Chapter One Hundred Fifty-Four: Loki's Notes

Ginny was more understanding of the situation that had arisen than Harry had any right to expect. He knew this. Indeed, she didn't even assume that he'd "stood her up". She came back to Hogwarts first thing, and, as Madam Pomfrey confirmed, went straight to the Hospital Wing. In case something had happened to Harry. He confessed to being…touched by her concern.

By this time, he'd spread out the first five sheets of parchment in a row, in the private emptiness of the Gryffindor common room. He had the sense that, as these notes were longer, they would be more in-depth, easier to understand, and that he could use these as a springboard to helping him to understand the scroll.

He'd forgot who'd written the notes. He believed Stephen. His lie-detection ability worked on Dr. Strange. And Stephen clearly believed the tale he'd been told, incredible though it seemed to Harry. Stephen must have witnessed something—an impressive sort of display of difference that convinced him that "Loki" was the real thing.

This left his past self's challenge to be answered. He hoped that he had the knowledge base to rise to the occasion. Unfortunately, as he'd been forced to admit when Stephen had asked what spell Loki had used to "diagnose" Sirius, that past self had knowledge that Harry lacked.

It was probably, in part, a residue of Thanos's control of the Mind Stone, and the temporary quasi-control that Loki had had over that same stone. Then, too, however, and far more problematically, it must draw most of its structure from knowledge gleaned and formulated, theories devised and polished, in the times of the gaps. It was obvious to any fool that his past self had all of his memories…up until his death.

Ron had been very solemn, indeed, when confronted with this fact, and Harry rather suspected that Stephen had kept from saying anything that would further damage Thor's self-esteem, his sense of being Harry's protector, by adding that Loki had said some rather unflattering things about that time that Harry couldn't recall. Perhaps, he'd even blamed Thor for his death.

It was times like these that made Harry glad that he was Harry. They weren't the exact same person, no matter how similar they could be in some ways. Troubling though that thought was when it came to trying to figure out Loki's notes.

Which, of course, were not straightforward at all. He'd made up entire new symbols to stand for…something. There were several of them, and Harry had the sneaking suspicion that reading these notes wouldn't be a matter of even simple symbol-to-letter translation. Or even symbol-to-rune translation. No, there'd be another step or three. He thought that symbol that looked like a horseshoe (but not like the capital letter omega) was supposed to represent a house. Or a building. It seemed to fit with the rare word that Harry could interpret without a fully developed decryption tool.

At a loss, tiring of looking amongst the five pages out of about twenty that he'd been given in a stack, he set them back in their proper order atop the stack, and turned, with mounting dread, to the notes on Sirius's mind.

And paused.

It made complete sense to him, once he acknowledged the fact that Loki had deliberately made this short scroll on healing Sirius much easier to understand than the stack of parchment. For one thing, it came complete with a lot of straightforward diagrams (Harry had seen a glimpse of a diagram later into the sheaf of papers that looked somewhere between a pentacle and Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man). For another, that dome shape never appeared at all, and indeed all of the symbols struck him as letters. Runes, rather, but direct, reliable, straightforward symbols.

Ciphered, of course, but Harry was grateful for any concession, by now. Any little thing that would make these notes into less of a headache.

They were straightforward. They were succinct. They made sense. It was Loki's understanding of the natural working of the mind versus an enumerated list of what was wrong with Sirius. It was an analysis of how pain and prolonged exposure to dementors had damaged Sirius's soul and mind.

It is not a matter of direct cure, a translated section of notes read. There is no cure for such profound damage. There are only two available solutions: provide mental structure from without, or unwind and disconnect the behaviour of body and soul.

He'd been planning on doing the latter, regardless, but it hit home, that they thought similarly. Well, it made sense that they did. But, he hadn't seen that, before….

"Provide structure from without"? How could he go about even attempting such a thing? Was it a process like what he'd had to do for the Longbottoms? Or was it something else—rearranging a mind, turning it around as if shuffling one of those puzzles with a square hole?

Perhaps, there was even a way to make such a structure, or to guide Sirius through it.

He'd have to ask Sirius, leave the choice partway up to him. If he said to try the mental rebuilding, Harry'd ask him how they might go about doing that, and pool their resources. Until a path was decided upon, there was no great need to figure out how to go about creating mental structure.

The alternative….

