Chapter Four of 'A Reckless Frame of Mind'- Visiting Hours
Chapter One. Chapter Two. Chapter Three.
Chapter Four-Visiting Hours
“You’ll have some visitors today, Mr. Potter.” The blonde mediwitch who had brought him his file the day before yesterday, and seemed to have been permanently assigned to him, was valiantly trying to conceal her distaste under the kind of crooning tone she might have used to a kitten. “Mr. and Mrs. Granger-Weasley. Won’t that be nice?”
Harry glanced sideways at her. “It will,” he said.
As always happened with simple statements that were hard to twist into outright lies, the Cassandra Curse made her take it as sarcasm. Her eyes-they were as blue as Ron’s, Harry noted with a touch of sadness-narrowed, and she took a step towards his bed. “If I had tried to commit suicide for no good reason,” she hissed, “I would welcome the visit of friends. At least it would prove they hadn’t completely given up on me. Even if I deserved to be given up on.”
Harry restrained his temper and managed to do no more than smile at her. He could yell, of course, but what good would it do? None.
This is why I can’t depend on anyone else.
“You really did just do it for the attention, didn’t you?” the mediwitch persisted in the face of his silence. She buried her hands in her gray robes to try to hide them, but it was too late; Harry had already seen them shaking with rage. “Because you have to have the eyes of everyone in the wizarding world on you?”
Hello, Harry thought suddenly, and restrained himself from sitting up. This is new.
And he might be able to use it.
He had known the attendants at St. Mungo’s wouldn’t believe him when he said he didn’t want to die, but he had thought they would work to keep him locked up more securely than ever, and keep sharp edges and corners and wands away from him. But if their disbelief had taken the form of scorn, the idea that nothing was wrong with his head except his pathological need for people to gossip about him…
They might let him go.
If he could only seize this and use it!
“I don’t want that,” he said carefully. Truth, of course, but she would hear it as a direct lie. “And really, if that Psyche-Diver was any good, he would see that.” Truth again, but it could easily send the woman running to Malfoy for answers-and, of course, Malfoy would confirm her guess.
“You have no idea what Psyche-Diver Malfoy risks when he comes in contact with a mind like yours,” the woman said snidely.
“Tell me, then.”
But she heard sneering superiority in it, and turned away with only a cold notation over her shoulder of, “Your friends will be here to see you at one.” And then she touched the door and let herself out.
Harry let his head fall back onto the bed and closed his eyes. He’d already eaten breakfast, under the watchful scrutiny of an older matron, and he knew lunch would come precisely at noon. Presumably the invariable routine comforted some patients who had ended up here because of the chaos and stress in their lives.
Not me. My haven’s far away as yet.
He’d eat. Then he’d pretend to be asleep again. But he would be watching carefully, very carefully, when Ron and Hermione entered the room at one.
The mediwitches, Healers, and others who belonged to St. Mungo’s had the ability to pass in and out of the warded doors without breaking the spells. They’d have to lower that magic to let his friends inside, though.
Harry was very interested in seeing how they did it.
*
Draco Apparated in to the hospital that morning with a frown on his face, which hadn’t gone away when he fetched tea from the communal kitchen. He had spent the night looking up the newspaper articles on Potter from the past few years, especially those that concerned the cases he’d been on for the Auror Department.
There were…
A great many of them.
Yet he’d also had good reason for thinking the Daily Prophet didn’t often write Potter up. He knew he had. He didn’t randomly make up facts and defend them to himself. But whenever he tried to think too closely about the idea, to trace the thought process that had made him certain Potter’s activities weren’t often written up, a headache began to pound behind his eyes.
It only made him all the more sure that something was wrong, and all the more determined to figure it out. He hadn’t had a patient who intrigued him like Potter in a long time. The surface of most psychoses was unique, but he had been Diving long enough to recognize at a glance, most of the time, what those irrational thoughts would prove to be rooted in at last.
With Potter, he was not sure.
He detoured to Potter’s room to watch him through the invisible window, and met a mediwitch coming out. He thought her name was Laura, and he knew she didn’t like him, since she was one of those soft-hearted fools who thought insane people should be persuaded back to health. He started to sneer peremptorily, but was caught off-guard when she turned to him with a softened expression.
