Dresden Files Reread - Fool Moon Chapter 20

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Harry wakes up (except not really) somewhere dark and smooth and featureless, except for a pool of light with no apparent source. This is where we meet Inner Harry for the first time. He looks just like regular Harry, except for the nicer, all-black clothes and the classic evil twin goatee. Despite the facial hair, Inner Harry makes it clear that he is not evil, he's just the subconscious, the instincts and intuition. And he says they need to talk. There's a bit of back and forth where Conscious Harry doesn't want to talk, and Inner Harry explains that he can't do the banter thing, and mostly what strikes me is how serious Inner Harry is. Like, Lirael-level serious. When Harry's being goal oriented, pragmatic, persistent, that's not any of it a strategy or a learned behavior - it's a core personality trait, instinctive. 

On "the banter thing": Inner Harry says he's not good at it, and he mostly doesn't try. This makes sense, and is displayed consistently in every appearance between here and Dead Beat. But when he reappears in Cold Days, his verbal-linguistic skills have taken a massive leap forward. He's suddenly using sarcasm, wordplay and complex metaphor, pop culture references. Heck, at one point he makes a joke in latin. Inconveniently, it's difficult to know if this is related to Bonea's existence or to the Winter Mantle. I'd guess the latter, going by the snowflake badge, but we can talk more about that when we actually get to Cold Days. 

Another small note on the beginning of this interaction - when Conscious Harry is trying to talk away, Inner Harry tells him he can't, because "no matter where you go, there you are". This, of course, is the same thing Uriel said at the end of Ghost Story when Harry asked for "fortune cookie wisdom". This is another thing we're gonna talk about more when we get to it, but it does suggest that in addition to the obvious implications - reassurance about the continuity of the self in the face of not only death but Mab, there may have been a layer of meaning there meant specifically for Inner Harry. 

The first order of business is for Inner Harry to reassure conscious Harry that what happened at the police station, what happened to Murphy, wasn't his fault. This despite the fact that they are both thoroughly convinced that Harry kept things from Murphy on this case, and if that were true it would be at least partly his fault, but he didn't. He kept things from Kim Delaney, but she'd not mentioned in this chapter at all. Even if we accept that he should have figured out Kim's connection to the case sooner, being wrong isn't the same thing as lying, and given that he didn't realize there was any connection until it was too late to do anything, I don't think he can be faulted for failing to volunteer "Oh, unrelatedly, I had a weird conversation with my kinda-apprentice, who is fucking around with greater circles". If I remember correctly, I don't think he's told Murphy about the Streetwolves at this point, or about being approached by Marcone, and he definitely should, at least if she ever starts acting reasonable enough to make conversation possible again, but neither of those things had any bearing on the specific chain of events that began with Murphy deciding to arrest a loup garou on the full moon, despite knowing how dangerous he was, and ended with the police station getting torn apart. Inner Harry's next point, that Conscious Harry needs to stop trying to protect Murphy, and give her close enough to the full pictures that she can start protecting herself, is considerably more valid, 'cause if she has context, rather than just pieces, her ability to figure stuff out on her own won't be so limited by what Harry does or doesn't realize is important. 

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The next point of discussion is why Harry doesn't trust Susan, and I notice that Inner Harry doesn't actually say they should trust her, or that he trusts her. He does, however, suggest that the basis for their mistrust is how things went down with Elaine. His mental illustration for this part is aged up a little from the last time they actually saw Elaine. I don't know if that's significant in some way I'm just not getting, of if Jim Butcher just hadn't yet settled on the age Harry and Elaine were at when things went down. Elaine's pentacle is described here as "identical" to Harry's, except for being less battered. I'm not gonna comment right now on The Controversial Thing - we'll save that for Summer Knight. At this point, of course, Harry is still fully convinced that Elaine betrayed him on purpose, and we get the first details of what actually happened there. Since the things with Elaine wearing only body paint, and DuMorne trying to get Harry to drink from a chalice of blood didn't happen in the flashbacks in Ghost Story, I'm assuming those were after h went back to the house, which we still haven't seen any part of. Inner Harry insists that Elaine is still alive, that they never found a second body, and that part of Harry being able to trust anyone is gonna have to involve consciously accepting that. There is plenty of reason to distrust Susan, because she routinely acts like she is only with Harry for the proximity to the supernatural, but I think I've belabored that sufficiently at this point. 

Inner Harry also wants to talk about Tera, and this is where things get a little weird. He points out that Conscious Harry hasn't confronted her about the secrets she's keeping, which is a little unfair - mostly he hasn't had time. He asks why Conscious Harry is trusting her, and points out that she's not human, and might be manipulating the Alphas. But looking at the trajectory of the conversation, the number of times he changes his position on Tera, I think this is a case of the subconscious needing to be indirect. Conscious Harry hasn't been trusting Tera; he keeps circling back to whether she betrayed MacFinn, whether she and MacFinn are targeting Harry, and by questioning Conscious Harry from this angle, Inner Harry is trying to maneuver him into noticing that he has plenty of reason to trust Tera, and no real reason not to besides "she's not human". And once we get some of that conscious-mind noise out of the way, he has enough room to introduce the thought that they haven't seen the real killer yet, at least not so as to pick them out from the background, and that in addition to the very real possibility that someone is targeting MacFinn over the Northwest Passage project, it could also be monster hunters or something, people who just hate him because he's a werewolf. 

The briefly discuss the known-but-unaddressed threats against Dresden, including Marcone, the Streetwolves, the cops, and the possibility that the former two might be working together. Then Inner Harry has a thought about Margaret, but he doesn't have a chance to say it before they get woken up. Harry's still in the car, and according to Tera, they're being followed. 

This was a weird one to talk about, and even weirder to find images for, since there is literally no scenery and technically nothing happens. It's literally two people in an empty room talking, and honestly I'm impressed that Jim Butcher managed to pull it off as well as he did. Stay tuned for our third Wheel of Time post (Chapter 1 - part 3) on Wednesday, and for Chapter 21 this coming weekend. Until then, be gay, do crimes, and read All The Things.