There were notes, somewhere in this scroll, on the "how" of both strategies.

Harry stared at the first diagram. A pattern, he realised. Arrows indicating a focus on before, an undone circle for unwinding, actual thread required for this spell to work. Spells didn't often require many external ingredients. Did wizards have a spell to conjure thread?

He couldn't see what use that spell would be, for ninety-nine percent of the population of the Wizarding World, ninety-nine percent of the time. This suggested to him that such a spell most definitely existed.

Then, there was another diagram, this one smaller. The time travel reversal spell was necessarily more complex than the mental trellis spell, but not by much. This one required flour and salt. He felt a bit as if he'd been handed a recipe instead of a pattern, particularly since this one was much smaller, and determined to be much less help.

But, he was the one who'd made these notes. If he thought hard about how he'd made up his own set of symbols and ciphers back in the summer before fourth year, he realised that there was no reason that he shouldn't understand these recipes and patterns more than anyone else.

There was more, besides, he realised as he read. Loki seemed to have presupposed that Harry would know mind magic, which was infuriating. It bothered him that his past self could treat the subject anything like casually. But then, here was a symbol representing connections, and disconnections. Disconnect mind from body. Fix mind. Fix body. Reconnect mind and body. Risky.

He thought of Alice's and Frank's labyrinths that had protected them deep within themselves. Even that retained a connection. But, there was something else. Notes on astral travel, the idea of a silver cord, out-of-body experiences. A connection so slight that Loki didn't seem to think that it would affect the spell.

A second option. The deaging strategy of setting the body back first. There was disparity enough caused by Sirius's lost years that it shouldn't deage his mind—reverse his maturation. Then, disconnect mind and body. Fix mind, as body was already fixed. Reconnect.

A riskier option than the first. Suppose there wasn't enough of a disparity, or it didn't matter, and it pushed back his mind and body over a decade? He'd be dealing with teenage Sirius, again. And nothing suggested that those years of mind or body, once lost, could be recovered.

Ron had said something about storing memories, but that wasn't the same thing. Harry'd worked with pensieves; he'd been in other people's memories, and,regardless of how well Stephen had reintegrated his knowledge, there would always be a sort of disconnect, a foreignness to those memories.

And Stephen had been briefed, had understood what he was about to remember, and had a chance to come to terms with it.

Nothing that risked Sirius losing his memories, his past ten years. Forgetting Azkaban would be a gift to him, but it wouldn't be the only thing he forgot. He'd have to grieve for Harry's parents all over again, be convinced of the true dynamics of the Marauders, and Harry…he'd forget Harry, and the big secret.

Not that path.

Harry could always leave well enough alone, but…with a means to heal Sirius quite literally in his hands, he owed it to Sirius to try. He'd tried to save—and had succeeded in saving—Neville's parents, complete strangers. He owed it to Sirius to at least try.

Or to give Sirius the choice, he realised, rolling the scroll into a tight cylinder, and tying it with a piece of twine.

"Sure. Might as well," Sirius said. Harry stared at him, not quite able to believe his ears. Sirius sure sounded cheerful, and…he hadn't seemed to need much convincing. Gryffindor or no, he should have at least given Harry the opportunity to fully explain the risks and choices available to him before he decided.

"Don't give me that look. You're the greatest magic-user I know. I'd trust you to do either scenario, but since you're such a worrywart, I knew I'd have to pick the one you thought was safer. That's a bit of a compromise, see. If it works, then I'll be a lot more useful to you, yeah? You know what it's like, to be…."

He illustrated his point with a genuine example, losing track of where his speech was going. This happened to Harry, too, and for the same reason. Prolonged exposure to dementors, amongst other things, had put gaps into his mind that would perhaps never fully close.

This did not seem to disturb Sirius as much as it usually did. And Harry, when he thought of it, wished that there were someone who could do for him just what he was offering Sirius. He understood the choice, but he questioned whether, even offered a fix, he'd have been willing to risk it, make the gamble, all or nothing. Sirius had always been a risk taker. Harry had always been full of hard calculations. It made sense that they'd think differently about this situation, too.

"If anything seems amiss, we will bring you to the Hospital Wing," Harry proposed. Sirius quirked an eyebrow in response, and shifted, slightly, in the mirror.

"The Hospital Wing? Not St. Mungo's?"

