#marcone

Harry describes the situation in the book as a no-lose situation for Marcone: either Harry successfully takes out the supernatural bad guy and Marcone no longer has to deal with it causing trouble (win for Marcone), or the supernatural bad guy takes out Harry, but Harry deals it significant damage first, making it easier for Marcone to take out, and Marcone can probably get his castle back! (Win for Marcone.)

Which. Okay. Sure. The first one is definitely a win for Marcone, and in the event of the second, I'm sure Marcone would appreciate that the bad guy is now easier to take out, and I don't doubt he would try to get the castle back. It's a good castle. Marcone certainly isn't letting anyone else buy it.

It's just.

If things had gone that way.

SPOIERS

Marcone said, a father's reproof in his tone. "Is that any way to talk to a business partner?"

I scowled. "I'm not your partner. I think you're scum. The worst criminal this city has. One of these days the cops will nail you, but until then, I don't have to put up with you here in my own office. Get out."

Okay, that's incredibly stupid.

OH BOY OH BOY!

Marcone is indeed a ton of fun, the kind of character that straddles the line between good-guy and bad-guy, because he’s frequently on the same side as the good guys, but he’s willing to go way further than they are to achieve his ends. He’s a type A control freak, ruthlessly pragmatic, and doesn’t allow himself a lot of illusions in terms of morality and culpability—the kind of guy who could do the math on the trolley problem and then shove you onto the tracks with a shrug of an apology. (And then Harry “agent of chaos” Dresden, who clings to his cherished illusions and who lies to himself like a rug, comes bulldozing into Marcone’s carefully-ordered world. Good times and character growth for everyone!)

SO LET’S GET SOME McFUCKIN’ RECS, SHALL WE? :D

Notes:

1) Not-appearing on this list are complete AUs—it’s just not my thing. I really enjoy canon AUs, where you change a variable and see how the story would have played out differently, but “what if they were power rangers?” etc is not my jam.

2) Marcone has been trying to recruit Harry since literally the first book in the series, and so a popular genre that emerged in Harry/Marcone fic is what I’ll call “Harry says yes”–that he’s finally in desperate enough straits to accept Marcone’s aid and protection, even knowing it’s got permanent, life-changing strings attached.

3) The book Changes (which was… book 12?) introduced some massive, well, changes to the series; up to that point it had been the adventures of Harry the lovably scruffy wizard-detective, monster-of-the-week style, with the baseline staying pretty much the same from book to book. (Enemy Mine reads like one of those books.) In Changes, however, Harry’s entire life goes up in flames and (under extreme duress) he agrees to serve in one of the faerie courts (and this is a very very bad thing). There is no going back to boys-adventures after that, and fics written pre- and post-Changes are telling very different stories.

4) These recommendations are only from the fics that I found back when I was active in the Dresden Files fandom 2011~2012. I’m sure more good ones have come out since, I just haven’t read them. And for the most part, this is only fics that are over 20k words long—there are tons of shorter fics that are also great fun, but they tend to blur together so they didn’t make the list.

So, in a good order for reading:

Fair’s Fair, Frenemy, Chacun à son goût, Please Hang Up And Try Again, by thehoyden (3k~8k) – Short, cute, funny little fics featuring Dresden and Marcone and their romcom dynamic. It was actually thehoyden’s fics that got me into Dresden Files fandom (before that, I’d read one book, out of order, and been unimpressed) and it’s not a coincidence that the early sequences in Enemy Mine are very similar; that’s what I was being influenced by when I started it.

Enemy Mine (124k) – (What, you thought I wasn’t going to rec my own fic? XD) So after thehoyden’s fics have whetted your appetite but left you craving MOAR to the story, enter Enemy Mine, which starts out like a hoyden fic but then grew a plot and turned into a full novel. Or as I summarized it on AO3: Harry gets invited on a date by everyone’s favorite mob boss, and then things get weird.

Near Miss by binz & shiplizard (42k) – A canon AU in which Marcone gets (forcibly) removed from the mob long before his rise to power, so he’s a humble mechanic when he meets Harry. Fun, slow burn, and they write an excellent Marcone-who-never-became-the-kingpin—how he can be not rich, not powerful, not polished, but somehow still very much the same man.

Not Even Silence in the Mountains by binz and shiplizard (112k) – Post-apocalyptic canon AU, hoowah! After the end of the world as they know it, Harry is still a wizard trying to protect people from the things that go bump in the night, and Marcone is still the de facto ruler of Chicago, just with more dirt and less law and order. Bittersweet, as post-apocalypticism inevitably is, but it’s about people rebuilding the world into one worth living in again.

The Spirit and the Letter by lightgetsin (20k) – post-Changes, Harry pisses off a faerie queen and gets himself turned into a woman for a while. (And this is body dysphoria, not comedy.) lightgetsin is an excellent writer at diving deep into the emotional landscape of characters who are not in a good place, and post-Changes Harry is definitely that. The sequels are much less fraught, as Harry gets better (in more ways than one) and it explores how they learn to live with each other.

Choices by kethrua (28k) – One of the darker “Harry says yes” fics, and holy cats, is it good. Intelligent and nuanced explorations of dubious consent are my jam, and this fic does dub-con as only magic can. Watch Harry and Marcone both break their own hearts trying to figure out how to make ‘yes’ mean anything when Harry literally, physically cannot say no to him.

Cross by lightgetsin (33k) – Set between Changes and Ghost Story, after Dresden dies (canon) and Marcone does not cope with it well. I recommend reading this one after you’ve read a number of other fics, because Marcone’s characterization is kind of atypical in this one—he’s not his usual cool and clear-headed self, he is low-key falling the fuck apart. Powerful, sometimes uncomfortable reading, because she does not write a sanitized Marcone.

other things the road to hell is paved with by LuciaZephyr (137k) – Another “Harry says yes” fic, basically an AU running parallel to canon that explores how everything would have shaken out differently if Marcone had succeeded in getting Harry on the hook in Fool Moon. An excellent, meaty slow burn that gives plenty of space to explore the ramifications of that choice and develop that relationship.

*

And I can’t shake the feeling there are some significant ones I missed, but when I was in Dresden Files fandom it was on LJ, and that was all I could find on AO3.

Omg no please, call him a snack he will get all blushy and fumble over his words.

@moxy-fruitbat