Apple Pie and Enchiladas: The Interlude
Part One: One Flew East, One Flew West, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Lucy Montero sighed, placed her hands on her knees, and raised herself out of her chair, where she had been sitting next to Ann Longbottom for the past hour. Ann stared into the distance with a blank curiosity, one hand absentmindedly stroking the kitten curled up on the blanket across her lap. The remains of a daisy she had been plucking lay forgotten in her other hand as she intently watched birds circling overhead.
"Ann, I think its time we go inside, would you like to go inside?"
Ann didn't respond. Lucy bit her lip, took a breath, and placed a hand on Ann's shoulder, turning the woman so she had to look at the young girl. Almost immediately after the contact Ann began shrink away, and Lucy could feel the beginnings of the wild thrashings that had rewarded her with a lump on the head the last time she attempted this.
But this time she was ready. She immediately used the physical contact to follow the familiar path into Ann's subconscious. She didn't stray from the carefully laid traces of her own energy, Ann's mind was a swirling void of terror, confusion, loneliness and anger, and a stray `step' at best meant an hour or more trying to find her way back to herself, at worst she'd never get out and end up as catonic as half the third floor of St. Mungo's psychiatric ward. Finding her way, she located the site of most intense activity, and focused her energy on sending a soothing presence. She could see a deep ruby red flow of energy penetrate the greenish gray cloud that was causing the tantrum, and dissipate it from the inside out. Once she was satisfied, she carefully pulled herself back out and looked down at Ann. She was calm, and as lucid as Lucy had ever seen her.
With her hand still on the older woman's shoulder, Lucy repeated, "Inside, Ann?"
Ann nodded clumsily, and Lucy wheeled her back to the Longbottom's room herself, rather than activating the `return' spell on the wheelchair. She found that the more time she spent with the couple in their new quarters, the better they worked with her in treatment.
An orderly was waiting in the hall outside Ann's room to take her down to lunch.
"You look nice today Ann. Why don't we fix you up a little and get some food? Henry's waiting there already."
The sturdy looking woman waited as Ann got to her feet, and held the door open to let her into the room. After Ann had entered she turned back.
"If I try to brush her hair today, is she going to bite?"
Lucy shook her head. "I don't think so, I just got her calmed. Come around from in front of her though, she tends to get more defensive faster when she isn't expecting it."
The woman nodded. "Are you seeing Henry after lunch?"
Lucy shook her head, "Before dinner, I have a meeting with Dr. Fizzit after lunch to discuss getting his dosage changed."
The orderly raised her eyebrows. The Longbottoms may be Lucy's case, but she gave her the look of one who had seen worlds more than she and knew it. "You think that's wise? They give him enough stuff as it is."
"I meant having it reduced."
"You're not serious? Henry Longbottom took three orderlies at least to control him before they upped his dosage."
"And that was years ago. Suppressing his behavior magically for that long can't be good. Besides, if I am ever going to talk to the real Henry it won't be through a fog of complacency spells. There's a reason Ann's been coming along with more visible progress, she never had that degree of medication."
"She never tried to throw her doctor out the window either."
Lucy sighed. "It was only four months after the attack and they were trying to take blood samples, I do read these files you know. Any animal that feels caged and trapped is going to lash out violently, and they were all so noisy and pushy it was no wonder Henry snapped. In his mind the doctors were the ones who had caused him the pain and he was angry. It didn't help that you people had him all tied up either."
"So you're telling me that anyone who was put in that position would behave the same way."
"More or less. It's not Henry's fault he had the strength to do damage, it was a natural reaction."
"Really? And what did you do to the last person who caused you pain? Toss them off a building?"
Lucy grinned and shook her head, "No."
The orderly turned to walk back into the room. "I thought not, bunch of rub-"
"I tried to crack open his skull with a cauldron."
Lucy left the orderly staring at her in a mixture of disbelief and wariness as she headed off down the corridor to grab a bite before her meeting.
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"Better now?"
Henry nodded and Lucy handed him a handkerchief, he clumsily dried his tears and blew his nose before trying to put it into his pillow case. Lucy sighed and removed it. She reached over on the bedside table and handed him a glass of water, which he drained, and again tried to put into the pillowcase. Lucy stopped him this time before he did it, shaking her head and placing it back on the table.
"No."
She helped straighten the sheets and tangled blankets and sat down again cross legged on the bed. She took Henry's wrists in hers, and began to quiet her breathing.
It had been over a week since Henry's medication had been cut, at Lucy's request, to a quarter of its usual amount. As a result she was now responsible for controlling his outbreaks, soothing terrified orderlies, and the most recent development, calming him after nightmares, which he had several of every night. The hospital had moved her from the temporary staff dormitories in the nearby building to a spare room on the ward, which was very eerie by itself.
However, Lucy thought the nightmares were a good development, and well worth her lost sleep. It was a sign that Henry could still connect to his memories and conscious, thinking mind, that the Henry Longbottom that had married Ann and named his son after his father was still active in there, just lost.
It had meant extensive and careful exploration of Henry's mind, following signs of terror and anxiety to locate the source of the nightmares, and begin to chip away at it. Hopefully, once it was worn down thin enough Henry would pull past the fears on his own and start to come around. What Lucy was helping with and what Henry couldn't do by himself was erode a wall of fear and apprehension that had built upon itself for over a decade until it was, metaphorically speaking, a wall 200 feet thick. If the real Henry was behind there, no one would have been able to hear him screaming.
Although that was reassuring, it was still dangerous. For one thing, a mind in that much chaos was easy to get lost in, and could quickly become a prison if Lucy lost touch with what was real and what was Henry's dream.
A more obvious problem was that Henry Longbottom was well over six feet tall and built like a Sherman Tank. He was lean, but even after all the years of captivity he remained incredibly strong and muscular. Despite worries about handling a stronger patient, once the doctors had discovered that working out helped lessen Henry's aggression, it had become a part of his daily routine.
Looking at him Lucy continued to be amazed at how Henry and Ann could ever have produced a son like Neville. Physically the boy looked like his mother, the same bone structure, the same eyes and hair, although there were lines in his face that reminded her of his father. She speculated over whom he acted like more, but she would never find that out until she got through Henry's nightmares.
Which were complex and frustrating. Now, more than ever she was convinced that they had been the cause of Henry's violent behavior during his first months at the hospital. She'd read about it in his records, Neville's grandmother had brought the little boy regularly, but it wasn't till almost a year later when Henry was up to 10 constraining spells a day that they let his son see him, and by then he was so out of it you could have dyed the walls purple and he wouldn't notice. Lucy shook her head, poor Neville.
She wished she had Rosa's book that held her case notes, but she was reasonably confidant that without the spells lessening his mental activity, Henry was becoming trapped in a cycle within his mind. Somehow the energy paths of reality and dreams had crossed, and when something triggered either or them, it set the other one off. So a nightmare could wake Henry and he would not know the difference between Lucy and the tormentor in his mind; likewise, any physical stress, like being strapped down for medical procedures, or even the initial jump that comes from being taken by surprise, could call up the terrors and nightmares in his brain, and since those dream paths crisscrossed with reality, triggering a dream could throw him into the spiral of not knowing the difference between his mind and reality.
Her first task then, was to uncross those paths. Her second was to deal with the source, the festering knot of terror that was the center of Henry's world had to be dissipated.
She didn't have the energy for either now, but once she got him back to sleep and headed for her room, Lucy felt better than she had in weeks. Her job was to try and re-establish the normal energy cycles and flows in Henry and Ann's minds. Now, the paths within the brain were incredibly complex, and she had been going slow because she was inexperienced and didn't know how everything worked. But she did have the healer instinct, she had known something was wrong, now she knew part of what that was, now she could fix it. And hopefully, when she did, the Longbottom's minds would begin to heal themselves.
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"How long has he been in there?"
"Three hours."
Silence.
"That's a record, you know. When he was younger we were lucky if he could stay thirty minutes. I mean, that young, trying to get your parents to recognized you."
"Well, his grandmother has been putting up pictures of him on every available surface in there..."
"Did you-"
"Explain to him? Yes, as well as I could, anyway. I didn't really need to do much. That boy may not be able to tell eel eyes from newt testicles, but if anyone knows anything about patience..."
"It's him. I guess he has to."
"It's his grandmother I'm a little more worried about. She was so happy when Dumbledore told her... and no matter what I said, I just don't think she really fully understands..."
"Neville will make sure she does. He can't remember his socks, but he does take surprisingly good care of her."
"She's all he's got."
"You should have seen his parents, I was a first year when they were in fifth. His father-"
Lucy and the orderly, Jerome, stopped talking as the door to the Longbottoms' room opened and Neville stepped out. As was usual after a visit to his parents, his face was unreadable. He gestured with his head toward the doors at the end of the hall, and Lucy got up and followed him, jogging a bit to keep up, Neville always wanted to get the hell off of the ward as soon as his visit was over.
They walked in silence passed the nurse's station, the enchanted doors recognizing their `visitor' and `employee' cloaking spells and letting them through. The doors weren't permeable to those with `patient' spells in the psych ward. The next corridor led them through the long term disease ward, and the corridor at the end of that led them to the `Hub'. St Mungo's was essentially designed with a circular center, the Hub, with various wings starting there and branching off. The emergency and operating wards were the only wards inside the Hub itself, everything else branched off. It was easy to get lost, so the building itself was enchanted with literally thousands of guiding spells.
One of those controlled the network of moving staircases in the center of the Hub. You could look straight down from the top floor to the bottom, and see nothing but staircases moving to connect to others, which connected with others, which moved to land at one of the hundreds of doorways in the side of the circular walls. Lucy and Neville waited in the door way from the fifth floor northwest wing, and Lucy said clearly to the banister leading to nothing,
"First floor reception."
After a few seconds, a few of the floating staircases began to align. As soon as one connected to the doorway, they began to walk down, onto and further down the next one it connected to, while the first one detached and went elsewhere.
Lucy had hated this her first week here, and had gotten so nervous she had frozen on a staircase in the middle of the air. She waited too long and the other staircase disconnected, so she had been stranded until that staircase was summoned elsewhere, after which she had followed a nurse wherever she was going, just gratefull to be on solid ground. The whole trick, the woman had explained, was just to keep going down, not to think about it, there was always going to be another staircase to climb, and concerning yourself that there was nothing behind you wouldn't help things at all. After that it was just a matter of practice.
They stepped off on the ground floor and headed for the doors. Outside, Neville sat down on a bench and Lucy did the same, not wanting to speak before he did.
"They're different."
"Try to remember that I told you in the beginning that, well, you might not-"
Neville stopped her nervous babbling by holding up his hand.
"It's all right, Lucy, really. I mean, no, they didn't all of a sudden give me the heart to heart talk I dreamt about since I was five, but I was able to kiss my mother's cheek without her becoming terrified, she actually smiled. And my dad... my dad... normally he has so many spells on him he doesn't realize anyone is in the room."
Lucy went to speak again, but Neville stopped her.
"Lucy, I know I'm pretty ridiculous at school, but believe me when I tell you I knew not to expect miracles when Dumbledore told me what you wanted to do. But what I saw in there, it is a miracle Lucy. It was a miracle that anyone wanted to reopen their case in the first place."
Lucy wasn't sure what to say to that, so she stared out at the fountain with a statue of St. Mungo in it.
"I spoke with the supervisor and a few of the orderlies. A few weeks ago we switched the physician in charge of your parents. The new one, Alexander, he's younger, but he has plenty of experience, used to work in the children's ward, he should do really well."
Neville nodded. "When do you go?"
Lucy shrugged, "They haven't told me yet. It should be fairly soon. The Circle has me starting their assignment in July sometime."
Neville nodded, then rose as his grandmother approached. Lucy greeted Harriet Longbottom with a quick hug, then waited outside until they had walked around the building and out of sight.
Part One: One Flew East, One Flew West, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Lucy Montero sighed, placed her hands on her knees, and raised herself out of her chair, where she had been sitting next to Ann Longbottom for the past hour. Ann stared into the distance with a blank curiosity, one hand absentmindedly stroking the kitten curled up on the blanket across her lap. The remains of a daisy she had been plucking lay forgotten in her other hand as she intently watched birds circling overhead.
"Ann, I think its time we go inside, would you like to go inside?"
Ann didn't respond. Lucy bit her lip, took a breath, and placed a hand on Ann's shoulder, turning the woman so she had to look at the young girl. Almost immediately after the contact Ann began shrink away, and Lucy could feel the beginnings of the wild thrashings that had rewarded her with a lump on the head the last time she attempted this.
But this time she was ready. She immediately used the physical contact to follow the familiar path into Ann's subconscious. She didn't stray from the carefully laid traces of her own energy, Ann's mind was a swirling void of terror, confusion, loneliness and anger, and a stray `step' at best meant an hour or more trying to find her way back to herself, at worst she'd never get out and end up as catonic as half the third floor of St. Mungo's psychiatric ward. Finding her way, she located the site of most intense activity, and focused her energy on sending a soothing presence. She could see a deep ruby red flow of energy penetrate the greenish gray cloud that was causing the tantrum, and dissipate it from the inside out. Once she was satisfied, she carefully pulled herself back out and looked down at Ann. She was calm, and as lucid as Lucy had ever seen her.
With her hand still on the older woman's shoulder, Lucy repeated, "Inside, Ann?"
Ann nodded clumsily, and Lucy wheeled her back to the Longbottom's room herself, rather than activating the `return' spell on the wheelchair. She found that the more time she spent with the couple in their new quarters, the better they worked with her in treatment.
An orderly was waiting in the hall outside Ann's room to take her down to lunch.
"You look nice today Ann. Why don't we fix you up a little and get some food? Henry's waiting there already."
The sturdy looking woman waited as Ann got to her feet, and held the door open to let her into the room. After Ann had entered she turned back.
"If I try to brush her hair today, is she going to bite?"
Lucy shook her head. "I don't think so, I just got her calmed. Come around from in front of her though, she tends to get more defensive faster when she isn't expecting it."
The woman nodded. "Are you seeing Henry after lunch?"
Lucy shook her head, "Before dinner, I have a meeting with Dr. Fizzit after lunch to discuss getting his dosage changed."
The orderly raised her eyebrows. The Longbottoms may be Lucy's case, but she gave her the look of one who had seen worlds more than she and knew it. "You think that's wise? They give him enough stuff as it is."
"I meant having it reduced."
"You're not serious? Henry Longbottom took three orderlies at least to control him before they upped his dosage."
"And that was years ago. Suppressing his behavior magically for that long can't be good. Besides, if I am ever going to talk to the real Henry it won't be through a fog of complacency spells. There's a reason Ann's been coming along with more visible progress, she never had that degree of medication."
"She never tried to throw her doctor out the window either."
Lucy sighed. "It was only four months after the attack and they were trying to take blood samples, I do read these files you know. Any animal that feels caged and trapped is going to lash out violently, and they were all so noisy and pushy it was no wonder Henry snapped. In his mind the doctors were the ones who had caused him the pain and he was angry. It didn't help that you people had him all tied up either."
"So you're telling me that anyone who was put in that position would behave the same way."
"More or less. It's not Henry's fault he had the strength to do damage, it was a natural reaction."
"Really? And what did you do to the last person who caused you pain? Toss them off a building?"
Lucy grinned and shook her head, "No."
The orderly turned to walk back into the room. "I thought not, bunch of rub-"
"I tried to crack open his skull with a cauldron."
Lucy left the orderly staring at her in a mixture of disbelief and wariness as she headed off down the corridor to grab a bite before her meeting.
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"Better now?"
Henry nodded and Lucy handed him a handkerchief, he clumsily dried his tears and blew his nose before trying to put it into his pillow case. Lucy sighed and removed it. She reached over on the bedside table and handed him a glass of water, which he drained, and again tried to put into the pillowcase. Lucy stopped him this time before he did it, shaking her head and placing it back on the table.
"No."
She helped straighten the sheets and tangled blankets and sat down again cross legged on the bed. She took Henry's wrists in hers, and began to quiet her breathing.
It had been over a week since Henry's medication had been cut, at Lucy's request, to a quarter of its usual amount. As a result she was now responsible for controlling his outbreaks, soothing terrified orderlies, and the most recent development, calming him after nightmares, which he had several of every night. The hospital had moved her from the temporary staff dormitories in the nearby building to a spare room on the ward, which was very eerie by itself.
However, Lucy thought the nightmares were a good development, and well worth her lost sleep. It was a sign that Henry could still connect to his memories and conscious, thinking mind, that the Henry Longbottom that had married Ann and named his son after his father was still active in there, just lost.
It had meant extensive and careful exploration of Henry's mind, following signs of terror and anxiety to locate the source of the nightmares, and begin to chip away at it. Hopefully, once it was worn down thin enough Henry would pull past the fears on his own and start to come around. What Lucy was helping with and what Henry couldn't do by himself was erode a wall of fear and apprehension that had built upon itself for over a decade until it was, metaphorically speaking, a wall 200 feet thick. If the real Henry was behind there, no one would have been able to hear him screaming.
Although that was reassuring, it was still dangerous. For one thing, a mind in that much chaos was easy to get lost in, and could quickly become a prison if Lucy lost touch with what was real and what was Henry's dream.
A more obvious problem was that Henry Longbottom was well over six feet tall and built like a Sherman Tank. He was lean, but even after all the years of captivity he remained incredibly strong and muscular. Despite worries about handling a stronger patient, once the doctors had discovered that working out helped lessen Henry's aggression, it had become a part of his daily routine.
Looking at him Lucy continued to be amazed at how Henry and Ann could ever have produced a son like Neville. Physically the boy looked like his mother, the same bone structure, the same eyes and hair, although there were lines in his face that reminded her of his father. She speculated over whom he acted like more, but she would never find that out until she got through Henry's nightmares.
Which were complex and frustrating. Now, more than ever she was convinced that they had been the cause of Henry's violent behavior during his first months at the hospital. She'd read about it in his records, Neville's grandmother had brought the little boy regularly, but it wasn't till almost a year later when Henry was up to 10 constraining spells a day that they let his son see him, and by then he was so out of it you could have dyed the walls purple and he wouldn't notice. Lucy shook her head, poor Neville.
She wished she had Rosa's book that held her case notes, but she was reasonably confidant that without the spells lessening his mental activity, Henry was becoming trapped in a cycle within his mind. Somehow the energy paths of reality and dreams had crossed, and when something triggered either or them, it set the other one off. So a nightmare could wake Henry and he would not know the difference between Lucy and the tormentor in his mind; likewise, any physical stress, like being strapped down for medical procedures, or even the initial jump that comes from being taken by surprise, could call up the terrors and nightmares in his brain, and since those dream paths crisscrossed with reality, triggering a dream could throw him into the spiral of not knowing the difference between his mind and reality.
Her first task then, was to uncross those paths. Her second was to deal with the source, the festering knot of terror that was the center of Henry's world had to be dissipated.
She didn't have the energy for either now, but once she got him back to sleep and headed for her room, Lucy felt better than she had in weeks. Her job was to try and re-establish the normal energy cycles and flows in Henry and Ann's minds. Now, the paths within the brain were incredibly complex, and she had been going slow because she was inexperienced and didn't know how everything worked. But she did have the healer instinct, she had known something was wrong, now she knew part of what that was, now she could fix it. And hopefully, when she did, the Longbottom's minds would begin to heal themselves.
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"How long has he been in there?"
"Three hours."
Silence.
"That's a record, you know. When he was younger we were lucky if he could stay thirty minutes. I mean, that young, trying to get your parents to recognized you."
"Well, his grandmother has been putting up pictures of him on every available surface in there..."
"Did you-"
"Explain to him? Yes, as well as I could, anyway. I didn't really need to do much. That boy may not be able to tell eel eyes from newt testicles, but if anyone knows anything about patience..."
"It's him. I guess he has to."
"It's his grandmother I'm a little more worried about. She was so happy when Dumbledore told her... and no matter what I said, I just don't think she really fully understands..."
"Neville will make sure she does. He can't remember his socks, but he does take surprisingly good care of her."
"She's all he's got."
"You should have seen his parents, I was a first year when they were in fifth. His father-"
Lucy and the orderly, Jerome, stopped talking as the door to the Longbottoms' room opened and Neville stepped out. As was usual after a visit to his parents, his face was unreadable. He gestured with his head toward the doors at the end of the hall, and Lucy got up and followed him, jogging a bit to keep up, Neville always wanted to get the hell off of the ward as soon as his visit was over.
They walked in silence passed the nurse's station, the enchanted doors recognizing their `visitor' and `employee' cloaking spells and letting them through. The doors weren't permeable to those with `patient' spells in the psych ward. The next corridor led them through the long term disease ward, and the corridor at the end of that led them to the `Hub'. St Mungo's was essentially designed with a circular center, the Hub, with various wings starting there and branching off. The emergency and operating wards were the only wards inside the Hub itself, everything else branched off. It was easy to get lost, so the building itself was enchanted with literally thousands of guiding spells.
One of those controlled the network of moving staircases in the center of the Hub. You could look straight down from the top floor to the bottom, and see nothing but staircases moving to connect to others, which connected with others, which moved to land at one of the hundreds of doorways in the side of the circular walls. Lucy and Neville waited in the door way from the fifth floor northwest wing, and Lucy said clearly to the banister leading to nothing,
"First floor reception."
After a few seconds, a few of the floating staircases began to align. As soon as one connected to the doorway, they began to walk down, onto and further down the next one it connected to, while the first one detached and went elsewhere.
Lucy had hated this her first week here, and had gotten so nervous she had frozen on a staircase in the middle of the air. She waited too long and the other staircase disconnected, so she had been stranded until that staircase was summoned elsewhere, after which she had followed a nurse wherever she was going, just gratefull to be on solid ground. The whole trick, the woman had explained, was just to keep going down, not to think about it, there was always going to be another staircase to climb, and concerning yourself that there was nothing behind you wouldn't help things at all. After that it was just a matter of practice.
They stepped off on the ground floor and headed for the doors. Outside, Neville sat down on a bench and Lucy did the same, not wanting to speak before he did.
"They're different."
"Try to remember that I told you in the beginning that, well, you might not-"
Neville stopped her nervous babbling by holding up his hand.
"It's all right, Lucy, really. I mean, no, they didn't all of a sudden give me the heart to heart talk I dreamt about since I was five, but I was able to kiss my mother's cheek without her becoming terrified, she actually smiled. And my dad... my dad... normally he has so many spells on him he doesn't realize anyone is in the room."
Lucy went to speak again, but Neville stopped her.
"Lucy, I know I'm pretty ridiculous at school, but believe me when I tell you I knew not to expect miracles when Dumbledore told me what you wanted to do. But what I saw in there, it is a miracle Lucy. It was a miracle that anyone wanted to reopen their case in the first place."
Lucy wasn't sure what to say to that, so she stared out at the fountain with a statue of St. Mungo in it.
"I spoke with the supervisor and a few of the orderlies. A few weeks ago we switched the physician in charge of your parents. The new one, Alexander, he's younger, but he has plenty of experience, used to work in the children's ward, he should do really well."
Neville nodded. "When do you go?"
Lucy shrugged, "They haven't told me yet. It should be fairly soon. The Circle has me starting their assignment in July sometime."
Neville nodded, then rose as his grandmother approached. Lucy greeted Harriet Longbottom with a quick hug, then waited outside until they had walked around the building and out of sight.