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Unlike his parents, who were naïve enough to believe that the rotting shell of a church would protect them in some way, or the man who rescued him when what the media called an act of God razed that sanctuary to the ground, Finn is neither selfless nor entirely moral. He has never seen himself as a hero, merely a weapon. It has never been entirely clear to him whether he was forged as one by the army or by Alec’s quiet belief in something bigger, each time he has grown certain about it his life has changed and his doubts have again grown. In recent years Finn has been self-serving and lax with his ethics. Why bother fighting for a country when its own leaders don’t give a damn about it. He’d still lay his life on the line for it, for his men, his team, but at the end of the day, he believes that none of it will be enough to stop humanity from eventually destroying itself. When that happens Finn plans to be walking out the other side, not just another life tossed on the scrap heap.

Sharp of tongue and sharp of mind Finn has never been hesitant to demonstrate either trait. He may be laconic, short enough of words to have some believing him aloof, but it could not be further from the truth. When he has something to say he will not hold back but pontification and self-aggrandisement doesn’t come easy to the man. Finn has little patience for time wasters and shirkers and will not suffer fools lightly. To him it doesn’t matter about somebody’s origins, training or appearance, in a fight, if you have taken to the field, you will do your part.

Finn has always been a warrior, despite the laxity of his morals. It might’ve been around burning trash barrels or in the echoing rooms of apartments that probably should’ve been condemned but Alec brought him up to know when to fight, taught him that he had a duty to put his life on the line for others. His guardian might not’ve liked the man he’s become now but Finn knows that Alec would be proud of the way he’s clawed his way up the ranks. He might’ve cautioned him to take a sharper look at what’s going on around him now, but that, Finn’s sure, is a fight that’s not entirely his place.

On the field Finn is cool and calm, despite the temper perpetually burning within him. Never showing a sign of fear or panic he will work his way to the centre of the field, never fearing for his own life as much as others. He is always organised and despite a deep-seated loathing for the paperwork trappings of his job at times, he does it to the best of his ability all the same. The same can be said for the instructions of those he follows, he might not always agree or follow the rule book to the letter but in the end he gets the desired results unless he has been bested by greater forces.


It started in fire. None of them had a clue then that it might end it too. All the painfully thin young man and woman knew was that the empty shell of the church in one of the rougher sections of Chicago might provide them with sanctuary for a few days. They crept in, nodding to the ragged group already there. Thin fingers extended towards the fire, the small child revealed when his mother’s coat eventually fell open silent and big eyed as he studied those around them. It took two days for them to start talking to the others there. It was a typical story of woe, a man who’d lost his job, a family who hadn’t been able to even scrabble the money together for a motel room. Just looking for a place for a few days, somewhere they could finally get a grip on the ladder and start hauling themselves up out of their misfortunes. Maybe if it hadn’t been for the storm that sizzled over the city two days later they might’ve managed it.

It hit though. The skies boiling and black with it, the rain pouring in steady streams through the cracked lead roof of the church. Enough to leave them all cold and miserable in their meagre shelter, not enough to stop the place from sparking alight when lightning struck the roof. In its heyday the church would’ve continued to stand proud, its steeple acting as a lightning rod, grounding that bolt from the heavens. St. Sebastian’s hadn’t seen a heyday in the better part of thirty years. The roof went up immediately, the broken timbers supporting it raining down like more bolts of light, trapping the occupants, setting those who hadn’t woke to the storm alight where they lay. The family tried to move, the father snatching up his boy, grabbing his wife by the hand, charging for the nave and its exit to the outside world. They were halfway there when the beam crashed down. Pinning the wife’s legs, tipping the husband to the paved floor.

He scrambled up, letting out a horrified cry as his wife held a shaking hand out to him. A figure loomed up in the smoke, offering help in that gruff voice they’d heard from time to time around the fire. The husband begged for help, The man tried, bending down in the army great coat that billowed around him like a cape. He strained until hacking coughs rolled out of him but it wouldn’t budge. The world had rained down, was raining down around them and would stay put. The husband wouldn’t take no for an answer. He set his boy down at their feet, ignoring his shrieks to drag the man back to the beam. The two of them tried, heaving and choking until the roof above them began to fall. One of the old stone tiles took the husband, a quick blow to the head that felled him like a tree. Eyes open, staring into his wife’s, he was gone in an instant. She wasn’t though. One bloodied, smoke blackened hand reached out to the stranger, a plea for him to save her boy bubbling from her lips with her blood. He backed up a step but as the child gurgled and stared at the roiling flames overhead he stepped back, bent and took the child. The whole roof came down with a clatter and a crash as he burst out into the light.

