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kittydesade) wrote2010-03-16 09:02 pm
kittydesade) wrote2010-03-16 09:02 pm
Entry tags:
[fic] When The Man Comes Around (2/5)
Title: When The Man Comes Around
Fandom: The Dresden Files (book)
Characters: Harry Dresden, Elaine, Karrin Murphy, Cowl, Marcone, Thomas Raith, and Molly Carpenter. And Carlos
Word Count 16,600+
Rating: PG-13
Summary: It's the end of the world, and it's starting in Chicago at the hands of the Black Council. (Presumes knowledge up to Turn Coat.)
Part 1 || Part 2 || Part 3 || Part 4 || Part 5
I wish I could say that I met Cowl with a witty remark and a fully fleshed-out plan that worked perfectly on the first try, but I've never been that lucky. Not as far as plans go, anyway. Witty remarks I have by the truckload.
I wasn't expecting him to be right there out in the open. Then again, up until a week ago I hadn't been expecting him back in town at all. The Black Council was moving all right, and they were moving faster these days. But Cowl hadn't set foot in Chicago in a couple of years. Not since his little Necropocalypse had gone wrong, thanks to yours truly.
First he wasn't there or anywhere at all, then he was just standing in front of the boarded up windows glaring at me. And the man could put weight behind his glare. I felt like I should check my shirt to make sure he hadn't lasered holes in my torso. And I waited for him to do something sneaky and painful.
He didn't. Which was bad enough, my nerves were rattling every time a stiff wind knocked the boards together. But he didn't do anything, and he wasn't acting like he was planning on it either. The energy around us was still and quiet. His robes draped straight down and his hood didn't move. He didn't have a stick or a gun. His body language was about as non-threatening as an evil bunch of cloth without a body could get. He looked almost normal. Like a guy playing dress-up, not one of the most powerful wizards on the planet. And that was stranger than day-glo plastic shoes.
Gradually it got even stranger. We stared at each other for minutes upon minutes and he didn't do anything.
"What do you want?"
The Ghost of Halloween Past pointed a sleeve at a store-front that had been covered over with plywood and spraypaint. I wondered if they just sold pre-graffiti'd plywood these days; that stuff couldn't have been a week old. Then I realized what the place was.
"The bookstore?"
He nodded.
"You know, the Dickens thing is really getting annoying."
His hood raised its eye-wrinkles at me.
"What does the bookstore have to do with anything?"
It turned out that was the wrong thing to say. I was suddenly the focus of enough hate, rage, fury, and other synonyms as well to power the ISS. Or short it out.
"Do you remember what happened here?" His voice was whispery and about as dramatic as his evil bathrobe, as always, but there was something different about his tone. Maybe it was the presence of it. He'd always been cut off before, removed from some kind of connection to the rest of humanity in a way that shouldn't have been audible but was, and now he sounded like a normal human being engaging with another. Not that he was even in the same ballpark as normal, and possibly not even human.
I folded my arms. "I remember you and Kumori trying to kill me, and, not to bring up such a painful memory, but why aren't you trying to kill me? Isn't this supposed to be your big event? Not," I added before he got any ideas. "That I think you should try to kill me. I mean, I kind of like this new fluffier y--"
Okay, so he wasn't so new and fluffy.
Graffiti or no graffiti, plywood hurt when you went through it at anything more than two miles per hour.
I picked myself up out of the wreckage and readied for his next attack. And held it. And held it. My back knotted up between my shoulder-blades and the tendons in my hands started to ache. I was going to get eye-strain if I squinted at him much more. I held it. And held it. And the attack didn't come. And then I held it some more.
He didn't advance. He didn't even blink, at least, I didn't think he did. He certainly didn't twitch, which I would have been able to see, or give any sign that he was even breathing. He didn't even float like any real spectre would have had the decency to do. He just stood there like I was supposed to make the next move. Trouble was, I didn't have a next move to make. I did want to know what was going on here, so I asked.
"What the hell is going on here?"
He came towards me, folded his sleeves over his robe, and stared.
"Okay, you know what? This is getting old." And creepy. "So, if you don't mind, I have places I have to..."
Cowl grabbed my arm as I walked past him.
His fingers dug into the meaty part of my bicep like four little vise grips. I instantly got the feeling he could break my arm if he wanted, which wasn't the best feeling in the world. It was almost enough to drown out the confusion I was feeling at him using physical force when I knew he could have cleaned my clock with magic if he wanted.
"You don't remember her at all."
