Doctor Who / Dresden Files: Side-trips and Lost Sleep
Title: Side-trips and Lost Sleep
Author's Name: limmenel
Recipient's name: mostlyharmless
Fandoms: Doctor Who (between Series 2 and 3); The Dresden Files (TV-canon blended with a hint of book-canon, post-Season 1).
Characters: Tenth Doctor, Harry Dresden, Bob (Hrothbert of Bainbridge)
Author's Notes: Written using the prompt Ten, Harry's lab. It's not quite what you asked for, and I apologize, but I think it's pretty close! And I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it! Thank you to my beta, who was patient when I was being stubborn, and who took a jumble of typos and grammar errors and made them into something readable.
My life moves quickly, so I’ll talk fast. Magic? Is real. Only, y’know, most people don’t know about it. And there’s a reason for that… it’s called the High Council. Led by Ancient Mai, enforced by Morgan, a Warden who really doesn’t like me. Come to think of it, Mai doesn’t like me much, either. None of the Council does. But that’s a story for another day.
Okay, so, the basics: magic, High Council, wizards, the whole nine yards. And then there’s me. Harry Dresden, paranormal investigator, especially if it helps me pay my bills. And I’m not a bad wizard, if I do say so myself. I’ve got a nice place, well-warded. I mean, I’ve held off the walls of Death itself in this place.
So when I hear a strange whirring noise from my living room at just after two in the morning, followed shortly by the sound of someone walking around? I start to worry. A lot.
Because if something’s inside my house, and my wards haven’t been disturbed… well, it’s probably time to start panicking.
[-]
For Harry, there’s something comforting about holding a big hockey stick in his hands. Apart from the whole unconventional-magic-wand part, he likes to know he can whack someone in the head with it if he needs to. And it doesn’t matter if that he’s a wizard instead of a normal human, because having a big stick in his hands as he creeps down the stairs to confront whoever’s breaking in to his house? Is incredibly reassuring.
Moving down the steps slowly, Harry shifts the hockey stick in his hands, ready to blast the intruder to kingdom come at any given second. He can still hear the person walking around, mumbling to himself-at least it doesn’t sound like anything’s being robbed or destroyed. And there’s still the whole part about the wards not going off, which, alright, freaks him out more than a little.
He slides down the last few steps, careful not to hit the last one that squeaks, and carefully walks around the corner, moving towards the living room where the intruder is.
The first thing he sees is a giant box. A giant blue box, actually. Like, ten feet tall, and that so wasn’t there when he closed the shop last night. It doesn’t look like anything magical, but appearances can be deceiving and all that, and maybe it’s a portal to another world, or something, for all he knows.
Then he sees the guy. It’s kind of hard not to, what with him pacing back and forth in front of the box, muttering to himself, pausing ever so often to stare at it, contemplate it, then shake his head and keep on walking. He seems unaware of the fact that he’s in someone’s home, in the middle of the night.
But Harry’s tired. He’s cranky. He had to put up with Kirmani glaring at him all afternoon yesterday, and Murphy’s latest weird-occurrences-case is going nowhere, and this guy is in his house, having not set off his wards, and possibly about to unleash the Demon of The Eighth Level of Hell.
So he pulls the hockey stick up, and steps out of the shadows.
“Hey. You. Don’t move!”
The guy moves. Of course he does, Harry reasons, exasperated. He spins around, surprised, to face Harry, though he doesn’t do anything else, at least, and he doesn’t look to have a weapon.
“Who are you?” Harry asks. “How’d you get in here?”
The guy looks just as perplexed as Harry does, although it’s kind of hard to tell on a face like his. “Who’re you?” he asks.
Harry ignores the accent (What the hell? British? Really?!), the strange box, and the fact that the man is standing in his home without disturbing the wards, and blinks. “Who am I?” he asks. “Who’re you?”
“Oh,” the man says, a smile easing onto his face. “I’m the Doctor. Hello!” He gives a wiggle of his fingers as a wave, then pauses and adds, “What year is it?”
Great. Harry sighs, lowering the hockey stick a fraction of an inch. A crazy person. Which doesn’t explain the utter lack of reaction to the wards, but at least he isn’t talking about trying to devour Harry’s soul. Yet. “Right. Uh-huh.”
The man, doctor, whatever he is, turns his head to the side and squints at Harry. “Do I know you?”
“Um, I’m pretty sure you don’t,” Harry says. Yeah, definitely crazy. He wonders if he can get to the phone and call the police, or if the guy will freak out.
“No, no, I think I do.” He leans forward, scrunching his face up. “What’s your name?”
“Harry,” Harry says. “Harry Dresden. Look, Doctor whatever-your-name-is,” he begins, but the man cuts him off.
“Just the Doctor,” he says, cheerfully.
“Right. Doctor. I’m gonna go make a phone call, and maybe see about getting you some help, alright?” He hefts the hockey stick as a warning. “So don’t go trying anything funny.”
