Profile
scribe_protra
Page Summary
- (Anonymous) - Trading Favors
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
cathrinerose - Murphy+Marcone friendship.- (Anonymous) - Re: panic room
- (Anonymous) - Re: Pern crossover: Queens High (1/2?)
- (Anonymous) - Re: Pern crossover: Queens High (1/2?)
- (Anonymous) - Messenger Boy
- (Anonymous) - Bob/Marcone
- (Anonymous) - (no subject)
- (Anonymous) - Re: Fill: Alternate Plans Part Two - False Starts [1/1]
- tellnooneyourname - Fill (3/?)
- (Anonymous) - Re: Fill (3/?)
- luciazephyr - Re: Fill (3/?)
- (Anonymous) - Re: Fill (3/?)
- (Anonymous) - Re: Fill (3/?)
- (Anonymous) - Re: Fill (3/?)
- (Anonymous) - Re: Messenger Boy
- (Anonymous) - OP
- (Anonymous) - Re: Messenger Boy - OP
- (Anonymous) - Language Kink
- (Anonymous) - Kon-el style kidfic
- binz - Re: Language Kink
- (Anonymous) - Re: Pern crossover: Queens High (2/3-ish)
- (Anonymous) - Of Mutual Agreement (1/1)
- (Anonymous) - Re: Fill: 4/? scrappy!Harry prompt
- (Anonymous) - Re: Harryslash
Style Credit
- Style: Neutral Good for Practicality by timeasmymeasure
Expand Cut Tags
No cut tags
Trading Favors
Date: 2011-02-22 01:17 am (UTC)Author's choice as to timing (how many favors Harry still owes, and how far along in the series they are).
Murphy+Marcone friendship.
Date: 2011-02-22 01:17 am (UTC)Inspired by this: http://yuletidetreasure.org/archive/81/dtente.html
Re: panic room
Date: 2011-02-22 01:19 am (UTC)Re: Pern crossover: Queens High (1/2?)
Date: 2011-02-22 01:53 am (UTC)Re: Pern crossover: Queens High (1/2?)
Date: 2011-02-22 02:27 am (UTC)(To the extent that infamous interview can be mitigated: she did later at least partially repudiate it, or at least whoever was doing her publicity did (and she's changed her story on green riders repeatedly both before and after that); and she was almost certainly in the early stages of undiagnosed dementia when she gave that interview. That said... she had some pretty horrible interpretations of gay men in some of her early work, too.)
Messenger Boy
Date: 2011-02-22 02:43 am (UTC)And then she wants something from Marcone, and threatens to stop sending Harry if he doesn't comply, cutting Marcone off from checking up on Harry and making sure he's (relatively) okay.
Of course Marcone doesn't tell Harry, but it's up to the author if he gives in to Mab's request or if he gets really affectionate with Harry just before the cut-off, and Harry doesn't get it until later (when Mab tells him, maybe?).
Bob/Marcone
Date: 2011-02-22 02:46 am (UTC)Marcone: baron of chicago, some morality and shame, absolute control freak, and inhibitions kept on a tightly wound leash.
C'mon. This pairing is all sorts of cracky chaos just waiting to be "unleashed". Lets have bob release the tiger some, huh? Maybe let it loose on Harry's oblivious ass. I don't care, but there is definitely not enough Bob/Marcone interaction in this meme.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-22 02:48 am (UTC)Re: Fill: Alternate Plans Part Two - False Starts [1/1]
Date: 2011-02-22 02:51 am (UTC)Fill (3/?)
Date: 2011-02-22 03:11 am (UTC)Apparently, he hadn’t seen anything yet.
Over the next few weeks, Harry lived in an expanding bubble of distraction and disorder. He put water on to boil for tea, then forgot it and went for a run. He took his pentacle off to clean it, dropped it down the sink in the master bathroom, and retrieved it with a summoning spell that sent every piece of silver in the house rattling frantically at its drawer, trying to get to him. He lost his keys, John’s spare set, his shoes, his handkerchiefs. He was erratic, too – cheerful and talkative one night, silently morose the next, or simply absent.
