Chapter Eighteen | Shell Shock

Dumbledore sipped from a cup of steaming tea, the bittersweet scent of it filling his office in a way that to Catherine bled nostalgia. It felt almost whimsical, as if it were something immaterial, lost to time itself. So strange it was, that Catherine nearly thought it couldn't be real, too mundane were it not for the conversation flowing between the two.

For the last hour they had sat speaking of Yharnam. Every sordid detail, from Catherine's dreams to the Dream itself, hosting a Doll and the memory of a man long dead. Dumbledore seemed aghast at the very idea of it, likening it to some sort of bitter hell - not fashioned of brimstone and molten cinder but instead soft remembrance and the idleness of time.

He himself admitted he didn't know which was worse.

At Catherine's whispered tale of Gascoigne his jaw clenched, a softly spoken apology drifting from his lips and a light in his eyes that spoke of raw understanding. She simply grimaced at the expression, either unable or unwilling to voice how little it reassured her.

They now sat almost idly, only the soft aroma of Dumbledore's tea and the intermittent sighs that threatened to trip across Catherine's tongue in hoarse gasps, an ever-present itch at the back of her mind that beckoned for her to slit something's throat, if only for the sake of it.

"How many weeks, you said?"

Catherine hummed quietly. "I don't know. At least a month though."

"And… my god," he looked up from his notes. "You said you're incapable of sleep. It must feel like so much longer."

"Yes and no? I dunno' it's all just…" Catherine waved her hands above her head, letting out a puff of air. "It's a fog. I'm full of adrenaline the entire time so it gets all muddled."

Nodding in affirmation, Dumbledore scratched another line across the page in front of him, the parchment slowly filling with notes and tiny annotations. "I'll have to see if this, Yharnam, was it? If it's existed in our time, or if it's even on this plane at all." He shook his head. "If it's another world entirely…"

"Then what?"

"I don't rightly know."

"Professor…"

"Yes?"

"I don't know if this is something that can just be fixed," Catherine admitted, both to herself and him. "I just- knowing you believe me… I can't begin to explain how much that means, but I think I'm trapped." She almost laughed. Almost. "I said this to Snape, but I think this is beyond all of us. I don't know if- I can't begin to explain, but I feel it in my bones."

"Damn your bones, then," Dumbledore stated, his voice made of iron. "I said I would help you Catherine, and by god I will. If I cannot get you away from it all then I'll do my best to ease your burden."

She grimaced, teeth grinding together. "All I've done is kill. Kill, kill, kill, until it feels like my eyes are stained in red. If we can't- if we can't figure a way to get me out of this, you know what that means, right?"

Dumbledore's nostrils flared, jaw set stubbornly, the almost childish expression surreal when painted across his face. "I will help you Catherine, and pacifism is not my intent. What you've told me… Yharnam seems far too deadly a place to even consider playing by the rules we have set for ourselves here."

"You can't be serious."

"I am. Deathly so. Tell me, Catherine, were you to suddenly find yourself not taken to Yharnam, but instead many hundreds - even thousands of years back in time, would you stay your hand in a land that requires violence? One that encourages it?"

"That's not the same."

"What you have described to me thus far is nothing less than a waking nightmare. Piles of corpses littering the streets, padlocked coffins, and a plague that turns man to beast?" Dumbledore shuddered, cradling his tea in both hands. "As much as it pains me to say, I believe violence may be the only true currency in such a place."

"Fuck." Catherine leaned back in her seat, an ache growing at her forehead. "Fuck."

"Although not as eloquent as I would put it, I can't help but agree. We have to look at this realistically, and if anything is my greatest fault and strength, it would be pragmatism."

"So we… what? Turn me into a killing machine? Like some sort of character out of an action movie?"

"There are more ways to navigate that city than simply slaughtering everything in your path. Stealth through magic. Apparition. Even transfiguration can be used to carve a path through most any obstacle, and I would imagine that the fortifications of that city aren't enchanted against such a thing."

"It might work, but I have a feeling it's not that simple. Magic isn't the same there. It feels different… more raw."

Dumbledore straightened his glasses. "Explain."

"I tried- I tried to use the killing curse, while I was there, and it just… bounced off the per- thing I was trying to kill. Sometimes I cast a spell without even thinking about it, it just happens." Catherine fiddled with her wand, staring at it as though it held the answer to Yharnam's secrets. "It's either the city that's changing my magic, or the blood inside me that's making me… I don't know, more receptive?

"I know things I never knew before I went there. I can speak and write in the Yharnamites language even though I've never once attempted to study it. Bits and pieces of magical theory float to the top of my head, things I shouldn't, couldn't know." She huffed angrily, tapping at the side of her head with one finger. "It might be that god, or whatever it is, pumping my head full of who knows what. I'm not saying I won't try whatever you've thought up, but I just have a feeling that it won't work how we expect it to."

