1/5 "Plausible Numbers" (Dresden Files/Numb3rs)
Title: Plausible Numbers.
Fandom: Numb3rs / Dresden Files.
Cannon Characters: Ancient Mai, Morgan, Bob, Harry Dresden / Amita Ramanujan, Charlie Eppes, Megan, Alan Eppes, Margaret Eppes nee Mann,
OCs:
Author: Keenir.
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: Dresden Files series 1. Numb3rs season 2, eps 1.01, 3.07, 4.01-4.12
Also, it will help to have read the “Covert Fear” drabble series, and the paired drabble “Collapse” & “Explanation” as they explain what the background is.
Summary: What is done, can be undone, but not with any ease. And what has been done, was only the opening salvo of the upcoming fight.
Previously, on Numb3rs and The Dresden Files…
“…and I don’t do birthday parties.” -Harry Dresden.
“I just want you all to be happy.”
“Then you shouldn’t have died.” -Margaret and Alan Eppes.
“I’ve been having dreams, Harry, weird dreams. And you’re in them.” -Connie Murphy.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Early Night:
SoCal:
It rose from the earth, animated by a greater force. Ever though there had been no rain in weeks, nothing crumbled from its body: what animated it, was strong enough to hold it together. Shallow pits sufficed for eyes, squat nubbins for fingers.
Strode past the koi pond. The pond’s motor stopped working. The thing did not. The koi lay stunned, weakened by it. The thing was not alive by all definitions of the word.
Up the front steps it went, pillar legs keeping it slow and unstoppable. Leaned against the front door - lacking a nervous system, it was not affected by the defensive wards on the other side of the door, nor by the magical shocks delivered by those same wards. It began to pound on the door, soon enough bowling the door off its hinges. It went inside, its pace slowed to a glacial rate as the interior wards of the house glowed fiercely. It was built to be a tank in every battlefield that could summon it.
Margaret turned around and looked at it. She knew what it was, and had known what it was long before she’d met Alan. Knew that ‘who are you?’ was entirely the wrong question. “Who sent you?” Margaret demanded.
It did not answer. It only strode towards her, legs never pretending to move like humans’ did. But it kept slowing.
“Speak!” she shouted.
Nothing.
“Why are you here?”
Still nothing. But it did slow down some more.
Margaret looked up at the wards she’d set up back when she and Alan had moved in. So far, the intruder was straining their power to the limit; much more, and nothing would be left to defend the home. “Please,” she asked of the intruder, “just one answer.”
The golem stopped moving. Limestone fizzled, and the escaping air formed the words, “Your debt.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Chicago:
“This’d better be good,” Harry grumbled as he made his way down the stairs to answer the ringing phone. Picking it up, “Hello?” It was the hour after the middle of the night in Chicago.
“Harry Dresden?”
“That’s me.”
“I - require to hire you. I am - Charles Eppes. Your - services, I require.”
Eppes, Eppes… wait a, this’ the guy on tv. The one who’d written that ‘The Attraction Equation’ Murphy’s been reading. “What seems to be the problem?” Harry asked, wiping sleep from his eyes.
“Ghosts,” Charlie said, feeling the urge to write - to jot down, even to scribble - the final piece of the equation on the chalkboard. Solve the problem of unification once and for all. “And demons.” But even the part that he had written, was already having an impact upon him. Scratch a sheet, scrape a bit of paint off…you don’t yet see the image, but you can still see the color out of time.
“You’re sure?”
“Yes. Please come to Los Angeles - postehaste.”
“L.A.?”
“Yes. You are - Harry Dresden.”
“Well, yes, but I don’t have any way of getting there.”
“Oh. Be right back,” Charlie said.
“Okay,” Harry said, and could hear the distinctive sound of chalk scraping across a board. Harry waited a minute…five minutes…ten minutes, before hanging up. “Think you can call back?” Dresden asked the phone.
No rings.
“L.A.?” he asked aloud. “How am I supposed to get to L.A.?” I’m nearly out of gas, and don’t get me started on my rent.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
SoCal:
Don had bought them tickets for a movie tonight. So, after the theater had three aborted starts, Alan and Millie’d finally made it through the movie. After that, back to home -
“What the…?” Alan asked, stepping up to the door. Well, to where the door had been.
“Clearly a very determined someone,” Millie said, not sure what else to say. Reaching into her purse, she decided to call Don - he’d know what to do, and he had a right to know what’d happened here.
