Work Text:
Something is wrong, but Harold can't quite put his finger on what. He feels like he's been sitting at his desk for days; his shoulders ache from hunching. He really ought to improve his posture. But when he flips through the pad of graph paper it's mostly blank, narrow blue lines unmarred by his crabbed hand, and what he has written doesn't make sense, incomplete equations with nonsensical syntax.
Perhaps he's tired. He's been pulling a lot of all-nighters lately, between his coursework and his own projects. Occasionally, if he stays up for too long, he stops being able to focus—not mentally but physically, blurred vision that isn't helped by cleaning his glasses, like they've been secretly replaced with a different prescription. He thought he slept several hours just last night, but maybe that was actually two nights ago; the graph paper's blue lines are fuzzy, parallels bending in to impossibly intersect.
This proof is due tomorrow, but he can get up early and complete it before class. He sets his alarm clock for 6 AM.
But sleep proves elusive, tired though he believed he was. A loose mattress spring is poking him in the back, and the covers are too heavy. He finally throws them off, but then it's too cold, a chill draft blowing over his sweating skin. He should get up and close the window, but he wants to sleep. He pulls the sheets up to block the draft but then they're twisted too tight, confining when he tries to roll away from the spring, as well as he can in the narrow bed.
The sunlight hurts his eyes, pulsing painfully red even when he closes them. He should've drawn the blinds but it was dark when he went to bed, and he should've woken up long before the sun climbed over the dorm's roof to reach his window. Only he can't wake up if he's never gone to sleep; the sun must be shining through that paradox. He puts his arm over his eyes to block it out.
"Do you want me to shut the blinds, Harold? I thought you said you wanted the sunlight," Nathan says.
Harold's momentarily confused. When did Nathan get here? They had spent most of the last weekend immersed in vector chaining and parallel pipelines; then Sunday night Nathan had said it had been fun but that he'd really like to pass at least a couple of his classes, so he'd be making himself scarce. Which Harold had, after some analysis, determined to be a polite cancellation of their developing association. He had not expected to see Nathan in his dorm room again. "Don't you have morning class?"
"No," Nathan says. "And it's not morning."
"Well, it's not night," Harold says reasonably, waving at the painful sun, "but my alarm clock hasn't rung yet, so it must be morning."
"You slept through your alarm," Nathan says.
"No, I didn't," Harold says. "I don't sleep through alarms. And I wasn't sleeping anyway."
"Then your clock must be broken." Drawing the blinds to shut out the worst of the offending sunlight, Nathan crosses back from the window to Harold's bedside, navigating through the labyrinth of stacked books and scattered notepads. "Come on, finish your juice."
"What juice?"
Nathan nods at the glass of orange juice in Harold's hand, chilling his fingers as if it was just poured, except he didn't pour it and there's no pitcher in sight. Suspicious, Harold doesn't drink but puts the glass down on the table by the bed. It's somehow a long way to reach, and his shoulder and elbow are sore and trembling, as if the glass weighs fifty pounds. He sets it down unevenly, too close to the edge; Nathan hastily grabs it before it topples and spills on his slacks.
"Sorry," Harold says, blinking at his unexpectedly unsteady hand.
Nathan's blurry face frowns at him, though not the irritated look he gets when Harold points out the occasional flaws in his generally solid work. This frown furrows his brow, makes him look oddly old. He puts the glass of juice down on the table, reaches over to press his hand to Harold's forehead. It's such a bizarre gesture that Harold doesn't think to brush him off. Nathan's palm is cool and damp from the condensation on the glass and it feels good, soothes a little of the tight pounding tension Harold hadn't noticed until now, like an iron band around his skull.
Nathan is still frowning. "Maybe I should take you to the hospital..."
"No!" Harold protests, struggling against the sheets to sit up—which makes no sense because he must have already been sitting up, to be holding the glass. "No, I don't need a doctor, there's nothing wrong," he lies.
Nathan's mouth is as tight as the band around Harold's temples. "You're running a fever of 104," he says, brandishing a thermometer that Harold doesn't recall coming near his mouth, though the underside of his tongue is sore where the metal sensor pressed.
"It's just a cold," Harold says, though his nose isn't stuffy and his throat isn't sore. Though his stomach is roiling now, thinking of being confined to a hospital, sterile instruments and close walls and nurses watching and he can't afford a private room on his student's insurance—"I don't need to go to the hospital, I'm fine here. Please..."