“I don’t know how you stand it, Psyche-Diver Malfoy,” she whispered, and that was another change. Most of the time, he received a cool Malfoy from her if he got any greeting at all. “Knowing that one of your patients tried to kill himself just to waste everyone’s time and make them fuss and mutter over him. When there are other people you could be helping!” She shook her head, blonde curls bouncing on her shoulders. “I only have to bring his files to him, and I can still hardly stand him.”
Draco felt his guard rise. If Potter was confessing that he had wanted to kill himself out of spite, then it seemed he had gone back to telling the truth. But why would he? “He told you this?”
“Oh, no, he’s still denying it and just saying he’s not suicidal, but it’s obvious enough from his behavior.” She put a hand on his arm. “There are-well, small things, you know, that we can do to make a patient’s life miserable here. I would ordinarily never suggest them, of course, but for someone who’s mentally healthy and a drain on our resources? Say the word.”
Draco thought for a long moment, eyes half-shut, watching Potter through the window. Potter had his eyes entirely closed, and appeared to be sleeping.
Conserving his strength, maybe.
And Draco’s mind had changed again. If Potter was now acting in such a manner as to convince everyone that, yes, he had just slit his wrists open for fun, then there must be something more behind that. Another lie, another reason that he wanted to turn suspicion away from his actions.
If everyone feels disgust towards him, what does that lead to? Petty torments at the hands of petty women like this, but what else?
Draco could not yet see Potter’s goal. But he thought he would have to start seeing it, and soon.
“Psyche-Diver?” the mediwitch persisted.
Draco might not know what Potter ultimately wanted, but he was opposed in principle to giving him anything he wanted, including contempt. He turned to the woman and let one eyebrow rise. “You would suggest harming any patient, even one this mad?” He leavened his disbelief with pity, and she flushed and abruptly found it hard to look him in the eye. “I will certainly remember your suggestion, Laura-“ A discreet search of her robes revealed her surname. “Fallowchilde. Whenever we must look for the source of shortened rations or a patient lying in his own waste, perhaps we will want to look into sacking you.”
He turned and strode on his way, ignoring her loud calls behind him that it had only been a joke. He felt happy enough to spread some of his irritability and confusion about, and make others suffer with him.
When he reached his office, he read the note that said Potter would have visitors at one, and smiled to himself grimly. Yes, he would want to observe that.
For now, though…
And again he pulled out memories of his session yesterday with Potter, but this time he used the ones of their conversation in the office rather than those that had come from his Dive. Perhaps there was something in Potter’s face or gestures or words he had missed, which he would catch if he viewed them from the outside.
*
“Mr. and Mrs. Granger-Weasley, to see Mr. Potter.”
Harry kept his eyes mostly shut and his muscles limp. He did, however, watch as the mediwitch guided Ron and Hermione in through the wards on his door.
He felt extraordinarily smug when he could see the wards part with a twang around them and reform like a cage of string. That was the usual procedure for wards on the remade Azkaban Prison, and if he had been thinking straight, he would have realized that those meant to keep in mad patients at St. Mungo’s couldn’t be too different. It was only the superficial differences in pattern that had confused him.
Don’t pay attention to superficialities, he scolded himself, and managed to sit up and smile at his best friends. Of course, the Cassandra Curse would twist their perception of it into a smirk. Harry was nearly used to it by now, and told himself he did not feel lonely when Hermione put an arm around Ron as if she needed the support.
“Hello, Harry,” she said softly. She paused, obviously trying to find a topic that he wouldn’t lie about when she knew full well there was none. Finally she continued, “How are you feeling?”
“Pretty damn good, actually,” said Harry, and Ron’s eyes narrowed.
“Just stop it,” he said.
Harry blinked. “Stop what?”
“Stop lying!” In a sudden blur of motion, Ron released his wife and raced across the stretch of floor that separated him and the bed, seizing Harry’s shoulders and shaking him so hard Harry felt his teeth cut into his tongue. “Tell us the truth, for once in your goddamn life! Tell us the truth!”