"After what happened to Bode last year? I thought better of it."

Sirius visibly conceded defeat.

"A chair should be sufficient," Harry said, for the third time, as if it needed to be said again, and he wasn't just stalling for time. "Eleven-year-olds sit on a stool when they're being sorted. Those don't even have backs."

Even Ron didn't mention that the Sorting Hat never sent anyone deep into their own mind, let alone separated mind from body. Particularly not using an actual weapon. Granted, it was just the ghost of the Sword of Gryffindor, but still.

"Are you ready?" Harry asked. Sirius nodded, and visibly refrained from turning the question back on him, showcasing a profound amount of patience, and showing that he was, in fact, more than the human equivalent of Ron. Mother was right in comparing him to both of her sons.

"Alright, then. Legilimens!"

For a moment there was memory, a flicker of a teenage boy Harry had never met, in his Hogwarts robes, a derisive sneer on his face, but something beneath that, perhaps. But, before Harry could think long on what that something was, Harry was wrenched aside, into Sirius's mind.

Sirius knew occlumency. He'd had to. That was a sobering reminder.

They stood, together, in what at first glance seemed to be a cosy cottage in the woods, that reminded him a bit of Mother's. A weeping willow grew on the left side, overhanging a portico and brushing up against the walls. There was a vegetable patch on the right-hand side. Harry felt himself relax.

"Gah!" Sirius said, as he turned to Harry, who understood after a moment. It had happened the last time, when Snape had tried to invade his mind, last year. But there, he'd fused subconscious and conscious selves, automatically. Here, he was only his conscious mind, and despite that, even still….

He grinned at Sirius, that rather feral grin that never failed to silence Hermione, but which seemed to have no effect at all on Sirius. It didn't this time, either.

His armour didn't usually have pockets, but it had decided to be different this time, mostly because this version of Harry was made of mind stuff. He still had bangs covering a lightning-bolt scar, but the armour gave him a more superficial resemblance to his past self.

"Still just me, Sirius," he said, rolling his eyes. "Don't be a Thor on me. Come on, I think we're going to have to go inside that house."

"It's your grandparents' cottage. I lived there when I ran away from home when I was sixteen. You were here, too."

Perhaps, it was the unreality of the place, but it didn't feel familiar, as Grimmauld Place did. Or, perhaps, that was due to what the inside of the house looked like. Perhaps a sixth sense for danger warned him that all was not as it appeared.

But, Sirius shrugged, as if he were content to follow Harry's lead, having said his piece.

The inside of the cottage was a dilapidated ruins, worse than Grimmauld Place, full of rotting floorboards, and grime-covered portraits hanging askew on the walls. It reeked of decay and damp, and the floor was covered in dust.

"Hadn't realised it was that bad," Sirius said, in his most indifferent, conversational voice. He put his hands in his jeans, leaning forwards and to the side to try to peer up the stairs.

There was a tremour of unease, at the similarities in the layout of this house relative to Mother's cottage. They were different, but there was a leaden feeling in his stomach, as if this were the ruins of Mother's cottage, and he'd lost her.

He reminded himself to focus.

The attic held memories. What lay in the basement? The buried things. Secrets. Regrets. He'd half a mind to find it, and burn everything in it. But, that wouldn't be enough.

Was it cold in here, or was it just him?

Sirius's eyes went wide, and Harry turned to face the stairs, crying "exspecto patronum!" as he marched forwards to meet the dementor head on. Terribly though they affected him, he could afford it more than Sirius.

The dementor burst into a vague white wisp of smoke as Harry drew near. He was on alert, now. If there was one, there might be more.

If it had come from upstairs, perhaps they should go up there, and clear the house of them before—

No. They had a purpose here. Dementors were a symptom of the problem, but for all he knew, he could slay dementors all day, and as long as he didn't confront the problem at its source, it would do nothing but drain his energy.

The basement or the attic?

Neither. The basement was a dangerous place, Mother had seemed to suggest, perhaps full of regrets. And the attic was a place for memories. When he'd pulled Snape out of his soulscape, he'd gone out through the garden. They didn't need to be inside, they needed to find something that represented the bond between Sirius's soul and his body.

Harry remembered that this was Sirius's mind, and reconsidered everything. He'd been distracted, set off track by the resemblance this place had to Harry's own soulscape. But, Harry's mind, too, had been a place of rooms and corridors.