Nathan studies him, unhappy, but he knows Harold well enough by now to understand that his paranoia isn't mental unbalance but practical necessity. At last he says, "All right, I won't take you in. Yet," he adds warningly. "But will you drink the juice, at least?"
The orange juice tastes bitter, like it's gone off, or been laced with something. Harold manages to force half of it down, under Nathan's watchful eye, along with a handful of orange pills which Nathan insists upon over Harold's protests and on threat of calling a doctor. "It's just Advil," Nathan says, "you're not allergic, are you?"
"No," Harold grudgingly admits, and swallows the pills.
Afterwards Nathan tells him to sleep. Harold explains the considerable effort he's already, fruitlessly, expended on this task, so Nathan hands him their Introduction to Dynamic Modeling Systems textbook and suggests he try reading instead, rather than bringing him a notepad like Harold asks.
Reading is no good, however; his glasses keep fogging over and the blurring words make his head pound harder. He throws the textbook aside in frustration. Nathan picks the abused volume up off the floor, fingers running along the spine to check for cracks. "Maybe you could watch TV?"
"What TV?" Harold grumbles. "Or are you offering to steal the student lounge set?" He picks at a loose thread in one of the blankets, running irritably diagonal and crooked across the neat perpendicular parallels of the blanket's weave. The headache is putting him in a horrible mood, and his temper only makes his head hurt more. "What are you doing here, anyway? Don't you have a late afternoon class to get to? Or an early frat party?"
"No," Nathan says. "And I'm here because I didn't see any sign of you for two days, and then you called and asked me to bring over orange juice."
"...I did?" Harold asks, momentarily distracted from the troublesome thread.
"You did."
Harold blinks at the half-empty glass on the end table. "Thank you," he says. "For the juice."
"No problem," Nathan says. "You could've said you were sick, I'd have come sooner."
"I'm not sick," Harold says, "it's just a headache...but you would have?"
"Yes," Nathan says, frowning again. "Of course."
"...Oh," Harold says, not sure what to do with this.
Nathan, atypically, doesn't offer anything more, neither teasing Harold for not understanding a concept as simple as friendship, nor changing the subject to something more comfortably impersonal. He leaves it up to Harold to fill the pause, and Harold fumblingly tries, "I wanted to talk with you anyway—remember the packet switching protocols we were discussing? And you were saying that you didn't think software could outpace an IMP's hardware calculation of the checksum?"
The last time they'd discussed this, Nathan talked loudly over and under all of Harold's arguments; but now he just says, "I don't really remember, why don't you remind me?"
So Harold begins to explain his latest idea for improving the calculating algorithm, and Nathan argues none of it, which Harold starts to suspect is a ploy to get him to talk himself to sleep—a trick Nathan figured out within the first two months of their acquaintance, when they were partnered in the relational databases lab. But talking now doesn't force Harold to slow his thoughts as it sometimes can; instead his mind keeps spinning off on different tangents, leaving his tongue behind. He's fairly certain that not everything he's saying is making sense—certainly not that nonsense about modular summation of binary data blocks—but Nathan just nods, humoring him.
Or else he's missing Nathan's answers. Time keeps erratically skipping past Harold; he has no sense of falling asleep or waking up, but it's night now instead of day, dark outside the shades and the bedside lamp is on. He wasn't asleep but he remembers dreaming, vague disturbing visions of being chased, of trying to run and being unable, trapped in a hobbled body. It makes him want to get up and go for a jog, outpace his thoughts for a little while; but merely sitting up in bed leaves him panting, every muscle aching like he's resting up from a marathon he doesn't remember running.
His glasses are off but he sees motion, makes out a fuzzy form sitting by the bed, leaning over him. His pulse speeds up in panic, before Nathan says, "It's just me, Harold."
Nathan, of course; who else would it be? He has a single this year and Nathan's the only person he's let inside it—the only person who's asked to come in. "You're still here?" Harold asks him, surprised.
"I'm not going anywhere," Nathan says. "Try to go back to sleep, you need the rest."
"I wasn't asleep. I need my calculator," Harold says. He just had a brainstorm about calculating the polynomial division remainders for check values, but he wants to check his work and he doesn't trust his aching head with numbers right now. "Have you seen it?"
"Maybe it's under one of these piles," Nathan said. "Your place is kind of a mess."
"Half of it's your mess!" Harold protests. Not just the stacks of filled notepads, either—Harold is fine with doing his reading at the library, but Nathan likes to check out books, those he doesn't just buy.
