Un Petit Poisson, Un Petit Oiseau - (Teen, No Archive Warnings Apply, 4.1k words, 1/1, Harold Finch/John Reese, Fluff)
John takes Harold on a trip to Cape May for some seaside relaxation. It's there that both witness something beautiful and new to them. Rinch Fest 2025 - Day One. Prompts: road trip + surprise + heat.
Magic Trick - (Mature, Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, 1.9k words, 1/1, Harold Finch/John Reese, Emotional Hurt/Comfort)
CW: Minor description of fatal injuries
Harold's guilt repeats on him in a violent fashion, causing John to intervene for better or worse. Rinch Fest 2025 - Day Two. Prompts: nightmare + cooking.
Do I Know Any Better? - (Teen, No Archive Warnings Apply, 3.4k words, 1/1, Harold Finch/John Reese, Angst and Emotional Hurt/Comfort)
Harold leaves his phone on the desk while making some tea in another room, allowing John to notice an incoming text about dinner plans that evening. Chaos ensues. Rinch Fest 2025 - Day Three. Prompts: misunderstanding + au.
Nyctophobia - (Teen, No Archive Warnings Apply, 1.4k words, 1/1, Harold Finch/John Reese, Emotional Hurt/Comfort)
When the southern half of Manhattan loses power, John discovers that Harold is afraid of the dark. Rinch Fest 2025 - Day Five. Prompts: hurt/comfort + blackout.
Like Tears in Rain - (Mature, No Archive Warnings Apply, 1.9k words, 1/1, Harold Finch/John Reese, Whump, Hurt/Comfort)
CW: Aftermath of Torture
Harold is rather brutally held captive when he gets dragged into the current number's dilemma. Reese plays both hero and nurse. Rinch Fest 2025 - Day Six. Prompts: whump + rain + tears.
H. Crankshaft - (Explicit, No Archive Warnings Apply, 3.8k words, 1/1, Harold Finch/John Reese, Smut, Crack)
John has been scouring the internet for info on Finch and ends up stumbling upon talk of a short-lived (and now retired) pornstar that, mysteriously, looks like a young Harold Finch. Rinch Fest 2025 - Day Seven/Four. Prompts: laughter + nsfw/kink.
LOST
You'll Always Be Little To Me - (Teen, No Archive Warnings Apply, 5k words, 1/1, Ben Linus & Alex Rousseau, Family Fluff, Light Angst)
CW: Mentions of past child abuse
There are plenty of bad things you can say about Benjamin Linus but nobody who knows the man could ever say he doesn't love his daughter. Four times Ben and Alex made a core memory on the swing set outside their house. Lost Secret Santa Fic Exchange 2025 - DarkwingKate.
Foreigners tend to assume that the big cultural confusions between Australians and most other countries are gonna be based on our food, or social services, or weather, or weird animals. But it’s never that. In my experience, the real cultural confusions re: Australians are about The Respect Thing almost one hundred per cent of the time.
The broader Australian culture doesn’t, as a whole, have status-based respect. Some individual groups might, because they’ve brought it from other cultures they’re involved in, but the general culture doesn’t. There’s no sense that your boss or scout leader or the guy in charge of your country deserves more respect than you, or that you should behave differently to them than you would to any random person you know similarly well. (The very rare exceptions include ritualised settings, such as courtrooms, and for some reason the fact that children use “Miss/Ms/Mr” honourifics for teachers at school.)
I don’t mean Australians are a “stick it to the man, fight back against those in power” kind of people – we’re generally not. And I don’t mean we have a “we’re going to do the status thing but pretend we don’t and pretend to all be equal in mixed company” thing that middle-class Americans do. I mean the status-respect system does not exist, and if you try to use it, it weirds people the fuck out at best, and insults them at worst. Treating someone most countries would say is ‘above’ you differently in Australia is basically telling that person that you hate them; it’s saying “I’m forced to interact with you due to our current circumstances but I don’t see you as a person and won’t grant you the basic respect of treating you like an equal”. (When I was in America, I was constantly suppressing the instinct that random service people were sassing me because they overuse honourifics and were so keen to help me.)