The man, Doctor, doesn’t look intimidated. “Dresden,” he says. “Dressssssden. Dresdennnnn.” He rolls the name around, making weird, exaggerated faces, like he’s trying to find a hidden meaning in the words. And then he’s off, pacing again, this time mumbling Harry’s name under his breath, eyebrows furrowed in thought.
Ooookay. Harry watches him for a second, then moves around the giant box (which is too weird for him to even begin trying to figure out right now, and man, he needs some coffee) towards the phone. He’s just picking it up, ready to dial 9-1-1, when the man snaps out of his pacing.
“Dresden!” he says, and Harry almost drops the phone at the outburst. He turns, hockey stick raised, and stares in surprise. The man grins widely, and Harry can see his teeth reflecting orange in the street light that’s filtering through the front windows. “Harry Dresden. Brilliant!”
The Doctor says his name with recognition, and his voice is tinged with a faint hint of… something else. Not awe, but fascination, maybe. Curiosity. Whatever it is, it’s enough to make Harry pause and set the phone back down.
For the first time, he takes the man in, completely. Dark hair, wild and ruffled. A pinstripe suit, the jacket of which is half unbuttoned, showing a tie and white shirt beneath. Long brown over-coat, leading down to dirty white tennis shoes. The entire picture lends to the crazy-person feeling that Dresden’s getting, but the man’s eyes are way too clear and sane, and they’re watching Harry intently.
“Alright,” Harry says. Takes a deep breath. “Alright.” Something about this entire situation is bothering him. “Look, Doctor, whatever. Just take your box and get out of my house, and I won’t call the cops on you, kay? Cause I’m pretty sure Murphy wouldn’t be too happy with me wakin’ her up this early. So, yeah.” He makes little ‘shoo’-ing motions with his free hand.
“Now that’s a problem, Harry Dresden,” the Doctor says. “I can’t.”
Ah. Here comes the part where the guy announces his desire to devour Harry’s soul, or try to destroy the universe, or whatever it is this week.
“Something’s got my ship trapped here, and I can’t seem to get her to power back up.” He pulls out a little metal thing while he’s talking, with a glowy light on the end, and the entire thing makes a weird buzzing as he runs it over the outside of his blue box, utterly unaware of Harry’s thoughts about the end of the world.
Harry blinks. “Your ship?” he asks. He looks at the Doctor, then at the box, then back at the Doctor, eyebrow raised. “A box that says 'police' on it? Doesn’t look like much of a ship to me.”
The Doctor makes a strange noise in his throat. “You of all people should know that things aren’t always what they appear to be, Harry Dresden,” he says. “And it’s not a box, it’s a TARDIS.”
“What do you mean by that?” Threatening, maybe a bit, but the guy talks like he knows what Harry is, what he can do, and that’s not supposed to happen.
The little glowy stick is lowered, and the man peers at him. “What year is it?” he asks again.
“2007. Same year it's been since January.”
The Doctor’s eyes go wide. “Then you've... ooooooh,” he trails off, eyes wide. “Well then. That changes everything, doesn’t it? And I’m actually in the home of Harry Dresden?” He looks around, as though seeing his setting for the first time. “Brilliant. I’ve always wanted to see this place. See where it all began.”
The conversation keeps getting weirder and weirder, and Harry’s awake enough to realize that he still hasn’t managed to get a straight answer out of the Doctor. “Where what all began?” he asks.
“Well, the magic, of course!” The Doctor says it like it’s obvious. “The birthplace of the Unseelie Accords, the home of the last Merlin of the White Council, the…”
Something in Harry’s face causes him to trail off. Probably the unadulterated shock, the fact that his jaw his hanging somewhere around his chest, and the way he’s got the hockey stick raised as if ready to fight at any sign.
“… and you don’t know about any of that yet, do you?” the Doctor asks, rhetorically at this point.
“How do you know about the Council?” Harry asks. Because remember that part where no one knows about the Council and magic, except for other wizards? Yeah, nothing’s changed in that in the last few minutes, which means this guy is either dangerous, or he’s like Harry, and either one would have set off the wards long ago.
“Never mind that!” The Doctor slips his hands into his pockets and rocks back on his heels. “Don’t suppose you could help me out? Get me on my way, out of your way.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” Harry says, holding his hands up in protest. “No ‘never mind’. I’m tired. I’m confused. I’m pissed. It’s not a winning combination. How’s about you tell me what’s going on, how you got past my wards, and how you know about magic, and I won’t lay the whammy on you.” He hefts the hockey stick in further threat.
It takes only a second for the Doctor to contemplate this. He opens his mouth, then pauses, closing it, and frowns. “Wards?” he asks. “What kind of wards?”
“The kind that should’ve stopped you from entering,” Harry snaps.
“Do you mind…” the Doctor pauses, mid-sentence, and waves his hand around. “Can I see them? I hadn’t thought of wards. I suppose if the algiz was positioned just right, it could have allowed the TARDIS to slip through, but of course then it wouldn’t let me back out.”
The High Council has this rule. Okay, it has lots of rules, most of which are pretty useless and not worth remembering unless you’re a Warden, but a few which Harry’s well aware of. Like the one about people who know about magic. If someone doesn’t know about magic, you can’t go and tell them about it. But this guy seems to know what he’s talking about, which means Harry can talk about it all he wants. That is, if he wants to.