And Alan cocked his head, positive he’d heard sobbing. And I know those tears. Coming inside, he saw Margaret sitting by herself.
No, not by herself - there was something standing in the middle of the room. A something that, even with its back to him, could only be one thing. Could only be a golem. “Margaret?” Alan asked.
“I’m here,” she said.
“What happened?” still trying to figure out what possible reason a golem would have for breaking into a Jew’s house.
Someone sent a message, Margaret thought to herself. But she didn’t want to worry Alan - and bad as this was, it held the potential to get worse. She sniffled.
Taking a seat beside Margaret, Alan glanced at the golem’s head. Its unadorned head. No lettering or numbers or any impressions. Just two sets of pits where eyes would go.
Unadorned. That scared him. In all the stories he’d heard while growing up, there always had to be a word written on the golem’s forehead.
“Margaret’s here?” Millie asked as she walked warily around the inside of the house. It was like a bad joke - she didn’t know where to look first…at the clay statue in the living room, at the glowing scrawl and shapes interspersed along the walls and ceiling, at the resting place of the door, or at where Alan said Margaret was sitting.
“She is,” Alan said.
Having heard of far stranger coping mechanisms for dealing with stress - some from her own flesh and blood - Millie just said, “I…I’m going to get some tea from the kitchen. Do either of you want anything? Coffee? Milk?”
“Coffee’s good.”
Don came over right away. And stopped in the doorway, not sure whether to take a close look at the ripped-away door, or at the pillar of clay that was melting in the living room. How exactly does clay melt? “I’ll get a shovel,” he brought himself to say.
“No,” his father said.
“No?”
“Have you seen what’s in our living room?”
“Uh, yeah, that’s why I want to get the shovel.”
“And that’s why I said no. Nobody’s touching it - not ‘til we know why its here.” And you’re assuming, son, that a shovel can do anything to it. The thing was unadorned.
“Because somebody’s got a sick sense of humor, dad, that’s why.” I suppose it’s better than getting a burning cross on your lawn…but not by much.
“Donny, these things are supposed to protect us,” Alan said.
Alan heard Margaret weepingly say, “I’m sorry,” again.
“It’s a story, dad. That’s it, that’s all.”
The elder Eppes sat down and tried to calm uneasy Millie and upset Margaret, refusing to say anything else to Don…who stayed with them until he got the call in the morning from Amita.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
MORNING:
Chicago:
A clap of thunder woke Harry Dresden up. He bolted out of bed, rattled by the pressure of every one of his wards shutting off; he’d never been on an airplane in his life, but Harry would recognize that same affliction of the ears popping. Tossing on a pair of jeans and grabbing his hockey stick, he came downstairs…
And saw who his company was. “Morgan,” Harry said. “Mai. Isn’t it a little early in the morning for surprise visits? Besides, I haven’t had a case in a little over two weeks, and I haven’t heard about any rumblings,” deciding not to mention his phone call. Mai didn’t strike him as the sort who drooled over mathematicians. “So I don’t know anything about whatever might’ve brought you here, but I can tell you in all honesty that I haven’t had a part in any of it.”
“It happened last night,” Mai said.
“Huh.”
“That’s why we’re here,” Morgan said, sounding more uncomfortable than he looked.
“Oh? Do tell.”
Looking none pleased about it, “We’re here to hire you.”
Harry blinked. To himself, “I like this dream. Now what was it I had just before I fell asleep?”
“You’re not dreaming,” Mai said.
“I see. So, did the High Council send you because of our history, or what?” Seeing the glaring face forming on Mai, “I’m just curious.”
“The High Council,” Morgan said, sounding very fish-out-of-watery, “wasn’t consulted.” He swallowed. “This comes from higher up.”
“The Merlin?” Harry asked. The Merlin, head of the High Council. The last time any Merlin had taken unilateral action, it’d brought an end to the Salem Witch Hunts.
“Higher,” Morgan said again, which explained, in Harry’s opinion, just why he was so uncomfortable - even Wardens didn’t like the rarefied politics of the things that outranked Councils and Courts. “The Elder Things.”
“Somehow, I get the feeling I’m going to be paid with my life.”
And the smile on Mai’s face didn’t rid him of that feeling. “Better, Dresden, even better. The Elders don’t want the Morningway line to come to an end with you…your payment will be an heir.”