This makes interacting with foreigners really baffling in a lot of circumstances. In university, my international friends would often describe Australians as “friendly, but very rude”. They thought we were all arseholes because of the way we spoke to our PhD supervisors and soforth, and wouldn’t believe us when we explained that our behaviour was respectful and that being deferential would be weird and awkward and insulting to them. Learning Japanese had a similar problem; everyone in the class could get the concept of different levels of formality and deference in language, ans was happy to memorise the usage of various words for Japanese people, but using them on each other was super weird, and we’d only ever use the most casual form of anything unless specifically instructed otherwise by the teacher.
The reason I’ve been thinking of this lately is because I’ve recently become aware that a lot of countries have like… a special respect for their country’s leaders? I don’t just mean “yeah, that guy makes the rules”, but that having that office makes them better than everyone else, somehow. Which I expect from countries with royal families, because Tradition, but I’ve recently found that Americans feel this way about their President, too. (Except the current one, who seems to be enough of a dick to break the system.) Like, if six Americans were in an aeroplane that was going down and there was only one parachute and one of the Americans was A Generic Non-Trump President, it’s just assumed that that guy gets the parachute? Like he’s automatically the life worth saving over the others, and they’d just give up their chance in favour of him? And that’s so weird to me. An Australian prime minister would have a 1 in 6 chance at the parachute; however the people decided, “this guy happens to be the leader of the country” wouldn’t be a factor.
When Americans don’t like a President, they usually feel the need to work in how he’s “not my president”, either through sheer denial, or by finding some way he’s theoretically illegitimate (different ways votes are counted, wild conspiracy theories about birth country, etc.), and while making sure those rules are obeyed IS extremely important, I’ve recently noticed that part of the motivation seems to be that they’re invested in whether he’s Really The President because being the President somehow makes someone Special rather than just a normal dick who’s been put in charge of the group project. (You see the same thing in “THIS IS TRUMP’S AMERICA!”, like him becoming President gives him superpowers or something).
This is getting off-topic. Point is, in Australia you can run into the Prime Minister and ask him to help you fix your phone and if he’s not busy but refused to help you out he’d be kind of a dick; of course he should help you out. And if I walk into your restaurant and you act like I’m a movie star and you’re going to be super attentive to my every need because I’m The Customer, I’m gonna get creeped out. We’re suspicious and insulted by what most people in the world consider to be basic manners, and vice versa. And it makes interacting with foreigners super weird because I always feel like they’ve got some invisible heirarchical flowchart in the back of their minds that I don’t.
I have long noticed that Americans have absolutely the same cultural attitude to the President as they would to a serving monarchy. They just think they don’t on a technicality.
Can confirm that if I call someone ‘Sir/Madam’ I generally mean ‘asshole’ (unless talking to an animal or tiny child) and that if I get called Ma’am I feel like I’m being called the asshole, which made time in Atlanta, Georgia suoer weird.
…so this explains why I have spent the last fourteen years low-grade pissed off at nearly every Australian I meet, because every time I try to be American Polite at them it pisses them off. And, for that matter, why my second boss here, the one I was so careful to be Formally Respectful of and always called “sir,” took such an intense dislike to me.
Yeah, even if that boss understood that you were American and what that meant, their instincts would’ve been screaming at them the whole time that you were being a dick. It’s a difficult thing for us to get used to even when we know the culture is different’.
As a Brit visiting Australia, the most vivid experience I had of this is: in the UK it’s really uncool to get into the passenger seat of a cab - you’re expected to get in the back. In Australia the reverse was apparently true.
covid update: you’re now meant to get in the back seat for social distancing and IT FEELS SO RUDE. sorry taxi person I AM NOT TRYING TO SHUN YOu just I know there are rules and we’re protecting each other. let’s be intensely awkward for a while.