John had been so focused on Harry’s stubborn refusal to just fucking give and say yes to moving in that he’d never realized he’d effectively won already. Harry had been living with him in every way that counted except for his signature on the dotted line. At least until he suddenly . . . wasn’t.
When he was there at all, he seemed to have cut his sleep time in half. He stayed up into the small hours tweaking obscure potions, then vanished before dawn. And he brooded; he could stare blank-faced at nothing for a solid hour, John timed him, and then look irritated and say he wasn’t thinking about anything when asked.
It was all very frustrating. John didn’t understand any of it – the moods, the unhappiness, the distraction. This sort of thing didn’t happen with Hendricks; on those vanishingly rare occasions he had a problem he couldn’t handle on his own, he let John know and John fixed it for him. Then again, Harry had been irrationally, pathologically opposed to letting John fix his problems since day one. Which was a ridiculous boundary to maintain – John happened to be fantastic at fixing problems, to start with.
It ate at him. The illogic, and all Harry’s wasted energy. Harry was . . . suffering. It reflected onto John, something sharper than empathy. It made him angry, helplessly and without focus or purpose.
Harry emerged from a haze of bitter-smelling potion making when John got up one Sunday morning. He poured himself a cup of coffee in silence, doctored it, took a single sip, and promptly dropped it on the tile, spraying porcelain and boiling coffee everywhere.
“Don’t move,” John said sharply, grabbing his elbow before he could shift his bare feet. “Are you burned?”
“Not much,” Harry said. “Fuck.” He jerked a hand through his hair. It was shaking with reaction.
“Just a second.” John ducked into the laundry room and yanked on a pair of old sneakers he kept there. When he went back into the kitchen, Harry was crouching down, sweeping the broken pieces into a pile with his bare hands.
John pulled the trash can out from under the sink, reaching for the broom.
“I got it,” Harry said. He stood, eyes on the floor, and took one long-legged stride out of the danger zone. John surrendered the broom without comment. He watched Harry’s back, the curve of his spine as he bent to sweep, the unnaturally strict set to his shoulders. John exhaled a silent, exasperated breath, and went to pour Harry another cup of coffee.
“So,” Harry said over the clatter of broken porcelain. “I was thinking about that brochure. The one for Executive Priority.”
“Mmm?” John said, giving him an extra spoonful of sugar. No one’s ribs should look like that.
“Yeah,” Harry said. “And I was thinking we could try . . . you know?”
John was about to poke at him, tell him that if he couldn’t say it, they definitely couldn’t do any ‘you knowing’, because really. Then he remembered the one thing they’d actually talked about from that brochure, and bit back the pedantry so hard, he nearly choked on it. He set the full mug down with care and turned to stare at Harry.
“To be clear,” he said. “We’re discussing playing a game where I pretend to rape you?”
Hot color flooded the back of Harry’s neck, which was all John could see. “Yeah?” he said combatively into the trash can.
John cocked his head. “. . . All right,” he said. “I assume you didn’t mean right this second?”
Harry straightened up and turned to face him. He looked incredulous, still flushed red, and most of the way to pissed off. “What?” he said.
John frowned at him, wrong-footed. “Was I supposed to . . . say no?” he asked, wondering a little helplessly where he’d missed that cue.
“I don’t know,” Harry snapped. He gestured wildly with the broom. “But you could have!”
“. . . What?” John said, completely lost now.
Harry puffed out a harsh breath. “Have you ever done anything like that before?”
“No,” John said.
“Ever thought about it? Ever wanted to?”
“No.”
Harry rolled his eyes. “But you just say ‘sure’ like – hell’s bells.” He took two quick breaths, loud in the silent kitchen. “I am not some – some fucking problem that you’re the only one willing to get his hands dirty to fix,” he said. “If we do this, it’s because you actually want to.”
Which also handily deflected the attention onto John and what he did or didn’t want. Still, it wasn’t a completely invalid point.
