Chapter Text
“Did not Dresden forbid you from doing that?”
At the sound of the voice I, Molly Carpenter, apprentice to Harry Dresden and junior of the white council, gave a thoroughly unwizardly squeak, snatched my hand back from between my legs, and nearly fell off my bed. I whipped my gaze to find a tall golden haired woman dressed in a vaguely Grecian tunic perched on the edge of my desk, long shapely legs crossed, and a decidedly smug expression pursing her lips.
“We’ve talked about this,” I gritted out. Instinctively, I scooted my legs up to my chest to regain at least some semblance of dignity, though really it was pretty pointless: having a fallen angel as your mental roommate meant that everything I saw she saw, including every time I’d showered since she popped into my head. I glared at the woman. “Fucking boundaries, Lash.”
“Is that not precisely what we are discussing though, my host?” Lasciel tilted her head to the side, eyes dancing with amusement. “Fucking boundaries?”
“Har har harrrr. I’m serious. I told you I don’t want you lurking around unless I call for you. Don’t you have evil fallen angel shit to do? Innocents to corrupt?”
Lasciel shrugged, somehow unbothered by my razor wit. “Perhaps something of the memory faded when my consciousness leapt from Dresden’s to yours, but I believe he expressly forbade you from touching yourself in such a manner.”
“That was a joke, he didn’t-” I started before cutting off abruptly as a thought popped into my head that made the pit fall out of my stomach.
“Lash,” I said slowly, “uh, you weren’t there when I- uh-”
“Humiliated yourself before Dresden?” Lasciel folded her hands in her lap, looking entirely too smug for an immortal being who probably flicked her bean to kids burning in a fire. “You forget I saw and felt all he did while I was within him. It was an admirable attempt to win him on your part, but perhaps a touch…. Overly enthusiastic.”
“Oh fuck off,” I muttered. I hugged my legs to my chest, humiliation and self loathing bitter as bile bubbling up in my chest just like it did every time I remembered that night. It didn’t matter that it had been years before, that Harry had never brought it up: the memory is still as vivid as though I were there right now, huddling naked and humiliated under the towel Harry had thrown over me.
In a testament to just how much I needed alone time without Lasciel, despite the humiliation bubbling up in me, the bare skin of my legs pimpled in goosebumps against the insides of my forearms at just the thought of Harry. I hadn’t really gotten started when Lasciel interrupted, but it had been a long month since she had popped into my head and I’d been able to, uh, take care of things without the mood immediately being killed at the thought of her watching. And that had left me a live wire, every sensation or merest provocation immediately heightened.
I mean, Jesus. Harry had been fixing his sink the other day, and when his forearms flexed tightening the pipe ring there was the very real possibility that I might have actually drooled.
Not metaphorically. Real drool. Over his forearms.
“You know what I should’ve done,” I muttered to no one in particular, perching my chin on the tops of my knees. “I should’ve gotten rid of you the minute you popped into my head.”
“And yet,” Lash said placidly, “we both know why you did not.”
I bit down on my lip. Because I did. Harry had told me once in passing the deal with Denarians: that once you’d picked up one of the coins the only way to ever fully rid yourself of the presence inside was to give it up of your own free will and set aside your power. Your magic. To give it up forever. And I couldn’t do that.
I just couldn’t.
It was why I hadn’t told Harry about Lasciel when she popped into my head while I waited in the car in front of the Raith mansion, fingers drumming the steering wheel helplessly as I knew Dresden was fighting for his life beneath the mansion. The mental walkie-talkie spell he and I used was open, a gentle thrum in the back of my mind, but he hadn’t sent anything through it since entering the mansion, and I was too afraid of distracting him to ask what was happening despite how desperately I wanted to know.
So I’d waited in the car, anxiety building, and suddenly the walkie-talkie didn’t just thrum; it squealed like an out of tune violin, a high and painful chord that made me clap my hands over my ears even though it wasn’t a physical sound.
The shriek seemed to last forever, but suddenly it was gone, only a high ringing left behind. And when I opened my eyes Lasciel had been there: a tall and striking woman in what looked like a toga studying me curiously from the passenger seat.
Well, she’d said with the audacity to sound like I was the puzzling part about this situation, that I did not expect.
The week after that had been a blur of panic and frantic attempts to push Lasciel to the back of my mind using every mental technique Harry had taught me. A full blown wizard like him might have had the mental discipline to accomplish it, but no matter what I tried Lasciel wouldn’t fade. I don’t know what I expected from her (fire? Brimstone? Cackling?), but Lasciel so far had been a suspiciously passive passenger. No offers of immortality or ultimate power or promises to rule the galaxy together with an iron fist.
But I knew. She was waiting for her chance. Biding her time.
So why couldn’t she have bided her time just an hour longer?
I heaved a breath. “Can you just go somewhere so I can fap in peace, Lash? Do you have any idea what a miracle it is that none of the Jawas are home right now and the house is empty?”
Lasciel tilts her head to the side, an amused smile flirting at the corner of her lips. “I have seen miracles from your god for true, my host. I do not think this is one.”
“Shows how much you know then.” I shook my head. “I’m not going to let you ruin this.”
“I could be of help.”
“Uh. I don’t really swing that way.”
Lasciel leaned her head back and forth as though weighing the possibility that she could unlock some secret sapphic streak in me, then waved a dismissive hand. “That was hardly my meaning. I may be only in your mind, my host, but I can shape your senses however you like. Show you anything you would like.”
I eyed her, way too many possibilities involving Harry’s lab flying through my mind, and suddenly all too aware of the way my nipples were hardening at the thought, the rings in them digging into my thighs. I’d gradually lost most of my piercings over the years as teenage rebellion faded to practicality, but those I’d always kept. The way Harry’s gaze grazed over them despite his best efforts every time I didn’t wear a bra, the way his jaw clenched in what I liked to imagine was him stopping himself from thinking about taking one into his mouth, was…
Well. It was simply too good to give up.
