Chapter Six
Trust

The prospect of reading minds (despite Cecilia's insistence that the mind could not be read, like some common book) held Harry's attention through the day. It might have been better to pay more attention to the nurses, since they were clearly the ones in charge of Harry - she hadn't seen Fitzsimmons since she arrived - or to Gin, who was kind and sweet and a good authority on this place.

But the lure of working some dangerous illegal magic right under their noses was too strong. Harry couldn't find it in herself to care that lunch was dry, flavorless corned beef sandwiches, or the designated time when an old woman came in and played the cello. Her playing was beautiful, but Harry hardly heard any of it.

After lunch, she'd gone aside, and asked Pareesa for an educational book. She produced an old, careworn book that called itself an introduction to psychology.

"Is this yours?" Harry had asked, feeling something tight and guilty in her chest.

"I was going to sell it anyway," Pareesa had admitted. "So it's not a big deal if I lend it out for a while."

"Are you sure?" Harry had asked.

"Of course," the nurse had answered.

So, in the back of the room, while the driest man Harry had the misfortune to encounter lectured all about subjects and objects in a sentence, Harry sat and wrote to Cecilia. Gin, next to her, was aggressively drawing an elephant on a sheet of paper. She was quite talented, Harry noted.

One of the nurses gave me her old textbook.

I see. Is this not good news? Cecilia asked. Harry had noticed that she wasn't the kind of person who thought a lot about other people's feelings.

I just don't know if it's a good idea to ruin her book. She likes me, and the nurses have a lot of power over us.

It's your decision, Harriet. However, consider the metaphysical weight of such an object. This is one of the older branches of magic. An object that represents the trust that someone has in you is exactly the kind of thing that this ritual favors.

What do you mean?

Blood magic is about sacrifice. If you destroy this book in a ritual, you're not just sacrificing the thing itself, you're also giving up any hope of having a good relationship with an adult who has power over you. That's worth more, so to speak.

Harry bit her lip. So, you'd go for it.

I would. The magical benefits outweigh the costs for me. I don't presume to say whether they ought to for you, though. I figure that I'd planned on getting out by the end of the summer, and that the benefit of having more talent for legilimency is something that would extend later in life.

Well, then, by that logic, wouldn't it be better to wait until the end of the summer, to get proper ingredients for this ritual?

That's good reasoning, but it would be less effective than you might think. As it stands, you have very few possessions and no access to your money. The things you're giving up - one of your few possessions, and the trust of one of the few allies you have in this place - these things might not be much when you're back at school, but while you are in here, they are very valuable.

So, it's not just the value of things, it's the comparative value of things?

Yes. In six months, when you are back at school, if you were to do the same ritual, sacrificing instead some expensive and appropriate magical materials, they will not have the same weight. Money, after all, is not very important to you.

I understand. Okay, I'll use it.

Excellent. We will have a good opportunity tonight.

I suppose that means I'd better do some magic, to make sure no one will come running.

It can't hurt.

Harry shut the book, and glanced around the room. It was a boring lesson. Everyone looked bored. The teacher, then. She sent a silent apology to him. He was here, after all. He probably didn't deserve this, so she'd try to be gentle.

She leaned over to Gin. "Hey, that teacher looks kinda old, huh?"

Gin glanced up from her elephant, curious. "What do you mean?" He was pacing back and forth in front of the ancient, rolling chalkboard.

"Well," Harry said, summoning up that hot, sick, too-full feeling. "You know what happens to old people sometimes, right? Their hips go out."

At that moment, the teacher tripped over his own feet, and went crashing into the board, toppling it over with an enormous sound like a gunshot. The nurses stood up, and the patients stared around at each other, too happy with the interruption to care.

Gin, however, was staring at Harry. "Did… did you do that?"

"I don't know what you're talking about," Harry said, the picture of innocence. "After all, I'm in here because I believe I have magic powers. I don't actually have them, not at all."

"Wicked," Gin breathed. "Normally, I'd say you were fucking with me, but I know what I saw."

"Nothing," Harry supplied. "You saw nothing."

"...Right."

The ministry never did show up. She was in the clear.

Later that night, Harry stood in her room. It was fortunate, as Cecilia had put it, that it was large enough to contain the circle that they had planned to make. She had so little furniture, too, that she didn't even have to move stuff around. The problem, however, was mostly that Harry would be much better off with some kind of paintbrush, for the ink. She had to make do with her felt-tip pen, but that was easier said than done.

Do I need to avoid doing other kinds of magic while drawing this circle? she asked Cecilia.

What kind of magic do you need to do?

I don't want to spill any of your ink. From what you've told me, it's basically your blood. And something might go wrong if I do spill…

Relax. My ink has magical properties, so it won't dry. So what we'll do is I'll create a small well of ink, and you can dip your finger in it, and draw the circle, as well as the glyphs. Have you copied them exactly?