There had been a fence, outside, behind them when they'd appeared. Something of an occlumency shield, he supposed.

Sirius's mind, then. The attic for memories, still, as the boundary point between mind and soul, not properly of either. The basement for hidden thoughts and memories, perhaps. And somewhere, a connection to Sirius's body.

Like, say, Sirius himself.

This realisation was so abrupt that Harry froze in place. He paused to consider how to proceed. First things first….

"Sirius, I think you're your mental connection to the physical world."

Sirius paused, looking up at the ceiling. Harry wasn't sure that he dared to follow Sirius's gaze. This house looked to be on the verge of collapse. Without, it looked just fine, but within….

"Makes sense," he agreed.

"I need to find a way to cut you out from this world. And protect you, should there be more dementors."

"That might pose a problem," Sirius agreed, rocking back on his heels.

"I'm considering petrifying you using the Sword of Gryffindor and then encasing you in a protective barricade of ice," Harry said.

"Don't be stupid," Sirius said, frowning. "I'd still be here. You need to fix my mind and soul. Can't you move me to someone else's?"

There was, unfortunately, only one real candidate.

"My mind is a dangerous place," Harry warned.

"I wouldn't wander off."

"I'd have to wall you off, to ensure you wouldn't go anywhere."

"Okay," Sirius agreed, nodding.

"I don't know how to do it," Harry admitted, looking away.

Sirius threw his hands in the air. "Didn't those notes say anything about how to separate a mind and soul from a body?"

"You can't. Not completely. There's hypnosis, to induce an out-of-body experience. But then, I'd be locked out of your mid, too. Those notes were all highly theoretical."

All of this had seemed much easier and more straightforward, when he read the notes. They'd misled him pretty thoroughly.

He thought of Neville's parents, again. The heart of a labyrinth. "There's a safe place. Somewhere deep in your mind. Not in this house, I don't think. Out there."

He gestured behind them, at the still open front door.

They'd wasted time, but a look at the state of Sirius's mind alone was enough to firm Harry's resolve.

He'd forgotten about the peculiarities caused by the existence of Sirius's other form. Being an animagus, Sirius had told him, was a different sort of magic from wizarding magic. He hadn't needed to tell Harry that. But, it was a fact that Sirius was an animagus, and that he had a fourth space other than mind-soul-body. The classic safe space.

In other words, there was a doghouse in the backyard. As was usual with wizarding spaces, Sirius assured him (after venturing in as a dog, and returning to report) that it was an actual dog house.

He agreed to stay there, while Harry worked on fixing his mind and soul.

"It connects to both mind and soul, I should think. And I should think it'll be safe from whatever you're doing, too. This must be where I went when…in Azkaban."

Sirius shuddered, and then visibly put on a brave face, with a cocky smile, and a cheerful wave. He transformed back into a dog, and bounded through the doorway arch.

To be absolutely safe, Harry drew the ghost of the Sword of Gryffindor, and drew a circle with it around the doghouse, symbolically cutting it off from the rest of Sirius's mind. The doghouse, another place where mind met soul. The attic was the other, obvious location. It seemed likely that Sirius's memories would be stored there, anyway. Harry'd yet to see for himself.

Returning into the house was not a task for the faint of heart. It was dilapidated, and looked to be on the verge of collapse, for one thing. Harry started off by casting the Star Preserver spell, and then casting reparo, on whole rooms as he went along.

It changed only little as Harry restored the rooms he passed through. His intuition said that there was a keystone, somewhere, a place that, once he restored it, would rip aside the superficial remaining rot that seemed to comprise this house. It looked the part of a haunted house—or how Harry had always supposed that the haunted houses Dudley sometimes went to at the faire might look.

But then, too, as Harry climbed the rotting wooden stairs to a second, and then a third, storey, there was a forbidding chill in the air. He knew that that could mean only one thing, but casting a patronus, and maintaining it, took a lot of energy. Energy he might better use restoring Sirius's soul and mind.

Or, should the dementors be the priority? It was just a good thing that restoring Sirius's mind took a lot less energy than restoring Harry's mind-soul had, back in third year. He still thought, sometimes, of Mother, with her dagger-needle, sewing back together the tapestry of his mind-soul.