“Ron!” Hermione cried out in alarm, and Harry was certain she was pulling at Ron’s arms, but he couldn’t open his eyes to be sure. He was concentrating, grimly, on making sure that his wandless magic didn’t rise in response to the danger. He was magically stronger than anyone knew, but if a sudden blast of power shoved Ron away from him now, the observers who might or might not be watching through the invisible window would be sure to notice. And that could be deadly to Harry’s plans for escape, in which his wandless magic played an enormous part.
After a long moment when he thought Ron might come near choking him to death, he pulled back. Harry let out a soft breath of relief and opened his eyes.
Ron was sitting in front of him on a chair the mediwitch had left, tears in his eyes. Hermione drew up another seat, her gaze passing warily back and forth between Harry and her husband. Harry licked a trickle of blood from the corner of his mouth and said, “That wasn’t very nice, Ron.” They would hear mockery.
Sure enough, Ron sat up and dashed his tears away with a sudden motion. Harry sighed to himself. Even after a year, he hadn’t become used to how much the curse hurt his best friends, but that was another thing, like the shroud it cast over his memories for a Legilimens, which actually served him in this instance. Shove them as far away as they would consent to go, and they wouldn’t be so hurt when he vanished into the Muggle world.
*
Draco’s fingers had closed on his wand so hard that he was surprised he hadn’t snapped it. Perhaps anyone else watching through the window would have concentrated solely on the Weasel and his anger, but then, most other people who might have been in this position were fools.
Potter had been the one to watch. He had shut his eyes and grimaced, and his features had taken on a look that Draco knew well-one he’d seen on Severus’s when the man had to restrain his magic in the face of insults from lesser Death Eaters. Potter could have stopped his “friend” at any time.
He’d held back. He hadn’t.
What is he doing? Why is he doing it? Draco felt sure the curiosity would devour him alive if he did not find out soon.
“I just want my friend back,” Weasel was saying now, his voice lower and more determined than Draco had thought it could become. “The best mate who joked with me, who worked on Auror cases with me, who told me he was going to marry my sister.”
Well, Potter’s well out of that one, at least, Draco thought.
“Where did he go? What happened to him?” Weasel leaned forwards, and his Mudblood wife stirred uneasily, but Draco could have told her he wouldn’t try to assault Potter again. He thought he could get answers out of the man who hadn’t answered any question truthfully for more than a year just by pleading. Idiot. “I want you to tell me that, Harry. I want to understand why you started this.”
“Whatever I say,” Potter murmured, his voice as low and clear and stubborn as the Weasel’s, “you would just disbelieve it.”
Draco felt his lip curl, and saw the same frustration reflected, less attractively, in the flush on the Weasel’s face. If Potter returned non-answers in the face of genuine concern, it was no wonder that Draco’s threats had failed to move him.
“I told you about the Cassandra Curse,” Potter continued, and raised his hand, for a moment, to feel at the trickle of blood running from the corner of his mouth. He must have cut his tongue or his lips, Draco reasoned. Weasel looked filled with stupid remorse, but of course he didn’t apologize, for which Draco might have almost mustered some fellow-feeling. One didn’t say sorry to someone like Potter; it was impossible. “I showed you the book I found the information in. You told me-“
“It isn’t real, Harry!” Granger said then, her voice shrill and her face flushing in turn. “I’ve looked up all the other books, and they insist it’s just a legend! There are dozens of well-documented cases where wizards tried to use it, and they failed, even when they varied the incantation in a hundred subtle ways. Stop asking us to believe that you’re under that curse.” She suddenly softened, and tried to catch one of Potter’s hands. He moved it away with an adroitness Draco had to admire, but she only tried again, and succeeded this time. “Would it help if you talked to me alone? Ron’s upset about Ginny, but you can talk to just me if he bothers you.”
“I’m never going to be Ginny’s husband,” Potter said, with a tone of gentleness in his voice that Draco was sure he had only summoned because it would hurt his friends more. Really, it is hard to know which side to applaud in this conversation. “And I don’t think I’ll be your friend anymore, either. That’s just the way things worked out.”