Yes.

Then there's nothing to worry about.

Chastised, Harry set the book down, and glanced again at her sketch. Around a perfect circle, a number of small symbols were etched. Three smaller circles were placed outside of the first, equidistant from each other, with a thin line of ink linking them back.

Harry drew, careful to make the circles as perfect as possible. It helped to follow the tile on the floor - the squares were helpful as a benchmark, and Cecilia drew out each rune in the diary, blown-up so she could reference them, as Harry drew them.

It was a lot of work - Harry's finger ached, and while the fact that the ink did not dry was very useful, it was also sort of gross. Harry had no intention of mentioning this to Cecilia.

After what felt like an hour, she sat back on her heels. The circles were complete, the glyphs were drawn, and her finger was covered in inky sludge. Per directions, she placed the book in one of the circles, her glasses in another, and the diary in the final circle, right in front of her.

The last thing she did was scratch at her arm, over and over till she drew blood. She squeezed the wound, pushing blood out in a few red drips.

The ink sizzled where the blood hit it, bubbling and spitting, like an enraged badger. Harry stepped back, and summoned the feeling again.

The hot, sick bubbling rose in the back of her throat. She could feel it - the magic was nearly palpable, humid, thick, roiling like it was about to spill over. It pounded in her ears, in her temples - in her head, like it was part of her.

In her mouth, she felt like she suddenly had a mouthful of blood - that coppery, savory tang.

It thrummed, and the lines on the floor began to hiss, low and jarring. The noise grated against Harry's teeth, louder, and louder. The thrumming in her brain got louder, and louder - not in decibels, until her brain felt like mush and there was no room left for thoughts, just the pulsing in her brain, the hissing in her ears, and the metallic tang on her tongue.

And then, it was over - the feelings stopped, all at once, and Harry was laying on the floor, head ringing. She didn't feel any different.

With what felt like a titanic effort, she heaved herself up, grabbed the diary, and then crawled into bed, fully dressed.

Harry was only woken by a shrill scream, the next morning. She forced open her eyes, and blinked at the blur in front of her. Nancy, then. Her horror was loud - not her scream, but her thoughts. It was like she was thinking too loudly. She thought that Harriet was deranged enough to think that she could summon demons.

This was far from ideal. Harry had done the ritual with the full expectation that she would be found out, but it was literally the next morning.

Nancy finished screaming, finally. The noise tapered off. Harry pushed herself out of bed, squinting.

"What is this?" Nancy asked. Harry thought that there were more people behind her, in the hallway now. That scream definitely would have tipped off the ward. And true enough, she could feel the flow of their thoughts, like little eddies, in the hall. Demon-summoning, it appeared, was the order of the day.

Harry just shrugged. "Sorry if I missed breakfast," she said. "Do you mind if I get changed?"

She was far too blind to be able to tell for sure, but she was pretty sure that Nancy's mouth was gaping open.

"Fucking hell," someone else whispered, from the hall.

Harry wasn't sure what to say, but she figured that ending this moment was best. She fumbled her way to the drawers, and then opened them up, grabbing a fresh set of clothes, complete with a thin hoodie. She staggered over to her bathroom, and shut the door.

She was going to take a nice long shower, let them get the gawking out of the way. Showering was, in its own way, comforting, since she couldn't usually bring her glasses into the shower, even if the constant cold of the ward and the lack of hot water compounded to make it a wholly unsatisfying experience.

When she finally stepped out into her room, hair wet but covered by her hood, teeth chattering, she found it empty. When Harry went to look, the book was gone, and what was left of her glasses had been placed on her dresser. She picked them up, and turned them over. They were still recognizably eyeglasses, but they looked as if they'd spent a warm half-hour in a furnace - twisted, broken, and still smeared with black ink.

Harry put them down, checked that she still had Cecilia's diary, put the dirty clothes in her hamper, and steeled herself. There was no putting it off - she was just glad that no one was waiting for her, when she came back.

Reaching into her pocket and curling her fingers around the diary for reassurance, she stepped out into the hall. The ward was a lot more frightening when it was a collage of vague, blurry shapes. Harry had her ears peeled - the quiet in most of the room probably meant that she'd missed breakfast and morning meeting.

"Hey, Harry," Gin called. She had a distractingly pleasant lack of giving a shit about demon summoning. Mostly, she thought Harry looked like an awkward duckling, and she recalled her experiences at first, in this place.

"Hey," Harry said. "What are we doing today?"

"We're drawing ourselves as trees. C'mon." Harry dutifully followed.

She had barely sat down at a table when another blur appeared, and asked her, "You're Harriet Potter?"