Reblogging this because I just remembered the time Molly Meldrum absolutely horrified Prince Charles by describing meeting the Queen as “I saw your mum last week”.
One of my favorite travel books described humanity as, broadly speaking, having two types of culture: one where formal is respectful and informal is rude, and vice versa. Australian culture sees formality as hostile or unfriendly and familiarity as warmth. It’s decidedly not the case in USA as a whole, though as with any broad category the dichotomy changes as the group gets smaller.
Look there’s honestly a lot of history that build our culture today to be like this. We never really had a true aristocracy or class system in Australia and was still considered the dirty colonies up until federation in 1901. Even when we had the gold rush in the 19th century there were rich people but also anyone could dig up a nugget and get rich so no one really bothered with the rich = better than you thing because old johnno down the road who normally is on the piss all day and lives in a swag just picked up a 2lb piece of gold that’s worth thousands of dollars so now he can go buy his own pub and sell his own beer but everyone will still think of him as that guy who was always cracking bad jokes at the end of the bar and drinking a minimum of 8 beers a day. Sure we have rich people but we also pull them back down to earth when they get hoity toity. Australia is one of the most unionised countries in the world and yeah its true we dont get upset by much but when we do, all hell breaks loose. Look up some of Australia’s biggest protests and union movements like the convict rebellions, Eureka stockade, the campaign for the 8 hour day, and he general history of our Australian Labor Party. Australia was the second country in the world to grant women’s suffrage. So many unions and strikes and demands we made in Australia demanding equal and fair rights to working class in the 19th century that by federation in 1901 we were ahead of the world with workers rights and equality. Really the only class system we had was the employer employee divide but we still never bowed down and took it from them just because they boss. I’m not going to go into what happened in the 20th century but if you’re interested definitely look up post war Australia, the women’s working unions in the middle of the century, definitely look up the late Bob Hawke and his legacy, the nurse’s strike in Victoria in the 80s, the land rights movement and Eddie Mabo, and go from there.
I remember in school we were always taught to treat others how you wanted to be treated. You were no better or worse than anyone else. You want to be treated equal to everyone else and that meant being polite and showing decency and helping each other out. It’s true we only use titles for teachers or elders (indigenous Australians use “Aunty” and “Uncle” as a show of respect to their elders) but outside of that if someone calls you Miss y/n or sir or whatever it’s just uncomfortable. In hospitality and retail some of us will still use sir/ma'am mainly because we don’t know customers names but even then that’s rare and usually applied only to elderly. We personally don’t want to be addressed by titles or even surnames (unless it’s a nickname which I’ll get to) so we don’t use the titles or surnames for other people. With surnames often we use them as a nickname if we dont/can’t shorten their names. Getting a nickname (a good one, not one that is intentionally meant to bully you ofc. E.g. ScoMo is the nickname for our PM but he’s a piece of shit and ScoMo sounds a lot like Scum-mo) is the biggest show of respect in Australia. Usually it’s simply just adding a vowel or changing it up a little. I.e. John = johnno, Darren = Dazza, etc. If we can’t do it to your first name we do it to your last name. If we can’t do it to your last name it’s either a feature or behaviour and we put it in a good light. You ever notice that Australians like to make fun of each other and “insult” each other? There’s a very subtle difference when it’s truly meant to be insulting but that’s our way of being affectionate for each other. We will point out your flaws and make fun of you (and stop if you say no) and we will give you a nickname and it’s all in good humour. It’s one of the things I find foreigners get really upset about because they dont understand why we are so rude to each other. You build up a hard skin in this country and forget hat sometimes that stuff IS a bit insulting.
It’s a very backwards system of respect but it is a very honest one. No one is better than you. No one is worse than you. We are all humans.
We treat our acquaintances like friends and our friends like family. Teasing your friends is expected the same way it is for siblings. If you act like someone is above you, in a not-joking way, that’s basically declaring that you don’t see them as potential friend material—that something about them repels you and you want as many barriers between you as possible.