He accused me. That was an accusation. I didn't even know who he was talking about. "Who?" I felt stupid. "Kumori?" He snarled. Most people sound stupid when they snarl, like they're trying to be Wolverine. This guy sounded like he actually was Sabretooth. And I still had no idea what was going on. And I was getting tired of it.
"Look." I yanked my arm out of the guy's grip, wondering if I was going to dislocate it right up until I was two steps away and my shoulder didn't hurt. "It's been a long week already, you and your bunch of crazies are making my life a living hell, and now you're doing a really, really good imitation of that emo kid who sits up in his living room listening to ..." I had no idea what kids were listening to these days. "The Cure and painting everything black. So why don't you just tell me what's going on, we cut to the epic battle, and I go home or maybe to the hospital with a few new scars and something else to complain about."
By the time he stepped back and looked like he might even say something, as much as he ever looked like anything that wasn't shapeless cloth, I was starting to get the idea that he didn't know what he was doing there.
In fact, the more I thought about the way he was acting, the more he reminded me of me. After Shiro, after Morgan.
After Justin. After Elaine.
I opened my mouth to ask who died and shut it again without saying anything. I knew who'd died. Kumori had died. Cowl was supposed to have died too, but evidently he'd had other plans, and Kumori hadn't been a part of them.
Or maybe she had and she just hadn't had the chops. And he hadn't had the power to protect her.
Ouch.
"I'm sorry doesn't really cut it, does it," I found myself saying, not really sure what I was supposed to say to the bad guy. Sorry for killing your sidekick? Did Batman apologize to the Joker for killing Harley?
He ignored me and kept on glaring. So, no, it didn't cut it.
It wasn't the first time I'd started looking at the bad guys as human. The first time had been Marcone. And there had been others. The thief who'd gotten the Shroud of Turin. Morgan, in his own way, not that he'd ever been what anyone would call a bad guy but he'd been a pain in my ass and tried to kill me on more than one occasion. But this was the Black Council. Cowl was one of the worst of the worst, and if I hadn't gotten lucky a couple of times the Black Council would probably be a lot further ahead in their plans.
And here we were, talking like I was the bad guy because I had killed someone he cared about.
Which I guess I had.
"I didn't want to kill her, you know," I told him. "I wasn't going to let you doom half of Chicago as a starting point to whatever crazy plans you had, but I didn't set out to kill anyone." I thought, but didn't say, that that was the difference between the two of us. I didn't believe in killing anyone to further some kind of demented utopia. "I didn't set out to kill her, and ... I didn't want her to die."
And that was the truth.
Cowl's hood stared at me. It wasn't a soulgaze, I couldn't see his eyes for that, and that made me think for a second that maybe that whole Ringwraith impression did have some advantages to it. But he was looking at me. I think he was really Looking, and that was kind of scary.
"What? What do you want?"
"For you to understand."
I opened my mouth to say something and shut it again as he started to explain it to me.
I had made some mistakes, and they almost killed me. Perhaps it would have been kinder if they had. Certainly you, no doubt, consider you would have been better off if I had died long ago, before you ever met me.
But that did not happen. I was pulled from the fire -- yes, fire, we have that in common -- before my body collapsed. I was badly burned. I doubt anyone who had known me before that would have recognized me, even assuming I wanted to be recognized. I thought that my life was over, and in a sense, it was. The man who had made those mistakes, who had transgressed, died that night when the building collapsed around him, and I was born.
Stop rolling your eyes, Dresden. You yourself have had such transformative moments.
And still you miss the importance of that moment. I was pulled from the fire, taken to a safe place, an isolated place, and healed until both my body and my mind were ready to face the world again. It was a process that took years, and she was endlessly patient with me. She did not leave, she stayed with me, and she helped me. For no reason and no promise of repayment of any kind. I was in no shape to introduce myself when she pulled me out of the fire and she never asked for my name or a list of my accomplishments or misdeeds. She healed me because in her mind it was the right thing to do.
Yes. I thought you might be familiar with the concept.
At the time I was not so practiced with Necromancy. Certainly I was aware of it, and I knew the theory behind most of its major undertakings and sub-categories of magic, but I had never made an intimate study of that particular field.
When she deemed me fit to walk about she gave me my freedom of the house and grounds, save only that I was to exercise caution in her work area, which was not unreasonable. And for a short time my curiosity regarding her work was overshadowed by my need for greater physical mobility. And that was a long, arduous process.
