Dresden Files Fic: "A Strange Calm" (PG)
Title: A Strange Calm
Author: guardian_chaos
Rating: PG
Words: approx. 2381
Fandom: Dresden Files
Characters: Bob, Harry
Genre: um. Angst? Maybe h/c?
Summary: Bob and Harry try to resume a life that at least somewhat resembles normalcy after the flashback events in "What About Bob?" (those involving Morningway. SPOILERS FOR THAT EPISODE!) cause them emotional harm.
* * *
It's weird between them for a long time after That Moment That Neither Harry Nor Bob Is Willing To Talk About. Justin Morningway's body is carted away, sealed up tight in a warded coffin, and his stuff follows soon after. After many months on the run, Harry Dresden's name is finally cleared (officially, if not in rumor) and he is allowed to come home.
Begrudgingly, the Warden Morgan and the rest of the Council find they have to, for legal reasons, allow Harry Dresden the option of deciding what he will do with the vast majority of the Morningway estate, but months under the keep of blood-devourers have made Harry bitter.
"None of this stuff was ever mine, anyway," Harry grumbles, but the possessive tilt of his arm around a decorated skull he claimed immediately upon first reentry to the Morningway home implies his words don't line up well with what he actually thinks. "How about we just light a match, burn the house down?" He can't quite pull up an ironic grin to match the quip. If anything, he is snarling, the expression dark and unwanted, even to him.
Morgan's disapproving eyebrow lets Harry know he is walking on thin ice, and Harry recants. He still finds it takes him a great effort not to set fire to the hallway he wants so badly to purge of all unwanted memory and thought. If he squints just right, Harry thinks he can make out the spot where his uncle let out his last breath, a patch of hardwood deadened by a black and yet invisible mist, poison bleeding out from that one area to the entire house, to Harry's entire life. Harry feels always that he is choking, and that there is never enough air.
Along with the skull, Harry takes with him a number of grimmoires and other magical trinkets he believes too dangerous to be left to the Council's own designs. Some powers, Harry believes, should not be controlled by politics, but rather by gut, intuition, and sheer, stubborn resolve. He first makes sure the skull is his, before the Council can change its mind. Everything else, outrageously powerful and insanely dangerous as the items are, is mere afterthought. Many of the items, he later ends up burning under cover of night in a church parking lot.
"This may not be the wisest course of action," Bob murmurs as Harry lights the fire, his pale face quickly lit up by the flickering, unearthly colors of dark magic burning away before himself and Harry. Although Bob cannot feel the cold, his hands are crammed deep in his velvet pockets and he keeps his shoulders hunched over, a miserable attempt to seem human that is practically automatic for him now. Harry, beside him, shakes genuinely. The fire burns hot, almost too hot, and scalds his body even from many yards away, but Harry cannot stop the tremble of his hands.
"Since when have I ever struck you as a wise man, Bob?" When he turns his back on the flames later, long after they have gone out, the cold that strikes his back lies almost as an afterthought, a memory of great things that will never be again.
Bob feels the tug of movement as the skull is taken away under Harry's arm, and he follows, his head bowed low. His next words are quietly spoken, barely a whisper in the dark, and he cannot be sure if Harry hears them or not.
"A wise action is not always the right one, Harry."
Heard or not, Bob has no idea how this simple phrase will grow to define the entire life of the young wizard, whose folded shoulders and beaten leather jacket already beg the world for a sympathy he believes he will never receive, nor ever possibly deserve, and if Bob had a heart, it would ache for him.
They walk back to Harry's jeep in silence, the night sky still and shining above the pile of black dust that gently drifts away in the wind, its once powerful magic now harmless in death like it had never been in life.
They don't talk much for many weeks after, each of them too caught up in their own worlds. In the shoddy, run-down apartment Harry barely managed to afford, Harry designs and builds a room for Bob's skull, a process Bob is both shocked and strangely touched by. There is room for Bob to draw figures into the air, and space to walk, and the room allows for Bob to hide or reveal himself at will. It is a kind gesture, one Bob would not have expected of previous owners, Morningway certainly not excluded.
"None of this is required, Harry," Bob says, softly, one day as Harry is tightening the final bolts of an enormously thick, metal door. Harry does not even turn to face him, only keeps working, his shoulder blades flexing beneath a deeply worn and fraying sweater. Bob believes that Harry has lost weight, but cannot say how much. Too much, if the weariness in Harry's movements is any indication. "You possess no sin you must atone for to receive my loyalty back," Bob continues. "It is, as you are no doubt aware, yours to do with as you see fit."
