Laurel Lance (i_crylikeabird) wrote in we_coexist, @ 2011-05-22 14:00:00 |
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Entry tags: | dinah lance, harry dresden |
Give me shelter from the storm (Harry/Dinah log, complete)
It had been over 48 hours since Dinah first discovered Jake missing. She’d slept for maybe two hours in that time. She was running on nothing but fumes, and she was starting to run out of the hope that the next person she questioned would somehow have the answers that would lead her to Jake.
The Joker had him. That was the only thought that kept her going, that drove her to haunt everywhere she could think of, beating up anyone that might have answers and an inclination not talk to her. There had already been information that led to nowhere, a string of false leads and the sense of a wild goose chase.
She was getting sloppy, and edgy. She knew this. Dinah finally had to tear herself away from the warehouse district, reminding herself that she wasn’t going to help Jake unless she was smart about her approach.
She considered returning to the Clock Tower, but remembered how it had felt to go back there the previous morning. It was empty, a hollow reminder of the fact that she’d failed Jake.
Instead, Dinah tried to call Harry. When he didn’t answer, she wasn’t entirely surprised. Disappointed, but she knew that meant that he was probably just as hard at work on his end. Which also meant that he probably needed a dinner break just as much as she did. She managed to find the little Italian restaurant by the Clock Tower again. Not a sign of a good day as she’d taken it on Sunday, but it was a comfort all the same. She picked up two healthy carry-out boxes of pasta and headed for Harry’s.
Once there, she knocked first. It was only polite, and she still wasn’t quite sure if she had a right to barge into his apartment, even if she did have a key. When there was no answer, she let herself in. After a quick check of the small apartment turned up no sign of Harry, she glanced at the trapdoor and figured that he was most likely in the subbasement. She knew better than to disturb him, so instead she helped herself to a few bites of her pasta. It was hard to eat more than that, because her stomach was still twisted in knots over the thought of what Jake might be going through, but she forced herself to eat enough that she wouldn’t pass out from hunger. Then she slipped both boxes into Harry’s icebox and laid out on the couch. She found a blanket and wrapped herself in it, breathing in the scent of him and finding solace in that little reminder that she wasn’t the only one looking for Jake, that she wasn’t alone in this.
Dinah didn’t plan to fall asleep, but her body obviously had different ideas. Now that she had stopped pushing herself to keep going, her eyes slid shut and she fell into a deep, if fitful, sleep.
Her hands were bound, wrists wet with blood. She looked down at the mess that had been carved into her chest, the blood that stained her skin.
“I can gut you like a fish, or I can make you last a few days.” Always the same voice. Always him. Only this time, it wasn’t the same.
The Joker leered down at her. And suddenly, Dinah realized that she wasn’t alone in the room. Jake was next to her, his eyes glazed over with pain.
“He can’t hear you. Oh what fun we’re having. And you won’t ever find us.”
She awoke screaming.
----
The Little Folk in the City were without their leader, and while Harry was glad to work with them regardless, he missed having Toot-toot around for support. There was a reason Toot was Major General of the Za-Lord's Guard - the tiny bugger was good at it. It was hard to keep the little ones on task without the tall pixie to guide them. He wondered how tall Toot was now. He'd been near eighteen inches the last time Harry saw him.
A few of these pixies knew who Harry was, and responded to his calls. They were also sided with Winter, as Toot had explained. It wasn't often that the Little Folk chose sides, but there it was. The sub-basement was normally cooler than anywhere else in the apartment, but this was ridiculous. There was frost lining the walls when Harry finally emerged, wrapped up in his warmest terrycloth bathrobe. He smelled pasta, and glanced around, finding Mouse lying against the sofa where Dinah had stretched out.
Normally, Harry was content to watch her sleep, to see the way her features softened, how the worries evaporated and she was simply Dinah. But tonight, her expression was still tense, still worried. He wasn't sure how long she'd been here, but it couldn't have been very long - the candles were still lit. An hour? He checked the icebox and found the boxes of pasta. Grabbing one and a Coke, Harry crept back into the room to eat. He could wake her up soon. But she was pushing herself, and needed the rest. One more hour. Then he'd wake her.
