FIC: Forward
Title: Forward
Author: guardian_chaos
Verse: TV!Dresden Files
Rating: PG
Words: 2779-ish
Characters: Bob and Harry
Spoilers: the entire fic is pre-series, but it’s set during the year containing the flashbacks in “What About Bob?”, so expect at least vague allusions to that episode.Summary: Bob and Harry await the New Year.
* * *
“Harry,” Bob called out, as he floated as a ball of flame up to the loft in Harry’s apartment and then reformed on the landing, “You wanted me to tell you when the numbers were about to change.” He nodded pointedly in Harry’s direction. “Well, they are about to. Is it still your intention to watch this?”
Blinkingly raising his head from one of the many boxes of his late uncle’s possessions that he still had left to sort through despite having had them in his apartment for many weeks already, Harry stared blankly at the ghost for a moment. Finally, a bit of comprehension dawned in his dark eyes. “Already?” he asked, his voice a tad strained. He coughed, bringing his voice back to full-strength and sending a puff of dust flying through the air. “Are you sure?”
“Have I ever had reason to lie to you, Harry?” the ghost replied, sympathetic as he surveyed the nigh-endless clutter of magical objects surrounding them both. He wondered how long it would take for Harry to decide which pieces were worth keeping and which were better off disposed of, as the wizard seemed to be having a lot of difficulty with deciding. This was, in part, why Bob had chosen this moment to distract Harry from the task, despite the fact that Harry hadn’t asked him to keep track of the coming of the new year, after all. This, Bob had absolved in his mind by reminding himself that Harry would likely think he had asked the ghost to do so anyway. Even when Harry had been a child, Bob had noticed that he had always been rather partial to New Years and, true to form, Harry still subscribed to such ideals.
“Hell if you haven’t,” Harry muttered in reply, but still set the box to the side and stretched as he stood. “Lead the way, Bob.”
His goal met, Bob smirked, inwardly pleased with himself. “By all means.” Turning promptly on his heel, Bob dissolved into a ball of flame once again and drifted down the stairs to Harry’s loft. Touching the ground, he immediately reformed, then turned to watch with scrutinizing eyes as Harry descended from the loft with considerably less grace.
“Wish I could do that,” the wizard said, with a soft chuckle that almost managed to make the black circles under his eyes seem obsolete.
“It is actually far more entertaining than walking,” Bob replied, having discovered this fact for himself many, many years before.
“Why don’t you move around like that more often, then?” Harry asked, with a puzzled tilt of his head as he followed Bob over to one of the many bookcases in his apartment.
Bob shrugged. “I suppose it is simply easier to remain like this. That, and the universe seems to prefer me this way.”
“Ah.”
“You should be careful making such wishes, I might add. Given certain situations, they can be quite dangerous.”
“More dangerous not to want anything, don’t you think?”
Pausing in his walk, Bob raised an eyebrow at Harry in question. A trying thought seemed to drift across the ghost’s pale face, but he let it slip away at the lightly contented look that Harry was giving him, as such expressions had been somewhat rare on the wizard’s face over the past few months. “In some circumstances, perhaps,” the ghost gradually conceded. “But certainly not all.”
“Wouldn’t kill you to have a little optimism, you know.”
“In that, you are correct,” Bob replied, stepping silently up to the bookshelf and standing before it, to be joined shortly after by Harry. “It certainly wouldn’t.”
Harry felt a sudden urge to glare at the ghost, or perhaps wildly swing an arm through him to see him react, but Bob’s eyes were already preoccupied by the sight of his skull and a cheap-looking travel alarm clock, the two objects sitting side-by-side at chin’s length on the bookshelf before them. From the reverent way Bob was looking at the objects, Harry almost decided it wasn’t worth it to snark back.
Almost.
So, with a sigh, Harry rolled his eyes. “Are you going to be Mr. Doom and Gloom for the rest of your life here, Bob?”
Though the ghost’s eyes never left the timepiece holding his attention, the barest trace of a smirk took residence on his lips. “Define ‘life’.”
Exhaling a sound that was almost a laugh, Harry rubbed his forehead. “Yeah, yeah. I get it. Real funny, Bob, but let’s not go there right now, all right?”
Bob nodded. “Agreed. Now is not the time.”
“Thank you,” Harry breathed, as if in relief. He looked at the clock, where the current time, 11:58, was glowing in red numbers. As Harry watched, two of the seven red lines making up the number eight blinked out of existence, creating from nowhere a glowing number nine. Feeling an odd chill run up his spine, Harry bit down on his lip, beginning a silent countdown to the end of the hellish year, although he knew even this wouldn’t remove from his apartment the many boxes of crap (and all the memories they carried with them) he still had left to sort through.