Water arced overhead almost immediately. Sparkling in the light of the still raging storms. Hands guided him to an ambulance, pushed oxygen at him, asked questions. Was there anybody else in there? No one still alive. What was his name? Alec LaSalle. What was his son’s name? His son? Alec had looked down at the boy then, fully prepared to say he wasn’t his, that he hadn’t a damn clue. His throat stopped working for a moment though as he frowned down at the boy he’d been charged with protecting. The lie was smooth as silk when it emerged, although he wasn’t sure how in the hell he’d handle this now. Finn. Finn LaSalle. Just four months old. That was what the woman had said around the fire, although she’d never given up names or any history. He had no clue if the boy had family out there, how he’d find them if he did. Those same hands put an oxygen mask on him, gently took the boy as they were both helped up into the ambulance. Alec repeated the story at the ER, watched over the boy on the bed next to his as both of them were treated for smoke inhalation, as the burns he’d sustained trying to get the woman out were bandaged.

They kept them in for two days. Fussed over them, the nurses laughing as he made the front page of the newspaper. Charging out of that church with the boy in his arms, that great coat he’d worn against the chill making him look like some sorta superhero. The second day, as he was being released, his former SO arrived. To give a lift to a motel by all accounts. What it was was an interrogation in the car on the way there. What in the hell had he thought he was doing by saying the kid was his? Was he prepared for a lifetime raising this kid. The Master Sergeant had him pegged to rights of course. He hadn’t thought it through. Alec was mute til they got there, arguing perfunctorily as the Sarge insisted on paying for the room, two weeks in advance. Once in the room, with the kid sleeping on the narrow twin bed, pillows barricaded around him as though he might make some break for the door, the Sarge pushed him to talk it through. The kid was gonna need somewhere to live, someone to watch out for him all the time. At some point school was going to be an issue and he’d need proof of ID to sort all of that out. There was no proof that he was the kid’s dad though, was there? Alec could only shake his head. The Sarge nodded, then walked out the door.

Three days later the IDs arrived at the front desk as he was returning from the store with the kid clinging to one of his hips and a sack of what the store clerk had insisted he needed for an eighteen month old. Alec had started down at the kid, throat working. He’d had no idea how old the kid was. Hell, the kid hadn’t even been able to provide his own name or those of his parents. He’d barely spoken a word at all. Wasn’t like the papers had been able to dig anything up on the couple either and they’d done a thorough rake on everybody else killed in that church. A plain brown envelope with his name and rank printed across the front. Alec fumbled it back to the room, sank down on the bed with the kid cooing in his lap and peeled it open. Documents. A birth certificate … a death certificate … the lease on an apartment in the city with three months rent paid up front. Father: Alec Malcolm LaSalle, Mother: Lily LaSalle (deceased). Son: Finn Gregory LaSalle. 18 months old almost to the day. The death certificate stated that Lily had died in childbirth. Alec LaSalle was officially a single father with a kid who was now his responsibility.

It took another three days and a begged ride from the motel clerk to get to the apartment. A poky little two bed place in a neighbourhood just on the border between rough and working class. No job, although Alec supposed the Sarge had expected him to do that part himself. The Sarge had never been about handing you everything on a platter. Begging hadn’t sat well with him either, not since those wracking pleas not to be discharged after the IED explosion had left him with shrapnel injuries and a TBI severe enough it would take him four years to get even this steady from. Alec gritted his teeth and did it though, signing on for some construction work. He had no clue what he was gonna do with the kid but the Sarge had that covered. The day before the new job was meant to kick in, just as Alec was pacing the apartment with a screaming kid bouncing in his arms and his head ringing like a bell the Sarge’s sister showed up. She was gonna play Mary Poppins to Finn while he did his thing. Days only though, she wasn’t about to miss her night classes at the City College so he could go drinking in the bar.

It was in that apartment that Finn spent the first couple of years as his life as he remembered them. A quiet, serious, watchful kid, he took in everything his ‘father’ and Maeve did. He learned fast, didn’t cause much worry. The kindergarten teachers were a little concerned about his lack of speech once he started there but it was never a matter of him not being able to speak, more a lack of want to. They should’ve been more concerned when the steady wore off and the construction crew chief fired his dad. Maybe if Maeve was still working with them they would’ve been but she’d started a full time job at an architect’s firm. Alec was only meant to work the hours Finn was in school then, maybe a little more if a neighbour would watch him but the headaches had started again, the PTSD that explosion had left him with rearing an ugly head that rendered Finn entirely mute as Alec would pace and ramble.

No apartment. No job. The shitty car he was paying a hundred bucks a month for. They were all gone. So Alec took Finn back to where they’d both seemingly started out. The streets. He still got Finn to school today, breathing a sigh of relief as the kid never opened his mouth about where they were living, kept him in clean clothes, kept him fed, but most of the time the roof over their head was leaking. Those rare times he managed to get a job and maybe keep it a few weeks they crept up in the world to another crappy apartment or a motel room for a night or two but for the most part Finn’s childhood was spent pinballing around the city’s underbelly. It didn’t seem to effect the kid much on the surface, he was a good student, great at sports, still quiet, but as he got older there was a gulf there between him and the other kids. Teasing started, was shut down with fists that his father had never taught him to swing. More than once Alec found himself called into school over it but knowing that him and his inability to give the kid the life the Sarge had expected him to when he’d entrusted Finn to him were what was costing Finn a normal childhood, he couldn’t tear him apart from it.