“Ya’know, I’d really rather do that myself.”
“Of course,” Ancient Mai said neutrally. “With Detective Consuela Murphy. It’s her life that is on the line here, Dresden.”
“If you hurt her, Mai, so help me, I swear -”
“That you’ll what? Turn to the Black?”
Threatening Mai - however good it felt for a brief while - always backfired. Usually in the selfsame conversation. “I’ll find something.”
The innovativeness in his answer, pleased her. She gave a small smile. “See that you do. Or see that you earn your bounty in this case.”
“I’ll take the case,” Harry said. “Pull up a seat,” plopping himself down at his kitchen table. “What can you tell me? And the more I know, the better I can solve this.”
First, the bombshell: “They destroyed Miskatonic, Dresden,” Morgan said.
“They - holy!” Harry swore. Even he knew about Miskatonic. Even Harry Dresden, uncle-killer and for-the-most-part outcast from the body of wizarding society, knew about Miskatonic. “No more decoy,” was all he could think to say.
“That’s right,” Mai said. Miskatonic had been wrought into being after that guy Lovecraft tried warning the world about the things of the Nevernever. It was a place both for saying ‘yes, weird crap happens there’ and for saying ‘its nowhere nearly as bad as he made it out to be.’
“So who blew it up?”
“The Elders.”
A question died on Harry’s lips - it was beyond pointless to ask if there was a power struggle in the Nevernever. For one thing, from what he’d heard from various sources, individuality wasn’t always a feature of minds there - ‘like photographing fog’ in the words of one. “You want me to head over to Miskatonic, look around?”
“No. Southern California.”
“Oh, tiny problem.”
“What problem?” Morgan asked, perking up at the prospect of something he could tackle.
“I’m out of gas, and I don’t have the money to refuel my jeep.”
“Pack your things, Dresden,” Mai said. “I’m sending you.”
Harry bolted upstairs, focusing on making sure he got all the right stuff packed. Tried not to remember the last time Mai had transported him: his entire house had ended up in Hell…all part of Mai’s self-protective instincts, to destroy the assassin that’d been after her.
“And,” Mai said, her voice carrying well enough without magic or raising her voice, “there’s one name you need to remember. Amita. That’s your contact.”
Got it.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Part Two:
SoCal:
Fandom: Numb3rs / Dresden Files.
Cannon Characters: Ancient Mai, Morgan, Bob, Harry Dresden / Amita Ramanujan, Charlie Eppes, Megan, Alan Eppes, Margaret Eppes nee Mann,
OCs:
Author: Keenir.
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: Dresden Files series 1. Numb3rs season 2, eps 1.01, 3.07, 4.01-4.12
Also, it will help to have read the “Covert Fear” drabble series, and the paired drabble “Collapse” & “Explanation” as they explain what the background is.
Summary: What is done, can be undone, but not with any ease. And what has been done, was only the opening salvo of the upcoming fight.
Previously, on Numb3rs and The Dresden Files…
“…and I don’t do birthday parties.” -Harry Dresden.
“I just want you all to be happy.”
“Then you shouldn’t have died.” -Margaret and Alan Eppes.
“I’ve been having dreams, Harry, weird dreams. And you’re in them.” -Connie Murphy.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Early Night:
SoCal:
It rose from the earth, animated by a greater force. Ever though there had been no rain in weeks, nothing crumbled from its body: what animated it, was strong enough to hold it together. Shallow pits sufficed for eyes, squat nubbins for fingers.
Strode past the koi pond. The pond’s motor stopped working. The thing did not. The koi lay stunned, weakened by it. The thing was not alive by all definitions of the word.
Up the front steps it went, pillar legs keeping it slow and unstoppable. Leaned against the front door - lacking a nervous system, it was not affected by the defensive wards on the other side of the door, nor by the magical shocks delivered by those same wards. It began to pound on the door, soon enough bowling the door off its hinges. It went inside, its pace slowed to a glacial rate as the interior wards of the house glowed fiercely. It was built to be a tank in every battlefield that could summon it.
Margaret turned around and looked at it. She knew what it was, and had known what it was long before she’d met Alan. Knew that ‘who are you?’ was entirely the wrong question. “Who sent you?” Margaret demanded.
It did not answer. It only strode towards her, legs never pretending to move like humans’ did. But it kept slowing.
“Speak!” she shouted.
Nothing.
“Why are you here?”