Harry looks over his shoulder, revealing only one dark eye. His hair falls over it, his bangs too long. Soon, he will cut it shorter, but for now, the fringe obscures his real thoughts from the world. "It's just a nice thing to do, Bob." He sounds angry, or maybe tired. Bob can't quite tell. "Don't tell me to stop." When Harry turns back to the door, his face invisible from Bob's gaze, Bob thinks he hears a catch in Harry's words when Harry says, "I need this."
Another silence drifts over them, Bob feeling the shapeless tug of a command Harry has been too careless to realize he has given. Usually a rare occurrence, the happenings of the past several months have made Harry somewhat more...lackadaisical about the words that leave his mouth. Perhaps that is why Harry has chosen to use so few of them as of late.
Bob offers a gentle clearing of his throat and steps forward, always silent and yet somehow Harry always knows when to look up as Bob kneels beside him and makes eye contact. When Bob knows Harry is paying attention, Bob speaks:
"You could have done far worse, Harry," he says, "than to end the life of a man who has committed so many terrible acts, and who wished harm upon you as well." Oddly, Bob suddenly finds the eye contact he is sharing with Harry to be too much. He looks away, but still feels Harry's gaze on his cheek. "It was a terrible moment, but it is past now. You must not dwell on the guilt for what you have done, or you will never be able to remove yourself from it."
There is another long silence. By the fates, why must words be so difficult to come by when they are so desperately needed? Bob may never know, and wonders if he has become useless, owing to his inability to find the right words when they are needed most. And yet when he looks back over to Harry, there is a small, worrisome smile on the wizard's lips.
"Is that what you do?"
Bob shuts his eyes, seals away the screams and blood that fill up what remains of his sense memories when he is not strong enough to hold them back. Were he mortal, he imagines breathing through the memories would be difficult. Through the chaos and the darkness, though, a face shines out from the center, soothing away the burning tenderness for those brief, gentle moments before the pain comes back, every time.
Winifred. She had been beautiful. Oh, how many times had he watched her die, watched others die in his efforts to preserve her? Too many times. Too many, unforgivable times.
When Bob opens his eyes, Harry's smile has turned into a frown, but his eyes have softened. He leans up against the door with one shoulder, one knee up to his chest in a casual slouch as he blinks exhaustedly up at Bob. "You know," he lets out, all in one breath, "I don't think I can do this, Bob."
Bob smiles, as softly as he can manage through his own pain. "You can."
Harry's brow furrows above eyes so bloodshot there is hardly any white in them. Bob cannot remember the last time Harry slept peacefully, the wizard's nearly unending nightmares springing him violently to life at least every night that Bob had taken it upon himself to look out for Harry as he slept.
And just like every other time Harry had doubted his own ability to do something Bob had taught him, and Bob reassured him that he could, something in Harry's face tightened up, that note of clever stubbornness that had always defined Bob's most treasured pupil, and the wizard nodded once, twice, then stumbled to his feet.
"Ok."
Bob looked up, their positions now switched. "Ok?" he mused. "Is that all you have to contribute?"
"I don't know what else could be said, Bob." Harry looked around himself, his face alight under the glow of several dozen candles. The scent of sandalwood was strong in the air, but so was the scent of mildew, adding a taint to an otherwise regal setting. "This is all I've got." His gaze flowed around the room, liquid until it solidified against Bob's face, and Bob felt some strange approximation of cold, then warmth slide through him.
Belonging, he labeled it, and was shocked to find it fit.
Harry swayed on his feet for a minute, then numbly stared past the exit door. "'m gonna try to sleep now." It was more of a mission statement than anything Bob had heard leave Harry's mouth in quite some time.
Bob nodded, his pale green eyes focusing on nothing in particular. He rested on his toes, knees in the air and elbows propped up against them so that his fingers could wrap together beneath his chin. "That would probably be for the best."
Harry stumbled past Bob, his footsteps loud and uncoordinated. "You gonna be ok by yourself tonight? Creeps me out when you stare at me sleeping."
Bob smiled, just a little, but it was a nice, easy smile, and brought with it no pain. "I will be fine, Harry."
"That's good, 'cause you know I need you, Bob." Harry scratched his head. "Not gonna get through this ok by myself, I know that much."
"You will not have to," Bob said, as much a reassurance as a promise. "I would not allow it."