It would hurt my dad so badly if I ever called him “sir.”
Yep, and the automatic assumption that you think I’m an idiot/bitch if I’m called ma'am. The only time it has ever happened and I haven’t taken offence has been brand new army recruits/cadets, who are required to use it while in public to show deference to civilians.
I legit take less offense from being referred to as a pigdog cunt than I do being called ma'am. Getting a sweary character reference or having a friend call you a mad cbomb is totally fine in Aus. Ma'am is not something I associate with respect, being included as part of the group, or acceptance in any way - it’s pointing out rather emphatically that you are “other”
It can’t be entirely about how Australia has never had an aristocracy. I’m Danish, and we have pretty much exactly the same concept of respect, and our country is a monarchy. But admittedly, it may be a relatively new custom.
The Danish language used to have a formal register, like Japanese and German and lots of other languages. You used a whole different set of grammar rules when you talked to a superior, and they’d get upset if you didn’t. It was still a thing in my parents’ generation, but these days it has almost entirely disappeared. It’s only used when you’re communicating with an unspecific person, like in “please insert your card in the slot”, where the receiver could be anybody at all - and even there, it’s on its way out. It’s also used when addressing the royal family.
Nobody else - ever - warrants this form of address in 2026. If you use it, you sound robotic at best, acerbic at worst.
We do the exact same thing as Australians where the more deferential we are, the less respectful we are. Even addressing someone by their last name is considered depersonalizing, and generally only something you do after getting permission. And you’d NEVER use the Danish equivalent of ‘sir’ or ‘madam’ out loud, even when you’re being formal - that is used in the military, and that’s most people’s only frame of reference for those titles. If you use them, you sound like a soldier.
When I started working in Germany, it took a bit of a mental shift to get my brain to acknowledge that management expected me to use deferential language, and that wasn’t just a weird power trip. That’s just how it works everywhere that isn’t Denmark, and apparently Australia.
As an anxious American, I tend to default to Polite when I’m nervous, in order to keep some distance but make sure there’s no ill will or unpleasantness. It’s not warm or super friendly but it is respectful and almost never actively disliked.
Do Australians and Danes not have any option like that? Do you just have to be… Casual and best buds With Everyone At All Times, regardless of how tired or anxious you are?
In Australia, addressing everyone as your equal isn’t necessarily considered being ‘casual best buds’, it’s assumed to be neutral. Defaulting to ‘sir’ because you’re anxious would be like a nervous high schooler calling the teacher 'mum’. It’d be an embarrassing thing to do because in Australian culture it tells everyone else that your automatic reaction to being a bit nervous is to immediately fall back on over-the-top arse kissing, which is cringe behaviour. We use more subtle ways to differentiate between 'we’re best buds now’ and 'I’m being polite and a little distant’ that don’t involve invoking deference. Simply opening a conversation with “excuse me” and using a neutral tone is enough to tell other Australians that you don’t want to get all personal with them. You wouldn’t ask a stranger for directions by greeting them with “oi cunt!” and asking about their family, but nor would you call them 'sir’ or 'ma'am’ unless you wanted them to assume you were a foreigner and make them feel a bit awkward. (“Mate” is acceptable as a substitute for an honorific, or a term of address if you don’t know somebody’s name, but it’s more common to simply omit the term of address entirely where that’s an option.)
Ten years ago this summer, Person of Interest ended. This July 31–August 2, we're throwing a free virtual fan convention to celebrate it — and we want your ideas on the program.
If you've been sitting on a character analysis, a meta discussion, a rewatch breakdown, a creative workshop, or really any panel concept that would be at home in a room full of POI fans: this is your moment.
When you submit, you'll be asked whether your panel is Open or Closed. Here's what that means:
Closed Panel — You're submitting both the idea and the full moderator lineup. If accepted, the programming committee won't find additional co-mods. Your co-mods don't need to be confirmed at submission time, but you are committing to run this panel.