Catherine laughed suddenly. "Worst case scenario I blow up, but that wouldn't really hurt me much, would it?"

A deep sigh left Dumbledore's chest. "Let's hope it doesn't come to that."

"Not really a big deal. I'm used to it now."

"Catherine…"

She put her hand up, scowling. "Dont. I just- shit. Damnit-"

She stood up, fingers twitching and a crackle running up her spine. "This is too weird. It's fucked up, right? That we're just sitting around talking about things that shouldn't even be real? How there's some- some thing that talks to me. I mean, for all I know I could just be in a padded cell somewhere drooling, and none of this is even real."

Her fingers ran sharp trails through her hair, and she swore again as she felt blood ebbing at the cracks. "Would that be better, if I was? I think it would be. If this was all some crazy hallucination. Maybe I'd choke on my own tongue and the wardens would have the good mind to let me go." She grinned at the thought. One could dream. "Maybe I wouldn't have to sit here and talk to my fucking grandfather about killing people, or how I know things that I shouldn't know. Because I see it in you, how uncomfortable you are. How much this hurts you to even think about."

Catherine almost faltered at the pained expression on Dumbledore's face, a sense of almost palpable distress in the air.

"Of course it bothers me! Having to know what you're going through and be powerless to fix it!" He asserted, his voice not rising but the tone that swept it across the room terse to a point. "I love you dearly, Catherine, but I cannot help you if you're unwilling to help yourself. Yes, this is unimaginably strange. Horrifying in a manner I cannot even begin to describe, but all the same I have promised to help. I do not regret this promise, nor will I ever, and if I must teach you how to burrow through fortifications and in the same motion offer advice on the best way to kill a man, then that is what I must do."

"I know, I know- fuck… I just- god this is all so bloody strange." She screwed her eyes shut, jostling her head back and forth as if rattling her brain would put her thoughts back in order. "It's like I don't even remember how to be me, or who I was before all this. There's a memory of her - me - somewhere, knocking on a prison door… and I don't know if she can ever come out. I don't think that Catherine exists anymore."

All Dumbledore could do was quietly nod, concern etched across his features. The unease within the room settled deep in their bones, stretching wide the rift between them. It was a tension borne of familiarity turned sour, to look upon a friend's face and learn that the mind behind it had long since turned unnatural, blighted by something dark and vicious.

They both knew of one another's plight. Both felt compassion for the other, in their own unique way. But, Catherine knew that knowledge of the fact could only go so far.

"So you'll help me, then? Teach me magic? Beyond what the school normally does."

"Whatever I may deem fit, yes." Dumbledore scratched his cheek, moustache quirking. "To be honest, it's something I should have done a long time ago. After your encounter with the Basilisk, at the very least."

"Dunno if that'd have gone well with the other students. People already call me your pet."

"Children are foolish. Adults even moreso. A black sheep is easy to blame, to be made outcast or idolized when the title fits best. I myself have experienced the vicious tongue of the press for many, many long years, and I imagine you shall as well."

"Yeah." Catherine scowled. "I'd ask for advice about that but… it all seems so distant now. I'd forgotten about it until - well - now. All that mess is so far away, and even if it wasn't I don't think I'd give much of a shit anyways. What's Rita going to do? Slag me off? She's already done enough of that anyways and it hasn't changed much for me. What's a pissy tabloid journalist when you've got beast blood in your veins and a talking doll for a friend?"

A smirk crawled its way across Dumbledore's face. "Always optimistic. It's a fine quality to have."

"More realistic I think." She chewed on her lip, foot tapping against the floor. "My life's an actual nightmare. Honest to god horror story. I think humour might just be the only way for me to cope."

"The war was like that. Not… humorous, but nightmarish."

Dumbledore fiddled with his quill, deciding after a moment to set it down with a muted groan. He glanced out his window, looking long beyond the stained glass, unfocused.

Catherine held silent.

"I was horrified when I'd first set out to end Gellert's reign. At the way some of the soldiers would speak, how they'd laugh at the carnage and bombed out cities."

He cleared his throat, lips pursed. "One made a show of tossing pebbles into a hole in a dead Germans chest and cheering as each one went in. He was seventeen, I think. Maybe younger. So many lied to enlist." He swallowed, fingers drumming across the tabletop. "Some killed themselves when they weren't accepted."

"And he was one of them. Just a boy, hardly older than you, and no one in his company even flinched." Dumbledore suddenly laughed, horror in his tone. "He offered me a few pebbles and asked me to join in. I almost threw up right there in front of him, sixty years old and unable to grasp what I was looking upon."

"Anyone would have been horrified," Catherine offered, her voice an awkward sort of soft. Strained, almost, as if she'd forgotten what comfort was.

