Round 2 is closed.

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The meme is being moved over to here http://dresden-kink.dreamwidth.org/

This round is now closed.

Comments

Re: A haunting in Iowa City

[(Anonymous)]

Oh, no, I wouldn't say that his Name is John Marcone, but I don't think he could have kept all of himself in his birth name, either, and still made John Marcone as real as he is, you know? The Baron isn't all he is, but the Baron is more than just a facade or shadow, too, like Lash was more than just a mask for Lasciel, and it's all tied up in the giving and taking of names.

So anyone trying to bind him with John Marcone would find themselves in a mass of trouble because they'd have left out most of what he is, but the thing is, I think anyone trying to bind him with his birth name would find John Marcone the mafia lord still free to come down on them, because vanilla mortals' names are tricksy like that.

Re: A haunting in Iowa City

[luciazephyr]

now THAT is a fascinating idea-- perhaps he's separated himself off so starkly that he has multiple Names and by binding one, you untie one of his others. For example, seal him with his birth name and you're left with an even more ruthless, terrifying Baron and mafioso. The opposite though, sealing 'John Marcone' leaves you with an equally dangerous but far more impulsive, uncontrolled man.

:cogitates on this:

Not-Quite Fill: Oakland's Angel

[(Anonymous)]

Not really what you asked for, but for setting and a reference. I hope this is okay, and that someone can give you the full amazing story you deserve. I'm just writing this because ... ahem, I'm sitting in my apartment that is a fifteen minute drive from the library, and anything with Harry Dresden in Iowa City makes me squee a little.

So, this is a story about Harry in Iowa City. Not so much the library, but hopefully you don't mind it. As soon as you mentioned this man in this place, there was only one thing I could think to write. Sorry if it's not too good. First time trying to comment-box write a fic.

-----------

I'd done the job. It had involved ghosts in the stacks of the University of Iowa Library. And, yes, before you ask it was just like the scene from 'Ghostbusters'. It should have been fun: aper flying, disapproving librarians and kids with work-study time having to clean up my mess. Instead, it just left me feeling sad. Banishing ghosts often feels less like vanquishing the lurking evil and a lot more like beating up little old ladies. And this ghost ... I didn't want to think about her. It just made me feel queasy.

I had been paid, and I tried to work up the enthusiasm required to treat myself to a drink or something in the campus town right up the hill. I trudged upward, and the light and sound met me halfway. It was maybe ten at night, and chilly in early October. All four blocks of downtown Iowa City were a crazy bustle of activity and life. It was getting colder, and the wind blew down Dubuque Street. I stopped in the middle of all the chaos, listening to cheers and laughter. I wondered if it was a home game, or if this place was always crazy on a Thursday night. Didn't these kids have class?

And as I stood there, getting colder even in my duster, I lost interest in getting a drink or hitting the town. There were dozens of kids walking around: girls in too few clothes for the cold night, dashing from bar to bar; guys walking in groups talking amongst themselves and looking at the girls who weren't wearing enough. I felt old. I felt like I was intruding on their world.

Don't get me wrong, there were people my age and older around as well. But they were well-dressed, or bohemian, or in some other way notable for being in some local community, and they were all, heading into restaurants with names like Takanami and Masala and Atlas. Everyone was having a good time, and everyone knew where they were going. I had no idea what any of these places were. What seemed five minutes ago to be a great idea stopped looking so good when I saw the crowds and the big screen televisions in the bars, and the trendy restaurants. If I went into a bar, I'd be the pathetic single guy trying to pick up girls half my age. And the thought of eating alone at a nice restaurant was even worse. I missed Chicago. At least there I would have my dog.

I headed out, away from the lights and bustle of the Iowa City nightlife. I cut through an alley between campus buildings that let out onto a quiet street lined by the campus and several churches. I made my way along it, then turned and went by some tiny hole-in-the-wall grocery store called John's. I kept walking past a used bookstore, and then the stores and restaurants gave way to residential neighborhoods.

I didn't know why I was walking. I knew that I needed to go somewhere, and do something, but it was like those moments when you half-remember something you wanted to get at the store: you stand there in front of the cereal with this glazed look, just hoping you spot that thing.

