Ghost Story Prompts and meta

[dresden_kink_mods]

The Ghost Story spoiler period is expired; prompts, meta, discussion, etc. including Ghost Story spoilers can take place in the regular pages, but please consider your fellow fans, and continue to warn for spoilers. You can continue to use this post if you would like.


Change of plans, folks. Given the fact that Ghost Story spoilers are supposedly already floating around the web and the fact that there's an early limited release at Comic Con this weekend, we're going to start a Ghost Story specific post.

All GS related prompts, fills, discussion and meta go here so as to not spoil your fellow fans (at least the ones that don't want to be :D). All fills should follow posting guidelines, with the exception of GS meta going to the meta/discussion post. Questions? Ask the mods.

Flat view: http://dresden-kink.dreamwidth.org/2520.html?view=flat

In case it needs to be said. All comments to this post are read at the risk of spoilers.

Comments

Re: Fill: Faerie Tale, 2/?

[(Anonymous)]

...Aaaaand Chapter One!

As I walked, I brooded. I'd gotten good at brooding, over the past year-and-a-bit. I tucked my hands into my duster and my head down against the wind and settled in for a good long angst.

There were a whole host of shiny little problems with my new situation, first and foremost being the idea that I was going to have to kill John Marcone. Ensure his death. Whatever. The order itself wasn't particularly bothersome; frankly, on the scale of morally-despicable-orders-Mab-has-given it didn't even make the top twenty. Hell, in some people's opinions (like those of the entire Chicago PD), it might even be considered a public service. Any objections I'd once had to murdering vanilla mortals were long gone these days, vanished with the fire of Chichen Itza and the subsequent year and a half of ice and bloodshed. And Marcone wasn't even an innocent. If it were up to me, I'd be heading off to do my duty with a whistle and a smile.

But the thing was, this wasn't about me. Ever since the Red Court, I'd been a lot less blase about political consequences. There was right and wrong, yes (however feeble my own personal ties to the side of "right" might be these days) but there was also collateral damage, and killing Marcone would mean a metric ton of collateral damage. Marcone was a significant player not only in the supernatural community (where he was, honestly, a bit redundant, and getting more so every day the Formor raged around Chicago unchecked) but in the normal vanilla world as well: eliminate Marcone and all the organized, neatly-controlled crime in Chicago's underbelly would suddenly get a hell of a lot less organized and a whole lot less neat.

And then there was the method. What Mab was asking me to do was perfectly legal under the Accords, and should be no trouble to carry out; that wasn't the problem. The problem was that it was weird. I was being asked kill like a Faerie: lure Marcone into a deadly situation and leave things to resolve themselves, and that's not what the Winter Knight is for. The Winter Knight is there to provide all the ass-kicking violence that Faeries aren't legally capable of committing. Mab could have sent any number of lesser or greater Sidhe to do this. Why did she have to send me?

Not to mention that this was the first time she'd ever tried to settle a debt using my services before. I had no false modesty about my position in Court, or how well I did my job: I held an awful lot of Winter power, power that Mab wouldn't have given away lightly. I was none too well-connected with the Chicago scene these days – Mab usually issued my assignments down towards Central America or Africa, in deserts or tropics; warm places (I'd never been able to figure out if that was more about punishing Summer or me). But if Mab owed Marcone that big a favor, I should still have heard something.

Which meant either that this whole bizarre trade actually involved paying off a favor to someone else entirely, or that Mab herself really desperately wanted to get Marcone killed, and knew sending me to him was the only way to do it.

And where the hell was Mab getting her information, anyway? Information not about what Marcone was doing, but about what he was going to do in the immediate future?

And what did she mean when she said she'd been forced?

On the plus side, it was already 6AM, and my skin was still safely covering my entrails and all of my blood. That made this officially the best day I'd had in four months.

And I was in Chicago. Not the NeverNever - Chicago. This was Chicago air I was breathing: smog, smoke, the stench of open sewers, and all around me electric lights and signs and the sounds of real human people, talking and laughing and shouting right along with the car horns.

I threw my head back, open to the city and the sweet, sweet, natural sun, and felt my face twist into something that might, just, be the first real smile I'd given in years.

And then I turned left, glanced at a street sign to get my bearings, and headed off south down Fourteenth street toward one of Marcone's buildings. As long as I was allowed back into Chicago, there were some people I desperately wanted to see.