A muted smile was her reply, Dumbledore's lips drawn tight across his face in something closer to a grimace than any expression of kindness. He was even more quiet when he spoke. "To this day I hardly find it in me to offer him a thought, because the next week as we made progress further inland, out of France, I found another group of soldiers prying a wrist watch out of a dying boys hands while another tried to torture an old man into revealing where his granddaughters were hiding."

Their eyes met, and Dumbledore almost flinched at the unfeeling acceptance in Catherine's gaze. "I too have seen horror. Not something brewed in the mind of a madman, but something sobering and cold beyond belief. The horror of us. Of humanity." He let out a shuddering breath, fingers splayed out across the top of his desk, twitching with nerves.

"I've never told anyone of that," he admitted quietly. "Nor have I ever told them how, in a fit of rage, I slaughtered those men and obliviated the bystanders. The disgust I felt still pains me to this day, but I cannot find it in myself to muster any form of apology for killing those soldiers. Thieves, rapists, and murderers alike… I felt justified. Powerful. If it wasn't for the memory of my sister I would have gotten drunk off the rush it brought me."

"Sir…"

He raised his hand, still shivering. "I understand your fears and the pain you are going through more than you can possibly imagine. What I've seen may be different but the trauma is the same." Chin raised and features steeled, Dumbledore looked at Catherine with a grim shine glimmering in his eyes. "I understand your confusion, Catherine. I understand the way your very soul feels split down the middle, how you feel like you will never be you again.

"It's as if… as if you're an impostor. Some actor who's put on the mask that is you and is parading about pretending to feel. Pretending to know what it means to laugh or cry. Yet, deep down, all there is… is anger." Fists clenched tight, he held them out in front of him as though grasping spears, bringing his hands together to grind knuckle against knuckle, the wrinkled flesh pulled taut and milk white against knobbled bone. "There's just anger, fear, and a sense of impossible hopelessness that stands in front of you like a mountain."

Drinking in air like a prisoner supping at a waterlogged crack in the wall, Catherine's lungs whistled against the truth of his words.

All she could muster was a muted, "I know."

Because she did know, intimately, the fear of which he spoke. How her mind had been rent in two, a sickly trail of viscera dotting the split corpse of her sanity. It was if she was stood on a rock in the middle of an ocean, looking out to see naught but waves in every direction, all slowly climbing as they rushed towards her with white fangs dripping brine.

"How did you… how did you learn how to be you again? Once you'd finally come back home?"

His features crumpled, and all of a sudden he seemed to be almost ragged - every hair out of place and each wrinkle carved through his flesh as though canyons.

"I- I'm afraid that I never did. Nor could I ever learn how to be who I once was, because I had been reshaped by the war and came out of it quite different from where I had started."

"So… you just, what, pretended to be who you were? People would ask you questions, try and talk to you and you put on a face and started acting?"

"Yes."

And it should have made her feel worse. It should have torn her insides out and painted the floor with her pain, but instead it calmed her. It was a soliloquy spoken not by her own mouth but his, yet it captured her thoughts all the same.

There was no coming back from this, and that's okay.

"Alright." She nodded, both to herself and the Headmaster.

All the fervor had left her. The fear, the confusion, the impending sense of doom above all else - as if she was about to wander into yet another trap - now gone from her beating heart and replaced by tepid complacency. Resignation to her new life.

"Yeah. That- that works I guess. Ron and Hermione? I- I can tell 'em about it? Should I, even?"

"Tell them if you wish. I imagine it would help you greatly to take that off your shoulders, although I cannot predict if they will react kindly."

"Yeah it's… it's a lot."

The Headmaster smirked, chuckling quietly. "An incredible understatement."

"Christ. What about the Order?"

"I will only tell Sirius, if you're comfortable with that. I would presume Alastor to go into a fit of pique and demand I dose you to the gills with all manner of sedative. Molly would… react as Molly would. Minerva, perhaps, would be amicable. She is quite fond of you, you know."

"Well she hasn't expelled me yet, so I'd guess she was." Catherine chuckled quietly. "Poor woman has had to put up with so much. But Sirius, though, I don't… you think he'll be fine? He's as good as imprisoned back at Grimmauld, I don't think him knowing about me having to deal with- with all this," she gestured broadly, spreading her arms wide. "Would do him any good."

"Very true. Perhaps-"

The two of them startled in fright as the door swung wide, Snape tearing into the room. "Albus, she's-"

And he stood, gawking at Catherine, who stood awkwardly and found she could only gawk back.

"Headmaster," Snape barked, drawing his wand. "She escaped."

"Yes, I'm aware. Catherine and I have been speaking for the last hour or so about what she's been going through."

"You believe her?" he asked, aghast.