The calculator wouldn't help much anyway, Harold thinks. He needs an actual computer. It's a shame that he can't have one small enough to take to bed with him. In twenty, thirty years, microprocessors will have gotten small enough to make it possible. A truly personal computer, not just desk-sized but portable, so you can work in bed or in your favorite armchair, with an actual computer on your lap. On top of your lap, and since the one universal constant of computers is that people like them to have silly names (it makes them less intimidating equipment, Nathan maintains), of course they'll end up called laptops—Harold giggles at the absurdity.
"What's so funny?" Nathan asks. He reaches over to Harold's forehead again.
His hand isn't soothing now, clammy and too heavy a pressure on Harold's aching skull. He pushes Nathan's arm away, says, "Nothing, just something I remembered." Remembering the future—that doesn't seem right? Not the standard cognitive process, and a blatant violation of general relativity besides. But he remembers quite clearly things that haven't happened yet. "I know why you keep your books here, you know—the girls you have over like it better when you tell them you're a Harvard med student. That will be harder next year when we're rooming together."
"We're going to be roommates, now?" Nathan's tone suggests he's still humoring Harold.
"For our last two years at MIT," Harold says. "And we'll argue all the time about who left what on the floor; you almost move out after stepping on that one circuit-board. But we get so much done—it's where it all starts, all those nights we stay up through. And there will still be lots of girls for you after we graduate."
"Great," Nathan says. "Though before we move in together, you're going to get yourself a room in the ER, if this fever hasn't broken by morning."
"It's not a fever," Harold says, "that's not what's wrong." He's figured it out now.
"What, then?" Nathan suddenly sounds unreasonably tense. "What's wrong with you? Drugs, poison—"
Nathan being more paranoid than Harold himself is disorienting. "No, nothing like that," Harold denies, carefully shaking his head. His neck twinges and he rubs it fretfully. "I've become a little unstuck in time, is all. My body temperature is probably raised due to my relative temporal acceleration."
"Unstuck in time," Nathan repeats, not as tensely. "Well, I guess Vonnegut's better than Kafka. Not sure what to feed a giant cockroach."
"A giant what?" Harold asks, taken aback by this bizarre tangent.
"Never mind. I'd've thought you'd read that, though..."
"Read what? Not one of your ridiculous SF books, you know I don't waste my time on those. And you'd probably have that 4.0 if you didn't, either...." Harold shuts his mouth, because he didn't mean to say that; that argument had gotten old before their first semester ended. Nathan leaves paperbacks over at Harold's place along with all their research materials, which Harold is aware is a blatant effort to tease his curiosity into picking one up; but it's a nonverbal battle now. And at least Nathan chooses books with halfway interesting covers and occasionally genuinely intriguing speculation, rather than the dense, dated literary works he's also partial to, for reasons Harold cannot comprehend. With all the infinite possibilities of the future before them, why dwell in the past any longer than physics demands?
Nathan doesn't retort, however. It's possible Harold hadn't spoken after all; he might have been reliving something he had said, or would say. "So what do you want to know?" he asks Nathan, to make up for that past or future slight.
"Know about what?" Nathan asks cautiously.
"About the future!"
"Ah," Nathan says. "Uh...are there flying cars?
"Why would anyone want a flying car?" Harold asks, baffled. "The ones on the ground are dangerous enough. Ask me something serious. Such as personal computing—they're going to call them laptops, by the way; but then when touch technology catches on those will be called tablets, so you get your way in the end."
"Good to know," Nathan says, not sounding noticeably impressed, but then he wouldn't be; hardware has never interested Nathan as much as software.
Harold has always been fascinated with both, and how one depends on the other, ever since he built the machine which would've opened ARPANET wide to the world, had the world been ready to receive its connections. Someday—someday it will be ready, and that's not optimistic conjecture; he can remember it, networks spread across the planet, wired and wireless, tying everyone to everyone else, so that no one can slip through and be forgotten, be lost—
But he's slipping now; he can feel time accelerating around him, like falling, like he's sliding off the bed even though it's level, and vast, far bigger than could fit in his cramped dorm room—"I think," he says faintly, "that I'm becoming unstuck again—just don't bring me to the hospital, please, Nathan?"
He's gone before he hears Nathan's answer, but when Harold slides back into realtime he's still in his own familiar bed, not in starched hospital sheets. The room is dark, so that he cannot tell his eyes are open, until he rolls over and sees a shadow against the slightly brighter rectangle of the open doorway.
