Chapter Text
Fuck. This was—well, bad was an extreme understatement. Harry and Marcone were meeting to discuss something of vital importance—Bob hadn’t really been paying attention to the specifics—and, as a show of faith, they had agreed to leave their weapons (and Hendricks) in their respective vehicles.
Bob had been brought along because, apparently, after the Incident a few weeks ago, Harry had decided that he wasn’t allowed to be left alone when there was a chance Harry’s landlady might drop by. Bob thought that was bullshit, personally, but he also wasn’t going to say no to an outing, even if he was still stuck in the skull and half-hidden inside a beaten-up old tote bag that proclaimed, I SURVIVED THE 1983 SUMMER READING PROGRAM.
Harry had taken steps to prepare for an ambush, of course; his self-preservation instincts may have needed serious work, but he knew better than to go to a high-stakes meeting without any contingency plans. Unfortunately, a significant number of said plans had gone down the drain when Mouse wandered off to go escort a lost kid home, Bob's protests falling on deaf ears. However, even with Mouse on standby, none of Harry's plans (well, Bob's plans, really) came close to capable of handling a threat like the fucking Leanansidhe. Bob watched through the Beetle’s side mirror as her hounds crept closer to Harry and Marcone, Lea herself watching from a distance.
The Handmaiden of Winter was a force to be reckoned with on a bad day. If Lea was actively picking fights with her aura blazing with power, then, at best, they were all fucked, and not in the fun way. At worst… Bob shuddered. Best not to think about it. Instead, he focused on figuring out how to get them all out of this mess, no matter how dubious their options may have been or how low their odds of survival were.
He had to do something. If the Leanansidhe abducted Harry and made good on her threat to turn him into one of her hounds… Bob didn’t know what he’d do, but he knew it wouldn’t be pretty. If Lea abducted Harry while Bob just sat by and watched, he. Well. He’d never forgive himself, to be perfectly honest, which was more than a little concerning, considering that, for millennia, Bob had maintained that free will, and the concept of forgiveness along with it, were utter bullshit; it was all just a web of lies invented by mortals to try to assuage the ridiculous amount of guilt they seemed to carry around—But he digressed.
Bob quickly narrowed down his plans to just two options. One option was to sit idly by, do nothing, and hope that Harry could manage to pull yet another victory out of his ass. The other… It was stupid. More than stupid, it was flat-out suicidal, but, hell, it just might work.
Fuck it. Even if Harry never let Bob leave his skull again or decided to—to lock him in a safe after this, so be it. Bob had had a good run of things, all things considered. If that was the price for making sure that both he and Harry (and, he supposed, the sexy mob boss as well) stayed in the frying pan and out of that particular fire (phenomenal rack or not, Bob knew better than to even contemplate sticking his metaphysical dick in the kind of crazy that Lea positively oozed, unlike some people), then, well. Better the devil Bob somewhat knew, at least. Being locked in a safe was nothing new to him, though the memories of his time spent in a lead-lined casket in France were still unpleasant at best.
The one snag in the plan was that, in order to execute it, Bob would have to leave his skull. Not knowing what would happen if his ridiculous idea actually worked wasn’t enough to stop him—it never had been—but risking the safety of his skull, the guarantee of somewhere safe to hide from the sun, that was another matter entirely. Leaving his skull without permission was not only theoretically impossible, but grounds for breaking the contract that made Bob’s skull the safe haven that it was.
Though, Harry had only told him to stay in the car. He hadn’t said anything about Bob staying inside his skull. Sure, ‘stay inside the skull unless given permission to do otherwise’ was a standing order, but if Bob could poke a hole in the magic keeping him in the skull or find the right weakness in the fabric of it, there was a chance he could wriggle out enough to at least turn the key and push the gas pedal.
“Come on, come on,” he hissed, carefully prodding at the borders between the metaphysical fabric of the wards that trapped him inside a gilded cage and the physical glyphs inscribed into his skull that turned it into a safe haven. There was a hole in the proverbial fence, Bob was sure of it, but it was hiding from him, and Bob was running out of time, damn it. He let a bit of his attention flick back to the outside world and shit, fuck, fils a puitan, Lea’s hound was harassing Harry and Marcone, and Lea herself had gotten within a half-dozen yards of them. No time for delicacy, time to act. He gathered up his reserves of power and rammed against the wards.
