Eeeeegads, what the hell am I doing?! I shouldn't be doing this! I signed up for NaNoWriMo to push myself on my novel Guardians of Shangri La (check my author page if you're interested), I sure as hell shouldn't be writing fanfic! But my muse has latched onto this idea and *refuses* to let it go until I get something down on paper, so here goes.

This story is a crossover between the CW show "Arrow" and the amazing novels of "The Dresden Files" by Jim Butcher. And as any "Dresden" fan knows, that means ground rules must be set, and set now.

ARROW TIMELINE: This story starts in the middle of the big final battle sequence in "League of Assassins" and enters into my own twisted version of the Twilight Zone from there. So if you're not totally caught up on Season 2 of Arrow, you might want to hold off on reading this.

DRESDEN CANON/TIMELINE: For fans out there not familiar with the combined collective amazingness of the source material I'm drawing from, Paul Blackthorne is the reason this story came into being in the first place. Blame him for being so darn fascinating to watch...anyway, that also means a level of taking the timeline of the show and the books, throwing them into a blender and hitting frappé. From the TV show, I am only taking two things: the physical appearance of both Dresden and Murphy. Sorry, I saw the show before reading the books, so even though the books describe them *very* differently, that's how I see them. Besides, it's the only way this story works. Otherwise, assume all Dresden novel cannon is fair game up to the end of "Changes" (which I'm slightly changing). "Ghost Story" and "Cold Days" don't exist for the purposes of this story. You'll understand why later. Also assume that all the events in my Dresden headcanon happened roughly twenty-five years prior to "Arrow". I'm sorry, you want to complain?! SORRY, I CAN'T HEAR YOU OVER THE NOISE OF THE BLENDER!

OTHER DISCLAIMER-Y BITS: Anyone who assumes I'm claiming any ownership of anything they recognize from the novels or TV shouldn't be reading *fan* fiction to begin with. There will be slightly more swearing than my regular fans might pick up on in my stories, but that's only because Harry Dresden, in the hell I'm going to put him through, would most definitely swear. I really have committed to NaNoWriMo, and as such my writing priority is my novel. This is just junk food to keep my muse happy so she'll keep churning out the word count. However, as such, that also means that updates to this story may be irregular and infrequent until NaNoWriMo is over on 12/1...unless I get a lot of positive comments encouraging me to keep going...hint, hint *wink*.

Anyway, enough warnings, let the adventure begin!

#

Officer Quentin Lance hadn't felt so helpless in a long time. He held onto his gun like a lifeline, hoping against all hope that he would find some way to get a shot off and disable one of these...master assassins so that they might somehow start to be evenly matched in this fight.

Evenly matched? thought Lance. Right...The three men they were fighting would make ninjas look like teddy bears. Sara, to Lance's amazement, looked like she was holding her own against the one she was fighting, and one of Sara's traps had one of the ninjas dangling overhead by his ankle...but that advantage wouldn't last long, and Lance knew that he was rapidly running out of places to duck and cover.

"You should be more mindful of your surroundings," he heard Sara say to her opponent. Those were the last words she was able to get out, though, as the assassin she was fighting got the drop on her, caned her across the back of her leg with his sword and was now holding the blade of the weapon to her throat.

It was as if some sort of primal switch has flipped deep in the recesses of Lance's mind. A thousand memories flooded his thoughts in the blink of an eye. Getting the news of the Queen's Gambit's sinking, and finding out that Sara had been on the boat. Her funeral. Crying in meeting after meeting. Losing his grief in a bottle.

And, superimposed over all of those images, as it always would be...the image of a precious, dark-haired little girl at a Mayan temple...seconds away from being sacrificed.

It simply couldn't happen. He had thought he had lost Sara once, and it almost killed him. There was no way, in all the circles of a personal hell he could devise for himself...there was no way that he was *ever* going to lose one of his daughters again.

Not when he had the power to stop it.

The power came to him in small drops at first, weak and unstable from disuse, but he poured all of the fuel of a father's instinctive fear and rage into it, and the floodgates opened. "Fuego!" he yelled. Sparks flew around him as soulfire and uncontrolled magical energy poured from his hands.

The fact that Sara was already kneeling on the ground probably saved her life; everything in the room above the level of Lance's hands was quickly being incinerated in a merciless inferno of soulfire...especially the three assassins, whose bodies were reduced to piles of bone and ash in a matter of seconds.

It was *all* over in less than a minute. Sara pushed herself unsteadily to her feet, coughing as she faced the smoke and heat of the inferno now blazing around her. There was only one thing that she could think about. "Dad!" she yelled, hoping that her father would answer her back and help her out of there. No such luck; her father had collapsed where he stood, in the epicenter of the firestorm. The firestorm that he had created...

An arrow flew over her head, lodging itself in a wooden support pylon. Oliver flew into the room on a zip line, dropping into the room less than a foot from Sara's position. "Sara!" he yelled out over the roaring firestorm around them. "Are you okay?! I saw the explosion..."

