for a Highlander crossover.

There is, of course, the easy (and humorous) route of having the machine pick up an immortal who is either hunting or being hunted, but pretty much regardless does not want to be saved by our mysterious duo.

However I have a different idea:

I want Finch to be pre-immortal who knows what he is or possibly recently-immortal, i.e. post accident. There’s no way he can survive The Game or any challenge. His best hope would be to join a monastery and he’s just not willing to do that. Maybe the tragedy of his past included the fact that he knew he could wake up immortal if he just died but there was somebody he needed to live for so he chose to live, even knowing that he was giving up the potential for eternity. And then that other person didn’t survive.

Reese, on the other hand, is mortal and will always be mortal, but he knows about immortals from his shady past.

So I imagine that Reese discovers that Finch is immortal and goes through this whole process of reactions where first, he’s just surprised: Finch must be an amazing actor to keep pretending to be that disabled. Next, he’s irritated because Finch could have helped out with the active stuff more. Then he’s trying to deny his own suspicions that it’s not acting, and he wonders if Finch had the metal pins put in his neck to prevent a beheading blow, and how that wasn’t a very good idea on his part. And finally he admits that Finch is just out of luck.

Finch, on the other hand, has come to accept his own status, and essentially acknowledge that he’s not going to get forever, but at least he’ll live longer than he would if he weren’t immortal, since in that case he’d be dead.

And the whole thing is sort of bittersweet where they both know that they’re each going to die by violence but neither on the other hand, neither one will have to survive the other by very long, so there’s a silver lining of a sort. And in the mean time, the only thing they can do is to try to accomplish some good in the meantime.

At this point, I don't really have a plot in mind, just the character development aspect, but the character development aspect does keep on nibbling at my mind wanting to be written and I'm not at all sure how to go about it. Thus, someone else should. *grin*

But the general feel of the concept is all very reminiscent of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem Mutability (The flower that smiles to-day…): 

I.
The flower that smiles to-day
To-morrow dies;
All that we wish to stay
Tempts and then flies.
What is this world's delight?
Lightning that mocks the night,
Brief even as bright.
II.
Virtue, how frail it is!
Friendship how rare!
Love, how it sells poor bliss
For proud despair!
But we, though soon they fall,
Survive their joy, and all
Which ours we call.
III.
Whilst skies are blue and bright,
Whilst flowers are gay,
Whilst eyes that change ere night
Make glad the day;
Whilst yet the calm hours creep,
Dream thou -- and from thy sleep
Then wake to weep.