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Title: I hold him like a blanket up against my chin (And I need him like I need another pack of chewing gum)
Fandom: Kyle XY/Hard Core Logo/Dresden Files
Pairings: Joe/Billy, implied Harry/Bob, plus some Foss/Billy UST.
Rating: R (for language)
Word Count: 3274
Summary: Foss calls in an expert to help him deal with Joe's ghost.
Notes: Unbeta'd. This is an AU of blackcurrant's Kyle XY/HCL "Security" series. After she posted part 3, I was in so much suspense as to how Foss would deal with a supernatural threat that I came up with my own (silly) answer. Blackcurrant was kind enough to give me permission to write it. So this begins where In the Sheets, There Was a Man, Dancing Around to a Simple Rock n Roll Song leaves off.
Disclaimer: These characters aren't mine and I am making no money off this.

###

"Nicole? Is everything all right?"

"Everything's fine. I called around, and I think I may have found someone who can help your client."

Tom frowns. "I told you, he didn't react well when I suggested therapy."

"This isn't a therapist. Just--please keep an open mind when you talk to him. I know you haven't committed to an interpretation of what you're seeing, but unless you've started drinking again--"

"I haven't."

"Then I think you should trust your perceptions. Let me give you the number. Do you have a pen?"

###

It's a Chicago area code. The phone rings eighteen times before anyone picks up. "--Shut up, Bob." There's a rustling sound. "Sorry about that. This is Harry Dresden speaking."

"Hi. I was referred by a friend. She was a little vague about what exactly you do."

"I'm a wizard."

Tom almost hangs up the phone. But he's been seeing Joe now too, on and off. It doesn't frighten him particularly, but he thinks it means Joe is getting stronger. Billy is sure as hell getting weaker.

###

"It may be a hoax," Tom tells Billy. "But I've tracked down several of his previous clients. They seem satisfied with his work."

"Buy the ticket."

###

"It's obviously a classic love haunting," the pale British ghost says. "Dick kills himself for Tallent, but the connection between them is strong enough that he is able to find his way back from the sweet hereafter. Touching." He doesn't sound touched.

"I think I'm gonna puke," says Joe's ghost. The wound on the side of his head is bleeding again. Privately, it bugs Tom. He's seen plenty of gunshot wounds to the temple, and this blood--there's something wrong about the blood. The color, or consistency, or amount. He can't put his finger on it, but it doesn't look real. It looks like a special effect. Like something Joe is doing on purpose to upset Billy.

Joe gestures for Billy to light his cigarette. "Come on, Billiam, sometime this century. Who are these fags, anyway?" Tom steps forward, not sure what he's going to do. As it turns out, nothing. Billy leans over and lights the cigarette, more smoothly than Tom's seen him do anything in the last three months. Tom doesn't get how it's even possible when Joe can't touch anything. Bob wrinkles his nose at the smell.

"We won't know what it is for sure until I do a few tests." The wizard isn't what Tom expected. He doesn't know what he expected. Something flashy. Sequins, maybe, and ostentatious charisma. But Dresden looks...professional. Young, but already worn around the edges. Comfortable, unobtrusive clothing--unlike his dead friend, who's wearing a black velvet suit and a purple ascot. Even Dresden's clunky bracelet looks workmanlike, the leather soft and smooth, the designs in the brass half rubbed away.

Nothing showy about the way Dresden works, either. He sits cross-legged on the floor and unzips his army surplus duffel bag. From inside he draws out a crystal, six tea lights, a piece of chalk, and two jars: one of peanut butter and one of strawberry jam.

Joe laughs. "Where's the bread? I'm fucking starving." Billy cringes a little, but no one says anything. Joe's eyes narrow. "Hey, I'm talking to you! I know you can see me, you fuckers." But he's obviously curious to see what Dresden will do, too.

Muttering to himself in Latin, Dresden chalks a six-sided star on the floor and sets the tea lights at the points. He lights them, dips one end of the crystal in the peanut butter and the other in the jam, and then sets the crystal carefully in the center of the star. Tom is annoyed. He just waxed that floor. "Bob?" Dresden prompts.

The ghost--Tom has to stop thinking of him as "the ghost." It's not specific enough. Bob uses his finger to write a glowing inscription in the air. He steps back, reads over what he's written, and nods. Dresden recites it aloud.

