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thatgoddamnwizard · 5 years ago

Note

✘ Why did you deliberately meet my gaze the day we met?

My muse has to tell nothing but the truth for 10 asks.

Ask them funny questions, get personal, query about the people around them or pester them for their deepest darkest secrets - go wild! Include ✘ with the asks!

My subconscious and I had a long, unpleasant chat about that once. He’s kind of an asshole, my subconscious, real good at telling it like it is whether I like it or not. Also he’s a better dresser than me, all kind of suave and put together. The jerk.

Anyway, it went a bit like this.

_______________________________________________________

I often say I had a grueling week because, well, I often do, but this week set a new standard definition for the word. It started out normally enough– whatever the hell that means in my case– but then quickly escalated when someone that I had been investigating decided he didn’t like being investigated.

Things happened. There were a bunch of goons with tire irons, fists, boots, and a ready-to-fire paralysis spell, some angry vampires hellbent on vengeance, a lot of blood and bruises, a concussion, and a few episodes of not-so-blissful unconsciousness.

Oh, and Marcone. There was a lot of Marcone in this mess, which of course cranked my surly wizard factor up to eleven.

We’d escaped the vampires by hook or by crook, got trapped in a snowstorm in the middle of the wilderness, took shelter in a cave. All of that gets told elsewhere. My point here is that I fell asleep in that cave, utterly spent, battered and scarred, and my magic was still suppressed by the remains of the thorn manacles that we hadn’t been able to completely remove from my wrists.

I came to awareness standing in darkness, not the moonlight-dappled darkness of the cave we were in, with its coarse, uneven floor and looming walls and damp, musty scent, but someplace smooth and flat and endless, featureless, but for the pale luminance spilling on the floor in a circle ahead of me. A simple folding chair stood in the circle of light, and a man sat in the chair, his arms folded across his chest, eyebrow raised as he studied me with his dark, glittering eyes. He was something akin to a mirror image of me, except he was dressed all in dark, custom-fitted clothes, sported a well-trimmed beard, and didn’t look like he’d just gone ten rounds with the Hulk. He wore the same black leather duster that I wore, though he wore it better. The jerk.

“It’s about damn time,” said my doppelganger. “We need to talk.”

“We really don’t.” I wasn’t in the mood. “We really, really don’t.”

One corner of his mouth turned up in a smirk. “The fact that you really, really don’t want to talk about something is usually an indicator that you really, really need to, Harry.”

“Don’t care,” I said. “Tired. Good night.” I turned to start walking into the darkened space around us, hoping that it would lead to peaceful oblivion and then maybe something resembling a normal dream (at least as far as these things go for me), but in the blink of an eye, he was standing in front of me.

“Can’t let you walk away from this, man,” he said. “It’s too important. You need to work some things out here. There’s too much at stake, and you need to understand why you’re doing what you’re doing or you’re going to end up somebody’s dinner. Or somebody’s pet. Or both.”

That rankled. I wasn’t particularly one to psychoanalyze myself, to dig up all sorts of hidden reasons why I do the things that I do. Yeah, I’ll question my motivations, if I’m doing things for the right reasons, if what I’m doing is right or wrong. But psychobabble isn’t really my thing.

“Yeah,” I said. “Because deep, quality introspection is so important when you’re trying to stop a supernatural gang war from breaking out in Chicago.”

“Hell’s bells,” my subconscious grumbled, passing his hand over his face in a gesture of sublime irritation. “Look. You’re dreaming. I’m your friggin’ subconscious. That means you’re a captive audience here until you wake up, and that’s probably not going to be for a while, considering the state of your physical body. You can go running off into any dream you like, but I’ll be hounding you the whole way. So make it easy on us both and sit down, shut up, and listen.” He pointed to the circle of light, where a second chair had appeared, situated across from the first one, as if by magic. Abracadabra.