But eventually even I reached the point where I could walk with only the assistance of a cane, and I did make my way out to her workshop, which she had situated some distance from her house to prevent accidents from spilling back on her home and destroying it.
I do not think she expected me there that day. I know I startled her at her work, and ruined nearly a week's worth of potions, for which I was roundly scolded. And then she explained to me what she was doing.
You cannot fathom, Dresden, how much time she spent with me, first healing my injuries and then explaining to me what she was doing. No other wizard in the world had such patience as she did, tolerance for my mistakes and my misdeeds for, yes, as you may imagine, they were many. I am not the most tolerant of wizards, as you well know, nor am I given to letting others set low standards for themselves or anyone else. We spoke of our goals, our dreams for the world and our specialties and skills, what we had done and what we planned to do. It was...
... I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it, for as little action as passed in that place. It was mostly talk. And yet, I had never met anyone quite like her.
The Council would have seen her damned and beheaded for what she thought and said, and what she tried to do. They refuse to see the possibilities for advancement in every field, limiting themselves instead to the hidebound practices that are deemed safe and good because they have been used for centuries. As the world changes they, too, must change. I learned that, and now so must they.
Stop being so damned sanctimonious, Dresden. You, who have founded your own magical organization and turned the Council on its head more than once, have no room to talk when it comes to uprisings.
Kumori, as she called herself to you, was dedicated, but she had neither the resources nor the learning to accomplish it. I offered my assistance to her as a way to repay her, though she refused to call it repayment. I took her on as my own apprentice in matters magical, and she...
... she took care of me.
You cannot fathom, Dresden, what it means to have someone like Kumori taking care of someone like me. I did not realize how unsound my foundation was until she began to poke holes in it, in the basic assumptions I made with regards to the nature of man and magic, in everything. She asked questions that I would have found outrageous had she not asked them with such earnest and naked desire to know the answer, rather than to have her assumptions confirmed. We had long conversations into the wee hours of the night on subjects I had never been able to simply discuss with another practitioner.
To be sure, I had my reasons for studying necromancy. They only ran somewhat parallel to hers, but that didn't seem to matter.
From there, being two of us now, our studies were able to increase and diversify tenfold. We studied not only necromancy but sangremancy, tantric ritual, hermetic practices. Holistic approaches. Everything that we could lay our hands on, we studied, and for a time longer than I imagine you would believe possible, I was content in that. To discover the answers to the new mysteries I kept uncovering, with another who shared my passions, that was a kind of contentment I had not yet known. After my own near death experience, I was perfectly at ease with the idea that I could spend centuries traveling over this world and others, learning new things and putting them to use in a more academic setting than I had planned prior to the fire.
We traveled together, and eventually we did come into contact with members of the Black Council, as you call them. Yes, I know you call them that. It was not difficult to figure out.
We met with the Council and discussed their goals. Their stated goals, of course, were far from what the individual members of the Council intended to do. Some of them you have guessed already. The vampires want their dominion, the Denariians want their corruption, and so on. Kumori and I wanted to fight for reform, but to do that we would have to change the guard entirely.
And it may comfort you to know that she objected to the measures proposed. She objected to the vampires' hedonism and the Denariians' corruption; she was not interested in causing pain for the sake of enjoyment or suffering. She allowed that death and suffering was a necessary side effect of what we intended to do, but she preferred to minimize the collateral damage. If that helps you to think of her at all.
It was something I admired about her.
She was a beautiful woman, Dresden. She had a brilliant, quick-thinking and analytical mind, and she had an imagination to her work that I had not seen in decades. She studied hard, and she put things together, experimented, and proved or disproved her theories with equal passion. She wanted to know if it was right so that she could continue, and kept her principles out of the theory of her work.
And she was kind. She spared no one the consequences of their actions but she forgave completely, when she granted forgiveness, and she did not lie about that. Not about the important things. She was honest, and she expressed her emotions as readily as speaking of them, most especially when she learned that I responded as well if not better to actions than to words. She observed and was able to understand that one needs to be clear when communicating about abstract concepts, and to be patient, and careful.
In short, Dresden, she was someone who made an effort to understand others and respond to their needs inasmuch as she was capable, without sacrificing more than she was prepared to of her own health and well-being. She was kind, and generous, and had she not been under my auspices at the time you might have met her and gotten along well with her before you realized what her goal was.
And you killed her.
Perhaps now you will understand why I cannot forgive you for that, though no doubt she would want me to. And why it infuriates me so that you seem to so easily be able to forgive yourself.