“All right,” John said. “Hang on a minute, let me think.” Harry nodded. He crossed his arms, balancing the broom like it was his staff, and leaned back against the opposite counter.
Oddly, John found it was easier to think it through when he wasn’t looking at Harry. He shut his eyes. Christ, but he was an eternal well of surprises. Where had this even come from? Focus. Could he do it?
Hendricks’s habit of formulating his thoughts into if/then statements was catching. If Harry wanted something, John had a vested interest in seeing that he got it; if Harry needed something, then . . . well.
What John wanted just didn’t seem as relevant. But Harry cared, so all right.
Stated bluntly -- do I want to rape him -- the question was meaningless, too much associative baggage, an automatic reflex of denial.
So, take it apart: did he want to hold Harry down? Did he want to fuck him without care or consideration – did he want to use him? Make him take anything John dished out? He’d done most of that already, in pieces, and enjoyed it. But so had Harry, then – he’d been egging John on the whole time, asking for more. Not saying no.
But he was asking now, too, wasn’t he? He was asking to be able to say no later, and to not have it count.
The entire idea reordered itself. John breathed in sharply, thinking of Harry’s defensiveness, his deflection. Thinking of him twisting up all his ample chutzpa to the sticking point to ask for this thing that clearly shamed him, made him angry. How deeply buried was this want, how secret, how old? And here he was, showing it to John, asking--
“Yes,” John said, opening his eyes. “I want to.”
Harry had been staring up at the ceiling, a determinedly blank look on his face. He snapped his chin down, visibly startled. “. . . Oh,” he said, swallowing audibly. “Um. Okay?” He eyed John, his mouth twisting down a little.
John sighed. “Harry,” he said. “If you start giving me that squinty look because I agreed to do something you asked me to do, I swear to God I will throw this coffee.”
Harry’s face cracked in a surprised grin. “Okay, fair,” he said, and laughed with a touch of hysteria.
“So,” John said. “My original question – you don’t mean right now?”
“No,” Harry said. He turned quickly, began sweeping again.
“Okay,” John said slowly. “You do realize . . . we’re going to have to have an actual conversation about this, right?”
“Thought we just did,” Harry grunted, loudly rattling shards of mug into the trash can.
John pressed two fingers to the bridge of his nose. “You’re going to need a safeword, for starters,” he said.
Harry was shaking his head, immediately put off by this suggestion of procedure and planning. “If I don’t like it, I can toss you across the room,” he said. “Pretty sure you’ll get the message.”
John calculated briefly, decided to let that one go. “Just try not to break me or anything else, please,” he said. “When do you want to do this?”
Harry straightened, leaning forward on the broom. “Look, I don’t want a whole . . . plan,” he said, making a terrible face on the last word. “Can’t we just . . . y’know?”
No, they could not. But. “You want me to surprise you?”
Harry nodded, relaxing. “Yeah, exactly.”
“All right,” John said, nodding thoughtfully. “And are there things you particularly want me to do? Or not do?”
“I just said—“ Harry started, exasperated. Then he shook his head, set his mouth, and met John’s eyes. “You can do anything you want to me,” he said.
John felt his pulse pick up, the blood flowing faster under his skin, the abrupt flush of response. He found himself leaning into Harry’s space, close but not touching. Harry was still red; he breathed fast through his nose, holding the eye contact.
“We’re done talking about this now,” Harry said after a long, crowded pause.
“All right,” John said. He nodded, eased back. Harry exhaled a huge breath, his shoulders dropping three inches just like that. John smiled at him, making it as benign and harmless as possible. “More coffee?” he said, offering the full mug.
Re: Fill (3/?)
Date: 2011-02-22 03:29 am (UTC)Re: Fill (3/?)
Date: 2011-02-22 03:35 am (UTC)The fact you're even pulling this off is astounding me.
Re: Fill (3/?)
Date: 2011-02-22 03:41 am (UTC)Just sayin'.
Re: Fill (3/?)