“I’ve got this handled,” I growled at Lasciel. “If I need help I have backup under my mattress.”
“You mean your crude, buzzing toys?” Lasciel gave me a pitying look. “Blunt, impersonal simulacrums are they not? They have none of the warmth and texture of the true thing, none of the unreplicable vitality.”
It was true, and I hated Lasciel for that. I might never have gotten to the actual P-in-V part of full on sex, but I knew what the real deal felt like. We humans might have gone to the moon and cracked the genome, but we still couldn’t make a dick that felt like the real thing. What was even more annoying was that over the last few years as my magic grew, I kept having to replace my vibrators as they each broke down with increasing and alarming regularity.
Guys, the struggle is real.
Lasciel raised an eyebrow, as though in thought. “I could help you perceive one as real if you liked.”
“What?”
Lasciel smiled faintly. “It is not only your sight I can shape. Ask, and I will make your buzzing toys feel real as though they were truly of flesh and blood.”
I stared at Lasciel, trying to figure out if she was serious, and realized with a nasty start that she was. “No.” I pinched the bridge of my nose. “No, no, no. That’s just too weird. I don’t need some disembodied dick flopping around like a fleshy Pringles can.”
Lasciel laughed, a light and pleasant sound. “Not even if it was his?”
“Whose?”
Lasciel rolled her eyes. “Come now, let us not play games. You and I both know where your thoughts turn to at times like these.”
“Queen and country?”
Lasciel clucked dismissively. “You forget I am a part of you, my host. I feel what you feel when you are near him.”
I gritted my teeth, not at all liking that revelation. “How would you even know what his dick looked like, weirdo?”
“I saw all he did while I was within him. Not just saw, but… felt.” Lascial gave me a placid smile. “You must only ask, and I can show you how he likes to be touched, every minute detail to make him shudder and gasp your name. Do you wish to hear it, my host? Feel his breath hot on your throat as he gasps your name real as you hear me now?”
I stared at Lasciel. A slow fire tingled through me as I did, up through my arms and legs and leaving me hot and flushed. I shivered, all too aware of how my nipples were poking against my thighs, how little I was actually wearing, how good it would feel to grind the heat between my legs against the mattress, to give in and slip my hand down and hear him finally, finally-
But it was more than that. So much more. To hear him say it, not grasshopper or padawan, but Molly. Molly .
I’d imagined it a humiliating amount of times: the scratch and timbre of his voice, the word easing some ache deep inside my chest, an unvoiced sob like a fist clenched tight long ago. Long before I’d become his apprentice by the yawning distance between my mother and me that I couldn’t ever seem to bridge no matter how hard I tried, by my own helplessness to block out the waves of emotions that that threatened to drag me under and drown me anew each day a power I didn’t understand continued to bubble up in me, by sitting with my hand clasping Rosie’s hand next to her hospital bed as she stared sightlessly at the roof, by what I’d done to her and Nelson and-
The fist had clenched long before I was Harry’s apprentice, but somehow it had only tightened over the years I had: when we slumped on the couch together with pizza or he ruffled my hair while calling me grasshopper or he gave me one of those wide lopsided grins of his. It would feel so good to hear him breathe my name like that. Would mean I wasn’t just the helpless girl he’d had to save. The dumb student hot for teacher. The lovestruck girl throwing herself at him.
“And you’d just do that out of the kindness of your heart, huh Lash?” I squeezed my eyes shut. “You wouldn’t want anything in return? Wouldn’t, I dunno, want me to help convince Harry to pick up your coin?”
Silence. Then. “I’ve never asked that of you.”
“Oh no, you’ve been really hands off.” I tried to laugh, but the sound was tired and hollow. “But c’mon. That’s the endgame, right? It took me a while to figure out why you haven’t tried to get me to touch your coin, but I did finally get there. You still want Harry to take you up. And it’ll be easier with his apprentice on your side. It starts here, just a tiny step, and then it’s another and another after that. And before I know it you’re helping me craft a better veil or teaching me how to slip into a bad guy’s mind, or hey, nudging Harry to pick up a totally not evil coin-”
“Shut up.”
The words cut the air like a knife, and my eyes flew open. Lasciel sat straight backed on my desk, but where before she was simply statuesque, now she was more : skin luminous, face carved of marble, the silhouette of her so stark and sharp against the wall of my room that it made the world around her swim like grainy sepia toned footage. Something twisted in her face, cold and ugly and hard. “It seems I mistook you. I thought you more than a vain and callow child, but in truth you are exactly that, shallow and self absorbed and thinking only of your own need to rut against anything that moves like a dog in heat. You know nothing of Dresden, and you know nothing of what I want for him or why. Do not presume that you do.”
And just like that she was gone.
I licked my lips, staring at where’d sat on my desk. It was an act of course: it had to be. Some kind of plan to make me think she wasn’t trying to use me. But no matter how much I rolled the idea around in my head, it just wouldn’t ring true. Whatever I’d just seen, whatever it meant, I couldn't shake the feeling that it had been real and ugly and something Lasciel hadn’t wanted me or anyone to see.
I blew out a breath and flopped onto my back, staring up at the ceiling of my room. Though my body was still flushed with heat, the ache between my legs still far too present, Lasciel had well and truly ruined the mood. To get off now would feel wrong. And not the hot wrong of how I pictured Harry doing me up against the wall of his lab sometimes. Just grimy and ick and… somehow a betrayal of him to think of him after all Lasciel had said.
I stared up at the ceiling, restless and hot and utterly, utterly frustrated at how unfair it was that the house was empty and I couldn’t take even the slightest advantage of it.