Harry blinked a couple times and reached for the door to exit. "I'll see you in the morning, Bob." His voice sounded young, like the worried voice of his younger self, a child afraid he had disappointed his mentor with a failed magic experiment that would forever color Bob's view of him. Harry could never know how admiringly Bob viewed him, no matter what mistakes Harry made. Even Bob was shocked by the depth of the devotion he felt that had somehow sprung up from a well Bob had once believed utterly bankrupt of anything but contempt, now tempered into something much...fonder.
Bob rose to his feet to stand away from the door opening as Harry left the room. "Indeed, Harry. I will be here when you awaken."
The exchange seemed to calm them both. With deep breaths, one real and the other more an expression of thought then anything else, they parted.
Bob remained in the candlelight, his hands open at his sides. He shut his eyes, this time not to the remembered sounds of screaming, but to the sound of Harry's bare feet, lightly padding away and lifting upwards as Harry climbed the loft to his bed. The shifting of mattress springs brought quiet once more, but this time, Bob welcomed the stillness as a place to build from.
Reopening his eyes, Bob lifted a finger and touched the air before him. It trembled, molecules excited by a touch only one who could command them could wield. A light sprung up at the touch, yellow-gold and shimmering, lines drawn in the sky, fire without the burn.
I do not know where this will lead. The thought did not exactly thrill him, but nor did it paralyze him as much as it once did, in those first days when Morningway was dead and the Council had not yet decided what to do with Bob's skull, or with Harry. Bob's thoughts leading from those days had been troubled, horribly so, until a beaten-down Harry had arrived at the Morningway estate and swept up Bob's skull into the crook of his arm before anyone else could draw near to it.
"No one hurts him," Harry had declared, to all the Wardens surrounding the skull, and though Harry was dirty and pathetic, lilting dangerously to one side and horribly outmatched, they had still let Harry have what he wanted. Perhaps they pitied him. Or perhaps they saw something in Harry's eyes that they weren't keen to tamper with. In any case, Bob's skull stayed with Harry through the whole of the negotiations, held tight to the wizard's lap with a care and protectiveness Bob had scarcely ever felt directed at him, and though Bob knew it was rooted in panic, he was nonetheless...warmed by it.
Now, Bob drew color into a once-darkened room. Perhaps, someday, he would fill it up completely, so that the glow filled in every dark crevice and every empty corner. For now, a few experimental strokes were enough.
Above him, he could hear the sounds of steady breathing, and it did not stop.
It was as good a place as any to start from.
~1/20/2011
Author: guardian_chaos
Rating: PG
Words: approx. 2381
Fandom: Dresden Files
Characters: Bob, Harry
Genre: um. Angst? Maybe h/c?
Summary: Bob and Harry try to resume a life that at least somewhat resembles normalcy after the flashback events in "What About Bob?" (those involving Morningway. SPOILERS FOR THAT EPISODE!) cause them emotional harm.
* * *
It's weird between them for a long time after That Moment That Neither Harry Nor Bob Is Willing To Talk About. Justin Morningway's body is carted away, sealed up tight in a warded coffin, and his stuff follows soon after. After many months on the run, Harry Dresden's name is finally cleared (officially, if not in rumor) and he is allowed to come home.
Begrudgingly, the Warden Morgan and the rest of the Council find they have to, for legal reasons, allow Harry Dresden the option of deciding what he will do with the vast majority of the Morningway estate, but months under the keep of blood-devourers have made Harry bitter.
"None of this stuff was ever mine, anyway," Harry grumbles, but the possessive tilt of his arm around a decorated skull he claimed immediately upon first reentry to the Morningway home implies his words don't line up well with what he actually thinks. "How about we just light a match, burn the house down?" He can't quite pull up an ironic grin to match the quip. If anything, he is snarling, the expression dark and unwanted, even to him.
Morgan's disapproving eyebrow lets Harry know he is walking on thin ice, and Harry recants. He still finds it takes him a great effort not to set fire to the hallway he wants so badly to purge of all unwanted memory and thought. If he squints just right, Harry thinks he can make out the spot where his uncle let out his last breath, a patch of hardwood deadened by a black and yet invisible mist, poison bleeding out from that one area to the entire house, to Harry's entire life. Harry feels always that he is choking, and that there is never enough air.
Along with the skull, Harry takes with him a number of grimmoires and other magical trinkets he believes too dangerous to be left to the Council's own designs. Some powers, Harry believes, should not be controlled by politics, but rather by gut, intuition, and sheer, stubborn resolve. He first makes sure the skull is his, before the Council can change its mind. Everything else, outrageously powerful and insanely dangerous as the items are, is mere afterthought. Many of the items, he later ends up burning under cover of night in a church parking lot.