“And see?” Granger raised her free hand in exasperation. “You want to be. I can hear the longing in your words, Harry. Tell the truth, and please, please recover and say you’ll never try to kill yourself again, and everything can go back to normal. We can pretend this idiocy of the last few months never happened. Please? Will you?” Her hand that held his was making little stroking motions, over the back of his wrist and up towards his fingers. “I promise you won’t regret it. We won’t ever taunt you about this, if we can just know why it happened.” Weasel nodded in support of his wife. “Please.”
Potter looked down at Granger’s hand holding his with an expression Draco couldn’t define. He ground his teeth, then forced himself to stop. But this was bringing him close to the kind of irrationality he expected of his patients. He knew Potter best, and would only know him better. He ought to realize immediately what that expression meant.
As the silence drew on, Granger closed her eyes and drew away from Harry with a long, slow huff of breath. “Fine,” she whispered, in a tone of uttermost defeat. “If you have to be that way, be that way, Harry.” She stood and tugged at Weasel’s shoulder. “Come on, Ron. There’s nothing we can do here.”
“Ginny misses you,” the Weasel told Potter, not moving from his seat. “She says that she wishes you hadn’t gone crazy, because there’s no one she would rather have for a husband. She hasn’t even been on a date since you started lying to us, do you realize that?”
I’m sure that’s just the temptation Potter needs to climb out of his madness, Draco thought, irritated. A red-haired fan sniffing up his crotch.
“Tell her I miss her, too, Ron,” Potter murmured.
Weasel let out an explosive breath and stood. “You could at least have sent her a letter saying you were through,” he said, and stomped out. Granger followed him, with one more pitiful look back towards Potter. The mediwitch let them out the door, but Draco didn’t watch them go. He gazed at Potter instead.
For a moment, an expression of the most desolate loneliness passed across his face. Then he took a deep breath, and screwed his eyes shut, and when he opened them again he just looked grim.
He must want something greater, to give up the company of his friends like that. What is it?
Draco had already cast a Disillusionment Charm on himself to avoid any nasty incidents with Weasel and the Mudblood when they emerged. As soon as he could be sure they were gone, he removed it and ducked into Potter’s room.
Like it or not, today was the day the bastard would let Draco see the first glimpse of his soul.
*
Harry straightened abruptly when Malfoy came into the room. He wondered if it was his imagination that a cold wind had come in with him, and decided that it was. He tightened his fingers on the edge of the bed and faced him. His best friends couldn’t give him the time of day anymore-he winced as his tongue sent another small jolt of pain back into his mouth-and his schoolboy rival thought he would succeed?
“Hullo, Malfoy,” he said, as amiably as he could. “Come to watch yourself be a failure once more?”
A slight narrowing of Malfoy’s eyes was the only indication that he took Harry’s insult seriously. He seated himself in the chair Ron had taken, and drew his wand. Harry rolled his eyes. “An impromptu session, then?” he asked, and watched in satisfaction as the curse flickered around the sides of Malfoy’s head. Yes, it would distort whatever he saw in Harry’s mind.
And he was welcome to look. Harry couldn’t imagine that his own soul would have been a very pleasant sight for anyone even unvarnished.
“Legilimens!” Malfoy said, and the sensation like a needle passing through Harry’s eye came a moment later. Harry shivered, but forced himself to sit and endure it. Only a few more days of this, instead of weeks, now that he had realized how similar the wards on the doors in St. Mungo’s were to the wards in Azkaban.
He had had to undo the wards in Azkaban himself, more times than he cared to count, particularly in this last year when he’d been assigned to numerous cases where the criminals nearly always ended up in the prison. He would want to wait and practice with these, until he was sure they would not trigger alarms when undone, but he could do it.
He rubbed the bandages on his wrists, and waited patiently for Malfoy to end his latest farce.
*
As before, Draco found himself carried into the midst of darkness. Ordinarily, his spell would have darted ahead of him and fetched more memories. But Draco was becoming steadily convinced that that wouldn’t work with Potter. Even his Pensieve study of their first session this morning, though it had convinced him more strongly than ever that something was wrong, had revealed nothing substantial. Potter’s eye-rolls and touching of his wrists and flickers of expression could mean too many things. What Draco needed was the knot that tied them together.
So he would have to begin the process that had given Psyche-Divers their professional name.