He still hasn’t totally ruled out that he might be a warlock in disguise, or a demon, or something wanting to devour brains.
“Oh, don’t look at me like that,” the Doctor says. “I’m not exactly in a position to hurt you. You’ve got the big hockey stick after all.”
True, Harry concedes. Besides, the wards are anchored in the threshold, and there’s no way this guy can change them, no matter how much he might want to.
With a sigh, Harry sets the handle of the hockey stick on the ground, and focuses. Pulling up the wards isn’t strenuous, exactly, but it’s not a piece of cake, either, especially not without coffee and a few hours of sleep.
The wards spring to life with a golden glow, symbols carved along the columns and ceiling beams.
“Fantastic,” the Doctor says, straining his neck to look up. “Wow.”
“How exactly does this box of yours work?” Harry asks, following the Doctor’s gaze along the runes above them.
“It’s not a box, it’s a TARDIS,” the Doctor corrects. “Time and relative dimensions in space.”
“A time machine?” Harry takes a step back from the Doctor and his box, and the wards on the ceiling vanish as he loses concentration. “The Seven Laws of Magic… you can’t…” he trails off, fear in his voice. If the Council finds out about this, finds that he didn’t turn this man-this warlock, he assumes, because that’s definitely black magic-in to the Wardens, he’ll be in a lot of deep shit. “Thou shalt not swim against the Currents of Time.” He repeats the words from memory. “The seventh law.”
The Doctor looks confused at first, then understanding replaces that. “Oh, that,” he says. “No worries, then, no law being broken here.” He pats the TARDIS lovingly. “I’m a Time Lord, not a wizard.” He says the words like Harry should recognize them, but frowns when Harry doesn’t. “If it makes you feel any better, the TARDIS is designed to swim with the Currents of Time. My people are-were-the ones who corrected paradoxes in Time. There’s no magic being used, so no laws being broken.”
Harry stares at the Doctor for a long moment, then nods. “I don’t know why I believe you,” he says, “but I do. That doesn’t mean I want you hanging around here any longer than you have to, though, cause I don’t want to deal with Morgan if he finds out about this. Let’s get you out of here soon, yeah?”
“Sure,” the Doctor agrees easily. “Wouldn’t want anyone getting in trouble. Besides, Mai doesn’t like me much, wouldn’t want to run into her again.”
That comment makes Harry brighten considerably, because Ancient Mai doesn’t like him much either, and he wonders what this guy did to get on her bad side. Not, of course, that she really has a good side.
“C’mon,” Harry says, motioning with his hand for the Doctor to follow him, “I think I have a book somewhere that’ll help figure this out. So, you sorta appeared here through Time?” The words stick in his throat, because time travel is something he never allows himself to consider, as tempting as it is sometimes.
“That’s right. Was on my way to twenty-first century London, wanted to check out a hospital there, and suddenly found myself here.” The Doctor looks around as he walks, clearly curious, like a spectator in a museum.
“One of my wards is designed to block anything coming in and anything going out,” Harry says, “but it’s not designed to deal with the flows of Time.”
Harry pauses in the middle of the hall and pushes the hidden door open to his lab. The Doctor looks like a kid in a candy store trying to take everything in as they walk down the steps. “So you think you can counter that somehow?” he asks, running a hand over a table. Then he spots the wall of shelves filled with ingredients and quickly moves to look at those. “Look at this. Smaller than I thought it’d be, but I guess everyone has to start somewhere.”
“Hey!” Harry says, because his lab is perfect, thank you very much. He digs through the piles on his desk, picking up books and glancing at them before tossing them back down. “Where is it?” he mumbles to himself. Not on his desk, clearly, but he has no idea where it might have ended up.
There’s an empty shelf on the bookcase next to his desk, empty except for a skull covered in runes and a couple of romance novels. Harry taps the skull a couple of times. “Bob,” he says, before turning back to his desk, “Up and at ‘em. Wakey wakey.”
With a yawn (and he’s not actually alive anymore, so Harry has no idea where the yawn is coming from), the skull lights up and Bob appears in front of it, looking completely unhappy at having been disturbed.
“Hrothbert of Bainbridge! Lovely to see you again!” the Doctor exclaims.
Bob gives him an unreadable look. “And just who, exactly, is he?” he asks Harry.
Harry waves his hand, not looking up from the book he’s flipping through. “He’s a doctor,” he says. “The Doctor. Whatever. Bob, where’s my copy of Arcane Runes? I could’ve sworn I left it down here.”
“The Doctor?” Bob looks genuinely pleased now, a rarity for him. “Well, I must say it’s been a while. Four hundred years or so?”
“Just about,” the Doctor replies, grinning.
“You look different,” Bob begins.
There’s a story there that Harry wants to hear someday, but right now he just wants the Doctor and his box out of his house so he can go back to bed. “Bob!” he interrupts. “Arcane Runes? The book? Any idea where it is.”
Bob sniffs and points to a stack of book in the far corner of the room. “You left it over there,” he says, voice heavy with condescension. “Fourth book down in the stack.”