"Yes?"

The blur - it had to be a nurse - placed a plastic cup in front of her. Harry glared at it. Pills, again. The nurse's thoughts told her they were anti-psychotics. Gross. She downed it without dwelling on that, but the woman didn't leave.

Harry squinted at her.

"I'm your named nurse," she said. "Toni Carter." It was some sort of obligation, but the woman was so busy that apparently she only got to visit with her patients once a week, if that.

"What's a named nurse?" Harry asked.

"During your stay, I am the primary caregiver in charge of your treatment, and your care. If you have a concern, it should come to me. Now that we have established that, do you have any immediate concerns that I should be aware of?"

"No," Harry said. The nurse wasn't really interested in her concerns - it was more rote efficiency than concern.

"Yes," Gin piped up. She, however, had a surprising amount of both observation and concern. "She needs glasses. Dunno what happened to her old ones, but the girl can't see shit."

"Hey!" Harry protested.

"Is that so? What happened to your previous pair?" Ms. Carter asked.

"They got broken."

The woman sighed, and strode off. Harry just glanced at Gin. This, apparently was a mistake, because Gin met her eyes - Harry blinked, and then there was a sensation - it was like stepping into a pool of water, but not - because it was in her mind, and Gin's mind wasn't a pool of water.

Harry panicked, and looked away - but it vanished, as soon as she broke eye contact. But even from that - she got a whole lot of jumbled thoughts, from that contact. Even a few memories - some of them old, some recent. It felt like rather more data than her brain was ready for. Her head twinged, a little.

That was what Cecilia was talking about, then. Harry cleared her throat, trying to dispel the sensation.

"So. You mentioned trees."

"Yes. Trees."

Harry frowned. "So am I supposed to be drawing me as what kind of tree I'd be, me turning into a tree, me as wood with a bunch of tree parts?"

"Use your imagination," Gin said. "Any of the above." She was working away at her own drawing, which was a bunch of faces in a tree. Weird.

"Alright."

Harry bent down, face close to the table, to draw. Except, she was pretty awful at drawing, and she'd never really tried to draw trees before.

She gave it her all, but it looked awful. She was a horrible tree.

"You're terrible at this," Gin remarked.

"Yep," Harry agreed. She polished off the terrible sketch of a tree, and opened her diary.

It succeeded.

Excellent, Harriet. What have you noticed so far? Cecilia's writing was cramped, and hurried.

I can see everyone's thoughts. I thought this was going to be a thing where I had to turn it on. Instead, it's sort of harder not to do it than to do it.

Yes. It's almost good that you're here, for it. It's a closed environment, and there are enough people around that you'll get some experience with it. You'll find that the ability to read minds involves very little actual reading. We do not think in text, after all. At first, you will mostly get emotions, or impressions - snapshots, of what people are thinking. Passively, the effect is somewhat weaker, and constant. Once you become used to it, you can peruse memories, or instill compulsion. The connection is stronger with eye contact, and with a wand, but it's possible to make do with less.

Harry smiled. That seems pretty useful. Do lots of people know it?

I am unsure about the present era, but when I was in school, most people did not know it. It is not something easily learned from books, so some of the old families passed it down among themselves, like the Blacks. Occasionally, there are people with natural talent for it, like us but becoming accomplished while being self-taught is rare.

So, that's why you wanted me to do this so badly. It's too hard to learn on its own. But that was easy, and now I have a whole new talent. I can read minds really easily - and more than one at once, though I can really only focus on one at a time. Why don't we do that for other kinds of magic?

While it might seem that way, it is generally better to learn things the hard way instead of cheating with blood magic. As a teacher, I would be remiss if I did not encourage you to learn and develop your own talents, rather than than turning you into a feeble copy of me. You would become more talented faster, yes, but in the long run, you would suffer for it.

I see.

Cecilia continued, however. Blood magic is useful, but it is not a cure-all, and it is ultimately no substitute for hard work. It often closes as many doors as it opens - there are likely as yet unknown limitations to the ritual we just did. Hopefully, they are not debilitating ones, because of what we gave up-front, but it is not a perfect science.

I get it. So we did this one because it was worth it?

Yes. Legilimency and Occlumency are singularly useful talents, and I think we can expect Voldemort to be skilled in them, as well. It is one of those things - you can imagine how useful it is in any confrontation, and now, you will be able to compete with her.

Oh. Everything always came back to Voldemort, didn't it?

You and I will defeat her, Harriet.

Yeah, I know. I just wish she'd gone to someone else's house that Halloween.

My condolences, little weed.

Instead of answering, Harry drew a face sticking its tongue out, and shut the diary. She was exhausted. She let her face slump onto the table, draping it onto her arms.

Within a few minutes, she was asleep.

