Chapter iii

Bob lifted his eyes for the first time in countless hours and saw the block of golden sunlight on the wall, shining through from the dirty window on the other side of the room. The entire night had gone by; Harry had not moved, and neither had he. The fever still burned, thankfully not rising but never falling either. Harry's breaths were shallow and sparse, the pulse in his throat slowly following suit.

Bob closed his eyes against the implications and swallowed the urge to weep for the first time in years. He reached out again, holding one hand on the top of Harry's head and curling the other around his shoulder in a semblance of touch. He slid his palm up and down the muscled arm like he could offer some comfort, when it reality he could barely feel it and if Harry could, it would give him nothing but chills.

He looked into Harry's white face when a tiny sound broke the silence, but he did not dare get his hopes up, and with good reason. Harry had been gasping out occasional wheezing breaths for the past two hours. It was getting more and more difficult for him to breathe.

In a flash, Bob imagined what would be in just a few more hours, sitting here on the cold, hard floor—the only thing he could feel in all the world—and watching Harry silently succumb to either dehydration or suffocation, whichever came first. And then more hours after that, his corpse lying on the floor in front of him until finally someone came in search of the infamous consulting wizard of Blackwater Street. (1)

Before he could fight off the image, Bob crumpled under the inevitable pain it would bring and a tiny sob ripped out of him. He covered his face with one hand as more quiet sobs escaped, but he kept one at the top of the sweaty dark head, because at least if he could feel the radiating heat he knew Harry was still alive.

He was torn between wanting to curl up in his skull and never come out again and wanting to scream and curse his own soul to hell. So often he complained about not being able to interact with the world; he had thought he was suffering then. There was nothing worse than this. This he could only compare to the moment he watched Winifred shot down with a perfectly aimed arrow.

The bell at the front door chimed.

Bob gasped, cutting off another soft sob, and he leapt to his feet all in the blink of an eye.

"Harry?" a woman's voice called out, sounding deliberately unamused, but he felt a rush of elated relief at recognizing it.

"Here!" he shouted as loudly as he could.

Then, abruptly he realized what he was doing. His gaze flickered instinctively to the skull on the shelf as he remembered the threats of the High Council. Reveal himself to any mortal of the human world, and he would be taken into their ownership. He wasn't fool enough to believe that was a state of protection, either. He imagined bare walls of some dusty vault, not seeing the sun or hearing anything but the voices of the guards until a hundred years had gone by and the Council deemed it "safe" to release him to a new owner.

He thought of his present owner and all his selfish thoughts vanished.

"Lieutenant, here, in the back room!"

When Murphy's shadow appeared, the relief swept over him like a wave, hitting him hard enough to overwhelm him for a moment.

The woman lieutenant stopped at the sight of him, and he was sure he must have looked eerie, a silhouetted figure in black standing in someone else's dark home.

"Who are you?" she questioned, not quite accusatory but certainly distrustful. "Is Dresden here?"

"Please," he came very close to pleading, not answering the first question at all (because, really, that was much too long a story), "he's here. He is very, very sick and you've got to get him to a hospital. Please, Lieutenant, I fear for his life."

It was then that her eyes must have adjusted to the shadows, because she gasped slightly as her gaze fell on the motionless form at Bob's feet. Even as she rushed toward him, however, she never took her attention fully away from Bob, noticeably keeping her hand at her side where her holster was.

When she finally bent down beside Harry, however, she apparently decided that Bob was not a threat. Giving Harry all her attention, she pressed two fingers against the man's throat to count his pulse and the other hand she put on his forehead.

"What happened?" she demanded.

When she received no answer, Murphy looked up impatiently to repeat her question, but the white-haired Englishman was gone.

She scanned all around the room, but there was no sign that there had ever been anyone at all. For the moment, she accounted it to yet another weird Dresden thing and focused on the emergency at hand, but logged the incident in her memory to bring up later (though she doubted she'd get any real answers from the unconscious "wizard" before her).

She whipped out out her cell phone, and as her authoritative voice echoed in the otherwise silent room, she never knew every word was heard by the smiling skull on the shelf.

"Hey, thanks for the ride back."

"Sure," Murphy replied, surprising him with a warm smile—and with not a hint of grouchiness in her voice, either. This had really been a close one.

He took in the familiar smell of old books and incense, never more glad to be back in his drafty old home. Even the stack of bills that had accumulated in his absence didn't seem so bad, especially since over half of the mail looked like notes from prospective clients.

"Hey, Harry."

He looked up from where he'd gotten distracted reading one of the notes, and found that that permanent solemnity was back in Murphy's expression as she stood in his front doorway.

"Yeah?"

"I need to ask you—when I found you the other day. . .well, the fact of the matter is I wouldn't have found you, if there hadn't been this man. He had white hair and blue eyes, I think, and he was wearing an old-fashioned-looking suit. He yelled from the back room. He was standing over you, but as soon as I looked away he was gone."

Harry set the mail down on the table and offered no explanation yet, allowing the silence to stretch on.

"Who was he, Harry?" she pressed, not falling for his game.

"How should I know?" he answered, not looking into her eyes and hoping the lie would suffice. "A client, maybe? I left the front door open."

"He called me 'Lieutenant.' He knew who I was."

"Murphy."

He turned a pleading gaze on her, one that he had given many times over the last few months. By now, she would know what it meant.

She took another moment, holding his gaze evenly as though debating on whether or not she should do what he wanted, but then she nodded slightly.