“Harry, about tomorrow…”
“Bob!” Harry hissed, mentally flailing as he tried to keep the backwards-counting number sequence alive in his head. “I’m counting; do you mind?”
Crossing his arms, Bob smirked. “I don’t, but continue.”
Muttering a rather non-genuine “thank you”, Harry resumed counting and turned away from the ghost.
For the next fifty seconds or so, neither man spoke, only remained transfixed by numbers that held the symbolic promise of something new. In the candle-lit dimness of the place, suddenly everything seemed to be moving a little faster, the year they were in rapidly running away from them both, soon to be replaced by the next. Perhaps it was only a fallacy that a new year meant a clean slate-no, for that matter, Harry knew it was. He would still have a lifetime to make up for, regardless of what year he was in-but still, Harry found himself clinging to the idea as he anxiously counted out seconds in his mind.
Feeling his heart beat a little faster as his counting neared twenty and continued downwards, Harry felt the gut-clenching feeling of an end creeping up on him, only made tolerable by the possibility that something better might be sneaking up along with it. Swallowing, he looked briefly at Bob, who looked back at him with a serious expression, and then both returned their attention to the clock just in time to see it shift, every former number being erased as it announced a new year.
In a moment of synchronicity, both men exhaled deeply and then looked around themselves at the empty apartment, gradually coming back to each other’s eyes as nothing else worthy of being paid attention to appeared in those few seconds of quiet.
“Well,” Bob stated, breaking the silence first. “New year.”
“New start,” Harry agreed, tugging down his sleeves and then crossing his arms across his chest. “Kind of weird.”
“Yes,” Bob said, and then there was silence again.
When no great, monumental, life-changing thing happened in the next few moments to declare the new year more forcibly, Harry uncrossed his arms and walked towards the door to his apartment. Hanging from the door was a small sign declaring the word “Open”, while on the other side-the side facing the outside world-was the word “Closed”.
“Guess I’ll be flipping this tomorrow,” he said, tapping the small sign and watching it sway about.
Crossing his own arms, Bob turned to regard the wizard. “It will be interesting to see who arrives.”
“Oh, I can’t even imagine. ‘Wizard for hire’, remember? I’m going to attract so many loonies.”
“And perhaps a few genuine cases,” Bob commented. “And won’t those make it all worthwhile?”
“Yeah,” Harry said, with a small grin. “I’ll be a do-gooder all over again; just watch me.”
“The world rejoices at the thought,” Bob muttered, dryly.
Laughingly, Harry leaned against the door and looked outside of it to the alley. “So, what about you, Bob? Any New Year’s resolutions?”
“The usual: diet and exercise,” Bob promptly replied, somehow managing to sound serious about the statement, despite the obvious poke at his spectral state that it was.
“Geez, Bob,” Harry muttered, pressing a hand to his face and shaking his head back and forth in disapproval. “I mean, for real.”
Pursing his lips, Bob pocketed his hands, while his brow furrowed in thought. “I suppose…” he began, but stopped himself. To ensure that my skull continues to be worth keeping around? Inwardly, Bob chuckled, at first thinking he was making a joke about himself, but this quickly bled into a frown as he realized that he was not and that he meant it.
Instead of revealing this private, tormenting thought that he had unintentionally brought upon himself, Bob forced his frown to reshape itself into an uneasy smile. “I am not sure that I have one,” he said.
Frowning, Harry stared at the ghost for a moment, clearly assessing the situation. To put Harry’s mind more at ease, the ghost strengthened the presence of his smile, letting it remain until Harry seemed more relaxed before Bob let the expression slip away.
“Did we just start talking about something else?” Harry asked, apparently more perceptive in this moment than Bob had thought he would need to give the wizard credit for. As if in response, the candlelight surrounding them dimmed for a brief moment, almost going out before returning to full strength.
Caught, Bob tried not to appear so. “How so, Harry?” he asked, the tone of his voice casual, “I have noticed no difference. Have you a New Year’s resolution, yourself?”
The wizard squinted a little, but after a brief, somewhat harrowing moment, he seemed to decide to give Bob the benefit of doubt. “I do,” he said, in a way that suggested that what he was about to say had some immense importance. “From this day forward, I, Harry Dresden, the only Wizard Detective for hire in Chicago,” To emphasize the point, he pointed at the yellow lettering painted on the glass paneling of his door, “declare that I will do all that is necessary and within my power not to royally screw up my life any further than I already have.”
Bob chuckled, though the sound was a quiet one. “That sounds to be about as good a resolution as any other,” he supposed. “And do you yet have any plans pertaining to how you are going to pull this off?”
“Just by being my amazing self,” Harry replied.
Bob shut his eyes, a hand coming up to his face as he sighed heavily. “How wonderful to know that you have so thoroughly thought this through.”