Date: 2011-02-22 03:46 am (UTC)One of the things I love about your stories is the balance between moments of (seemingly) irrelevant character development with the angst and the porn. All of the Hendricks moments in here are that but more: they are also absolutely charming humor in what is otherwise a fairly heavy chapter. Gorgeous.
Re: Fill (3/?)
Date: 2011-02-22 03:48 am (UTC)1. I start humming Leonard Cohen to myself.
2. Hey, these are the lyrics that genderswapped Leonard Cohen would write.
3. OMG GENDERSWAP LEONARD COHEN/HARRY DRESDEN FTW.
And then, because I am me:
4. Dude, genderswap Leonard Cohen/Waldo Butters, for the awesome Jew porn.
Re: Messenger Boy
Date: 2011-02-22 03:55 am (UTC)OP
Date: 2011-02-22 03:57 am (UTC)Dammit, Harry. I have a terrible feeling you're so not ready for this. But knowing John, he'll handle it well.
Re: Messenger Boy - OP
Date: 2011-02-22 04:02 am (UTC)Language Kink
Date: 2011-02-22 04:38 am (UTC)Harry accidently gets hit/dosed with a spell that Molly made which was to help her learn many languages for her class. It didn't quite turn out that way.
Instead, Harry can now speak any language, even Latin, relatively well now. The downside, he can't seem to speak in English now.
So until the spell wears off, he'll probably need someone translating for him. It's up to the writer to pick a language. Examples:
Marcone-Italian Y/Y?
Erlking-Hmm...Might be either the Fae/Elvish language or German
Odin-Same goes for him, unless there's a norse language...
You don't have to learn the language in order to write this, just imply that Harry's speaking a different language.
Kon-el style kidfic
Date: 2011-02-22 04:40 am (UTC)Can I have fic where some minor practitioner who works for Marcone decides to do him a favor, and makes him a baby who is half Dresden and half Marcone? And Marcone doesn't find out about it until the baby is already born, whereupon he adopts the baby and destroys all the evidence, and then shows up shortly thereafter with a baby that he says is his and all the papers in order, and doesn't tell anyone who the real mother is, and goes on to become the world's most terrifyingly efficient single father?
Re: Language Kink
Date: 2011-02-22 04:54 am (UTC)Wikipedia is your friend.
Re: Pern crossover: Queens High (2/3-ish)
Date: 2011-02-22 05:34 am (UTC)Of Mutual Agreement (1/1)
Date: 2011-02-22 05:42 am (UTC)The plan as Harry presented it was simple: find the stone baby, turn it back to flesh, get paid by its ecstatic parents, exit the warehouse, but not necessarily in that order.
Which was probably why the last time John saw the Winter Knight, Harry was racing an arrow made of cursed arctic ice, and the arrow was winning.
**
Inside the warehouse the walls were thick and crusted over with ice, a nasty side effect of the ice demon the kidnappers had summoned as a security guard. Now the demon was long gone, but the air stayed brittle and damp, so that drops of frozen moisture clattered and rang like crystal when Harry sprinted through them. The kid was clinging to his neck, and even with the strength potion, Harry's face was showing the strain of running at a dead sprint with a stone baby in his arms.
Kids again. Even Hendricks had made that face like John was getting predictable and one day it would get him dead.
He stared. "What in heavens is--?"
"Coming through!" Harry said, ducking.
An arrow of solid ice sliced through the air where his head had been. It shattered against the wall and lay twitching in pieces on the floor. John was reminded strongly of vivisected glass squid, the legs writhing long after death.
"Stars, granite weighs a lot." Harry hitched the kid higher, trying not to groan when it caught him in the gut with a stone foot. "Looks like an ice curse, pretty powerful. Probably Inuit--"
"Mr. Dresden," John said. The warehouse windows were filling rapidly with what looked like oil-black snow, and he had no desire to see what it did when touched. "If you wouldn't mind hurrying?"