"All right, Harry," was all she said quietly, accepting in trust what he could not tell her. "Maybe there's an angel looking out for you."

Harry locked the front door behind her and turned to face the man he already sensed was there.

Bob's blue eyes were wide and open in a way they seldom were, and when he spoke his accent was soft.

"You were gone for so many days," he said. "I thought, perhaps—"

"I'm fine, Bob," he interrupted so that his friend wouldn't have to finish. "It was pneumonia, that's all."

"That's all?"

He winced. Wrong thing to say. It was always so hard to tell with Bob.

"Harry, you could have died. You nearly did!"

"But I didn't," he said with that childish smirk that had never failed to annoy the old ghost. "So that's that."

"No. No, that is not 'that.'"

Irritation started to rise in Harry's chest. Yes, he had nearly died—didn't that make him deserving of a little peace and quiet, five minutes to enjoy being back home after a week in an impersonal hospital before Bob started up again?

Before he could even think about voicing this, however, he saw the look in Bob's eyes, and suddenly he wished, not for the first time since childhood, that he could hug the cranky old spirit.

As it was, he stepped close enough to force Bob to look at him, and said, gently,

"Hey, I'm all right. See? Not a ghost."

He knocked on the solid table for emphasis. Blue eyes glared sidelong at him, but the glare was without heat.

"Harry, you must learn to take better care of yourself," Bob continued.

The infuriated accusation in his tone had faded into that familiar grumpy sort of concern—and something else, something new, that Harry couldn't quite decipher. It almost sounded sad, though why that should be, he had no idea; he was home, healthy, and well-rested.

"I do," he said with a haphazard shrug, and it was more a joke to lighten the mood than anything (because of course they both knew he certainly did not).

"No, Harry."

He froze where he'd barely taken a step around Bob toward the kitchen. There was definitely something very deeply wrong with that tone; it was one he'd never heard before, in all his years with this peculiar sorcerer. There was enough grief in those three little syllables to span whole lifetimes—and perhaps, he realized, that's exactly how much grief it was.

He met Bob's intense gaze with surprise, and he knew his expression was solemn enough to show that he was not going to make any more jokes. He stayed silent, allowing Bob to say whatever he needed.

"What you do requires risk, I know," Bob said, voice calm in comparison to the electric emotion in his eyes. "Every day, you work to protect innocents from the dangers of a cruel, dark realm of magic of which they know nothing. You face creatures worse than nightmares; you do it bravely, unselfishly, and you receive very little in return."

Harry could feel the shock coloring his cheeks. He could not recall the last time Bob had spoken with such candid approval about what he did. Oftentimes, it was just the opposite, with his complaining over what Harry should have done differently and why his life was going virtually nowhere. It was the role he had taken—Harry's reminder that the rent was due, that the bread was burning, that he was an ordinary man who needed ordinary things like a new pair of socks and human interaction. Never before had Bob become this…angel.

"You experience distrust and, at times, persecution from all sides, not to mention you have the Council breathing down the back of your neck at any given moment."

Harry gave a breathy chuckle at that and half-expected Morgan to pop up out of nowhere just on general principle.

"And, to top it all off, you must lie to your one ally constantly or you'll be imprisoned and she'll be marked as a threat by the Council, or worse—you'll both be executed according to the secrecy laws."

He hadn't even really thought that far in his life, to be honest. Apparently, Bob had been doing all the caring for the both of them.

"For all these things, I admire you."

Harry found himself at a loss as to how to respond. Bob didn't seem to expect it at all, because after allowing only a heartbeat of time for the words to sink in, he added,

"Please, Harry, there's so much more for me to be worrying about—buy yourself a coat. If this were ever to happen again, Murphy might not show up, and I'll be forced to watch something so completely pointless take you."

Suddenly, Harry felt like a moron and an asshole both at the same time. The whole time, from when he'd woken up in the hospital with fluids in his IVs to when he'd first seen Bob just now, he hadn't even thought about it—what it must have been like, to watch someone, anyone, slowly dying just a few feet away from a telephone and be unable to do anything.

He had never particularly pitied Bob for his plight. For one thing, Bob did not want pity; he wanted respect and a place in the world, so that's what Harry offered him. Now, however, Harry's heart was abruptly breaking for this ancient warlock who had more than paid for his sins, and would continue paying probably until the end of time, with a host of memories of loved ones long-buried without him.

And Harry was one of those loved ones. That much was obvious by the watery sheen that made Bob's eyes look like tiny crystal-clear pools.

He started to say something, to apologize at the very least, but nothing he said could change anything, past or future.

Instead, he moved with intent to the back room and picked up the skull from the shelf. Bob followed—or maybe disappeared and appeared again behind him, he could never be sure at this point.

"That consignment shop on the corner is open," he said, shoving the ornate skull into his backpack. "Want to walk with me? I could use your company. A week is too long."

Bob's expression softened at the peace offering. Harry never offered to take him anywhere, even when he complained about being cooped up all the time, for fear of a mortal discovering the secret of the skull and its incorporeal occupant.

Harry struggled not to grin at the hasty, controlled way Bob nodded.

"Good."

He pulled the backpack straps securely over his shoulders and let Bob step first over the threshold and into the pale light of the wintry afternoon.

END

(1) I couldn't find any mention of the name of the street where Harry lives, so I assume there's not an official one and just made up something that sounded wizardy.

Pneumonia: the most convenient sickfic sickness. I hope you enjoyed! I'll probably write more for this fandom. I'm still working on my book for now, though-and I'm taking up drawing and painting, so wish me luck with that too!