I did shut up and listen to him rant, after the first few times he snapped at me. It wasn't that what he was saying wasn't interesting, just that his whole attitude was unnerving. Hannibal in his cell I could live with; relaying his life's story since whenever like an alcoholic at an AA meeting was downright creepy. I got the feeling it was the longest speech he'd ever given. In five minutes he'd probably more than doubled the number of words he'd said to me.
Which told me, more than any of the actual words he'd said, that she really meant something to him. Maybe he loved her. He obviously had cared about her. Scary thought.
No wonder he was so pissed at me.
"I didn't mean to," I said, and realized right after I'd said it that that was probably the absolute worst thing I could have said to him. He let out a pained, infuriated shriek of a curse that sounded like metal shearing and blasted me with something made of pure rage. Rage, for those of you who don't know, feels like burning.
Yeah, if someone had killed a woman I cared about and then responded with I didn't mean to I probably would have slugged them too. It sounded callous. While he was deciding on his next move I tried to explain. "No, look. I didn't start ... dammit!" I had to scramble for cover. That shot would have cooked me faster than you could say Dresden en flambe.
"I didn't start out that night meaning to kill her! I was..."
I had been trying to stop them, not trying to kill anyone. Kumori's death had been a kind of unavoidable side effect, given the strength of the energy they'd been throwing around. They'd set up the spell and the energy, and had held me off long enough that it was either stop them in the middle in a massively suicidal move, or let them wreak havoc all up and down the midwest, for starters. But they started it. They had been throwing around that kind of powerful magic. Not me.
It wasn't my fault. It could have been any of the White Council who went to stop them.
Who was I trying to convince, here, me or him?
This was going to be up there on the top ten list of Stupid Things I've Said. "Look, you crazy son of a bitch, if anyone here's responsible for her death it's you! You're the one who dragged her into this, you're the one who set her doing shit that got her killed. If you hadn't ..."
Which was about as far as I got before I had to move before my idiot self, the mailbox I was hiding behind, and a good chunk of the pavement around both of us was vaporized. "Great going, Harry," I muttered from behind the safety of a building. Hopefully he couldn't vaporize that, too, although given that it was Cowl I wasn't counting on it. "That's just great. Poke the crazy world-destroying wizard in his Freudian complex."
When I stopped talking, everything stopped. There was no boot-stepping crunch, no sepulchral whisper of robes, nothing exploding. It was way too soon into the climactic duel for Cowl to have just scampered off already. Hell, in another few minutes he would have stomped me into a smear on the pavement. Which left the burning question, did I poke my head out to see what the hell was going on, or did I take a lesson from the many lives of Daffy Duck and stay hidden till I was really sure either he was gone or I could run away.
I just had a case of the stupids today, didn't I.
"Cowl?" Hands up in the don't-shoot-me position. "Look..." I'm sorry just wasn't going to cut it, tonight. Specifics might work, but I had to convince him he didn't want to squish me before I came out of hiding. And to do that, all I could think of to do was to repeat ad nauseum until he calmed down or ran out of angry. Which seemed about as likely as the ocean running out of salt. "I didn't want her to die. I never wanted anyone to die, okay? You know me, you know that's not how I do things."
He stayed stubbornly silent. I dragged myself to my feet and braced for impact.
"I didn't set out to kill her, or you, or anyone. I just wanted to protect my city. You would have done the same..."
Thing.
Yeah, he'd been waiting for me. And no matter what I said, he was going to kick my skinny white-boy ass for killing his friend, or lover, or whatever she had been to him. And I couldn't even put up much of a defense because in his place, I probably would have done the same thing.
Hell, I had pretty much done the same thing at least once. Granted, they had been ghouls, but to this day I wasn't sure if I would have stopped if they had been human. A fact which gave me a number of sleepless nights, and was irrelevant to the wave of force or whatever it was that lifted me off my feet and hung me over a lamppost.
I landed on something hard, dusty, and not at all welcoming.
On the plus side, Cowl was gone.
And here I was again, lying on the ground, with warm liquid seeping out of my stomach. There were a few sharp pains that I thought were cracked ribs, and one dull ache where he'd hit me with something. It felt a little like a gunshot wound.
It couldn't be a gunshot wound. The man was a powerful wizard, with god-knew-what at his command. Outsiders, I wouldn't put it past him to be the one who brought Outsiders to the fight. Why would he shoot me?
Maybe because I'd brought a gun to a magic fight, the first time he was in town. I was known for using guns for just that reason; they surprised the hell out of magic users.