“Isn’t it?” Harry said.
“In the very strictest of senses…no.”
“Aw, come on, Bob. Throw me a bone he-” He shut up immediately, a hand coming to mouth. “Damn it,” he murmured, but Bob only chuckled, in that faint, barely there way that he always seemed to fall back on when he found something amusing but wasn’t able to fully admit to it.
“It’s all right, Harry,” he assured the wizard, though his eyes were considerably softer than before as he looked beside himself at the decorated skull sitting just beside a clock still counting forward. “I am not offended.”
Seeing Bob’s sudden distance, Harry felt a pang of guilt at the thought that he had caused it. Such moments of quiet on the ghost’s behalf had always existed, even when Harry had been younger, but it seemed that they had been easier to provoke as of late and the frequency of such events was beginning to worry Harry.
“Um…hey. Bob,” Harry called, bringing the ghost back as he walked towards him and leaned against the wall beside the bookcase. Feeling a little awkward, Harry rubbed at the back of his neck. “So…I’ve been thinking.” Before Bob could make a witty comment about this, Harry pointed a warning finger at him and said, “Stop it.” Seeing the ghost narrow his eyes in an expression best described as profoundly irritated, Harry continued, “What do you think about me setting up that room in the center of this place to be a lab of some sort?” He gestured vaguely behind him in the direction of the aforementioned room. “Y’know, when we get the boxes out of it. It seems like you could probably use a place to work on spells and such without having to worry about wiping them away if someone knocks on the door.”
A stunned, pleased sort of look came across Bob’s face, replacing the irritation in one full swoop. “I would like that, Harry,” he said.
“Yeah? Then it’s done. Soon as I can, I’ll start looking at steel doors and pretending I can afford them.”
“You really don’t have to go through so much trouble if it’s...”
Harry held up a hand, effectively silencing the ghost. “Hey. Not trouble. Wizards need a place to put their cauldrons, after all.” He looked to his left, into the kitchen. “And I almost seasoned my spaghetti with wormwood the other day, so I’m thinking I could use a place that’s set-aside for special herbs, too.”
Bob’s lips twitched in a way that suggested he was trying not to smile. “It does seem that you should be making that a priority.”
“Lest my cooking become even more hazardous than it already is,” Harry mumbled, looking with an almost pained gaze into the kitchen. Exhaling a quick breath, he returned his gaze to Bob. “Oh, and hey,” Harry said, making a quick segue from one topic to the next. “We made it through last year. Can you believe that? Happy New Year, Bob.”
The ghost raised his eyebrows. “Surprising,” he said, flatly. He nodded in Harry’s direction. “None the less, a fine New Year’s day to you, as well, Harry.”
“And tomorrow, the clients start to come.”
“Alert the media.”
“Already did,” Harry said, with a grin. “Newspaper.”
“Ah. Then I predict you will be overwhelmed by the swarm your newspaper ad will provoke.”
“Hey,” Harry said. “You have to start somewhere.”
“Yes,” Bob admitted, almost begrudgingly. He tugged down on his sleeves, straightening them with a perfunctory twist of his shackle-bound wrists. “And speaking of which,” he added, nodding pointedly to the clock beside him, “do you have plans to be awake for the outpouring of Chicago citizens in need of your supernatural assistance, or do you wish to appear half-dead when they show up at your doorstep?”
Huffing, Harry rolled his eyes. “Fine, hint taken,” he muttered, heading towards the stairs. “Feel free to make up another lie about my telling you to watch for a certain time if you feel like talking anymore tonight.”
The ghost stiffened, his arms locking in place across his chest as he stared up at Harry’s retreating back. But there was no ill will in Harry’s expression as he regarded Bob with a smirk over his shoulder, so Bob relaxed his guard. “I will keep that in mind, Harry,” he said.
“You do that. ‘Night, Bob.”
“Goodnight, Harry.”
And as the candles around them grew dim at Harry’s whispered command, Bob turned to face the red numbers glowing on the timepiece before him. Beside the numbers, his skull appeared bathed in the dim red light, as much a part of the darkness as it was of the light being offered to it by the progression of time. The seconds ticked forward in tune with the blinking of the colon in-between the hour and the minutes, and for a moment, the constant progression of time seemed less an expression of an endless eternity and more an expression of simply moving forward.
Content with this observation, Bob transformed himself into a ball of light and twirled about in the darkness for about a minute before finally escaping into his skull in a sudden smothering of light. In the loft above, having watched the giddy flight of the fireball with no small amount of amusement, Harry grinned and shook his head as the light faded, plunging the lower half of the apartment into a comfortable darkness once again.
In his skull, Bob rested. In his bed, Harry pulled his covers around himself and slept. All around them both, time continued to move forward, for this moment, at least, a burden to neither.
~END.