He closed his eyes for a long moment-even though, here, his eyes were mental, and what he saw with them shut or open, as long as no memories danced in front of him, was the same-and prepared himself. Then he raised his wand, or the imagined analogue of it. Even though he was within Potter’s mind, it was easier to think of himself as being in his own body. It strengthened the sense of his separation from his patient, and that was essential, or he could be pulled out of his own sanity and drowned in the overwhelming flood of another personality.
“Metempsychis meum,” he whispered.
The darkness around him wavered for a moment.
Then he began to move.
*
Harry sat up abruptly. Whatever Malfoy was doing, it didn’t feel anything like a normal Legilimency probe. He was used to something slimy darting about in his mind, seizing his memories and making him relive them at the same time as the Legilimens did.
But this…
This felt as if Malfoy were passing out of the surface of his mind and somewhere deeper, into a place where Harry hadn’t given him permission to go.
For the first time, he pushed with all his might, the way he had once done in his Occlumency lessons with Snape, doing his best to chase this intruder out of his mind.
*
Ah, yes, Potter was fighting back now. Draco wasn’t surprised. Even patients who didn’t care that another presence was in their minds-since they had their share of second, third, and other voices-disliked the sensation of someone else entering their soul.
But the spell had been spoken, and Draco’s own powerful magic and dedication to his job, and his curiosity in this case, carried him deeper and deeper. The darkness was rushing past him now, not simply parading. The spell had worked even better than usual.
Well, in most cases I’m not as desperate to catch a glimpse of the soul as I am with this man.
Harry, his mind amended a moment later, because one could not be this deep and still think of the patient in less than intimate terms. Draco spent a few moments wagering with himself what the predominant color of Harry’s soul would be. Probably red, for his temper and his devotion to courage and other Gryffindor virtues.
But when the first lights began to shimmer alongside him, they were blue and green. Draco smiled tightly as he spoke the second, simpler incantation that slowed his dive. Being wrong about this minor thing just made him all the more determined to learn what the fuck Harry was hiding.
And then he hovered in the midst of Harry’s soul, and, as usual, the beauty nearly struck him senseless for a few moments.
He turned in what looked like empty air, though it was really only the small gap he had created to maintain his own sanity, with the sides of a vast chasm stretching away endlessly to right and left. Draco had never been able to describe them accurately to anyone else who hadn’t seen them; the most he could say was that they resembled transparent panes of jeweled glass, shaped like graceful curves, laid overlapping on one another. When the colors were strident, as the red and gold of Draco’s crazier patients tended to be, the effect was blinding.
But Harry’s soul was the brilliant blue of an ocean surface near sunrise, and behind that glowed the gentle green shade of moss in a noontide forest. Blue and green, they rippled away into the distance, with only a touch of red and gold or black and purple here and there, small chips nearly lost in the great springtime cathedral.
Draco knew he would not be able to stay long. For one thing, there was no obvious source of the problem to focus on; for another, his own soul hurt with the sight of this overwhelming glory. He would have to grow used to it over repeated Dives.
He was already hungry for his next journey back, though. If Harry’s soul was so perfect on the surface, what lay beneath?
He began to swim.
*
Harry was concentrating so hard on pushing Malfoy out of his soul that he nearly didn’t sense the other flicker of motion in his mind, sliding like a long, lean snake down the path Malfoy had taken. He flared his eyes open, certain for a moment that a second Psyche-Diver had entered his room, but all he saw was Malfoy sitting in his chair and staring at him like a blank-faced doll, which was quite unnerving enough.
And then he realized what it must be. The Cassandra Curse prevented someone else from reading the truth even in his less extreme gestures. Surely it would act to prevent someone else from reading the truth in his soul, too; it had merely never had to reach so far before.
Harry fell back on his bed with a loud sigh of relief. Malfoy hadn’t proven any more immune to the curse than Ron and Hermione, yet.
It would be all right. He would survive unscathed, unnoticed.
And, with Malfoy so far from the surface of his mind, he could plan his escape from St. Mungo’s without Malfoy reading his thoughts.
He smiled, and half-closed his eyes, thinking of the few times he’d visited the fourth floor on his own, and what the staircases looked like that led from the Nereus Norby Ward to the place where they held his wand.
Chapter 5.