It was only twenty minutes later that he heard it. Faint sounds. From the way Mouse picked up his head, Harry knew they were coming from Dinah. He set his plate aside and moved to the couch. Faint. Not quite whimpers. No, these were different entirely. He'd seen it before. Somewhere in her mind, Dinah was screaming.
Harry kept his touch gentle, reaching for her hands. "Dinah," he whispered, rubbing her wrists. "Dinah? Wake up, sweetie. Come on."
And then she was awake, screaming. Harry threw out a hand and a word, letting the candles and the fireplace flare up, brightening the room. "Dinah!" he called, releasing her hands, but staying close. "Dinah, it's Harry! You're safe, Dinah, you're safe! It's okay!"
----
Dinah’s breathing started to slow as she finally registered her surroundings, and the man who was right beside her. A sob broke forth and she couldn’t stop herself from shaking.
She didn’t wake like this very often. Those particular nightmares were all but banished. All but fully conquered.
Dinah leaned against Harry as she mentally willed herself to stop shaking, as she attempted to slow the stream of tears.
“He wants him alive. If he’d killed him, we would know by now. Joker doesn’t ever do things quietly,” she said, her voice rough. “I’ve been in the hands of someone who doesn’t want to kill you, someone who gets off on causing pain.”
The shaking had slowed, but a light shudder passed through her at the last sentence.
“It never actually goes away. Not really. I wanted to find him before Joker had the chance to do that, before he inflicted scars that couldn’t quite heal,” she continued. “I failed. I failed Jake.”
The tears that fell were silent now, but still flowed steadily down her cheeks.
----
Harry held her when she broke down, leaning into the couch and pulling her all but into his lap. His eyes shut when she laid out the Joker's plans, and then her own experience. He ran his hand through her hair, trying to comfort. He couldn't answer her. The knots in his chest and throat were too large to speak through. Jake was a kid - a hard kid, but still a kid - and he shouldn't have to experience something like that.
Nightmares still plagued Harry from the things that bumped in his nights. Dinah had her ghosts to contend with. Maggie... A light sigh escaped Harry as he realized that even his own child would have nightmares of her own, but at least her father had Shown Up in the end.
"We'll get him back, Dinah," Harry said, surprised at the strength of his own voice. "No matter what, we'll get him back. He'll heal. And you'll be there to help him. Because he'll need to see that there's more to it than whatever he's seeing now. And you'll be the one to show him."
Vampires had gotten Maggie, but Harry had killed them, killed them all, before they could kill her. This Joker was one man, a human. Mortal. Harry's magic wouldn't help to fight him.
But a .44 would be perfect.
"I promise, we'll get him back."
----
Dinah rested her head against Harry’s shoulder and curled into him for just a moment. She closed her eyes and concentrated on the nearness of him, letting his presence ground her. It served as a strong reminder that she was no longer trapped in that particular nightmare. This was a nightmare of its own, but one in which she couldn’t go to pieces. She needed to stay calm and focused on finding Jake.
Dinah opened her eyes again and placed a few light kisses on Harry’s jawbone before she sat up and looked over at him, her shoulders squared and her eyes dried now.
“Sorry. I just… don’t do well with helpless. There haven’t been many situations that I couldn’t kick or scream my way out of. This one…” she spread her hands in a gesture of frustration. “It just feels like I’m missing some crucial piece of the puzzle. Like I should be better than this, should be smarter than this.”
She sighed and then rested her head back on his shoulder.
“I guess now it’s just a matter of hoping that we get a break. The computers in the Clock Tower are searching around the clock for any sign of them, you’re waiting on your sources, and I’ve run out of people to beat up for answers…”
She tiled her head up towards Harry’s.
“So, while we wait, tell me something? Something you don’t normally tell people,” she tried to keep her tone light, but a distraction was definitely what she needed for the moment. At least until she could calm down enough to sleep for longer.