With some difficulty, Harry lifted his arm and pointed his staff at a sheet of ice. A portal wrenched itself open like a muscle, the dark cloaca passage quivering obscenely.
"What's a matter," he said, grinning and maniacal and edged with something brightly burning. "Johnny not getting enough attention? Don't worry, I'll come back for you. Just gotta drop off little Wayne here--"
A tendril of ice peeled away from the floor and reached for Harry's ankle.
Wordlessly, John fired twice, shattering it into a hundred pieces.
After a moment, Harry said, "Oh."
"Yes," John said grimly.
Hendricks and the baby sighed in unison. They glared at each other, Hendricks' ears suspiciously red.
Harry turned to disappear into the portal, then stopped.
"Hey," he said. He shifting his weight and wrinkled his nose and heaved a great belabored sigh. "Thanks."
John watched him go.
"Boss," Hendricks said, and it was that precise moment he realized he had been standing motionless in the center of a cursed warehouse for quite some time.
He blinked hard, came back to himself. "Let's go," he said. "I might still be able to make my dinner reservation."
**
In the car John's head began throbbing like he'd mainlined ice through the jugular. Hendricks had filled the ice bucket with warm water, and John's left hand was soaking in it. At the bottom were flakes of disintegrating ice that swayed with the rise and fall of the road. He suspected they were layers of skin.
He cleared his throat. "You're uninjured?"
Hendricks grunted in the affirmative.
With his free hand John felt around his belt, found his PDA. It was damp where ice had crept into the cracks and expanded, forcing out the screen. He holstered it, resolving to have the chip wiped. Not that it would probably need it. When it came to unintentional magnetic chicanery, Harry had the blast radius of an atomic bomb.
"That's the third this year," Hendricks said.
It was the fourth, technically. John supposed Hendricks was being figurative. According to Gard, he would have been a decent potions wizard if only he'd had a kind of lobotomized certainty to go with it. For Hendricks a measure of doubt was axiomatic; in its own way that single fact often served as John's private reserve of certainty.
Their eyes met in the rearview mirror.
"We're making good time," Hendricks said. He pushed the tuner once, rotated the dial until he found public radio.
Nodding, John arranged his stiff limbs on the seat as the sleepy, underwater murmurs of the radio filled the car. They were ten minutes deep into North Shore, at least another forty from the offices. He allowed his shoulders to relax. His eyes he kept trained on the traffic, the buildings shooting up in height and width as they neared city limits. The tinted windows took the blood out of the sunset.
After a while, Hendricks brushed a thumb against his own chin, said, "Boss--you've got--here--"
His thoughts raced. He touched his face. His stubble had turned to ice.
**
Time passed and time passed.
In the meantime, the wizard known as Harry Dresden dropped over the edge of a surveillance cliff and disappeared.
The informants made conflicting reports, and all of them were past belief. John handled them personally, sorting through the details in lulls between meetings and "meetings." He kept a mental list of sources Gard had indexed by reliability, used the thread as a guide through endless permutations of Harry, dead and half-dead and might as well be. One report told of how the Winter Queen had frozen Harry's legs to ice and then staked him upside down over a boiling cauldron of Hellfire.
Unlikely, in Winter's Court. John had filed it away with the rest of the sightings under Manage, Only Harry Dresden Could.
I'm coming back for you. After a while, he could feel himself remembering it as a promise.
The frostbite on his fingertips had healed without requiring amputation. When he was too tired to remember why it was a bad idea, he sat at his desk and rested his chin in hand and felt the warmth of his own palm, the blood drawn by pressure to the surface; the cold that had long since faded to nothing.
**
The call came on the longest, hottest day of the year. Later, John would think that was on purpose.
He counted to three, hit the blinking red button and picked up.
The line frothed with static.
"Hey," Harry said. "It's me."
Something inside John stretched long and taut and released.
**
For their meeting place, John chose a boat Harry hadn't tried to blow up yet but probably would in the future. For the lake, Michigan. Day, of mutual agreement.
Attendance, optional. Some things could not be forced, elicited or threatened.