Did it have something to do with the ghost? I hated to think of her again, of her screams and her insubstantial fingers grasping at me. I'd forced her out. I hadn't been able to resole anything for her, in the end, and she'd tried to hold onto me with fingers that couldn't reach across that void. I guess I should feel good about that. I didn't. She'd been so damn young, and I didn't know who she was.

I looked around, trying to bring myself back to the land of the living. The houses were softly lit, and inside through blinds and drapes I could see people moving. Families and groups of students, old people and young people all going about their lives. And because it was a small town, they just sort of forgot that they were seen. It didn't matter.

It was these people that I had to fight for. Them and their quiet lives. I wanted nothing more than for them to keep on living those lives in blissful ignorance of all the danger that lurked just outside their view. It was for people like this that I had to banish ghosts like the one in the library. If they wouldn't go willingly, they had to be forced out. She'd hurt people. She'd scared a lot more. She would have escalated. Violent ghosts always escalate. I did what I had to. I couldn't do anything for her, but I could do something for the living.

I felt like such a dick.

I'd been staring at my feet while I walked. I couldn't bear to look at the houses. I only looked up when the lights started to fade. I'd taken a few more turns. The houses were getting older, and the area was full of old trees. They creaked in the autumn wind, groaning and shifting in indistinct shapes above me. Their dropped leaves crunched under my feet. I couldn't remember the last time I'd waked a sidewalk covered in leaves at night. It's not like the parks in Chicago are welcoming for a guy like me after dark.

I finally stopped when I came the end of a road, and a wooden sign was set next to a much narrower path flanked by trees. It said 'Oakland Cemetery'. To my right, I saw a green rolling field dotted with headstones. In Chicago, we'd fence all this in. We'd worry about vandals or kids smoking joints and getting naked and wearing black lipstick in cemeteries. There were no fences here. The sign and a little cheerful house was about all that marked the transition from a residence of the living to a residence of the not-so-living.

I chuckled to myself. It sounded loud in the night air. "Figures I'd end up here."

The wind rustled in the leaves. Nothing else answered me.

I drew my hand out of my pocket. There was a white cotton handkerchief clutched in my fist. When the ghost was fading, grabbing at me and crying and screaming, she had looked at me. She had looked me in the eye as though she could really see me and understand. She'd slumped to the ground before me, fading into the floor, spreading out to be absorbed. She had looked at me again, right before she'd vanished, like she knew something.

And then she'd been gone, like she had never been there at all. Just a little puddle of ectoplasm where she had been, and in the middle, wet, there had been a handkerchief.

I didn't know what to think of that. Ghosts can be tied to objects, but not physically. They can't hold things. They don't form around something. But there it was, some sad scrap of white cotton with the initials A.R.E. stitched on. I had meant to take it back to Bob, to ask him about it.

But as I stood in front of that massive cemetery with a sense of 'need to do something', I wasn't so certain that was what would happen. I held the handkerchief in one hand and started to walk.

The cemetery was massive, a sprawling field dotted in stands of trees as old as the plots themselves. I passed by markers both recent and dating back to the settlement of the city. Maybe two-hundred years of dead were buried in that place, spread out in a way Chicago could never manage.

I left the road after a time, and walked between the headstones. I wasn't paying attention where I was going. The sun had set, but the white of most of the stones made navigating easy.

There was some part of me that was asking what the hell I was doing walking through a cemetery in the middle of the night. But I'd destroyed a ghost, and all I knew about her were her initials. I was where I had to be.

I saw the road and I traced along it, then stepped back into the grass. I had made it maybe the feet when I tripped over a low, dark granite headstone and went stumbling forward. I tried to regain my balance, failed, and tumbled down atop a long slab of stone that I didn't want to think might just be a grave marker. It was blank.

I looked up. The headstone was carved in large, block letters with a name I couldn't make out in the dark. I stood, thinking it ended at the top of the marker.

And then I almost fell over again. Standing atop the monument was a black angel. My heart almost stopped in the second it took to realize it was a statue, its wings and arms outstretched and its face half-shadow under a yawning cowl above me. It towered over me, this metal thing, and it made me feel small and scared.

I had dropped the handkerchief when I'd seen the statue, and it lay at the folds of its metal robe. I reached out to pick it up, but I stopped. Where better to leave the remains of a ghost than at the feet of an angel, even this sort of angel?