"Hey!" Joe says, reacting to something Tom can't see. "Fuck you!" He flips them off and disappears--but only for a moment. When he pops back into view, looking startled and pissed off, there's a thick, glowing cord running between his chest and Billy's. Something like sinews and veins and audio cables and barbed wire all bundled together, but blue and translucent.

The blue glow makes Billy look even paler. "What the fuck is this shit?" He passes his hand through the cord once, twice, chops at it with the edge of his hand. He stares not at his own chest, but at Joe's.

Joe grins. "Pretty cool, huh?"

"I told you," Bob says smugly.

"And now we know you're right. As opposed to just guessing." Dresden makes a pass with one hand and smears the chalk with the other, and the cord fades out of sight.

"So what is a love haunting, exactly?" Tom demands, fed up with shop talk he doesn't understand. He didn't like the look of that cord, the way it grew into Billy's chest like tree roots. It didn't look safe, and it didn't look like something he could protect Billy from.

"It's more or less what Bob said earlier," Dresden says with an apologetic smile. "Joe and Billy share a strong enough connection that Joe was able to use it as a sort of tether, a guide back from death."

"Ha," Joe says. "I knew you didn't really want to break up the band."

"Yes I fucking did," Billy says. "Can't you saw through it or something?"

Dresden frowns. "No. It would kill you."

"What are our other options?" Tom asks.

"There's a simple ritual to rip it out, but simple doesn't mean easy." He looks at Billy. "The safest way is for you to do it yourself by moving on with your life. The connection should wither on its own."

Billy laughs. "Let's do the fucking ritual."

Dresden still looks troubled. "There can be permanent side effects."

"I don't care. I want him out of my fucking life."

Joe puts one hand in his pocket, swaggering a little. "The lady doth protest too much, me-fucking-thinks." His other hand is on his chest, wonderingly tracing strands of sweater.

"What kind of side effects?" Tom says.

"Have you had your wisdom teeth removed?" Bob asks. Tom nods. "It's like that. We're tearing the connection between them out by its roots."

"Can't be done," Joe says.

Dresden rubs at the stubble on his cheek. "It hurts like a bitch. And it doesn't always come out clean."

"If the roots have started to rot, they can take pieces of the jawbone with them. The wound can get infected."

Dresden rolls his eyes. "Okay Bob, now you're taking the metaphor too far."

"Billy, I don't know if this is such a smart idea," Tom says.

Billy lifts his chin and glares at Joe. "Do it."

"What happens if we do nothing?" Tom asks.

Bob purses his lips. "Was Billy always so thin?"

Joe cackles. "As a fucking rail."

"He's lost weight," Tom says.

Bob and Dresden exchange signficant glances. "If they can't reach some kind of equilibrium--" Dresden doesn't seem to want to finish the sentence.

"He's letting him take his life force," Bob says. "It won't end well, unless you consider dying ending well. Although I suppose in my case..."

Tom agrees to the ritual.

###

Tom hovers in the doorway, watching the two ghosts talk. Either Joe hasn't noticed, or he doesn't deign to acknowledge him.

"That traitorous fuck!" Joe tries to kick Billy's desk over, but his foot passes harmlessly through.

"Perhaps if you made some effort to be presentable." Bob eyes Joe with distaste. "I know in-the-moment-of-death is the default, but at your strength you should have better control. Of course it can be fun to spook one's friends, but after a certain point it's just tacky. Crimson blood running down both sides of your face? Really? This isn't a production of Titus Andronicus."

Joe folds his arms. "I think it's punk."

"Oh, spare me."

###

"What the fuck is he doing here?"

"He's my bodyguard, fuckface."

"What's he gonna do, punch the wall behind me if I get fresh?"

Tom raises his eyebrows. "Maybe."

"That I'd like to see."

"I'm not leaving you alone with him."

"You're just Princess Billy's knight in shining armor, aren't you? You don't have to keep trying to impress him like this. He already wants to fuck you."

Tom doesn't say anything.

"Shut the fuck up," Billy says tiredly. "And you wonder why I want you exorcised."

Joe laughs meanly. "Oh, I haven't told him anything he doesn't know. You're really fucking obvious when you flirt, you know that?"

Billy gives Joe a look of such seething hatred that Tom is startled. "You never fucking change, do you?"

"I think we should just go on like this," Joe says. "It works fine for Bob and Harry. I bet they'll tell us how they fuck if you ask politely."

"Christ, will you never take no for an answer!" Billy shouts. "Maybe it works for Bob and Harry because Bob hasn't sabotaged every single other connection Harry's ever tried to make since he was thirteen!"