“Awesome,” Harry says, ignoring the tone, because Bob wouldn’t be Bob if he was happy and helpful all the time. He grabs the book and brings it back over to the desk, setting it down hard and sneezing at the cloud of dust that rises as a result. Man, he really needs to get a cleaning service, he thinks.
The Doctor hovers next to him, still curious. “What are you planning on doing?” he asks, eyes skimming over the pages as though he actually understands what he’s reading. For a guy who claims not to be a wizard, Harry thinks, he knows an awful lot about the magical community.
“This,” Harry says. “The ehwaz rune. Or a variation of it, rather. I think I might be able to alter it, and give you enough power to transport out of my house. Not totally sure where you’d end up, though, but it should be enough to get you through the wards. Whatcha think, Bob?”
Bob reads the page upside down, standing on the other side of the desk, and his eyebrows crease with thought. “You can’t incorporate it into the wards,” he says, “Not without leaving a gaping hole in them for anything to slip through.”
Harry nods. “Was planning to draw it on the Doctor’s ship, actually, and use my own power to trigger it.” He hefts the hockey stick. “Maybe a crystal to help magnify it, if the rune isn’t enough.”
“You can’t send it through the wards, Harry,” Bob points out. “You’ll tear them down completely if you do that.”
The Doctor interrupts here, having followed the conversation so far. “You’re not planning to send it out, are you?” he asks Harry, eyes widening with understanding.
“Nope,” Harry agrees. “You say this thing can travel in time and dimensions, right? The rune should give you the boost of energy you need, so you can just slide out of the building through another dimension, if I do this right.”
“That could work,” Bob says. He flips through the book, tapping another rune. “You’ll need to use an inverse isa to help undo the blocking being done by the wards,” he says. “And you’ll need a circle, if you don’t want the entire city of Chicago to know what you’re up to.”
“Already on it,” Harry says, grabbing another book off his desk and flipping through the pages quickly.
It’s not a difficult spell, but getting around the wards is going to be tricky, and Harry’s not willing to risk doing it unless everything’s done just right. “A nine foot diameter should be enough,” Bob says as Harry grabs a piece of chalk and his hockey stick. “You really think this will work?”
Harry shrugs. “Don’t see why not,” he says. “C’mon, let’s get this show on the road. I need sleep, and the longer you stay here, the more time the Council has to figure it out. You don’t wanna deal with Morgan and Ancient Mai any more than I do.”
Bob follows them back up to the living room and looks at the TARDIS with obvious recognition. “You still haven’t managed to fix your ship, I see,” he says.
“Wouldn’t want to anymore,” the Doctor says, fondness in his voice. “Gives it a bit of character. Besides, you humans never seem to notice what’s going on around you, even when there’s a police box where it shouldn’t be.”
Harry listens with half an ear as he chalks the rune onto the side of the Doctor’s ship, a long M-like shape, with the straight line of isa lying sideways through it. Bob and the Doctor are taking their time, chatting about something that happened back in the seventeenth century when Bob was in the possession of some wizard Harry’s never heard of, when something tugs on the back of Harry’s mind and a rune over the door flares to life.
“Um, guys,” he says, breaking into their conversation. “I hate to interrupt and rush you… okay, that’s a lie, I’d love to rush you and get back to bed, but that’s beside the point because we’ve got incoming.” He points to the glowing rune above the door. “And I have a feeling we all know who it is.”
“Wardens?” Bob asks. “You think they sensed the Doctor’s arrival and finally figured out where he landed?”
Nodding, Harry waves the Doctor forward. “I think they detected the time travel, yeah,” he says. “ETA in, what, a minute or so? Hurry, let’s get you out of here before either of us get in trouble.”
The Doctor moves next to the TARDIS, and Harry hastily scratches a circle of chalk into the floor, Bob pointing out where to draw. It only takes a few seconds for the circle to be closed, the box and the Doctor standing in the middle of the pentagram.
“Ready?” Harry asks, raising his hockey stick and pointing it at the circle.
The Doctor nods, pulling a key from his pocket and unlocking the ship. “It was a pleasure to see you again, Hrothbert,” he says. The circle around him begins to glow as Harry focuses his power on it, and the rune on the side of the ship brightens, filling the room with light. “And you, Harry Dresden. It was a pleasure to meet you again.”
Harry opens his mouth to ask what that means (“again”? He can’t remember ever having met this man before), but the Doctor slides into the TARDIS and closes the door behind him as the light fills the room, blinding Harry.
When the light dies down, the TARDIS is gone.
Harry leans heavily on the stick, exhausted, and tiredly rubs a toe through the chalk line, breaking the now-empty circle. The wards on his ceiling are undisturbed, and his bed calls to him.
He starts to drag himself towards the stairs when there’s a knock on his front door. “Shit,” he says, taking a deep breath and forcing himself to stay awake. The Wardens. Bob gives him a look that says ‘Your problem, not mine,’ and vanishes through the wall.
“Looks like I’m not sleeping tonight,” he mutters, moving towards the door and already trying to come up with a story to weasel his way out of trouble this time.