Nathan, Harold remembers. Nathan is talking, low-voiced, as if he doesn't want Harold to hear, saying, "Yeah, 104 is the highest—he's been in and out—no coughing—the flu? Dammit, Finch, aren't you paranoid enough to get a flu shot?—all right, by morning, got it. Thank you, Dr. Enright."
"Who? Who's there?" Harold cries in alarm. "I told you, I don't need a doctor—"
"It's okay," Nathan says. He closes the door, putting the room into full darkness, but Harold can track his voice moving toward the bed. "No one's here but me, I was just talking on the phone."
But even as he says it there's a thumping outside the door, then a scratching. Harold starts. "What's that—"
"Someone upstairs," Nathan says calmly, almost too calmly, as if he's forcing his voice to soothe. "Noisy neighbors," and of course, even the cinderblock walls of the dorm can't drown out all the partying. In truth it's quieter than Harold would expect; it must be quite late.
Reluctantly he sinks back on the bed, enervated from the brief surge of panic. "Who's Finch?" he asks. It's not a name Nathan's mentioned before, that he recalls. Though he likes its sound, the soft opening contrasting with the final fricative. More character than 'Wren', he thinks. Perhaps he can use it someday.
Nathan hesitates a second shy of triggering Harold's innate paranoia, then says, "No one. Just a friend. You don't know him."
"You've got so many friends," Harold remarks. "Doesn't it get tiring?" It makes him tired just to think about it, trying to keep track of so many people. He only has the one friend, really, and sometimes that's still too much. He'd been almost relieved when Nathan had said his farewell last Sunday, thinking of how much more he could be able to do if he didn't have to explain it all before he did it. Thinking of how much safer he would be—solitude is the only way to ensure privacy, and privacy is the only way to ensure safety; he'd learned that long ago.
Yet for some reason he feels none of the normal anxiety of having his living space invaded, not with Nathan. Rather there's something—(safe)—reassuring about having Nathan here—about having Nathan here now, watching over him. Giving Harold an anchor to return to when he becomes chronologically adrift.
He's becoming used to it, how Nathan is always there to ground him, to make him talk, to get Harold to force all his many thoughts into the inefficient oversimplicity of words, rather than just enjoy their perfect complexity in the isolation of his own mind. To bring him back to the present when Harold tries to sprint too quickly into the astonishing future. It's frustrating sometimes, but Harold will come to understand that he needs it. He'll be grateful for it, how Nathan keeps him from getting lost, from losing the rest of the world.
He tried to thank Nathan for it once—or will try? Past or future memory, he can't tell—but Harold remembers it clearly, trying with his clumsy imprecise words to express that necessity, express his gratitude that Nathan would devote the time he could spend with all his many influential friends and all his many pretty girls, to Harold instead.
And Nathan said—says—will say—in a particular lightly mocking tone that Harold eventually realizes is covering either deep insult or deep amusement, "Oh, yes, what a burden it is, hanging out all the time with my best friend!"
Years later, Nathan will remind Harold of that awkward conversation, and add, "Besides, you've made me the eleventh richest man on the planet, so even if you did owe me for some of those nights back in college when I was making code with you instead of love with a co-ed, I believe I've been compensated..."
By then Harold will understand better the processes involved, will have solved enough of the endlessly complex equation of human interaction to properly thank his friend. "I'll ask you to be the best man at my wedding," he says, then frowns at the incompleteness of that memory. "You'll be the—"
"Harold," Nathan interrupts him, oddly gently, "how about you don't spoil things for me. Don't tell me any more about the future; I'll wait and see for myself how it goes."
"Are you sure?" Harold asks. "I may not be unstuck for much longer...." He feels heavy, weighed down by the memories that are filling up his head. Nathan is in many, not all good ones. But Harold remembers this clearly: Nathan by his bedside, skipping classes for three days, only a week before finals. He'd managed to pass the semester, but lost any chance for the 4.0, even with Harold's help.
Someday, long after they've graduated, Harold will ask Nathan why he'd stayed, why he hadn't just dragged him to the doctor and been done with him. (And if he had, if Harold had been entered into their records, with his then-imperfect cover identity...but Nathan had listened, as Nathan always listened, even when he didn't like what Harold had to say.)
"You asked me not to," Nathan will say. "What are friends for?"