Which led to John with his hands in the pockets of his sailing shorts, the mast pressing rigid like a second spine. He monitored the surface of the water, half-expecting an uninvited guest. It would be Harry's style: a man-eating turtle, perhaps, with a side of cthulhu to keep things interesting.
The informants had never managed to ascertain precisely how Harry had shed the mantle of Winter. Gard said it was none of his business, in the tone that said it could easily be his business, and if he didn't figure out how soon, she was going to have herself recalled to Oslo out of disgust.
John kept an eye on the shoreline and didn't check his watch. He almost didn't notice the moon going down until its reflection was thick and glossy, a ribbon of snow on the water.
**
Harry arrived at half past three in a modified tugboat, the muffler releasing puffs of cottontail steam. The peaks of his knees were appalachian, his lanky frame giving the boat the illusion of flatness. Only when performing magic did he seem other than outsized.
Grunting, Harry clambered onto the yacht one-handed and shoved a wet cooler into John's chest. "Got something for you."
John caught it by the handle, sniffed surreptitiously. Something sloshed inside; he cracked the top and found six bottles of beer bobbing in lukewarm water. There were bits of dirt and grit where the ice cubes had melted.
"Thank you," he said, and didn't object when Harry popped off a lid on the yacht's wood siding.
"To the skin of your teeth," Harry said, and drank deeply.
**
He had never been interested in the particulars of John's life, and he wasn't interested now.
There were other things he wanted to talk about. Theories on his cat's paternity (racoon), his dog's emotional intelligence (dalai lama-esque), the marital state of the ghosts who lived in the apartment next door (separated but reconciling).
"Most of them don't know I'm back," he said, after a long silence.
John nodded, murmuring.
"It's different being back." He scratched his nose with the lip of his bottle, left a wet smear across the bridge. "Just." He shook his head. "Never mind."
It was different having him back--no, John corrected himself. Having was the wrong word. Having implied things, connoted a certain possession Harry had never invited and likely never would.
But.
"Your friends don't know you've returned," John said slowly. He was aware of tasting the words, enjoying them somehow. "But you found the time to locate a working payphone and call my private line."
Harry looked away. For a moment, John thought he would refuse to answer.
"Yeah," he said, bringing his gaze level with John's. "Guess I did."
**
"You," Harry's hands were folded on his chest, almost child-like, "really can't hold your alcohol." He lay across the teak bench and then some, his legs hooked over the waxed ropes that bordered the upper deck. They were long, and the hairs ran only partway up his shins, like something had burned the rest off. "No one stops at just one. 'Specially not Mac's."
John sat on the floor, legs stretched in front of him. He'd shed his shoes after Harry threatened to write on him in magical ink if he passed out with them on. Something he'd learned from his charming werewolf friends, no doubt.
He turned the empty over in his hands. The glass was strange, almost liquid to the touch.
"Impaired judgment is bad for business," he said finally.
"Bullshit."
John raised an eyebrow.
"This isn't business," Harry said. He was right, but not the way he thought he was. "You don't trust me."
"Harry."
"You don't want to get too cozy, in case I pull a fast one," Harry said. He was laughing, and the contents of his third bottle were seesawing back and forth like liquid caramel. "You think I'm going to shove you off your boat or something. Long walk off a short yacht."
John allowed himself a smile. "I assure you, the yacht is more than adequate size."
Harry snorted. "Point's the same. One's your limit? One, really?" His gaze turned speculative. "You know, you don't look like a fourteen-year-old girl."
"Maybe it's the gray hair."
"Ha ha, Marcone made a funny." He sat up suddenly, eyes narrowing. The back of his hair was a mice nest. "You don't know how much you can drink, do you." He shook his head, marveling. "Control issues, hello."
"I come from a proud line of baptized alcoholics," John said, mouth quirking. "I decided early on it would be--prudent not to tempt fate."
Harry seemed amazed. He jabbed a finger at John's stomach, accusing. "That's no good. You don't know your limit, you don't know how susceptible you are to certain kinds of potions."