And now I'd been shot by one.
Well, I was pretty damn surprised, all right.
Fandom: The Dresden Files (book)
Characters: Harry Dresden, Elaine, Karrin Murphy, Cowl, Marcone, Thomas Raith, and Molly Carpenter. And Carlos
Word Count 16,600+
Rating: PG-13
Summary: It's the end of the world, and it's starting in Chicago at the hands of the Black Council. (Presumes knowledge up to Turn Coat.)
Part 1 || Part 2 || Part 3 || Part 4 || Part 5
I wish I could say that I met Cowl with a witty remark and a fully fleshed-out plan that worked perfectly on the first try, but I've never been that lucky. Not as far as plans go, anyway. Witty remarks I have by the truckload.
I wasn't expecting him to be right there out in the open. Then again, up until a week ago I hadn't been expecting him back in town at all. The Black Council was moving all right, and they were moving faster these days. But Cowl hadn't set foot in Chicago in a couple of years. Not since his little Necropocalypse had gone wrong, thanks to yours truly.
First he wasn't there or anywhere at all, then he was just standing in front of the boarded up windows glaring at me. And the man could put weight behind his glare. I felt like I should check my shirt to make sure he hadn't lasered holes in my torso. And I waited for him to do something sneaky and painful.
He didn't. Which was bad enough, my nerves were rattling every time a stiff wind knocked the boards together. But he didn't do anything, and he wasn't acting like he was planning on it either. The energy around us was still and quiet. His robes draped straight down and his hood didn't move. He didn't have a stick or a gun. His body language was about as non-threatening as an evil bunch of cloth without a body could get. He looked almost normal. Like a guy playing dress-up, not one of the most powerful wizards on the planet. And that was stranger than day-glo plastic shoes.
Gradually it got even stranger. We stared at each other for minutes upon minutes and he didn't do anything.
"What do you want?"
The Ghost of Halloween Past pointed a sleeve at a store-front that had been covered over with plywood and spraypaint. I wondered if they just sold pre-graffiti'd plywood these days; that stuff couldn't have been a week old. Then I realized what the place was.
"The bookstore?"
He nodded.
"You know, the Dickens thing is really getting annoying."
His hood raised its eye-wrinkles at me.
"What does the bookstore have to do with anything?"
It turned out that was the wrong thing to say. I was suddenly the focus of enough hate, rage, fury, and other synonyms as well to power the ISS. Or short it out.
"Do you remember what happened here?" His voice was whispery and about as dramatic as his evil bathrobe, as always, but there was something different about his tone. Maybe it was the presence of it. He'd always been cut off before, removed from some kind of connection to the rest of humanity in a way that shouldn't have been audible but was, and now he sounded like a normal human being engaging with another. Not that he was even in the same ballpark as normal, and possibly not even human.
I folded my arms. "I remember you and Kumori trying to kill me, and, not to bring up such a painful memory, but why aren't you trying to kill me? Isn't this supposed to be your big event? Not," I added before he got any ideas. "That I think you should try to kill me. I mean, I kind of like this new fluffier y--"
Okay, so he wasn't so new and fluffy.
Graffiti or no graffiti, plywood hurt when you went through it at anything more than two miles per hour.
I picked myself up out of the wreckage and readied for his next attack. And held it. And held it. My back knotted up between my shoulder-blades and the tendons in my hands started to ache. I was going to get eye-strain if I squinted at him much more. I held it. And held it. And the attack didn't come. And then I held it some more.
He didn't advance. He didn't even blink, at least, I didn't think he did. He certainly didn't twitch, which I would have been able to see, or give any sign that he was even breathing. He didn't even float like any real spectre would have had the decency to do. He just stood there like I was supposed to make the next move. Trouble was, I didn't have a next move to make. I did want to know what was going on here, so I asked.
"What the hell is going on here?"
He came towards me, folded his sleeves over his robe, and stared.
"Okay, you know what? This is getting old." And creepy. "So, if you don't mind, I have places I have to..."
Cowl grabbed my arm as I walked past him.
His fingers dug into the meaty part of my bicep like four little vise grips. I instantly got the feeling he could break my arm if he wanted, which wasn't the best feeling in the world. It was almost enough to drown out the confusion I was feeling at him using physical force when I knew he could have cleaned my clock with magic if he wanted.
"You don't remember her at all."