"But we weren't friends yet," Harold will reply. "Not then, not really—you were using me for my technical expertise, you've told me so," because Nathan does not have Harold's ability to see the potential in computers, long before the hardware exists to support his vision; but he can see the potential in people. "So why?"
And Nathan will shrug, unusually indecisive, and finally say, "It just seemed like you needed to trust someone. And maybe I needed someone to trust me, just then..."
"You could ask me," Harold says, thoughtfully, knowing he's safe; he remembers that Nathan doesn't ask him, not now, anyway.
"Ask you what?"
"Ask me what my real name is," Harold says. "I'm still sufficiently temporally confused that I might tell you, if I don't recall when I am now."
"Oh," Nathan says.
"You're not going to ask, are you?" Harold asks him, half disappointed, half elated, that his memory of this near future is so accurate.
"No," Nathan says, "I'm not."
"I know," Harold says. "I remember."
"Harold..." Whatever Nathan is contemplating saying, he doesn't say it after all. Harold can almost hear him shaking his head in the dark, can picture his expression so clearly, the wry, fond smile that doesn't change in over thirty years, for all the tolls aging takes on his boyishly handsome face.
Close, Harold thinks, I'm close to settling. He can feel it in the pit of his stomach, a sour aching knot pulling him down, tying him in place, dragging him back into the regular one-way timestream, the past always flowing into the future and there's no way to swim against that current. The best you can do is take your memories with you.
There's something he needs to know—something he didn't ask, hasn't asked yet.
"Nathan." He has to say it quickly, while he's still adrift; he doesn't remember getting another chance. "Nathan, if you...if I...if something happens to you, would you care...would you mind if I made another best friend?"
Nathan is silent. Harold squints through the darkness, wishing he could see his friend's face. He's scared—terrified, the sweat breaking out on his brow chill instead of fever-hot. "I don't—I don't want to lose you; I don't know what I'd do if I did.
"But if I ever did, and there was someone else, someone who needed my trust, when I needed someone to trust...he wouldn't replace you, no one could replace you; he wouldn't be anything like you. But all the same, would it be all right, if we worked together like you and I work together, if we saved the world together...would it be all right, if he came to mean as much to me as you do?"
Nathan doesn't answer for a long time, so long that Harold thinks he could have skipped in and out of years and Nathan would still be standing before him, his shadow over Harold in the darkness, not saying anything. But he doesn't skip; he stays in place.
And Nathan finally replies, quietly, "I don't know—I can't answer that, Harold. But...I hope it would be all right. If he's a true friend."
"He will be," Harold says. It's exhausting, to stay fixed like this, to have to live every second as it passes. His head is pounding and his eyes are slipping closed. Maybe he'll hold in place long enough to sleep... "He is."
Harold awakens to a loud noise, repeating steady as an alarm but more insistent; and then a shout, "Bear! Wees stil!"
The barking cuts off with a whine that Harold can only characterize as embarrassed. "It's okay, Bear," he says reassuringly, which is all the permission the dog needs to leap onto his bed and lick his face as eagerly as if he'd been wearing a peanut butter facemask.
Harold tries to fend him off, not very successfully; he can scarcely raise his arms, all his limbs feeling stiff and rubbery at once. After a moment reason reasserts itself and he calls off Bear with a murmured command; Bear obediently hops down from the bed and sits beside it, looking up at Harold, wildly wagging tail thumping on the floor.
"Did he wake you up? Sorry," someone says from the bedroom doorway.
"Mr. Reese?" Harold squints at the blurred shape there. It's extremely...peculiar, to see John standing in his apartment. If not as unnerving or upsetting as Harold feared it might be.
"Your fever broke a little after midnight, but then you were out like a light," John says. "Dr. Enright said rest was recommended. I was keeping Bear with me but he snuck off when I was figuring out the stove."
It's even more peculiar when Harold realizes that the blotch of purple covering a half or more of John is one of his kitchen aprons. He really must locate his glasses.
"I made eggs benedict," John adds. "Protein's good for recovery. And more orange juice."
He keeps standing there as Harold blinks blearily at him. Finally Harold says, "I did get a flu shot, in fact. They're targeted to the most common strains of the season, which doesn't account for approximately thirty percent of infections."
"All right," John says. "Do you feel up for breakfast?"
Harold considers his stomach, which testifies to its emptiness with a muttered rumble. "Yes, please."
"Coming right up," John says, and Bear gives a hopefully hungry whimper as his tail thumps the floorboards again, and Harold finds himself smiling, to add this memory to all the others he carries along with him into the future.