She had a feeling she was going to need a good night’s sleep if she had any hope of coming at this from a new angle and figuring out the answers.
----
Harry continued to brush at her hair. Soothing noises didn't work coming from him, he didn't seem to have the right voice for it, but he could hold onto her, and damnit, he was going to. As long as she needed.
"It's only a matter of time. Every second we get closer. The computers, or the Little Folk will turn up something." When she settled back against Harry's shoulder, he took her hand in his, rubbing along the back of her knuckles with his thumb.
Something he normally didn't tell people, huh? Harry thought for a bit, trying to come up with something.
"I have very few memories of my father. I was about six years old when he died. What I do remember is a careworn, slightly stoop-shouldered man with kind eyes and strong hands, He was a magician - not a wizard, a stage magician. A good one. He never made it big, though." A ghost of a smile touched his lips. "He spent too much time performing for children's hospitals and orphanages to pull down much money. He and I and his little show rounded the country. The memories of the first several years of my life are of my bed in the backseat of the station wagon, going to sleep to the whisper of asphalt beneath the tires, secure in the knowledge that my father was awake, driving the car, and there to take care of me."
His voice and his thumb caught a rhythm as he spoke, and held it. He drifted with the memory, remembering the bits he could from the earliest days of his life.
"My mother died in childbirth. I never knew her, never saw her. Only in pictures. Once, only once, I got to hear her voice. I'll never forget it." He swallowed, his throat dry, and shifted the topic back to his father.
"It was my father who named me. After magicians, of course. He knew David Copperfield - they were amateurs together before Copperfield got his break, but he was already using the stage name. We probably would have settled someplace once I started school, and then maybe Malcolm Dresden would be one of those top names now. But a brain aneurysm took him away before that ever happened. My own nightmares hadn't started until just before his death. I don't remember them, specifically - but I remember waking up, screaming in a child's high-pitched shriek of terror. I'd scream in the darkness, scrambling to squeeze into the smallest place I could find. My father would come looking for me, and find me, and pull me into his lap. He would hold me, and make me warm, and soon I would fall asleep again, safe, secure. 'The monsters can't get you here, Harry,' he used to say. 'They can't get you.'"
Harry tilted his head and pressed a kiss to Dinah's forehead. "You're safe here, Dinah. Nothing can get you here. I won't allow it."
----
Dinah snuggled into Harry as he talked about his father. It was as much for her own comfort as a reminder that he wasn’t alone. Her own time with her parents had been too short, but at least she’d had time to grow up before she’d lost them. Even if she’d barely been an adult when her father had died.
She smiled up at him as he promised she was safe.
“I know you won’t.”
Her smile faded slightly as she thought of Harry’s parents, and of her own parents.
“My dad was a cop. All his life, until the corruption on the force just got to him. Then he went into business for himself as a private eye. He let me help him with some cases, to my mother’s chagrin. She might have inspired my methods, but he’s the one who gave me the taste for it all. And he always pushed me to do whatever I wanted to do, to hell with what everyone else thought.” She smiled at the memory. “He loved me no matter what I did or who I became.”
She took a moment before continuing.
“I was legally an adult when he died, but I still felt like a kid. I was lost. Lost enough to jump into a marriage with a guy who was nothing but trouble in the hopes that I could somehow fill that hole by starting my own family. Of course, that’s not something you can just recreate-not with the wrong person. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you find a group of friends and loved ones that become a family and start to fill that void.”
Dinah sighed.
“Of course, then sometimes you end up a place like here with no way to contact any of them and no choice but to start all over.”
Her hand found Harry’s and she gave it a little squeeze and looked up at him with a semi-smile.
“I’m not glad you’re stuck here, but I’m glad I found you here all the same. I’m just sorry the City didn’t give you more time with your wish.”
Even knowing that his day hadn’t been a picnic, she knew what having that time with his family had meant to him and she thought it was cruel of the City to dangle that possibility of having his family all in one place only to yank it away.