Things for better for a couple of years when Finn hit middle school. Maeve was back on the scene, playing wannabe social worker. She got Alec a job as a janitor in the architect’s office she was now a partner in. She took it easy on him those times when she could see he was at a low, she paid the rent when Alec ended up broke. It was Maeve who went to parent teacher conferences for him when Alec couldn’t and at 17 when Finn returned home from school to find Alec’s body cold on the couch it was Maeve and the Sarge who stood beside him at the funeral. Finn had never been to show emotions on the surface, he’d remained that quiet, watchful kid, the one who sat in the back of the class and took everything in but never spoke up much, he wasn’t demonstrative. Despite the tears that coursed silently down his face that day he continued to hold his head up high through the service and the wake filled with the men his father had served with in the Gulf.

He wasn’t sure what he was expecting afterwards but Maeve’s house wasn’t it. The place was bigger than anywhere he’d ever stayed with his dad. He had a room of his own, one simple and stark as a monk’s cell but his all the same, something that hadn’t always been guaranteed. Alec hadn’t known what was coming, none of them could’ve predicted the weakened vessel in his brain bursting devastatingly the way it had, but with the Sarge and Maeve he’d made plans all the same – just in case. Guardianship under Maeve’s care until he turned 18. There wasn’t money for college, not that Finn had ever believed there would be. Maeve sat him down at the table, told him she’d help him apply for scholarships if that was what he’d wanted but Finn had started to laugh and shake his head. Had she honestly thought he’d end up anywhere but the Army. Alec had never wanted him to but had taught the boy regardless, hoping to put him off instead of encouraging him. Finn hadn’t been put off, he’d soaked up everything Alec had to teach him instead.

At 18 he enlisted. Being the son of a former soldier with the 101st Airborne might’ve gotten him some favours but he slogged his way through basic training all the same. He made it through top of his class, quiet, stoic but displaying the sort of leadership skills Alec once had. Finn knew he could’ve stayed where he was, climbed the ladder, maybe even out ranked the Sarge one day but it wasn’t where he had his eye. Airborne. Maybe not the 101st but Airborne all the same and then Special Forces training. The chances of him getting in, even with the Sarge’s patronage were slim but he’d survived a childhood on and off the streets with Alec. He could survive this. He stuck the pin where he wanted to go and slogged every step towards it. The Middle East was the focus then, his skill with Arabic and Farsi, thanks to Alec’s lessons and the constant buzz of audio language lessons in his headphones in his downtime, putting him on the radar.

His first real opportunity he signed up to Jump School. Heights didn’t bother him a bit, neither did the jumps themselves. He’d done enough in preparation over the years. While others in his class dropped out Finn again sailed through. He could’ve gone on to another duty station, enjoyed his new position a little but Finn had only ever focused on that one thing. Special Forces. Straight out of Jump School he headed for SOF qualification. He was 29. At the peak of fitness and as determined as they came. He could’ve ended up anywhere but the instructors had already winnowed him out of the bunch. They saw the aptitude for Logistics, for the sort of ‘undercover’ work that even most special forces soldiers couldn’t pull off. Finn didn’t come out top of the class this time, in fact he had to claw for every inch of ground during the training but he made it through. He qualified. He was in.

Eight years would pass with him working his way up to head of his unit. He wasn’t the old man of his team by any stretch of the imagination but he was LaSalle the wise, spoken about like he was some sort of wizard. What he’d become was jaded. Seeing what went on in his own country, overseas. Very little of it was worth it when you saw what was happening on the ground, the kids who didn’t even have an Alec to get them. Finn carried on with the work, handling every order handed down to them but it didn’t mean he agreed with much of it anymore. It only got worse when the virus hit. Out of the blue, something that didn’t look much worse than Avian or Swine flu at first. Rapidly it gained ground, people dropping like flies. Including two members of his own team. The rest of them were isolated, tested out the wazoo, came out clean the other end. His supervisors, including the Sarge, who wasn’t a Sarge anymore, who had instead climbed the ranks, shuffled sideways to make sure Finn came under his purview.

The Sarge looked serious when he called Finn to his office one afternoon. They needed a liaison. Someone to work between the Military and Prism Tech. Tag. He was it. Finn had laughed out loud, believing it to be the sort of assignment that would keep him out of the field, to protect him from this thing that was ravaging the world. The Sarge swore it wasn’t, this was important work, the sort he could only trust him with. That sobered Finn up a little but he was still wary when he left the base that today to head to Prism Tech. Months down the line he’s still wary now. Prism’s doing some sort of work with the virus but he’s not been able to tell what. Honestly, it wasn’t his place to know but the little cogs are still spinning in his head as he watches the world start to burn in the way that church did. Dark eyes ever watchful Finn’s now waiting to see when the roof would fall and nearly crush them all.