He accused me. That was an accusation. I didn't even know who he was talking about. "Who?" I felt stupid. "Kumori?" He snarled. Most people sound stupid when they snarl, like they're trying to be Wolverine. This guy sounded like he actually was Sabretooth. And I still had no idea what was going on. And I was getting tired of it.
"Look." I yanked my arm out of the guy's grip, wondering if I was going to dislocate it right up until I was two steps away and my shoulder didn't hurt. "It's been a long week already, you and your bunch of crazies are making my life a living hell, and now you're doing a really, really good imitation of that emo kid who sits up in his living room listening to ..." I had no idea what kids were listening to these days. "The Cure and painting everything black. So why don't you just tell me what's going on, we cut to the epic battle, and I go home or maybe to the hospital with a few new scars and something else to complain about."
By the time he stepped back and looked like he might even say something, as much as he ever looked like anything that wasn't shapeless cloth, I was starting to get the idea that he didn't know what he was doing there.
In fact, the more I thought about the way he was acting, the more he reminded me of me. After Shiro, after Morgan.
After Justin. After Elaine.
I opened my mouth to ask who died and shut it again without saying anything. I knew who'd died. Kumori had died. Cowl was supposed to have died too, but evidently he'd had other plans, and Kumori hadn't been a part of them.
Or maybe she had and she just hadn't had the chops. And he hadn't had the power to protect her.
Ouch.
"I'm sorry doesn't really cut it, does it," I found myself saying, not really sure what I was supposed to say to the bad guy. Sorry for killing your sidekick? Did Batman apologize to the Joker for killing Harley?
He ignored me and kept on glaring. So, no, it didn't cut it.
It wasn't the first time I'd started looking at the bad guys as human. The first time had been Marcone. And there had been others. The thief who'd gotten the Shroud of Turin. Morgan, in his own way, not that he'd ever been what anyone would call a bad guy but he'd been a pain in my ass and tried to kill me on more than one occasion. But this was the Black Council. Cowl was one of the worst of the worst, and if I hadn't gotten lucky a couple of times the Black Council would probably be a lot further ahead in their plans.
And here we were, talking like I was the bad guy because I had killed someone he cared about.
Which I guess I had.
"I didn't want to kill her, you know," I told him. "I wasn't going to let you doom half of Chicago as a starting point to whatever crazy plans you had, but I didn't set out to kill anyone." I thought, but didn't say, that that was the difference between the two of us. I didn't believe in killing anyone to further some kind of demented utopia. "I didn't set out to kill her, and ... I didn't want her to die."
And that was the truth.
Cowl's hood stared at me. It wasn't a soulgaze, I couldn't see his eyes for that, and that made me think for a second that maybe that whole Ringwraith impression did have some advantages to it. But he was looking at me. I think he was really Looking, and that was kind of scary.
"What? What do you want?"
"For you to understand."
I opened my mouth to say something and shut it again as he started to explain it to me.
I had made some mistakes, and they almost killed me. Perhaps it would have been kinder if they had. Certainly you, no doubt, consider you would have been better off if I had died long ago, before you ever met me.
But that did not happen. I was pulled from the fire -- yes, fire, we have that in common -- before my body collapsed. I was badly burned. I doubt anyone who had known me before that would have recognized me, even assuming I wanted to be recognized. I thought that my life was over, and in a sense, it was. The man who had made those mistakes, who had transgressed, died that night when the building collapsed around him, and I was born.
Stop rolling your eyes, Dresden. You yourself have had such transformative moments.
And still you miss the importance of that moment. I was pulled from the fire, taken to a safe place, an isolated place, and healed until both my body and my mind were ready to face the world again. It was a process that took years, and she was endlessly patient with me. She did not leave, she stayed with me, and she helped me. For no reason and no promise of repayment of any kind. I was in no shape to introduce myself when she pulled me out of the fire and she never asked for my name or a list of my accomplishments or misdeeds. She healed me because in her mind it was the right thing to do.
Yes. I thought you might be familiar with the concept.
At the time I was not so practiced with Necromancy. Certainly I was aware of it, and I knew the theory behind most of its major undertakings and sub-categories of magic, but I had never made an intimate study of that particular field.
When she deemed me fit to walk about she gave me my freedom of the house and grounds, save only that I was to exercise caution in her work area, which was not unreasonable. And for a short time my curiosity regarding her work was overshadowed by my need for greater physical mobility. And that was a long, arduous process.
But eventually even I reached the point where I could walk with only the assistance of a cane, and I did make my way out to her workshop, which she had situated some distance from her house to prevent accidents from spilling back on her home and destroying it.