True to her word, Harry's named nurse scheduled a visit from an optometrist that very afternoon. Harry was quite pleased that she'd even convinced Uncle Vernon to shell out to cover a new pair of glasses. She spent an hour with a man who looked almost as old as Dumbledore, with his own set of thick spectacles, before she picked out another pair of glasses that looked quite a bit like her father's.

She trailed her mind through the waters of his thoughts, but stopped, almost immediately. His overriding thought, for most of the session, was that Harry didn't look crazy. Plus, it was worth it to try and stop herself from reading people's memories as much as she liked.

Harry found herself much less fond of his bumbling grandfatherliness after that. She walked back into the ward, and threw herself into the seat next to Gin.

Gin nudged her, honest concern floating out of her, like beams of light from a candle. Harry poked her back. When Harry met her eyes, she dove into the pool of water, again. Gin had noticed that Harry didn't have breakfast, had slept through most of the day.

"I'm alright," Harry said. "I've just been so tired today."

"Mhmm," Gin hummed. "What do they have you on? Might be the drugs." While she suggested it, Harry watched her observe other girls in this ward go on medication, and realized they became drowsy for days afterwards. It was almost surreal. Harry could feel her head twinge, a little bit.

"No idea."

"Ah. They might not tell you, anyway. You could ask if you wanted to." That thought was accompanied by a stab of pity, and Harry realized that Gin was a voluntary patient - she'd agreed to come here, of her own free will, and could leave, if she wanted to.

Harry wasn't sure how to feel about that - she supposed that she had a rather uncommon perspective, because she genuinely didn't belong. People like Gin clearly did, and agreed that they did. A bit more digging, and she learned more about Gin than she cared to know, along with a throbbing in her head, from the intensity of their direct connection.

She felt a bit ill - Gin had problems, and they were hers to share. She hadn't shared them with Harry, and Harry had just snooped behind her eyes, and in a few seconds she knew that Gin had a history of throwing everything she ate up in the bathroom, afterwards. This had gotten out at her school, and then things had gotten worse, until - Harry's brain stuttered - she had suicidal thoughts, and told her teacher about them.

One thing led to another, and Gin had ended up here, because that was the best option she'd had.

Harry tore her eyes away. It felt horribly invasive. She hadn't really meant to snoop, it just… happened. Part of this talent meant that all it took was an idle thought - and then someone's mind would seize on that, and she instantly knew more than she had ever wanted.

Her head hurt more, now, like someone had lodged a small, smooth stone behind one of her eyes.

She yawned. Part of her wanted to open up the diary, and ask Cecilia about how to stop reading people's minds, but she was just so tired. She put her face in her hands, ready to sleep again.

"If you're going to do that, you might as well go back to your room," Gin said.

"I can do that?" Harry asked.

"Well, yes. They usually frown on patients not participating, but all you've done today is sleep, so no one will notice."

"Cool. Thanks."

Later, after Harry had slept, she curled up in a nest of her sheets, and took out Cecilia's Diary. She huddled, trying to expose as little skin as possible to the frigid air.

How do I turn it off?

What did you see, Harriet?

I learned a lot more about Gin than I ever wanted to, that's for sure.

Yes, that is bound to happen. With this power, you will find it harder to not look into others' minds, than to do so. However, it is like any other talent - mastery will come in time.

Ahh. So I have to keep doing it to learn how to stop doing it. That seems backwards.

it might, but it's not dissimilar to learning how to ski. It is easy to move, but keeping your balance is necessary. It is difficult to regulate your speed, but with practice, balance is much less of an issue. As of now, you are a baby bird, fumbling and struggling to move. With time, you will become a graceful raptor, swooping and diving as you please.

Harry chortled. First I am a weed, now I am a baby bird.

You are many things, darling. One day, you will even be great. But, more seriously, do not fret about what you will inevitably learn, in the course of practicing your Legilimency. It is inevitable, and it happens to every single person that develops a talent as strong as yours now is. I felt similarly, once. With practice, you will inevitably cut down on all the superfluous information. For the time being, it is a necessary growing pain.

Thanks, Cecilia. That does make me feel better. I think, for now, I'd settle for getting out of the mental hospital. Harry wondered, for a second, about Cecilia's obsession with making Harry great. Harry had never considered herself destined for greatness, but it seemed to be Cecilia's way of helping - she seemed to double down on oppression and loneliness, instead of looking to others.

What had happened to her original? Why was it so important to her, that Harry succeeded? Perhaps it was purely that kind of empathy - she had been in a similar situation. Maybe the differences Harry had noticed came only from the fact that Harry had chosen Gryffindor, instead of Slytherin.

Of course.

But even if she didn't agree with Cecilia on everything, she was still Harry's friend - the best.