Author's Name: limmenel
Recipient's name: mostlyharmless
Fandoms: Doctor Who (between Series 2 and 3); The Dresden Files (TV-canon blended with a hint of book-canon, post-Season 1).
Characters: Tenth Doctor, Harry Dresden, Bob (Hrothbert of Bainbridge)
Author's Notes: Written using the prompt Ten, Harry's lab. It's not quite what you asked for, and I apologize, but I think it's pretty close! And I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it! Thank you to my beta, who was patient when I was being stubborn, and who took a jumble of typos and grammar errors and made them into something readable.
My life moves quickly, so I’ll talk fast. Magic? Is real. Only, y’know, most people don’t know about it. And there’s a reason for that… it’s called the High Council. Led by Ancient Mai, enforced by Morgan, a Warden who really doesn’t like me. Come to think of it, Mai doesn’t like me much, either. None of the Council does. But that’s a story for another day.
Okay, so, the basics: magic, High Council, wizards, the whole nine yards. And then there’s me. Harry Dresden, paranormal investigator, especially if it helps me pay my bills. And I’m not a bad wizard, if I do say so myself. I’ve got a nice place, well-warded. I mean, I’ve held off the walls of Death itself in this place.
So when I hear a strange whirring noise from my living room at just after two in the morning, followed shortly by the sound of someone walking around? I start to worry. A lot.
Because if something’s inside my house, and my wards haven’t been disturbed… well, it’s probably time to start panicking.
[-]
For Harry, there’s something comforting about holding a big hockey stick in his hands. Apart from the whole unconventional-magic-wand part, he likes to know he can whack someone in the head with it if he needs to. And it doesn’t matter if that he’s a wizard instead of a normal human, because having a big stick in his hands as he creeps down the stairs to confront whoever’s breaking in to his house? Is incredibly reassuring.
Moving down the steps slowly, Harry shifts the hockey stick in his hands, ready to blast the intruder to kingdom come at any given second. He can still hear the person walking around, mumbling to himself-at least it doesn’t sound like anything’s being robbed or destroyed. And there’s still the whole part about the wards not going off, which, alright, freaks him out more than a little.
He slides down the last few steps, careful not to hit the last one that squeaks, and carefully walks around the corner, moving towards the living room where the intruder is.
The first thing he sees is a giant box. A giant blue box, actually. Like, ten feet tall, and that so wasn’t there when he closed the shop last night. It doesn’t look like anything magical, but appearances can be deceiving and all that, and maybe it’s a portal to another world, or something, for all he knows.
Then he sees the guy. It’s kind of hard not to, what with him pacing back and forth in front of the box, muttering to himself, pausing ever so often to stare at it, contemplate it, then shake his head and keep on walking. He seems unaware of the fact that he’s in someone’s home, in the middle of the night.
But Harry’s tired. He’s cranky. He had to put up with Kirmani glaring at him all afternoon yesterday, and Murphy’s latest weird-occurrences-case is going nowhere, and this guy is in his house, having not set off his wards, and possibly about to unleash the Demon of The Eighth Level of Hell.
So he pulls the hockey stick up, and steps out of the shadows.
“Hey. You. Don’t move!”
The guy moves. Of course he does, Harry reasons, exasperated. He spins around, surprised, to face Harry, though he doesn’t do anything else, at least, and he doesn’t look to have a weapon.
“Who are you?” Harry asks. “How’d you get in here?”
The guy looks just as perplexed as Harry does, although it’s kind of hard to tell on a face like his. “Who’re you?” he asks.
Harry ignores the accent (What the hell? British? Really?!), the strange box, and the fact that the man is standing in his home without disturbing the wards, and blinks. “Who am I?” he asks. “Who’re you?”
“Oh,” the man says, a smile easing onto his face. “I’m the Doctor. Hello!” He gives a wiggle of his fingers as a wave, then pauses and adds, “What year is it?”
Great. Harry sighs, lowering the hockey stick a fraction of an inch. A crazy person. Which doesn’t explain the utter lack of reaction to the wards, but at least he isn’t talking about trying to devour Harry’s soul. Yet. “Right. Uh-huh.”
The man, doctor, whatever he is, turns his head to the side and squints at Harry. “Do I know you?”
“Um, I’m pretty sure you don’t,” Harry says. Yeah, definitely crazy. He wonders if he can get to the phone and call the police, or if the guy will freak out.
“No, no, I think I do.” He leans forward, scrunching his face up. “What’s your name?”
“Harry,” Harry says. “Harry Dresden. Look, Doctor whatever-your-name-is,” he begins, but the man cuts him off.
“Just the Doctor,” he says, cheerfully.
“Right. Doctor. I’m gonna go make a phone call, and maybe see about getting you some help, alright?” He hefts the hockey stick as a warning. “So don’t go trying anything funny.”
The man, Doctor, doesn’t look intimidated. “Dresden,” he says. “Dressssssden. Dresdennnnn.” He rolls the name around, making weird, exaggerated faces, like he’s trying to find a hidden meaning in the words. And then he’s off, pacing again, this time mumbling Harry’s name under his breath, eyebrows furrowed in thought.