Open Panel — You're pitching the idea and asking the programming committee to assemble the moderator team from volunteers. If you'd rather moderate someone else's open panel than pitch your own, we'll open a sign-up thread at contingencycon.com after submissions close.
A few other things worth knowing:
You can submit up to 3 panels, ranked by your preference
There will also be also a poster presentation option if you'd rather share something async (no camera required) Stay tuned for updates on this.
The form takes about 10 minutes, and a PDF preview is on the site if you want to draft offline first
Deadline: May 24, 2026 Submit at: contingencycon.com
Questions are welcome here. We'd love to see what this fandom has been thinking about for the last decade!
Best POI fic recs? Looking for all timers. Any ship. <3
Oh, dearest anonymous, you have arrived in my inbox with an impossible question and absolutely wrecked me.
Best POI fic recs? Of all time? Any ship? Do you realise what you’ve done. My brain immediately started buffering like it was 2013 and I had seventeen tabs open.
I genuinely could not answer this properly. There is simply too much brilliance, too much heartbreak, too much deranged excellence in this fandom to give you a neat little definitive all-timers list and pretend I feel normal about it.
So, instead of attempting the impossible, I am going to do something slightly more survivable: I’m giving you a few absolute gems from this year. Because somehow, gloriously, wonderfully, these legends are still out here writing POI in 2026, and I think that deserves both celebration and applause.
So: a small 2026 rec list, with enormous affection.
These are listed oldest to newest, because apparently my recs also needed a chronological emotional arc.
Take a Cup of Kindness — Stingalingaling @stingalingaling
Rating: General Audiences | Words: 1,755 | Category: Gen | Relationship: Harold Finch & Nathan Ingram
A lovely little missing scene set on New Year’s Eve, 2002: Nathan, attending a glittering Manhattan charity gala, realises Harold hasn’t texted and immediately suspects he is somewhere alone doing something reckless with his latest AI attempt. So naturally he leaves the party and goes to find him. What follows is funny, warm, faintly melancholy, and quietly pivotal — one of those fics that feels small and intimate on the surface while brushing right up against something enormous.
It has that warm, bittersweet New Year’s Eve glow to it, with the quiet ache of the post-9/11 moment sitting underneath everything. I especially loved Nathan here: affectionate, lightly snarky, but genuinely worried in exactly the way that makes it feel perfectly right that he would walk twenty blocks in party clothes because Harold didn’t text. The comic timing of the AI exchange is also absolutely perfect, and then the fic pivots into something unexpectedly tender and philosophical without losing any of its charm. The whole ending lands so beautifully — sweet, hopeful, and just a little ominous, like standing on the threshold of a new era and not yet knowing how much is about to change.
A missing scene from 3x06, “Mors Praematura”, this picks up with Harold nearly being killed in the storage unit and follows John through the immediate aftermath: the rescue, the dissociation, the horrible shock of almost losing him, and the slow, aching intimacy of getting Harold safely home. It is very much a hurt/comfort fic, but in that beautifully precise way where every gesture feels earned — all raw nerves, quiet care, and two traumatised idiots trying to hold each other together.
I was completely undone by this one. The opening is so sharp and cinematic — pure adrenaline and sensory overload — and then the fic turns, almost without warning, into something devastatingly intimate. John’s dissociation feels frighteningly real, Harold’s voice becoming the thing that keeps pulling him back is just exquisite, and the protective tenderness running through all of it absolutely wrecked me. There are so many lines here that feel like tiny knife twists, but the one that really got me was the sense that, to John, Harold simply should not be cold, should not be hurt, should not be frightened. And then all that urgency and terror gives way to these incredibly careful, vulnerable moments of trust: Harold steadying John, John washing him down with almost painful gentleness, the shy physical closeness, the soft morning aftermath, the reaching hand, the “Please stay.” It’s tender in a way that feels almost unbearable —deeply felt, beautifully observed, and full of that particular Reese/Finch mix of devotion, restraint, and need.