"This may not be the wisest course of action," Bob murmurs as Harry lights the fire, his pale face quickly lit up by the flickering, unearthly colors of dark magic burning away before himself and Harry. Although Bob cannot feel the cold, his hands are crammed deep in his velvet pockets and he keeps his shoulders hunched over, a miserable attempt to seem human that is practically automatic for him now. Harry, beside him, shakes genuinely. The fire burns hot, almost too hot, and scalds his body even from many yards away, but Harry cannot stop the tremble of his hands.
"Since when have I ever struck you as a wise man, Bob?" When he turns his back on the flames later, long after they have gone out, the cold that strikes his back lies almost as an afterthought, a memory of great things that will never be again.
Bob feels the tug of movement as the skull is taken away under Harry's arm, and he follows, his head bowed low. His next words are quietly spoken, barely a whisper in the dark, and he cannot be sure if Harry hears them or not.
"A wise action is not always the right one, Harry."
Heard or not, Bob has no idea how this simple phrase will grow to define the entire life of the young wizard, whose folded shoulders and beaten leather jacket already beg the world for a sympathy he believes he will never receive, nor ever possibly deserve, and if Bob had a heart, it would ache for him.
They walk back to Harry's jeep in silence, the night sky still and shining above the pile of black dust that gently drifts away in the wind, its once powerful magic now harmless in death like it had never been in life.
They don't talk much for many weeks after, each of them too caught up in their own worlds. In the shoddy, run-down apartment Harry barely managed to afford, Harry designs and builds a room for Bob's skull, a process Bob is both shocked and strangely touched by. There is room for Bob to draw figures into the air, and space to walk, and the room allows for Bob to hide or reveal himself at will. It is a kind gesture, one Bob would not have expected of previous owners, Morningway certainly not excluded.
"None of this is required, Harry," Bob says, softly, one day as Harry is tightening the final bolts of an enormously thick, metal door. Harry does not even turn to face him, only keeps working, his shoulder blades flexing beneath a deeply worn and fraying sweater. Bob believes that Harry has lost weight, but cannot say how much. Too much, if the weariness in Harry's movements is any indication. "You possess no sin you must atone for to receive my loyalty back," Bob continues. "It is, as you are no doubt aware, yours to do with as you see fit."
Harry looks over his shoulder, revealing only one dark eye. His hair falls over it, his bangs too long. Soon, he will cut it shorter, but for now, the fringe obscures his real thoughts from the world. "It's just a nice thing to do, Bob." He sounds angry, or maybe tired. Bob can't quite tell. "Don't tell me to stop." When Harry turns back to the door, his face invisible from Bob's gaze, Bob thinks he hears a catch in Harry's words when Harry says, "I need this."
Another silence drifts over them, Bob feeling the shapeless tug of a command Harry has been too careless to realize he has given. Usually a rare occurrence, the happenings of the past several months have made Harry somewhat more...lackadaisical about the words that leave his mouth. Perhaps that is why Harry has chosen to use so few of them as of late.
Bob offers a gentle clearing of his throat and steps forward, always silent and yet somehow Harry always knows when to look up as Bob kneels beside him and makes eye contact. When Bob knows Harry is paying attention, Bob speaks:
"You could have done far worse, Harry," he says, "than to end the life of a man who has committed so many terrible acts, and who wished harm upon you as well." Oddly, Bob suddenly finds the eye contact he is sharing with Harry to be too much. He looks away, but still feels Harry's gaze on his cheek. "It was a terrible moment, but it is past now. You must not dwell on the guilt for what you have done, or you will never be able to remove yourself from it."
There is another long silence. By the fates, why must words be so difficult to come by when they are so desperately needed? Bob may never know, and wonders if he has become useless, owing to his inability to find the right words when they are needed most. And yet when he looks back over to Harry, there is a small, worrisome smile on the wizard's lips.
"Is that what you do?"
Bob shuts his eyes, seals away the screams and blood that fill up what remains of his sense memories when he is not strong enough to hold them back. Were he mortal, he imagines breathing through the memories would be difficult. Through the chaos and the darkness, though, a face shines out from the center, soothing away the burning tenderness for those brief, gentle moments before the pain comes back, every time.
Winifred. She had been beautiful. Oh, how many times had he watched her die, watched others die in his efforts to preserve her? Too many times. Too many, unforgivable times.
When Bob opens his eyes, Harry's smile has turned into a frown, but his eyes have softened. He leans up against the door with one shoulder, one knee up to his chest in a casual slouch as he blinks exhaustedly up at Bob. "You know," he lets out, all in one breath, "I don't think I can do this, Bob."