Ooookay. Harry watches him for a second, then moves around the giant box (which is too weird for him to even begin trying to figure out right now, and man, he needs some coffee) towards the phone. He’s just picking it up, ready to dial 9-1-1, when the man snaps out of his pacing.
“Dresden!” he says, and Harry almost drops the phone at the outburst. He turns, hockey stick raised, and stares in surprise. The man grins widely, and Harry can see his teeth reflecting orange in the street light that’s filtering through the front windows. “Harry Dresden. Brilliant!”
The Doctor says his name with recognition, and his voice is tinged with a faint hint of… something else. Not awe, but fascination, maybe. Curiosity. Whatever it is, it’s enough to make Harry pause and set the phone back down.
For the first time, he takes the man in, completely. Dark hair, wild and ruffled. A pinstripe suit, the jacket of which is half unbuttoned, showing a tie and white shirt beneath. Long brown over-coat, leading down to dirty white tennis shoes. The entire picture lends to the crazy-person feeling that Dresden’s getting, but the man’s eyes are way too clear and sane, and they’re watching Harry intently.
“Alright,” Harry says. Takes a deep breath. “Alright.” Something about this entire situation is bothering him. “Look, Doctor, whatever. Just take your box and get out of my house, and I won’t call the cops on you, kay? Cause I’m pretty sure Murphy wouldn’t be too happy with me wakin’ her up this early. So, yeah.” He makes little ‘shoo’-ing motions with his free hand.
“Now that’s a problem, Harry Dresden,” the Doctor says. “I can’t.”
Ah. Here comes the part where the guy announces his desire to devour Harry’s soul, or try to destroy the universe, or whatever it is this week.
“Something’s got my ship trapped here, and I can’t seem to get her to power back up.” He pulls out a little metal thing while he’s talking, with a glowy light on the end, and the entire thing makes a weird buzzing as he runs it over the outside of his blue box, utterly unaware of Harry’s thoughts about the end of the world.
Harry blinks. “Your ship?” he asks. He looks at the Doctor, then at the box, then back at the Doctor, eyebrow raised. “A box that says 'police' on it? Doesn’t look like much of a ship to me.”
The Doctor makes a strange noise in his throat. “You of all people should know that things aren’t always what they appear to be, Harry Dresden,” he says. “And it’s not a box, it’s a TARDIS.”
“What do you mean by that?” Threatening, maybe a bit, but the guy talks like he knows what Harry is, what he can do, and that’s not supposed to happen.
The little glowy stick is lowered, and the man peers at him. “What year is it?” he asks again.
“2007. Same year it's been since January.”
The Doctor’s eyes go wide. “Then you've... ooooooh,” he trails off, eyes wide. “Well then. That changes everything, doesn’t it? And I’m actually in the home of Harry Dresden?” He looks around, as though seeing his setting for the first time. “Brilliant. I’ve always wanted to see this place. See where it all began.”
The conversation keeps getting weirder and weirder, and Harry’s awake enough to realize that he still hasn’t managed to get a straight answer out of the Doctor. “Where what all began?” he asks.
“Well, the magic, of course!” The Doctor says it like it’s obvious. “The birthplace of the Unseelie Accords, the home of the last Merlin of the White Council, the…”
Something in Harry’s face causes him to trail off. Probably the unadulterated shock, the fact that his jaw his hanging somewhere around his chest, and the way he’s got the hockey stick raised as if ready to fight at any sign.
“… and you don’t know about any of that yet, do you?” the Doctor asks, rhetorically at this point.
“How do you know about the Council?” Harry asks. Because remember that part where no one knows about the Council and magic, except for other wizards? Yeah, nothing’s changed in that in the last few minutes, which means this guy is either dangerous, or he’s like Harry, and either one would have set off the wards long ago.
“Never mind that!” The Doctor slips his hands into his pockets and rocks back on his heels. “Don’t suppose you could help me out? Get me on my way, out of your way.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” Harry says, holding his hands up in protest. “No ‘never mind’. I’m tired. I’m confused. I’m pissed. It’s not a winning combination. How’s about you tell me what’s going on, how you got past my wards, and how you know about magic, and I won’t lay the whammy on you.” He hefts the hockey stick in further threat.
It takes only a second for the Doctor to contemplate this. He opens his mouth, then pauses, closing it, and frowns. “Wards?” he asks. “What kind of wards?”
“The kind that should’ve stopped you from entering,” Harry snaps.
“Do you mind…” the Doctor pauses, mid-sentence, and waves his hand around. “Can I see them? I hadn’t thought of wards. I suppose if the algiz was positioned just right, it could have allowed the TARDIS to slip through, but of course then it wouldn’t let me back out.”
The High Council has this rule. Okay, it has lots of rules, most of which are pretty useless and not worth remembering unless you’re a Warden, but a few which Harry’s well aware of. Like the one about people who know about magic. If someone doesn’t know about magic, you can’t go and tell them about it. But this guy seems to know what he’s talking about, which means Harry can talk about it all he wants. That is, if he wants to.