Joe smirks. "I wouldn't bet on that."

"You think I don't know you were smoking around Billie? You gave her asthma attacks! Mary had to take her to the hospital. You think that's fucking funny?"

"You never wanted Billie and you know it."

"You don't know the first fucking thing about what I want."

"You're still such a fucking liar. I thought one day you'd outgrow it. How old are you now? Sixty-four?"

Billy licks the corner of his mouth, suddenly quiet. "Forty-eight."

"You don't want Billie, you didn't want Jenifur, and you didn't want to sign with fucking Seymour Stein either," Joe says with finality. "Come on, Billiam, did I ever give you anything but what you wanted?"

"What do I want, then?"

Joe spreads his arms and grins. "Me."

Billy shakes his head, looking tired. He is forty-eight. It's not all that old--Tom will be there himself in a couple of years--but with Joe standing next to him, the lines on his face look as subtly wrong as Joe's fake blood. "You are so full of it," he says. "I wanted all those things. I want lots of things. Then I make rational decisions that aren't just based on what I want. Like a fucking grown-up."

"Why?"

Billy covers his face with his hands. "I need a drink," he moans. Joe gently nudges him with his shoulder, and Billy leans into the touch. Their shoulders share a couple of inches of space.

###

Tom is doing a last-minute perimeter check before the ritual when his phone rings. It's Jessi. "Is everything okay?"

"Actually, Latnok tried to kill me today. I'm in the hospital."

It's like being dipped in acid. Everything burns and sizzles. "Wha--?"

"Jessi!" he hears, fuzzily, before Kyle takes the phone away from her. "She's lying," Kyle reassures him. "She's mad because you missed her performance." Shit, that was today.

Jessi grabs the phone back. "Well, they could have tried to kill me, and you wouldn't have--"

"Don't you ever do that again, do you hear me?" he yells.

"You're just like Brian," she says, and it's like he ran full-tilt into a glass door he didn't know was there. "You say you care about me, but you just want me to do what you want and shut up about what I want."

"Jessi. I wanted to be there. Can't you just tell me how it went?"

"You can't describe performance art," she says coldly.

He can hear Kyle, tinny and raising his voice. "It was a challenging but oddly captivating interweaving of poetry, acro dance, electrical engineering, stand-up comedy, body painting, and--"

"Shut up, Kyle."

What the hell is acro dance? "I just can't take time off right now. I have responsibilities."

"I thought I was your responsibility."

"Jessi, stop it."

"You'd better be at our graduation." She hangs up the phone. She didn't attach a threat, but the words sound ominous anyway. Tom can hear ice clinking into a glass, in the kitchen.

###

When Tom goes into the kitchen, Dresden is taking the glass out of Billy's hand. "You have to be sober for this to work," he says. "You have to feel it."

Billy nods, already looking numb. "When I got my wisdom teeth out, me and Joe were high on painkillers for days," he says. It's the first time Tom's ever heard him talk about Joe directly when Joe wasn't there. Where is Joe, anyway? Hiding, probably.

Dresden takes a container of Morton's salt out of the cabinet and leads them into the living room, where he's cleared a blank space of floor. He pours the salt in a perfect circle on the floor. "I'm going to trap Joe in here, and banish him. But look, the two of you are connected. I'm going to do the technical stuff, but you have to do the heavy lifting. You have to let him go. If you don't--"

"I can get a chest infection, I know."

"No, you can be banished too."

"Now wait a minute!" Tom breaks in. "You didn't say anything about that earlier."

Dresden regards him gravely. "It's not too late to back out."

"No," Billy says immediately.

"Mr. Foss, you can be his anchor. Hold onto him, try and keep him here. If I think Billy is in serious danger, I'll try to stop the ritual, but I may not be able to."

"I don't like this," Tom tells Billy.

Billy shrugs.

###

Dresden pours another circle around Billy. He tells Tom to stand just outside it, and to maintain contact. Tom puts his hand on Billy's shoulder. Dresden sets a skull on the floor, intricate designs carved into the bone. "Bob," he says, and flame darts out of the skull and turns into Bob. Tom would have thought he'd have a harder time dealing with all this mystical stuff, but it turns out it doesn't faze him much. He'll have to ask Dresden if there's an Idiot's Guide or something.

Billy is watching Joe's circle. His shoulder trembles a little under Tom's hand. Dresden starts to chant. Tom tenses, holding himself ready.