Nothing. The wards didn’t so much as twitch. Bob was stuck.
That was when Bob started to really panic. Not worry, not fret, but flat-out panic.
Panicking about anything other than his own potentially imminent demise was wholly new to Bob. Panic over the safety of others, in particular, was something he’d never experienced before, and Bob really wished it would fuck off right back from whence it came. How mortals lived like this was genuinely a mystery to him, because this? This was the worst. It had never popped up at any point during the millennia he’d lived before then, so why now? Why Harry in particular?
Bob had never cared about what happened to any of his masters before. It just wasn’t the way he was wired, not really. Hell, some of his masters he’d been glad to see go, but that was because they were egotistical assholes on a power trip who never let him out of the skull, not because of any pesky moral foibles.
Then Harry fucking Dresden just had to pull him out of the smoking wreckage of DuMorne’s house—not that Bob wasn’t grateful he hadn’t been left to smolder, but really, there ought to be some sort of hazard pay for ‘proximity to Dresden.’ Harry had been spectacularly weird about Bob since the day he’d taken ownership of Bob’s skull. Who looked at a spirit of intellect bound to them and treated it like a friend? Harry ‘Pain in the Ass’ Dresden, apparently. Some days, Bob swore he’d rather go back to being called ‘it’ and ‘spirit’ just so things wouldn’t be so ambiguous.
Harry was a mess of contradictory rules that confused Bob to no end, and that was before taking the specific peculiarities of his magical heritage (on both sides) into account. If Bob’s suspicions were anywhere close to accurate, Harry was a powder keg of epic proportions. Whether Harry knew it or not, he wasn’t just giving beings like Ivy and Bob nicknames. No, Harry was giving out new Names like they were condoms at Pride. He was such a force of—of whatever the hell Harry was that, just by sheer proximity, the fundamental definition and nature of Bob’s being, his Name, had changed enough that he was no longer the standard spirit of intellect he had once been. No, now ‘Bob’ was part of his Name, and it had a hell of a lot more power to it than Bob would like. To add insult to injury, the wizard’s moral compass was proving contagious.
(Bob, though he would never admit it to anyone, least of all himself, had much the same feelings about his new Name (and Harry, really) as a feral cat who’s being pet and firmly denying any enjoyment of said petting, hissing and carrying on about the situation despite purring like a motor the whole time.)
Though, unbeknownst to Bob, his new Name was about to make things very interesting; as in, "may you live in interesting times" interesting. The change to Bob’s name severely compromised the integrity of many of the heavier-duty wards keeping him in place (ha, can’t use a heptagonal array to contain a spirit with an eight syllable Name, suckers). Combined with the mass quantities of energy thrashing around as Bob drew on reserves that he didn’t even know he had out of sheer panic, the entire system was stretched to the breaking point. The next time Bob rammed up against the wards, instead of holding firm, they shredded like wet tissue paper.
Much to his surprise, Bob found himself not only out of his skull, but technically back inside an entirely different one, this one of his own making. Somehow, Bob had gathered enough excess energy to spontaneously manifest a body. On top of that, he was only about ninety-five percent certain it was a construct.
Bob would swear this day couldn’t get any weirder, but, knowing Harry, it very much could.
With that in mind, maybe it was time to embrace the chaos. Normally, Bob would have taken a little bit of time to figure out what in the fresh hell was going on, but there was no time for that. Lea was advancing on Harry, and fast.
Instead, Bob slid into the driver’s seat of the Blue Beetle without further ado. Harry had left the key in the ignition, thankfully, and the Beetle started with minimal protest on the first try. Bob buckled his seatbelt, then let out a hysterical little laugh at the inanity of it all. He was about to hit the Handmaiden of Winter with a car, and he’d buckled his seatbelt. If his plan succeeded, the Leanansidhe, Handmaiden of Winter, second in power only to Mab, was going to hunt him for sport. If his plan failed, she was still going to hunt him for sport, and it would probably end with her siccing The Hound Formerly Known as Harry on him.
Either way, Bob probably wasn’t going to survive this particular bout of temporary insanity.
“I am going to die,” Bob said, then let out another hysterical giggle, put the Beetle into first gear, and revved the engine. “But what a hell of a way to go!”