He still hasn’t totally ruled out that he might be a warlock in disguise, or a demon, or something wanting to devour brains.
“Oh, don’t look at me like that,” the Doctor says. “I’m not exactly in a position to hurt you. You’ve got the big hockey stick after all.”
True, Harry concedes. Besides, the wards are anchored in the threshold, and there’s no way this guy can change them, no matter how much he might want to.
With a sigh, Harry sets the handle of the hockey stick on the ground, and focuses. Pulling up the wards isn’t strenuous, exactly, but it’s not a piece of cake, either, especially not without coffee and a few hours of sleep.
The wards spring to life with a golden glow, symbols carved along the columns and ceiling beams.
“Fantastic,” the Doctor says, straining his neck to look up. “Wow.”
“How exactly does this box of yours work?” Harry asks, following the Doctor’s gaze along the runes above them.
“It’s not a box, it’s a TARDIS,” the Doctor corrects. “Time and relative dimensions in space.”
“A time machine?” Harry takes a step back from the Doctor and his box, and the wards on the ceiling vanish as he loses concentration. “The Seven Laws of Magic… you can’t…” he trails off, fear in his voice. If the Council finds out about this, finds that he didn’t turn this man-this warlock, he assumes, because that’s definitely black magic-in to the Wardens, he’ll be in a lot of deep shit. “Thou shalt not swim against the Currents of Time.” He repeats the words from memory. “The seventh law.”
The Doctor looks confused at first, then understanding replaces that. “Oh, that,” he says. “No worries, then, no law being broken here.” He pats the TARDIS lovingly. “I’m a Time Lord, not a wizard.” He says the words like Harry should recognize them, but frowns when Harry doesn’t. “If it makes you feel any better, the TARDIS is designed to swim with the Currents of Time. My people are-were-the ones who corrected paradoxes in Time. There’s no magic being used, so no laws being broken.”
Harry stares at the Doctor for a long moment, then nods. “I don’t know why I believe you,” he says, “but I do. That doesn’t mean I want you hanging around here any longer than you have to, though, cause I don’t want to deal with Morgan if he finds out about this. Let’s get you out of here soon, yeah?”
“Sure,” the Doctor agrees easily. “Wouldn’t want anyone getting in trouble. Besides, Mai doesn’t like me much, wouldn’t want to run into her again.”
That comment makes Harry brighten considerably, because Ancient Mai doesn’t like him much either, and he wonders what this guy did to get on her bad side. Not, of course, that she really has a good side.
“C’mon,” Harry says, motioning with his hand for the Doctor to follow him, “I think I have a book somewhere that’ll help figure this out. So, you sorta appeared here through Time?” The words stick in his throat, because time travel is something he never allows himself to consider, as tempting as it is sometimes.
“That’s right. Was on my way to twenty-first century London, wanted to check out a hospital there, and suddenly found myself here.” The Doctor looks around as he walks, clearly curious, like a spectator in a museum.
“One of my wards is designed to block anything coming in and anything going out,” Harry says, “but it’s not designed to deal with the flows of Time.”
Harry pauses in the middle of the hall and pushes the hidden door open to his lab. The Doctor looks like a kid in a candy store trying to take everything in as they walk down the steps. “So you think you can counter that somehow?” he asks, running a hand over a table. Then he spots the wall of shelves filled with ingredients and quickly moves to look at those. “Look at this. Smaller than I thought it’d be, but I guess everyone has to start somewhere.”
“Hey!” Harry says, because his lab is perfect, thank you very much. He digs through the piles on his desk, picking up books and glancing at them before tossing them back down. “Where is it?” he mumbles to himself. Not on his desk, clearly, but he has no idea where it might have ended up.
There’s an empty shelf on the bookcase next to his desk, empty except for a skull covered in runes and a couple of romance novels. Harry taps the skull a couple of times. “Bob,” he says, before turning back to his desk, “Up and at ‘em. Wakey wakey.”
With a yawn (and he’s not actually alive anymore, so Harry has no idea where the yawn is coming from), the skull lights up and Bob appears in front of it, looking completely unhappy at having been disturbed.
“Hrothbert of Bainbridge! Lovely to see you again!” the Doctor exclaims.
Bob gives him an unreadable look. “And just who, exactly, is he?” he asks Harry.
Harry waves his hand, not looking up from the book he’s flipping through. “He’s a doctor,” he says. “The Doctor. Whatever. Bob, where’s my copy of Arcane Runes? I could’ve sworn I left it down here.”
“The Doctor?” Bob looks genuinely pleased now, a rarity for him. “Well, I must say it’s been a while. Four hundred years or so?”
“Just about,” the Doctor replies, grinning.
“You look different,” Bob begins.
There’s a story there that Harry wants to hear someday, but right now he just wants the Doctor and his box out of his house so he can go back to bed. “Bob!” he interrupts. “Arcane Runes? The book? Any idea where it is.”
Bob sniffs and points to a stack of book in the far corner of the room. “You left it over there,” he says, voice heavy with condescension. “Fourth book down in the stack.”