Tuesday — root393
Rating: Teen and Up Audiences | Words: 791 | Category: F/F | Relationship: Root | Samantha Groves/Sameen Shaw
A fun little Root/Shaw snapshot: the Machine is quiet, Shaw is deeply unimpressed by the lack of things to do, and Root, naturally, decides to make that her entertainment. It’s brief, sharp, and very much built around their chemistry — all needling, tension, and the sense that neither of them knows how to interact normally even when they have a free afternoon.
I really enjoyed this. It captures their dynamic so cleanly: Shaw being gloriously bored and prickly, Root being impossible on purpose, and both of them sounding exactly like themselves. The banter has that great sharp little edge to it, with just enough sting underneath to keep it feeling like them. It’s quick, flirty, and very easy to hear in their voices — the kind of short fic that knows exactly what it is doing and leaves you smiling by the end.
The Art of Flirting — Little_Cinch @littlecinch
Rating: Teen and Up Audiences | Words: 1,045 | Category: M/M | Relationship: Harold Finch/John Reese
A very charming episode-related Reese/Finch fic built around teasing, misunderstandings, and one conversation tipping into something much more honest. It has that lovely slightly cracky setup energy, but it plays the emotional turn completely straight, so you get all the fun of John needling Finch right up until suddenly he is saying something mortifyingly real and there is no taking it back.
I adored this one. John’s jealousy comes out in the most painfully honest, slightly ridiculous way, and Finch being completely oblivious for half a beat before becoming instantly earnest is such a perfect combination. The whole exchange is delicious — funny, awkward, warm, and increasingly impossible to survive once the subtext becomes text. And Finch, once he finally understands, is so lovely here: a little flustered, a little sly, and completely devastating without even trying. It’s sweet, sharp, and ridiculously satisfying, with exactly the kind of mutual fondness and teasing that makes Reese/Finch so delightful to read.
Prologue; or, 5 times John didn’t kiss Harold — saltyqt @salty-qt
Rating: Teen and Up Audiences | Words: 3,251 | Category: M/M | Relationship: Harold Finch/John Reese
A pre-relationship Reese/Finch fic built around five almosts, and it uses that structure beautifully. Moving across different moments in canon, it traces the slow accumulation of feeling without ever forcing it, so what you get is not just pining, but John repeatedly trying to translate wanting into forms he actually knows how to live with: protectiveness, steadiness, getting Harold out alive, staying useful, staying close.
The moments chosen feel so right, and the way they are stitched together makes the escalation feel completely natural — each near-miss has its own emotional texture, but together they build this lovely ache of John getting closer and closer to naming something he would much rather file away under duty, relief, or practical concern. That is what makes the interruptions land so well too: every time he drops his guard for half a second, the world barges back in. There is a lot of feeling here, but so very POI to me — restrained, a little wry, very character-driven, and all the more effective for how much is left sitting just under the surface. And that final note it ends on is quietly devastating in exactly the right way.
officially crushing szn... or something like that.
sharing earbuds/playlists - one realizes that the song they introduced the other to is on their regular playlist
holding the other's hand to guide them somewhere, realizing how perfectly they fit together
the hesitant pinky reach before they hold hands for the first time, neither daring to make eye contact
small, reassuring touches under tables, even when they're not yet together
one nervously rambles while the other simply observes, finding it endearing
biting their lip (hard) to resist smiling at the other and/or their antics
subtle acknowledgement in group settings - a slight eyebrow raise, nod, and always looking at the other to find them already watching
one smiles while looking at a candid photo they took of the other
^ the subject of said photo catching them do it
the creation of inside jokes!
the small pang of excitement when one makes the other laugh
sitting to watch a movie together, but (un)subtly watching each other instead
blush rising to their cheeks at any mention of the other and their blatant attraction to them
as always my friends, submit to my "ask" box if there is anything you want to see OR anything you want to share! i'm trying to respond to more asks and post more than once every three months (oops)