Still nothing. But it did slow down some more.
Margaret looked up at the wards she’d set up back when she and Alan had moved in. So far, the intruder was straining their power to the limit; much more, and nothing would be left to defend the home. “Please,” she asked of the intruder, “just one answer.”
The golem stopped moving. Limestone fizzled, and the escaping air formed the words, “Your debt.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Chicago:
“This’d better be good,” Harry grumbled as he made his way down the stairs to answer the ringing phone. Picking it up, “Hello?” It was the hour after the middle of the night in Chicago.
“Harry Dresden?”
“That’s me.”
“I - require to hire you. I am - Charles Eppes. Your - services, I require.”
Eppes, Eppes… wait a, this’ the guy on tv. The one who’d written that ‘The Attraction Equation’ Murphy’s been reading. “What seems to be the problem?” Harry asked, wiping sleep from his eyes.
“Ghosts,” Charlie said, feeling the urge to write - to jot down, even to scribble - the final piece of the equation on the chalkboard. Solve the problem of unification once and for all. “And demons.” But even the part that he had written, was already having an impact upon him. Scratch a sheet, scrape a bit of paint off…you don’t yet see the image, but you can still see the color out of time.
“You’re sure?”
“Yes. Please come to Los Angeles - postehaste.”
“L.A.?”
“Yes. You are - Harry Dresden.”
“Well, yes, but I don’t have any way of getting there.”
“Oh. Be right back,” Charlie said.
“Okay,” Harry said, and could hear the distinctive sound of chalk scraping across a board. Harry waited a minute…five minutes…ten minutes, before hanging up. “Think you can call back?” Dresden asked the phone.
No rings.
“L.A.?” he asked aloud. “How am I supposed to get to L.A.?” I’m nearly out of gas, and don’t get me started on my rent.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
SoCal:
Don had bought them tickets for a movie tonight. So, after the theater had three aborted starts, Alan and Millie’d finally made it through the movie. After that, back to home -
“What the…?” Alan asked, stepping up to the door. Well, to where the door had been.
“Clearly a very determined someone,” Millie said, not sure what else to say. Reaching into her purse, she decided to call Don - he’d know what to do, and he had a right to know what’d happened here.
And Alan cocked his head, positive he’d heard sobbing. And I know those tears. Coming inside, he saw Margaret sitting by herself.
No, not by herself - there was something standing in the middle of the room. A something that, even with its back to him, could only be one thing. Could only be a golem. “Margaret?” Alan asked.
“I’m here,” she said.
“What happened?” still trying to figure out what possible reason a golem would have for breaking into a Jew’s house.
Someone sent a message, Margaret thought to herself. But she didn’t want to worry Alan - and bad as this was, it held the potential to get worse. She sniffled.
Taking a seat beside Margaret, Alan glanced at the golem’s head. Its unadorned head. No lettering or numbers or any impressions. Just two sets of pits where eyes would go.
Unadorned. That scared him. In all the stories he’d heard while growing up, there always had to be a word written on the golem’s forehead.
“Margaret’s here?” Millie asked as she walked warily around the inside of the house. It was like a bad joke - she didn’t know where to look first…at the clay statue in the living room, at the glowing scrawl and shapes interspersed along the walls and ceiling, at the resting place of the door, or at where Alan said Margaret was sitting.
“She is,” Alan said.
Having heard of far stranger coping mechanisms for dealing with stress - some from her own flesh and blood - Millie just said, “I…I’m going to get some tea from the kitchen. Do either of you want anything? Coffee? Milk?”
“Coffee’s good.”
Don came over right away. And stopped in the doorway, not sure whether to take a close look at the ripped-away door, or at the pillar of clay that was melting in the living room. How exactly does clay melt? “I’ll get a shovel,” he brought himself to say.
“No,” his father said.
“No?”
“Have you seen what’s in our living room?”
“Uh, yeah, that’s why I want to get the shovel.”
“And that’s why I said no. Nobody’s touching it - not ‘til we know why its here.” And you’re assuming, son, that a shovel can do anything to it. The thing was unadorned.
“Because somebody’s got a sick sense of humor, dad, that’s why.” I suppose it’s better than getting a burning cross on your lawn…but not by much.
“Donny, these things are supposed to protect us,” Alan said.
Alan heard Margaret weepingly say, “I’m sorry,” again.
“It’s a story, dad. That’s it, that’s all.”