I stepped back, off the grave. The moon came out from behind a cloud, and under the cowl I could see a delicate chin, and a pair of perfectly rendered lips. Why, I wondered, would a statue so rough, with grooves along its arms and its wings, have a pair of lips that could do the Chicago Art Institute proud? Why finish the face and leave the rest a rough, looming thing?

I pulled out my Zippo and flicked it. The light sprung up, illuminating a pair of eyes slightly too large for the face, but so well-made I could swear they were looking at me. I met them only in flickers, like I was afraid I could soulgaze a statue.

Cities have protectors, I thought, symbols worked so thoroughly into the locational identity that they themselves are powerful. Chicago certainly has protectors: the lions at the Art Institute always felt like they were watching me, and Sargon's sphinx in the Oriental Institute Museum gave off a sense of ancient power so strong I couldn't be in the building for too long or I'd get a headache.

Iowa City had a rough, weathered black angel with a perfect face staring out from the darkness. She had wings wide enough to encompass all its lost souls, and presence enough to terrify me.

I didn't have a hat, but I touched my forehead. "Ma'am," I said, and then I turned and walked back the way I came.

Re: Not-Quite Fill: Oakland's Angel

[(Anonymous)]

Beautiful.

Re: A haunting in Iowa City

[(Anonymous)]

Ahaha. I basically just wrote this exact comment in reply to luciazephyr above and then deleted because I thought it was getting too tl;dr for the anon meme. So in other words, I feel you!

I have a nickname that was used all through childhood, and I have my legal name which has always been used by a different set of people than the nickname (which is still used by people who've known me since childhood), and then there are several versions of my legal name, and then there's my online handle which at this point I've been using for a significant portion of my life, and is mostly a written name because it doesn't really have a set pronunciation, and then there's my stylized initials which I almost feel more strongly about than any of my spoken names because I put it on things I'm putting my honor/pride into, then there's the fact that when I'm calling myself something in my head it's never my name, it's "kid," or "lady," or something like that, because I don't really feel myself in any of those names: and actually I tend to think my naming history is simpler than a lot of folks', because after all, I've never legally changed it, nor even made a particular effort to get people to use a different nickname.

So. ...this is kind of a thing with me. I have no idea what my own Name would be.

A lot of fantasy novels deal with it by having truenames be something entirely separate from the names we get called? In fact in some fantasy novels I think truenames are a lot closer to what Dresden thinks of as a soulgaze - they're not language, they're imagery. Or they're really complicated, long descriptions, which are constantly changing or growing, like the computer-code like truenames in Young Wizards.

But I kind of like what Dresden Files does with it, because you have the spirit creatures who really are there names, because in some ways they are as simple as a single unchanging word, spoken. And you have people like the White Council wizards, who treat, and empower, their names like almost like the Sidhe do, because they've been taught early on to protect and value them, and maybe also because, dealing with the forces they deal with, they need that rock-solid version of self that they can turn to in extremity and know who they are.

But your average vanilla mortal - and this gets mentioned at least once in one of the early books - their names aren't stable, aren't simple, are hardly worth the collecting, because by the time you've bought the name and set up the spell, half the time they've changed their mind about who they are, even if they ever had just one person that they were in the first place. And yet they still have power, because all names have power, it's what names are for, you just have to be like quicksilver through a net to get a hold on it. Mortals are tricksy like that. ^_^

Re: A haunting in Iowa City

[(Anonymous)]

>>The opposite though, sealing 'John Marcone' leaves you with an equally dangerous but far more impulsive, uncontrolled man.

...or leaves you with a sweet pussycat of a man who just wants to cuddle his boyfriend and listen to bad '80s punk on scratchy LPs

AlwaysaGirl!Harry/John - Virginity

[(Anonymous)]

I was thinking about the joys of Fem!Harry, when I realized that, if that was the only genderswap that occurred, and if she was straight, there would be a decent chance that poor Harriet would be a virgin by circumstance alone. Because there have been a whole bunch of ladies in her life, but not many guys.

So I would LOVE a story about Harriet being the pushiest, mouthiest, snarkiest virgin ever. Because she has waited long enough, dammit, and if Marcone doesn't get his act together she won't be responsible for the consequences. Or the burned buildings.

Please, Anon. Make my year!

