Consequences
Title: Consequences
Fandom: The Dresden Files
Spoilers: Speculative one from... White Night, I think, but it's not a huge deal, plus minor one from Grave Peril.
Rating: PG
Summary: There are some consequences I am not prepared to accept, not now, not ever.
Notes: Odd little ficlet I found while trawling through my "In Progress" folder. I don't plan to expand it, but I figured you all might like it. It seems to fit prompt 26, Determined, so we shall pretend that I intended that all along.
There are some consequences I am not prepared to accept, not now, not ever.
This is one of them.
They had Murphy, the Black Council. They’d taken her right out of her bed, sent men in and kidnapped her from the one place where she should have been safe. And I wasn’t there to help her, because I’d been halfway across town, chasing shadows. Chasing ghosts while they took Murphy.
I didn’t even know.
I didn’t even know until they fucking told me.
They left me a letter—
We have the woman, we will kill her unless you give yourself in trade—and I would, in a heartbeat, but I couldn’t because I knew what they’d do to me, and to her. They wouldn’t kill her, no, but they wouldn't let her go either.
There was so much I didn’t know and any of it could mean my life or hers. How long they’d had her, why they’d taken her, where they were, why they wanted me (well, I had a pretty good idea as to that one) and why they wanted her (likewise, I could guess). And I had no way of finding any of it out.
Except one thing.
Murphy didn’t know I had it. I should probably have told her, if only so she knew; using it without her knowledge felt dirty somehow, and was skirting the edge of black magic to boot. But if I was going to find her...
I’d made it after that debacle with the Nightmare and what it had done to her. That helplessness, knowing I couldn’t get to her in time to protect her... I’d realized that I needed a charm or something. So I had taken three of her hairs (three is a magical number), braided them together and wrapped them seven times in red ribbon (so is seven, and red is a protective color), and put it away in a box I kept in my lab, in a circle of protection. I’d mostly forgotten about that charm in the years that followed. After all, when Murphy got into supernatural trouble it was almost exclusively with me by her side, and the rest of the time either it was something she could handle without any problems, or I didn’t have the charm with me and had no time to get it.
I took it out now, and stroked the hairs, now brittle with age, gently with my thumb. “I’m coming,” I whispered, and left the lab.