The elder Eppes sat down and tried to calm uneasy Millie and upset Margaret, refusing to say anything else to Don…who stayed with them until he got the call in the morning from Amita.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
MORNING:
Chicago:
A clap of thunder woke Harry Dresden up. He bolted out of bed, rattled by the pressure of every one of his wards shutting off; he’d never been on an airplane in his life, but Harry would recognize that same affliction of the ears popping. Tossing on a pair of jeans and grabbing his hockey stick, he came downstairs…
And saw who his company was. “Morgan,” Harry said. “Mai. Isn’t it a little early in the morning for surprise visits? Besides, I haven’t had a case in a little over two weeks, and I haven’t heard about any rumblings,” deciding not to mention his phone call. Mai didn’t strike him as the sort who drooled over mathematicians. “So I don’t know anything about whatever might’ve brought you here, but I can tell you in all honesty that I haven’t had a part in any of it.”
“It happened last night,” Mai said.
“Huh.”
“That’s why we’re here,” Morgan said, sounding more uncomfortable than he looked.
“Oh? Do tell.”
Looking none pleased about it, “We’re here to hire you.”
Harry blinked. To himself, “I like this dream. Now what was it I had just before I fell asleep?”
“You’re not dreaming,” Mai said.
“I see. So, did the High Council send you because of our history, or what?” Seeing the glaring face forming on Mai, “I’m just curious.”
“The High Council,” Morgan said, sounding very fish-out-of-watery, “wasn’t consulted.” He swallowed. “This comes from higher up.”
“The Merlin?” Harry asked. The Merlin, head of the High Council. The last time any Merlin had taken unilateral action, it’d brought an end to the Salem Witch Hunts.
“Higher,” Morgan said again, which explained, in Harry’s opinion, just why he was so uncomfortable - even Wardens didn’t like the rarefied politics of the things that outranked Councils and Courts. “The Elder Things.”
“Somehow, I get the feeling I’m going to be paid with my life.”
And the smile on Mai’s face didn’t rid him of that feeling. “Better, Dresden, even better. The Elders don’t want the Morningway line to come to an end with you…your payment will be an heir.”
“Ya’know, I’d really rather do that myself.”
“Of course,” Ancient Mai said neutrally. “With Detective Consuela Murphy. It’s her life that is on the line here, Dresden.”
“If you hurt her, Mai, so help me, I swear -”
“That you’ll what? Turn to the Black?”
Threatening Mai - however good it felt for a brief while - always backfired. Usually in the selfsame conversation. “I’ll find something.”
The innovativeness in his answer, pleased her. She gave a small smile. “See that you do. Or see that you earn your bounty in this case.”
“I’ll take the case,” Harry said. “Pull up a seat,” plopping himself down at his kitchen table. “What can you tell me? And the more I know, the better I can solve this.”
First, the bombshell: “They destroyed Miskatonic, Dresden,” Morgan said.
“They - holy!” Harry swore. Even he knew about Miskatonic. Even Harry Dresden, uncle-killer and for-the-most-part outcast from the body of wizarding society, knew about Miskatonic. “No more decoy,” was all he could think to say.
“That’s right,” Mai said. Miskatonic had been wrought into being after that guy Lovecraft tried warning the world about the things of the Nevernever. It was a place both for saying ‘yes, weird crap happens there’ and for saying ‘its nowhere nearly as bad as he made it out to be.’
“So who blew it up?”
“The Elders.”
A question died on Harry’s lips - it was beyond pointless to ask if there was a power struggle in the Nevernever. For one thing, from what he’d heard from various sources, individuality wasn’t always a feature of minds there - ‘like photographing fog’ in the words of one. “You want me to head over to Miskatonic, look around?”
“No. Southern California.”
“Oh, tiny problem.”
“What problem?” Morgan asked, perking up at the prospect of something he could tackle.
“I’m out of gas, and I don’t have the money to refuel my jeep.”
“Pack your things, Dresden,” Mai said. “I’m sending you.”
Harry bolted upstairs, focusing on making sure he got all the right stuff packed. Tried not to remember the last time Mai had transported him: his entire house had ended up in Hell…all part of Mai’s self-protective instincts, to destroy the assassin that’d been after her.
“And,” Mai said, her voice carrying well enough without magic or raising her voice, “there’s one name you need to remember. Amita. That’s your contact.”
Got it.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Part Two:
SoCal: