I kept finding excuses all day yesterday to not write down what happened - what he said, what I saw. I have to write it down. It doesn't make it true to write it down. But it's going to fade from memory (I hope!) and if I don't write it down, then I can't do anything to counter him.
Come on, write! Just the facts. Fine, just the setting.
He didn't bring me to a torture chamber, just the Hospital Wing. And the False Memory Charm makes it hard to narrate what happened next. He lifted it, so the memories are jostled and blurred between what I saw and what I now know is true. Or maybe what I think is true. It could have been two layers of spells. He wasn't necessarily right when he said [crossed out heavily], he might have rigged it.
In any case, he didn't seem angry that I had gotten tutoring in Occlumency, but he said he wanted to see how I was doing, before I did the Legilimency lesson. So he asked me to shield a few thoughts (my knowledge that this was a dream, how I usually woke up) and he would try to read them.
I deliberately undershot my defences, so he wouldn't know how good I'd gotten. And even if he could tell I was cheating, it was still better than giving an accurate reading. But he cheated better and never meant to cast Legilimens at all. With my memories floating near the surface of my mind, it was easy for him to skim them off with a targeted Obliviate.
Muggles have a word for what we do to cover the gaps in our memory: confabulation. He hadn't done anything too elaborate, but by the time he was done, it didn't seem odd that I was standing over Professor Umbridge's unconscious body with him leaning lazily on the bars at the foot of the Hospital Wing bed. He told me that she was my exam in Legilimency, and that I would have to retrieve several memories before he would tell me which one held the information I needed to get out of the room and away from him.
I knew and didn't-know that she was dead, but, at that moment, my biggest concern was that I hadn't studied for his exam and that it wasn't fair. I wasn't allowed to practice on people. He must have tweaked my emotional responses so I wouldn't care, and I just focused on the exam, so I could muster the focus Legilimency requires.
The first memory I pulled from her was the first time she had bought one of those horrible, tacky kitten plates. And I managed to find it, pretty fast, or I thought I had. That accidental Legilimency I did on Harry had been my only experience. How was I supposed to tell if a memory was off somehow? The emotional notes were what came across clearly, more than the details of the shop or the passersby. Umbridge's possessiveness and her flinch as another shopper mocked her for choosing it, and she hugged it tighter.
It wasn't more difficult to retrieve the memory than it was to catch a glimpse of Harry's, but it was harder to endure. I only got a flash of images from him, and here I was getting a much richer picture, and it clung to my mind like a film, taking a while to break, even after I surfaced. The second time Riddle made me plunge in, he had me watch her supervising Harry's detention, and her smugness and righteousness choked me. Every time Harry flinched, I could feel a sickly warmth spread through her. She was happy to be hurting him, happy to have the upper hand, happy to have scarred one enemy and presumably cowed the rest.
[crossed out] No. I'll just run through what I happened, in the order I experienced it. I'm not going to think about that until I have to.
Riddle said I should watch her teaching Defence Against the Dark Arts, since a memory of a routine wasn't actively defended, but could be harder to retrieve, since it hadn't impressed the subject very deeply. I was antsy and frustrated, so I cast it wordlessly, just to show off, and my feeling of barely suppressed anger focused to a point as I willed her to show me the memory, and then diffused out but didn't fade, until it was clear it was just part of her memory - a feeling of being stuck, of having been stuck with the worst work, however necessary, of being underappreciated.
I wanted to get her off of me as quickly as possible, so I almost obeyed immediately when Riddle told me that I had to watch her memory of the day we led her into the Forbidden Forest. I didn't want to him to lay into me again, and I didn't want to see what she had done to herself what I had done to her. I can write it. I have to write it. It will help.
It hurt. I was helpless and humiliated. I was only able to hold onto her/my feelings of anger for a moment before that sense of something being wrong drained from a fire to a queasy, awful feeling. I'm not sure if I managed to make it out of that memory myself or if Tom pulled me out. It took me a little while to come back to myself. It did take her several days, when it really happened, to be responsive at all.
Stop, that's not true. It took her several days to come back to the world, but she wasn't entirely unresponsive. Ginny and I laughed when Ron made quiet "clip-clop" noises at her, and caused her to jolt upright in a panic. She hadn't made it out of hell yet, but we were capable of pushing her under and sinking her deeper.
Riddle had to place my wand back in my fingers, before I could do the last piece of Legilimency that he requested. He told me, and my addled brain believed, that Umbridge had been attacked, and I had to see the last thing she saw - the face of her would-be murderer. And I pushed my way into her brain, too tired to do it wordlessly, and saw my own face shaping the words "Avada-"
He was lying, of course. His every action had been a lie. Why should I believe he stopped lying once he lifted the memory charm on my and showed me what he'd done. Why should I care what he said, once he showed me that he didn't have any memories of Umbridge's, but he had mine, and had used them as bait for me, with just a few, subtle adjustments.
I can't. I can't. I don't want to write down the hateful, spiteful things he said. I'm going to go down to the common room and sit with people and not be alone or worse, be not alone, with my memories of him.