Bob smiles, as softly as he can manage through his own pain. "You can."
Harry's brow furrows above eyes so bloodshot there is hardly any white in them. Bob cannot remember the last time Harry slept peacefully, the wizard's nearly unending nightmares springing him violently to life at least every night that Bob had taken it upon himself to look out for Harry as he slept.
And just like every other time Harry had doubted his own ability to do something Bob had taught him, and Bob reassured him that he could, something in Harry's face tightened up, that note of clever stubbornness that had always defined Bob's most treasured pupil, and the wizard nodded once, twice, then stumbled to his feet.
"Ok."
Bob looked up, their positions now switched. "Ok?" he mused. "Is that all you have to contribute?"
"I don't know what else could be said, Bob." Harry looked around himself, his face alight under the glow of several dozen candles. The scent of sandalwood was strong in the air, but so was the scent of mildew, adding a taint to an otherwise regal setting. "This is all I've got." His gaze flowed around the room, liquid until it solidified against Bob's face, and Bob felt some strange approximation of cold, then warmth slide through him.
Belonging, he labeled it, and was shocked to find it fit.
Harry swayed on his feet for a minute, then numbly stared past the exit door. "'m gonna try to sleep now." It was more of a mission statement than anything Bob had heard leave Harry's mouth in quite some time.
Bob nodded, his pale green eyes focusing on nothing in particular. He rested on his toes, knees in the air and elbows propped up against them so that his fingers could wrap together beneath his chin. "That would probably be for the best."
Harry stumbled past Bob, his footsteps loud and uncoordinated. "You gonna be ok by yourself tonight? Creeps me out when you stare at me sleeping."
Bob smiled, just a little, but it was a nice, easy smile, and brought with it no pain. "I will be fine, Harry."
"That's good, 'cause you know I need you, Bob." Harry scratched his head. "Not gonna get through this ok by myself, I know that much."
"You will not have to," Bob said, as much a reassurance as a promise. "I would not allow it."
Harry blinked a couple times and reached for the door to exit. "I'll see you in the morning, Bob." His voice sounded young, like the worried voice of his younger self, a child afraid he had disappointed his mentor with a failed magic experiment that would forever color Bob's view of him. Harry could never know how admiringly Bob viewed him, no matter what mistakes Harry made. Even Bob was shocked by the depth of the devotion he felt that had somehow sprung up from a well Bob had once believed utterly bankrupt of anything but contempt, now tempered into something much...fonder.
Bob rose to his feet to stand away from the door opening as Harry left the room. "Indeed, Harry. I will be here when you awaken."
The exchange seemed to calm them both. With deep breaths, one real and the other more an expression of thought then anything else, they parted.
Bob remained in the candlelight, his hands open at his sides. He shut his eyes, this time not to the remembered sounds of screaming, but to the sound of Harry's bare feet, lightly padding away and lifting upwards as Harry climbed the loft to his bed. The shifting of mattress springs brought quiet once more, but this time, Bob welcomed the stillness as a place to build from.
Reopening his eyes, Bob lifted a finger and touched the air before him. It trembled, molecules excited by a touch only one who could command them could wield. A light sprung up at the touch, yellow-gold and shimmering, lines drawn in the sky, fire without the burn.
I do not know where this will lead. The thought did not exactly thrill him, but nor did it paralyze him as much as it once did, in those first days when Morningway was dead and the Council had not yet decided what to do with Bob's skull, or with Harry. Bob's thoughts leading from those days had been troubled, horribly so, until a beaten-down Harry had arrived at the Morningway estate and swept up Bob's skull into the crook of his arm before anyone else could draw near to it.
"No one hurts him," Harry had declared, to all the Wardens surrounding the skull, and though Harry was dirty and pathetic, lilting dangerously to one side and horribly outmatched, they had still let Harry have what he wanted. Perhaps they pitied him. Or perhaps they saw something in Harry's eyes that they weren't keen to tamper with. In any case, Bob's skull stayed with Harry through the whole of the negotiations, held tight to the wizard's lap with a care and protectiveness Bob had scarcely ever felt directed at him, and though Bob knew it was rooted in panic, he was nonetheless...warmed by it.
Now, Bob drew color into a once-darkened room. Perhaps, someday, he would fill it up completely, so that the glow filled in every dark crevice and every empty corner. For now, a few experimental strokes were enough.
Above him, he could hear the sounds of steady breathing, and it did not stop.
It was as good a place as any to start from.
~1/20/2011