Sara cut him off, her mind still focused on the only objective left to her. "My dad collapsed," she told him. "Help me get him out of here..."

Oliver nodded and picked up the older man in a fireman's carry. "What happened?" he asked Sara as they ran for the stairs.

"No idea," she replied, stealing one last glance back at her father before focusing on their escape. I wish to hell I had one, though...

#

Quentin Lance woke up on a sofa in an unfamiliar apartment with a dry mouth and a pounding headache. By the light of the full moon pouring through the window, he tried to get a bearing on his surroundings...and failed. He had no clue where the hell he was. He did, however, know exactly *why* he was feeling the way he was. And everything that meant, both for his future and the future of his family.

"Dad?"

Lance looked up to find his daughter standing in the entrance to an opened, darkened doorway that, he presumed, led to someone's bedroom. "Hey pumpkin," he replied, not surprised to hear how raspy and weak his voice sounded. "You okay?"

"I'll be fine," she told him, determined to not let the conversation focus on her injuries. Not when she had so many questions that needed answers. "Are *you* okay?"

"Water," he replied weakly.

Sara crossed the darkened living room to a kitchen alcove, pulled a glass from the cupboard and filled it with water, then brought it to Lance and placed it in his hand before sitting down on the small patch of floor next to the couch.

Lance downed the glass of water in one long gulp, then Sara took the empty glass from his hand and put it down on the nearby coffee table. "Thanks," he told Sara, his voice growing in strength with every passing moment.

"You're welcome," said Sara.

"Where are we?" Lance asked his daughter after trying and failing to place his surroundings as belonging to any location he was already familiar with.

"We're at Felicity's place," Sara replied. "After...everything that happened...I figured a hospital might not be the best place for *either* of us to go..."

Lance pushed himself up until he was sitting upright, wincing as his overtaxed muscles protested every movement. "You're probably right about that," he admitted. "Does she know we're here? Is that...is that why we're sitting in the dark?"

Sara shook her head. "She knows. But for some reason she hasn't been able to to get a single light to turn on since we've been here. She went out to get some lightbulbs and find out if it's just her place or some sort of blackout..."

"It's just here," Lance declared with solemn confidence. "Everything will go back to normal once I...once I leave. But she shouldn't try to turn on any of those fancy computers of hers. If she wants to keep them, that is."

Sara frowned in confusion, unsure as to why her father would be so sure of the cause of Felicity's electrical problems...she then swallowed nervously as she realized that his confidence must have something to do with the 'elephant in the room.' "Dad..." she asked cautiously, unsure of exactly how to proceed, "what the hell happened back there?"

Lance cupped Sara's cheek in his hand; his expression overflowed with all the love he felt for his daughter...and all the regret he felt for the pain he knew he was about to cause her. "I couldn't let him hurt you, sweetheart," he admitted, choking back tears as he spoke. "I couldn't lose you again."

Sara turned her cheek to kiss her father's hand, out of respect for the love in his words. "That's not what I'm asking, and you know it."

"I know," Lance admitted with a weary sigh. He turned away from his daughter, staring out the window at the full moon as he tried to form the words to a conversation he had hoped and prayed he would never, ever have to have. "Sweetheart...you're not the only one in this family who carries the burden of big secrets." He turned to face the confusion he expected to see in his daughter's expression, and traced the length of her arms until he was able to take her hands into his own. "Sara...my real name isn't Quentin Lance. It's an alias I made up about a year before I met your mother."

That was probably the last thing that Sara had expected to hear. "Dad?" she asked, concern and fear slowly creeping into her shaking voice.

"My name...my real name is Harry Dresden, sweetheart," Lance admitted. "I'm a wizard."

The word seemed to hit Sara like an emotional sucker punch. Her jaw dropped open as she stared at her father in disbelief. She wished she could discount her father's words as the rantings of a crazy man or evidence that he had hit his head when he fell. But she couldn't. Because when she weighed her father's admission against the evidence of what she had seen, it was the only thing that made any *sense*. "A *wizard*?" she repeated.

Harry nodded. "I stopped practicing magic because I didn't want to be a part of that world anymore. The price..." his voice trailed off for a moment as memories of his old life forced him to choke back a sob. "The price for being a part of that world was just too damn high. So I quit. Cold turkey. Changed my identity so no one from my old life could find me and moved to Starling City. I wasn't sure if I could even practice magic anymore," Harry admitted with a half-hearted attempt at a chuckle.

"Until tonight," said Sara.

Harry nodded solemnly. "Unfortunately, sweetheart, that little fireworks display I set off back at the tower now means that I'm back on the magical radar in a big way."

"What does that mean?" asked Sara.

Harry sighed again. "I was a massive magnet for trouble in my old life, honey. And now that twenty-five years of that trouble has built up in my absence, I'm guessing the shit-storm that's headed our way is going to make the League of Assassins look like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles."

#

Comments, as always, most welcome!