I do not think she expected me there that day. I know I startled her at her work, and ruined nearly a week's worth of potions, for which I was roundly scolded. And then she explained to me what she was doing.
You cannot fathom, Dresden, how much time she spent with me, first healing my injuries and then explaining to me what she was doing. No other wizard in the world had such patience as she did, tolerance for my mistakes and my misdeeds for, yes, as you may imagine, they were many. I am not the most tolerant of wizards, as you well know, nor am I given to letting others set low standards for themselves or anyone else. We spoke of our goals, our dreams for the world and our specialties and skills, what we had done and what we planned to do. It was...
... I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it, for as little action as passed in that place. It was mostly talk. And yet, I had never met anyone quite like her.
The Council would have seen her damned and beheaded for what she thought and said, and what she tried to do. They refuse to see the possibilities for advancement in every field, limiting themselves instead to the hidebound practices that are deemed safe and good because they have been used for centuries. As the world changes they, too, must change. I learned that, and now so must they.
Stop being so damned sanctimonious, Dresden. You, who have founded your own magical organization and turned the Council on its head more than once, have no room to talk when it comes to uprisings.
Kumori, as she called herself to you, was dedicated, but she had neither the resources nor the learning to accomplish it. I offered my assistance to her as a way to repay her, though she refused to call it repayment. I took her on as my own apprentice in matters magical, and she...
... she took care of me.
You cannot fathom, Dresden, what it means to have someone like Kumori taking care of someone like me. I did not realize how unsound my foundation was until she began to poke holes in it, in the basic assumptions I made with regards to the nature of man and magic, in everything. She asked questions that I would have found outrageous had she not asked them with such earnest and naked desire to know the answer, rather than to have her assumptions confirmed. We had long conversations into the wee hours of the night on subjects I had never been able to simply discuss with another practitioner.
To be sure, I had my reasons for studying necromancy. They only ran somewhat parallel to hers, but that didn't seem to matter.
From there, being two of us now, our studies were able to increase and diversify tenfold. We studied not only necromancy but sangremancy, tantric ritual, hermetic practices. Holistic approaches. Everything that we could lay our hands on, we studied, and for a time longer than I imagine you would believe possible, I was content in that. To discover the answers to the new mysteries I kept uncovering, with another who shared my passions, that was a kind of contentment I had not yet known. After my own near death experience, I was perfectly at ease with the idea that I could spend centuries traveling over this world and others, learning new things and putting them to use in a more academic setting than I had planned prior to the fire.
We traveled together, and eventually we did come into contact with members of the Black Council, as you call them. Yes, I know you call them that. It was not difficult to figure out.
We met with the Council and discussed their goals. Their stated goals, of course, were far from what the individual members of the Council intended to do. Some of them you have guessed already. The vampires want their dominion, the Denariians want their corruption, and so on. Kumori and I wanted to fight for reform, but to do that we would have to change the guard entirely.
And it may comfort you to know that she objected to the measures proposed. She objected to the vampires' hedonism and the Denariians' corruption; she was not interested in causing pain for the sake of enjoyment or suffering. She allowed that death and suffering was a necessary side effect of what we intended to do, but she preferred to minimize the collateral damage. If that helps you to think of her at all.
It was something I admired about her.
She was a beautiful woman, Dresden. She had a brilliant, quick-thinking and analytical mind, and she had an imagination to her work that I had not seen in decades. She studied hard, and she put things together, experimented, and proved or disproved her theories with equal passion. She wanted to know if it was right so that she could continue, and kept her principles out of the theory of her work.
And she was kind. She spared no one the consequences of their actions but she forgave completely, when she granted forgiveness, and she did not lie about that. Not about the important things. She was honest, and she expressed her emotions as readily as speaking of them, most especially when she learned that I responded as well if not better to actions than to words. She observed and was able to understand that one needs to be clear when communicating about abstract concepts, and to be patient, and careful.
In short, Dresden, she was someone who made an effort to understand others and respond to their needs inasmuch as she was capable, without sacrificing more than she was prepared to of her own health and well-being. She was kind, and generous, and had she not been under my auspices at the time you might have met her and gotten along well with her before you realized what her goal was.
And you killed her.
Perhaps now you will understand why I cannot forgive you for that, though no doubt she would want me to. And why it infuriates me so that you seem to so easily be able to forgive yourself.