“Awesome,” Harry says, ignoring the tone, because Bob wouldn’t be Bob if he was happy and helpful all the time. He grabs the book and brings it back over to the desk, setting it down hard and sneezing at the cloud of dust that rises as a result. Man, he really needs to get a cleaning service, he thinks.
The Doctor hovers next to him, still curious. “What are you planning on doing?” he asks, eyes skimming over the pages as though he actually understands what he’s reading. For a guy who claims not to be a wizard, Harry thinks, he knows an awful lot about the magical community.
“This,” Harry says. “The ehwaz rune. Or a variation of it, rather. I think I might be able to alter it, and give you enough power to transport out of my house. Not totally sure where you’d end up, though, but it should be enough to get you through the wards. Whatcha think, Bob?”
Bob reads the page upside down, standing on the other side of the desk, and his eyebrows crease with thought. “You can’t incorporate it into the wards,” he says, “Not without leaving a gaping hole in them for anything to slip through.”
Harry nods. “Was planning to draw it on the Doctor’s ship, actually, and use my own power to trigger it.” He hefts the hockey stick. “Maybe a crystal to help magnify it, if the rune isn’t enough.”
“You can’t send it through the wards, Harry,” Bob points out. “You’ll tear them down completely if you do that.”
The Doctor interrupts here, having followed the conversation so far. “You’re not planning to send it out, are you?” he asks Harry, eyes widening with understanding.
“Nope,” Harry agrees. “You say this thing can travel in time and dimensions, right? The rune should give you the boost of energy you need, so you can just slide out of the building through another dimension, if I do this right.”
“That could work,” Bob says. He flips through the book, tapping another rune. “You’ll need to use an inverse isa to help undo the blocking being done by the wards,” he says. “And you’ll need a circle, if you don’t want the entire city of Chicago to know what you’re up to.”
“Already on it,” Harry says, grabbing another book off his desk and flipping through the pages quickly.
It’s not a difficult spell, but getting around the wards is going to be tricky, and Harry’s not willing to risk doing it unless everything’s done just right. “A nine foot diameter should be enough,” Bob says as Harry grabs a piece of chalk and his hockey stick. “You really think this will work?”
Harry shrugs. “Don’t see why not,” he says. “C’mon, let’s get this show on the road. I need sleep, and the longer you stay here, the more time the Council has to figure it out. You don’t wanna deal with Morgan and Ancient Mai any more than I do.”
Bob follows them back up to the living room and looks at the TARDIS with obvious recognition. “You still haven’t managed to fix your ship, I see,” he says.
“Wouldn’t want to anymore,” the Doctor says, fondness in his voice. “Gives it a bit of character. Besides, you humans never seem to notice what’s going on around you, even when there’s a police box where it shouldn’t be.”
Harry listens with half an ear as he chalks the rune onto the side of the Doctor’s ship, a long M-like shape, with the straight line of isa lying sideways through it. Bob and the Doctor are taking their time, chatting about something that happened back in the seventeenth century when Bob was in the possession of some wizard Harry’s never heard of, when something tugs on the back of Harry’s mind and a rune over the door flares to life.
“Um, guys,” he says, breaking into their conversation. “I hate to interrupt and rush you… okay, that’s a lie, I’d love to rush you and get back to bed, but that’s beside the point because we’ve got incoming.” He points to the glowing rune above the door. “And I have a feeling we all know who it is.”
“Wardens?” Bob asks. “You think they sensed the Doctor’s arrival and finally figured out where he landed?”
Nodding, Harry waves the Doctor forward. “I think they detected the time travel, yeah,” he says. “ETA in, what, a minute or so? Hurry, let’s get you out of here before either of us get in trouble.”
The Doctor moves next to the TARDIS, and Harry hastily scratches a circle of chalk into the floor, Bob pointing out where to draw. It only takes a few seconds for the circle to be closed, the box and the Doctor standing in the middle of the pentagram.
“Ready?” Harry asks, raising his hockey stick and pointing it at the circle.
The Doctor nods, pulling a key from his pocket and unlocking the ship. “It was a pleasure to see you again, Hrothbert,” he says. The circle around him begins to glow as Harry focuses his power on it, and the rune on the side of the ship brightens, filling the room with light. “And you, Harry Dresden. It was a pleasure to meet you again.”
Harry opens his mouth to ask what that means (“again”? He can’t remember ever having met this man before), but the Doctor slides into the TARDIS and closes the door behind him as the light fills the room, blinding Harry.
When the light dies down, the TARDIS is gone.
Harry leans heavily on the stick, exhausted, and tiredly rubs a toe through the chalk line, breaking the now-empty circle. The wards on his ceiling are undisturbed, and his bed calls to him.
He starts to drag himself towards the stairs when there’s a knock on his front door. “Shit,” he says, taking a deep breath and forcing himself to stay awake. The Wardens. Bob gives him a look that says ‘Your problem, not mine,’ and vanishes through the wall.
“Looks like I’m not sleeping tonight,” he mutters, moving towards the door and already trying to come up with a story to weasel his way out of trouble this time.