But, not only was Harry possessed of a non-human soul (the soul of a god, which took much greater energy to restore), but his soul was also his mother's place of refuge. He'd been repairing that, as well, whatever it was. Compared to this… well, Sirius was a magical prodigy, and brilliant, but he was still only human.

Harry's energy was waning, nearly spent, before he could find the attic, nonetheless.

He barely noticed the lay of the third storey of the house, on the lookout for the stairs leading to the attic. They frustrated his attempts to find them by being hidden behind a closet door, like some sort of old-fashioned castle with a special servants staircase.

The chill, of course, was coming from the attic. It was twenty times fiercer in the white fog of a shrouded room. It was like being outside during a blizzard, Harry reflected. He could barely see a foot in front of him—just enough to see his breath. He managed to keep from stuttering as he cried,

"Exspecto patronum!" He had never cast the Patronus Charm fortified with the Star Preserver spell before. At least, not that he recalled.

A form emerged from the tip of the holly-and-phoenix-feather wand, and charged into the fray. But, it wasn't a deer.

Harry stared, at a loss for words. That messy black hair…and glasses? He kept forgetting that detail, somehow.

"Dad?" he asked. And of course, Remus and Sirius had claimed that it was his dad all along, but here, in this room, to see something other than what Harry had expected….

He could only stare, as James tackled the dementors that Harry could barely even see, at first, clearing the room of fog, using spells Harry had never heard before, turning objects Harry couldn't see into projectile weapons, fire, a wave to drive them back, vines to ensnare them, and then projectiles to finish them off. Here, in Sirius's mind, at least, dementors could be slain by something sharp through the heart.

Harry rather doubted this was true in the real world.

James fought like a whirlwind, all motion and chaos. Harry'd rather expected he would. There was a bit more caution and analysis involved than Sirius's straightforward, direct assault. But, the strongest difference between their styles was that James's focused on transfiguration, a point that Ollivander had suggested was a particular strength of his, back before first year, when the subject of Harry's parents' wands had come up.

Sirius was far more balanced, but he tended to favour charms, hexes, jinxes, any spell that affected an assailant directly. Harry filed all this new knowledge away. It would help him make better plans. Or Ron. Whoever.

The room cleared under an onslaught of daggers and pickaxes and what Harry thought might be Devil's Snare, with a speed that astonished Harry. He barely had time to consider offering his assistance. He mostly stood there, watching, as if this were a recording that he couldn't in any way interact with. He shook himself out of his stupor only when the room itself came into focus around him, all rotting blackened wood, soaked and singed and covered in green growing things.

"Reparo!" he cried, glancing around as he cast the spell, noticing the window on the back wall, huge, with four panes full of cracked glass covered in grime. Papers and wooden chests littered the room. James walked through them, to stand in front of Harry.

"I'm sorry," he said, stretching out a flickering arm, and hand, for Harry. "I'm sorry I wasn't there for you all your life. I'm sorry I—"

He flickered out of existence.

Harry stood in the attic, and refused to cry. Show no weakness. But, the attic was a much darker place, with James gone. Harry barely even noticed that the room had repaired itself, truly repaired itself, in response to the spell he'd cast. He didn't see the light streaming in through the window, full of afternoon sunlight. Or the trunks no longer spilling their contents all over the floor. Or the way the wood gleamed, varnished and whole, shiny mahogany and teak.

He stood there for an hour, or a day, before it occurred to him that he ought to look for the way into Sirius's soul. He decided that it had to be the window, and left it at that, quite literally, turning and heading back down the hidden stairway, past doors and down corridors, down another flight of stairs—

Here, on the second storey, he recovered enough to open one of the shiny new doors. He just wanted to check to see whether or not his theory seemed to be on the mark.

The room was darker than he'd expected, all black and blue and violet, the fuchsia pillow on the bed the brightest object in the room. But, there was a window to the outside, curtainless, letting light stream in. A room of ill intent, Harry supposed, but not one of evil, despite that. He wondered if it were Pettigrew's.

All he'd wanted to know was that these rooms had been restored, despite never receiving Harry's direct focus, by the work he'd put into the keystone room—the attic, the home of Sirius's memories. The knowledge that it had suggested that Sirius's mind had been restored, at least for the most part. Some damage might remain unnoticed, but there were no more holes and racks and treacherous shards of broken glass.

Harry wished he could fix his own mind as easily.