I did shut up and listen to him rant, after the first few times he snapped at me. It wasn't that what he was saying wasn't interesting, just that his whole attitude was unnerving. Hannibal in his cell I could live with; relaying his life's story since whenever like an alcoholic at an AA meeting was downright creepy. I got the feeling it was the longest speech he'd ever given. In five minutes he'd probably more than doubled the number of words he'd said to me.
Which told me, more than any of the actual words he'd said, that she really meant something to him. Maybe he loved her. He obviously had cared about her. Scary thought.
No wonder he was so pissed at me.
"I didn't mean to," I said, and realized right after I'd said it that that was probably the absolute worst thing I could have said to him. He let out a pained, infuriated shriek of a curse that sounded like metal shearing and blasted me with something made of pure rage. Rage, for those of you who don't know, feels like burning.
Yeah, if someone had killed a woman I cared about and then responded with I didn't mean to I probably would have slugged them too. It sounded callous. While he was deciding on his next move I tried to explain. "No, look. I didn't start ... dammit!" I had to scramble for cover. That shot would have cooked me faster than you could say Dresden en flambe.
"I didn't start out that night meaning to kill her! I was..."
I had been trying to stop them, not trying to kill anyone. Kumori's death had been a kind of unavoidable side effect, given the strength of the energy they'd been throwing around. They'd set up the spell and the energy, and had held me off long enough that it was either stop them in the middle in a massively suicidal move, or let them wreak havoc all up and down the midwest, for starters. But they started it. They had been throwing around that kind of powerful magic. Not me.
It wasn't my fault. It could have been any of the White Council who went to stop them.
Who was I trying to convince, here, me or him?
This was going to be up there on the top ten list of Stupid Things I've Said. "Look, you crazy son of a bitch, if anyone here's responsible for her death it's you! You're the one who dragged her into this, you're the one who set her doing shit that got her killed. If you hadn't ..."
Which was about as far as I got before I had to move before my idiot self, the mailbox I was hiding behind, and a good chunk of the pavement around both of us was vaporized. "Great going, Harry," I muttered from behind the safety of a building. Hopefully he couldn't vaporize that, too, although given that it was Cowl I wasn't counting on it. "That's just great. Poke the crazy world-destroying wizard in his Freudian complex."
When I stopped talking, everything stopped. There was no boot-stepping crunch, no sepulchral whisper of robes, nothing exploding. It was way too soon into the climactic duel for Cowl to have just scampered off already. Hell, in another few minutes he would have stomped me into a smear on the pavement. Which left the burning question, did I poke my head out to see what the hell was going on, or did I take a lesson from the many lives of Daffy Duck and stay hidden till I was really sure either he was gone or I could run away.
I just had a case of the stupids today, didn't I.
"Cowl?" Hands up in the don't-shoot-me position. "Look..." I'm sorry just wasn't going to cut it, tonight. Specifics might work, but I had to convince him he didn't want to squish me before I came out of hiding. And to do that, all I could think of to do was to repeat ad nauseum until he calmed down or ran out of angry. Which seemed about as likely as the ocean running out of salt. "I didn't want her to die. I never wanted anyone to die, okay? You know me, you know that's not how I do things."
He stayed stubbornly silent. I dragged myself to my feet and braced for impact.
"I didn't set out to kill her, or you, or anyone. I just wanted to protect my city. You would have done the same..."
Thing.
Yeah, he'd been waiting for me. And no matter what I said, he was going to kick my skinny white-boy ass for killing his friend, or lover, or whatever she had been to him. And I couldn't even put up much of a defense because in his place, I probably would have done the same thing.
Hell, I had pretty much done the same thing at least once. Granted, they had been ghouls, but to this day I wasn't sure if I would have stopped if they had been human. A fact which gave me a number of sleepless nights, and was irrelevant to the wave of force or whatever it was that lifted me off my feet and hung me over a lamppost.
I landed on something hard, dusty, and not at all welcoming.
On the plus side, Cowl was gone.
And here I was again, lying on the ground, with warm liquid seeping out of my stomach. There were a few sharp pains that I thought were cracked ribs, and one dull ache where he'd hit me with something. It felt a little like a gunshot wound.
It couldn't be a gunshot wound. The man was a powerful wizard, with god-knew-what at his command. Outsiders, I wouldn't put it past him to be the one who brought Outsiders to the fight. Why would he shoot me?
Maybe because I'd brought a gun to a magic fight, the first time he was in town. I was known for using guns for just that reason; they surprised the hell out of magic users.
And now I'd been shot by one.
Well, I was pretty damn surprised, all right.