Joe pops into being inside the empty salt circle. He's wearing a backwards baseball cap, and his face is--not clean, but there's no blood. "What the fuck?" Joe puts out his hands, feeling at the air. He reacts as if there's an invisible wall surrounding him, rising up from the salt.

Billy giggles, high-pitched and nervous. "You look like a mime."

"What the fuck?" Joe sounds dangerous, now. "Billy. I am going to kill you."

Billy tilts back his head and gives the ceiling a bright, small, crazy smile. "Maybe."

"No," Tom says. "He's not. Let him go."

Joe's face contorts, and he punches the invisible wall, hard. "Fuck!" He punches it again, until his knuckles bleed. Tom half expects to see blood smeared in the air, but there isn't any. "Let me out of here. Billy, you fuck! Look at me while you're killing me, cuntface!"

Tom tightens his hand on Billy's shoulder. "You're already dead, Joe."

Dresden keeps chanting. Bob's face is watchful and quiet. He's Dresden's security, Tom realizes.

Joe throws himself against the wall. His body jars, but there's no sound of impact. Tom doesn't like that. "Billy! William James Boisy!"

"That's not my na--" Abruptly, Billy claws at his chest. "Fuck," he moans. "Oh shit, oh fuck, that hurts, motherfucker."

"Billy!" Joe sounds panicked now.

Tom puts his arm around Billy's shoulders, gripping his upper arm tight. Billy is shaking and sobbing curses, his face a mask of pain. Tom doesn't like how white he looks.

"Maybe you should stop," Bob tells Dresden.

Just then, Joe starts to fade. "It's working," Billy gasps, snot dripping down his bloodless face. "Keep going."

"It's not working," Bob says sharply. "He's taking you with him. You said you wanted him gone. Let him go."

"Billiam!" Joe is obviously still shouting, but it sounds as if it's coming from the other side of a sheet of glass.

Suddenly, Tom can feel something. A sucking sensation. It's coming from inside his ribcage but it's also, somehow, drawing him closer to Billy. "Billy!" he shouts. "Let him go!" He looks down at his feet. His boots are sliding slowly towards the salt circle.

"Stop," Bob tells Dresden, and the chanting ceases. Nothing happens. Tom's feet continue to slide. Billy's shoulders feel thinner, under his arm. "I've never seen anything like this," Bob says. "He's dragging in his anchor. Billy, are you sure you don't want to keep him after all?"

"If your foot crosses that circle and he goes, you'll go too," Dresden says. "Dammit, Bob, where's my oregano?"

"Stay with me!" Tom tells Billy. "You wanted your life back, remember?" He plants his feet, but his boots can't get a grip on the newly waxed floor. He's weakening, too. "What about Billie?" he says desperately. "Last week you promised you'd teach her to play the guitar!"

Billy looks at him, translucent around the edges and faintly incredulous. "It hurts."

Tom glances at Joe. He looks triumphant. Tom grits his teeth. "You stopped drinking. For years. You can do this."

Billy laughs. "What's the fucking point, Tom? Joe's been dead for twelve years and I'm still dying for a fucking drink." Tom's foot is a quarter of an inch from the circle. He promised Billy he would keep him safe.

He lets go. "I'm not dying with you."

"Ha!" Joe says, distantly.

Billy looks shocked. "You're my security, you fucker. If someone shoots at me, are you just gonna step out of the way?"

"No," Tom says honestly. He feels like something small is being ripped from his chest, too, the thickness of a piece of twine. It stings. He remembers guarding Billy while he slept. "This is different. You're doing this to yourself. You want to go with him, go by yourself."

Billy flickers for a moment. He still looks stunned, like he never thought about the reality of what was happening. Maybe he just assumed Tom would be there to guard him from Hell too. Billy looks at Joe, his lips pressed together, and then, very clearly, shuts something off.

Joe sees it. "Asshole." He smacks his hand against the invisible wall one last time, and then he turns his back on Billy and sits on the ground, his knees pulled to his chest. A trickle of blood slides past his ear and down his neck. It looks real this time. Then he vanishes. At the same time, Billy shudders back into solidity. Tom feels a rush of gratitude.

Billy gives them all a tired smile. "Thanks. I really appreciate it. Give me a second, okay?" As he turns away, the smile slides off his face as if it were never there. He heads for the kitchen, scattering Joe's empty circle with his feet. A few seconds later, Tom hears the freezer door opening.