Re: Not-Quite Fill: Oakland's Angel

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you so much! I've never done impromptu-fic like that, but I felt like I ought to.

And the best part? She's real:

http://public.fotki.com/dwdarby/the-black-angel-iow/

Re: Cuz We Know It's Comin'... :)

[(Anonymous)]

Bolshevik Muppet? Inquiring minds want to know, nonny!

Re: A haunting in Iowa City

[(Anonymous)]

Wow, hah, I'm glad I'm not the only one!

And ooh, your last two paragraphs fascinate me, because either I wasn't paying enough attention when reading the books, or I just haven't yet gotten to the relevant books. Because that DOES make a whole lot of sense, in terms of how names work in the DF universe. In fact, that stuff is awesome.

Re: A haunting in Iowa City

[luciazephyr]

which reminds me... :goes to make a prompt:

Dancing!

[luciazephyr]

Preferably Dresden/Marcone but this kinkmeme has made me ship everyone, so.

DANCING! I would love someone dancing with Harry or teaching him to dance. Not so much looking for ballroom/formal dancing as "hey, this song has a great beat, c'mere" thing.

And I prefer John if only because that leather jacket-wearing young punk we get a glimpse of in White Night? He can dance. You know he can.

Bonus points for not being in public. IDK why, just like the idea of barefoot dancing to favorite songs.

Re: A haunting in Iowa City

[luciazephyr]

THIS yeah, I think the RPG book says a mortal's Name will only be fresh for a few months. Wizard's Names last quite a bit longer. Immortal Names tend to be absolute.

Re: Dancing!

[(Anonymous)]

FUCK YEAH FUCK YEAH

I have been trying very hard not to post a similar prompt for a while.

...Hey, wait. Would swing dancing be acceptable? Because men swing dancing together may be the cutest thing ever.

Re: Dancing!

[luciazephyr]

If you like, certainly! Bit too energetic for my tastes, but the idea of someone swing dancing with super tall Harry is fraught with impending hilarity. 8D

Re: OP Here

[(Anonymous)]

Am I the only one reading this who actually likes coffe? I feel sad and alone now. Non-traumatized Harry is adorable and fluffy. Rahm and Marcone fighting over him is hotter than my very "Irish" tea.

Re: Dancing!

[(Anonymous)]

Well, then. I may or may not fill this, but I'm definitely seconding it.

Re: Not-Quite Fill: Oakland's Angel

[binz]

This was really lovely. An introspective Harry is nice to have from time to time, and you've handed what is really a land mine of a subject so well. (And kudos to you for being brave enough to put something of your own [place] in fic. Which idk, maybe it's just personal for me, but I really liked the added depth of knowing that it was there.)

also Cities have protectors, I thought, symbols worked so thoroughly into the locational identity that they themselves are powerful. Chicago certainly has protectors: the lions at the Art Institute always felt like they were watching me

I will totally take a little bit of fanon pride from that. ;)

Re: Cuz We Know It's Comin'... :)

[binz]

non-anon would suggest reading Blood Rites.

Re: Dancing!

[binz]

And Harry, who was dance partner for senior citizens, can waltz and swing and ballroom dance with the best of them, has utterly no idea how to dance to something recorded more recently than 1950 (despite his love of classic rock)?

Re: Dancing!

[luciazephyr]

Exactly. He needs his education expanded.

Re: Dancing!

[binz]

Considering John's (...basically entirely in my head) love for Joan Jett, Cherry Bomb is no doubt an experience he will have, um. A hard time processing.

Ghost!Harry/Marcone

[(Anonymous)]

_{anon has only vague idea about Ghost story and haven't read preview on principle}
Since Harry is a ghost now no mortal boundaries can stop him. He takes some time out of his busy afterlife existence to visit Marcone - maybe to spook him or just to see what is he up to now that Harry is dead. He is surprised to find John if private mourning.

Further development is up to author but I'd prefer that in the end Marcone finds out about Ghost!Harry and helps him return to life.

Re: Dancing!

[luciazephyr]

Explains his leather jacket. Someone needs to set up a stereo inside a magic circle post-haste.

Re: Dancing!

[binz]

Somewhere along the way he combined late 70s, 80s punk and James Dean into a rather ridiculous ensemble, I'm sure. A little bit rebel drag, a little bit street tough, a whole lot of tight jeans.