----
Harry let out a long sigh of his own. "Things... never really got better after my father died. I never felt that safe again. When I felt safe, it was because I did it myself." He did manage a bit of a smile and squeezed her hand back. "I'm not sure that wish actually got it right. It... it changed things, but... it brought the wrong people. Thomas, yes. He's my brother, and I was glad to have him. But so much else was different. So different that the things that really mattered - the people who really mattered - weren't there. The people who are my real family. Thomas, Murphy, Sasha, Mouse, Even Elaine and Susan... and Maggie."
Maggie hadn't existed in that world. And for as little as Harry knew of his mother, and how he might have wished to know her more, he wouldn't have traded his daughter, Margaret Angelica Mendoza Dresden, for Margaret LeFay McCoy. Not ever.
"I'm not sorry about not having more time with them. I can't speak for my mother, but I know Thomas well enough to say he would have wanted things back the right way. I'd like to think the same for her."
He gave Dinah a slight pinch to the back of her hand. "You, though. No more running yourself ragged. Especially when you can't remember that I'm around to help." Stupid wishes. From what Harry had heard (and seen, with those stitches!) Dinah's had been more physical strain than his emotional turmoil. Neither of them had made out well, but he could hide the scars of his experience.
"Want me to keep going?"
----
“No, from what I’ve heard, I don’t think any of the wishes got it quite right, unless the goal was to teach us all to be careful what we wished for.”
Dinah’s free hand travelled to the newly formed scar on her side.
“Though at least I learned that I’m not meant to have god-like powers-that I have to learn that I’m not good enough to do it all. Nothing like a near-death experience to remind a person of the value of prioritizing,” she said with a self-deprecating smile.
“And yes, please,” she answered his question.
----
Harry shook his head. "It's not that you're not good enough to do it all. It's that you're not meant to. If everyone could do everything, we wouldn't need each other, would we?" It had taken Harry years to learn that. He'd kept plenty of people at arm's length, thinking it was for their protection, for their own good. He knew better now.
He kissed her again, then fell silent as he tried to remember what he'd been saying, to start again.
"I spent a long time in an orphanage. I think they call them 'group homes' now, but it amounts to the same thing. Eight years of people being paid to care for you. There's no genuine care, no real attachment. If you get it, you better get rid of it quick, or you'll lose anything else you've got. So many unloved kids around, we weren't one big family. It was like high school. Every day. Watching kids come and go, wondering what was so wrong that no one wanted you. And then this guy comes along, and says he wants to take me away from there. He wants to bring me home."
He nearly laughed at the irony. "I felt so good. So special. His name was Justin DuMorne, and he wanted to be my dad. Of course, he never said those words. He never wanted that - I just assumed it. I was fourteen, just come into my magic, and was getting dealt the 'freak' card pretty hard. I thought I was going to be safe again.”
"As it turned out, Justin knew what I was. He'd also adopted Elaine, knowing we were both wizards. He trained us in how to use our magic. I didn't know about the White Council then, about Wardens, about any of it. I had a home again, but now on top of school, I had tutoring, training, assignments in both academics and magic, and an extremely attractive teenage girl living with me." His sigh this time was laced with good humor. "That doesn't exactly make for an easy adolescence."
----
Dinah reached up and kissed Harry lightly.
“Doesn’t sound like a walk in the park to me. In fact, sounds busy and more than a little distracting. I take it Justin didn’t take you in out of the goodness of his heart?”
Her heart ached at the thought of Harry, waiting in an orphanage for a family that would never really come. At being alone in the world and having to deal with abilities that were beyond the comprehension of most ‘normal’ people.
----
Harry lifted his hand in order to trace Dinah's lips with a finger. "Strong in the Force, you are, to such knowledge have." His voice softened again after the Yoda impression. "We were the start of his army, I suppose. He was... an effective teacher. Justin believed that pain was the best kind of motivator. When someone keeps pelting you with baseballs, it motivates you to learn a good kinetic shield." Harry glanced at his left hand. "And then a couple of Redfields attack that shield with some homemade flamethrowers and melt most of your hand, it's a good motivator to make a shield that can block heat and fire."