And just like that, I was sitting across from him in the chair, mirroring his body language, arms folded across our chests, legs crossed at our knees, scowls on our faces. “Fine,” I said. “Talk.”

My double regarded me for a few seconds, and then pointed to his left. I looked and saw Marcone, leaning against my desk and looking at a battered, bloodied figure that sat on the floor, propped against the wall. I did a double-take. The bloodied figure was me. Wow, those guys had really done a number on me. Marcone was cool and collected as ever, regarding me with a level of composure that belied the pain he must have been in after weathering his own attack.

“Yeah?” I said. “So?”

My double sighed. “Marcone is attacked, and the first person he goes to see about it is you. Despite the fact that you have, on multiple occasions, told him where he could stuff his job offer.”

“He’s relentless like that. But so am I.”

“So why did you decide to work with him this time?”

I glared at my doppelganger. “Because,” I said, then paused. “Because I’m trying to prevent a goddamned supernatural gang war, for Christ’s sake.”

He arched an eyebrow at me. “So you decided to team up with one of the players in that up-and-coming blockbuster.”

“I didn’t– I’m not– I’m not teaming up with him,” I protested. “We’re not bosom buddies. We just–”

“Why did you let yourself get drawn into a soulgaze with him?”

I blinked at the sudden shift in topic. “What? I didn’t let myself–”

“You let yourself. You’ve been habitually avoiding eye contact with people since you were old enough to know what it could do. You tempted fate. You did it because you wanted to see him for who and what he was. Why’d you do it? Of all the people, all the enemies you’ve encountered, why’d you do that with him?”

I didn’t really like where this was going. “He was a threat. I wanted to take his measure. See what I was dealing with.”

“And?”

“There’s no ‘and.’ Just that.”

“Bullshit.”

I sighed. “Okay, oh wise and stylish guru. What else is there?”

He smiled. “You saw something in him, before you ever locked eyes. Something that looked an awful lot like you. Drive, determination, the ability to be an ice-cold bastard when the situation called for it. You weren’t just taking the measure of an enemy. You were taking the measure of a potential ally and friend.” Then the bastard winked at me, actually winked. “You also thought he was kind of hot.”

The sounds that came out of my mouth sounded more like a choking Ringraith than anything human. “I what?!”

“You heard me.”

“I did not!”

“Did so.”

“Did not!”

“You really did.”

“Okay.” I stood up and kicked the chair away hard enough to knock it over. “This conversation is over. I’m not gonna sit here and talk about my latent sexual tendencies with my freaking subconscious. Especially in regards to Marcone.”

He held his hands up in a placating gesture. “Okay, okay. There are more important things to talk about here. But you really ought to look into that. It’s not healthy to repress. It’s the twenty-first century, man. It’s okay.”

I glared at him and repressed.

“Look,” he said. “I’m not suggesting you should trust the guy. But I’m saying that you’ve seen him like few other have. You’ve seen sides to his story that he doesn’t let anyone get a peek at, and he let you see them. Deliberately. He has a vested interest in keeping the city free of unchecked bloodshed and violence. War’s bad for his kind of business. You can be sure he’s on your side as far as all that.”

“Marcone’s on the side of Marcone,” I mumbled.

“Yeah. You’re right. You two just happen to have the same goals at the moment– minimizing the death and destruction that you’re both going to be ears-deep in if you don’t work together to prevent it from happening in the first place.”

I didn’t say anything. My double glanced to one side, then back to me. “We don’t have much time left. I’ve just got one more thing to say.”

“What’s that?”

“Do you really think Ariana and her vampire mod squad are the only allies this new player has?”

“What do you mean?”

The world was fading around me, and I could feel myself getting dragged reluctantly towards the waking world, but I heard him say, as if from a great distance: “Where’d he get the hellhound?”

#pragmaticvillainy #lmao this turned into a book #hope you like it!#tell the truth meme #guess i'll tag as #fic #too #since it turned into one #long post #dresden files

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