John chuckled. "Like?"
Harry slammed his beer down, jaw tight. "Plenty. It's not mind control, but it's up there. Charisma potion. Favorability potion, makes you more inclined to agree with 'em and do what they want. Other stuff's even nastier." His eyes fixed on the cooler. "You need to get shitfaced right now."
He laughed.
"I'm not kidding, John."
"Neither am I, Harry." He ran a hand over his face, scrubbing hard at his eyes. "Whatever relation alcohol tolerance has to magical resistance, it's surely miniscule compared to other factors. Like force of will, perhaps?"
Harry lifted his chin. "Miniscule matters."
John paused, considering. He stared hard at Harry as he said, casually, "It matters a miniscule amount."
"That's--" He worried his lip between his teeth, let it spring back out red and bitten. "A little is all they need, all right?"
Gently, John said, "Who needs?"
Harry threw up his hands, let them land on his thighs with a slap. "I don't know! Everyone. Anyone."
John looked at him a long time.
"Answer me truthfully if you can," he said. "Are you or are you not still the Winter Knight?"
"Yes," Harry said, and then his hand was on the back of John's neck, pulling him in.
**
The first time John saw Harry Dresden's soul, he saw a good man who had done bad things; who was hellbent on dying before he would do them again.
The second time, he saw a man who nearly wasn't there. Half his soul gone, excised and amputated in ragtag pieces here and there. Like Winter was an infection, and the doctor had dug around scraping and stitching until everything it had touched was gone, what was left of the patient be damned. The surgery was a success.
In a moment John had a thousand questions; in the next, he put them out forever.
"You came to me for protection," he said.
Harry froze. Let his hand slide from John's shoulder, curled it into a loose fist.
"Though your power has been greatly reduced," he said, cutting deep as he could, "your enemies' ire has not. You knew of my regard and thought you would use it against me--"
Harry's voice was low and shaking. "Screw you, Marcone."
John tapped a finger against his chin. Murmuring, he said, "No, that's not right. You came to warn me"--he looked askance at Harry, who was making a point of looking elsewhere--"that you."
He trailed off. That Harry was less of what he had been, less massive, less--blindingly, frighteningly, exhilaratingly powerful. That he could no longer protect anyone, not even his allies, his friends. Not even himself.
The surgery was a success. Where Harry's magic should have been, there were patches and scraps and tatters missing. It burned brightly, fiercely, regardless.
John softened. "The rest of your magic, has it been destroyed?"
Sullenly, Harry said, "It's gone."
"I didn't ask if it was gone."
"I don't know."
Rounding on him, using his shoulders to block him against the hull. "Who knows?"
Harry snarled. "No one you want to meet."
"Oh," John said, smiling with teeth, "I don't think that's quite true."
**
When he thought about it, it made him want to plant the tip of his knife into the nearest flat surface and pull back, very slowly.
He thought about it often. Pieces of Harry's magic--his soul--bought and traded around the magical underworld, in tastefully generic establishments like those operated by the Outfit. His own personal karma visited on Harry, and he understood what that said about him, and about Harry. About them.
Harry was often tired these days, though he covered it with hostility and barking. I'm cutting back on caffeine, bite me, he'd say. It was a late night, some people work for a living, Marcone.
Every time someone so much as ran a finger over a piece of his magic, Harry felt it in his bones.
It was slow going, recovering all the fragments. Deals struck, favors called in, favors elicited. Some things were worth threatening for.
At night John sat up in his study and thought of what it would be like to hold that final piece of him, the keystone in his soul, a portion of Harry's very life. How it would feel to Harry as they stood there in triumph, magic recovered, defenses down. Turning to John with that smile a supernova in his eyes.
His expression at the feel of John's hands on his face, on his mouth, the back of his neck.
Re: Fill: 4/? scrappy!Harry prompt
Date: 2011-02-22 05:44 am (UTC)Re: Harryslash
Date: 2011-02-22 05:54 am (UTC)