Harry gave a half-shrug. "I can't deny that his methods were effective, but they were nothing I'd ever repeat. I used snowballs on my own apprentice. With Justin, for me and Elaine, it was learn fast or die. He had his reasons. He wanted us strong. All the better tools for his manipulations."
----
Dinah reached for his left hand and took it lightly, bringing it up to her lips. She kissed the glove and then looked up at him.
“I like your method of teaching better, but you’re right that some things are learned the hard way. Every fight I lost only motivated me to train harder and to become better, stronger.”
She sighed.
“I’m just sorry you had to go through that. You deserved better.”
----
Again, Harry shook his head. "It made me who I am. It made me the person who got Molly back from Arctis Tor. The person who raised a zombie dinosaur to kill necromancers. The guy who was able to save Maggie. And the crazy idiot who ran across half the City with a bullet-hole in his leg to help a bunch of kidnapped women. I'll tell you, getting shot hurts. But there are ways to block out pain. If it hadn't been for Justin's training methods, I might not have all these scars - I might be six feet deep instead."
He eased the glove off his hand. It was mostly healed now, though the fingers still curled together and the two on the end couldn't quite straighten out completely. The skin was still a mess, and probably would be for a while longer. Harry wasn't sure if scars healed perfectly on wizards, though Butters seemed to believe so. If so, it was the last to heal, and there were older scars to get to first.
He was only mildly self-conscious about it now. Mostly, he wore the glove because others tended to be offset by the sight of it. And the memories bothered him on occasion. He had enough nightmares to deal with already.
He turned his hand over, letting Dinah look or touch as she liked. On the palm was the unscarred area, the only place that retained his own unharmed skin, in a shape vaguely resembling an hourglass.
----
“Can’t say I’m sorry you were a crazy idiot that night,” Dinah said with a small smile. “Because as often as I’ve run into them since getting here, I’m going to have to say that vampires aren’t my forte. Not yet.”
As he removed his glove, her fingers went back to his hand. She lightly traced the scars with her fingertips and then kissed the two fingers on the end. The scars didn’t bother her, save for the thought of the pain that must have caused them. All the same, they were part of Harry and a reminder of one of the many things he’d survived.
She clasped his hand in hers and looked up at him.
“Thank you.” She didn’t bother elaborating on the reason for the thank you. For being there, for trusting her enough to share so much, for taking her mind off things for awhile.
----
Harry leaned, and kissed her. "Don't thank me yet. Otherwise I'll start thinking I don't have to talk anymore. And since you look like you could use a few more hours of sleep, I'll keep going until I've bored you enough that you get it."
He wiggled his fingers as much as he could, taking a few moments to clench and stretch them slowly. "I was originally told that I'd never have use of it again. That I'd be better off just letting them amputate and getting more use out of a prosthetic." His fingers began to move much more slowly, deliberately, picking out notes he would use to play his guitar. "Then Butters got me a guitar, once it started healing. He's convinced that the reason wizards live so long is because we have some kind of healing factor. Nothing like Wolverine or something, but that we heal perfectly. Showed me some x-rays he managed to get of some of my broken bones. Apparently there's no fuse lines from the breaks anymore. He thinks it's fascinating." Again, Harry had to shrug. Butters was a pure geek though, and he was a friend.
"Where was I?" Oh, right. "Err. Any questions so far?"
----
“Wow. That sounds helpful, though you seem to have a knack for getting hurt faster than you can heal,” Dinah said. “I would tell you that you have to be more careful but,” she touched her side. “Pot. Kettle. Black. And for the record? You aren’t boring me. At all.”
She kissed his neck and then pulled back and studied his face for a moment, thinking about any questions.
“How long can wizards live exactly? Are we talking an extra decade, or closer to Nicholas Flamel?”
----
"Good to know I'm not boring you. And we'll just bypass anything about who gets hurt and who doesn't, okay? We both know that we wouldn't be doing our jobs properly if that wasn't part of the risk."
Harry grimaced a bit when she asked that particular question. "A few centuries. Ancient Mai is about four hundred years old, but she's an exception. Most wizards, without external influence, can live around three centuries. Gives us time to grow out those long white beards."
He couldn't quite remember how long Nicholas Flamel had supposedly lived. Sometime around the fourteenth century, if he was right?
"But most of the ones who reach that sort of age aren't the ones who, say, start wars with vampire courts or have casual conversation with Faerie Queens. Those guys tend to stay pretty isolated."
----
It took a moment for the idea of living three centuries to fully sink in. Over three times the normal human lifespan, and she didn’t even want to think about how much longer than the normal superhero’s lifespan that would be. Nor was she going to say that she was already a few years past the lifespan of the average superhero.
“That sounds… a little lonely,” she said, a little sadness creeping into her voice. “Living that long, I mean. Unless all of the people you care for are wizards, of course.”
She ran her thumb along the side of his face before tangling her fingers in his hair.
“But it doesn’t do to worry about tomorrow, does it? The only guaranteed moment is this one. And even if you knew without a doubt that you had years and years, there’s no guarantee you’ll still want to be around the same people year after year, is there?”
It went without saying, but she hoped that, should he live the centuries-long life that wizards were capable of, he found companionship to fill that time.
----
Harry was very quiet for several minutes. Not still - his fingers still gently caressed her skin, his hand still weaving through her hair. But the silence was almost deafening for those long moments.
"It's not something I like to think about much," he finally admitted. "I live in the world, not apart from it. Maybe somewhere deep down, I do these things because I don't want to outlast the people I love." He gave a snort of laughter, but there was no humor in his expression. "For all I know, this is my afterlife. I was shot. One of those ones you don't get up from. I fell into Lake Michigan... and then I was here. In any case, I try not to plan that far ahead."
----
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought it up,” Dinah apologized.
She thought about him being shot, thought about her theories when she’d first gotten here, about the fear that this was just some sort of bizarre afterlife.
She reached down and touched the place where he’d told her he’d been shot.
“For what it’s worth, I think we’re still alive. Unless I died in my sleep, I think we’re really here. Wherever here is, of course. Not to mention that Barbara was apparently here years ago, even though she was still alive when I left my world.”
She chewed her lip thoughtfully.
“At any rate, I can relate to not planning ahead. It’s not really something I like to do either. And every time I have, well… things just have a way of not working out the way I hope. It’s easier to stick with the assumption that tomorrow everything could easily turn upside down and go to hell than to plan for what you’ll do if it doesn’t.” A little bit of wistfulness crept into her tone, but she quickly shoved that feeling aside. “Though maybe that’s just me,” she said with a half-smile.
----
Harry took up her hand again, holding her fingers and rubbing his own along them, though his face was set, thinking elsewhere. "I guess I was the one who brought it up," he admitted. "It feels... easier to talk to you. But it's still not something I talk about much. To anyone, really."
He began to shift, one way and then the other, careful not to let his hands leave her for very long as he moved. He was, in fact, quite determined to keep her in that very spot. Only, he no longer wanted the thick robe separating them. The need to touch and be touched by another human being was overwhelming at times, and right now, Harry needed it. Comfort in humanity. Simple, raw emotion. Someone he trusted. Someone he needed. With the robe off his shoulders, Harry wrapped both arms around her, one encircling her waist, the other her shoulders, and pulled Dinah against him, as tightly as he could manage without hurting her.
----
Dinah responded to the shift in tension between them by kissing him, responding with her own sense of urgency as her fingers found the zipper for her suit. She wriggled out of it and then pressed up against him once more, her skin tingling as it made contact with his. Time alone with him was definitely in short supply, but she tried to make the most of it whenever she got the chance.
In the midst of her own personal nightmare, it was good to find a stolen moment of comfort, of pure intimacy with someone that she loved.
Afterwards, she fell into a blissfully deep and dreamless sleep nestled against him, physically spent and secure. When she awoke, there would be more to do. More fears to face, but for that fleeting moment she had found peace.