"Yes. She has shown me undeniable proof of her travels." He waved his hand over the saw spear that now leaned against his desk. "This was produced out of thin air. No transfiguration, no magic whatsoever, and it was carried into this room by creatures that I have never encountered nor so much as heard of in my very long life. Not to mention this weapon is infused with the essence of something more powerful than any reagent known to man."

"You cannot be serious."

"Oh, I very much am."

"Then how do you explain her immortality?"

"I saw her deaths, Severus. I looked into Catherine's mind and felt as she died. I saw with my own two eyes this city she calls Yharnam, and what is inside her head is far too complex - far too detailed to be fiction. Tom would never have the patience to construct such a story, nor would he ever do such if he did. A few minor details, yes, but weeks and weeks spent in what may very much be a different plane of existence?" He shook his head. "No. As far fetched as it may be, Catherine here is telling the truth."

"Ridiculous."

Catherine scoffed. "You saw it. You looked into my head and you saw it. You know it, Snape. I lied to you, but now I know why you were so rattled. You felt me die as well, and it scared you."

A scowl worked its way across Severus' already resentful mask. He grit his teeth, eyes sparking with anger. "She is still dangerous, Albus. You know it and she knows it. She admitted it herself! If this is true, and I severely doubt it is," he shot, glaring at Catherine. "Even so, she is a killer by her own admission. We cannot allow a murderer to live among the students."

"That's rich, coming from a Death Eater. What'd you do to get that tattoo on your arm?" Catherine taunted. "Set a family of muggles alight? Maybe you tortured one? Did you have to do that, Snape? Did someone put a gun to your head and force you to join Voldemort, or did you decide that jumping in bed with a genocidal maniac was what you wanted from life?"

"You know nothing, girl."

"Yeah? So you got bullied, right? That make it okay to be a fucking Nazi? Because that's what he is. He thinks the same, he acts the same, and that's all you are, is a petty, spiteful-"

"Enough!" Dumbledore roared, his voice like thunder in the small room. "Enough from both of you! Severus, I am exhausted by your need to continue this proxy war you have with James Potter, a man long dead I may remind you, by haranguing his daughter at every chance!" He turned to Catherine. "And Severus is right that you are dangerous, and that puts us at a quandary. What if you snap again, Catherine, and instead of hurting yourself you hurt someone else? You sprained Miss Grangers wrist when she went to speak with you the other day. What if you had cast a spell instead?"

"I won't- I would never-"

"But you could, whether or not you wanted to. You know it and I know it, and Professor Snape does as well." He raised a hand, one finger pointed to the ceiling. "And don't even begin, Severus, it is beneath you to gloat."

Snape responded with a curled lip.

"Catherine, we will need to find a way to keep you calm when you're here. That does not mean drugging you or anything so obscene, but I will need you to check in with me every morning and evening to see how you are. If you feel out of control, tense, angry, anything that you felt like when you went to the Astronomy Tower, you will come and find me without hesitation, understood?"

"What about Umbridge."

"I will deal with her and the Ministry. I believe I've been much too kind to them, and cannot continue to do so with your current… situation."

"And he won't try and rile me up?" she asked, pointing at Snape. "Because I wouldn't put it past him to try and get me to hurt another student if it meant he could be rid of me for good."

"How dare you," Severus fumed, his voice thick with condemnation.

"I will be pulling you out of his classes beginning immediately." The Headmaster looked over his nose at Snape, even his gaze brokering no negotiation. "It seems to be as though you two will never be able to find any measure of understanding, and it would be foolish to try and put two angry dogs together in the same kennel."

"If he wasn't such a cunt-"

"You will not be attending his classes and that is final. In fact, I will teach you personally before tutoring you in magics that will be helpful in your efforts to escape Yharnam. And Severus, the Order is not to know of her predicament."

Snape seemed to growl as he took a step forward. "Understood. Do you have any more need of me, Headmaster?" he hissed, each word clearly enunciated, and his furious gaze leveled not on the Headmaster but Catherine.

"No. You may go."

The tension in the room spiked as Snape whirled about, marching out the door with far too much flourish for a thirty year old man Catherine mused, noting to herself how he had seemed on the verge of a fit.

Dumbledore's bitch was right on the mark.

She turned back as the Headmaster himself let out a weary sigh, pinching the bridge of his nose. "I believe that is enough for today, wouldn't you say?"

"Yeah. When- when do you want me to check in with you?"

"Tomorrow morning should do. Unless something makes you feel the need to come see me, in which you should do so immediately."

"Even if it's the wee hours?"

"Bring tea, if that's the case," he said with an exhausted smirk on his face.

"I'll try and keep that in mind. I…" Catherine paused, quirking her jaw and fidgeting with the sleeves of her jumper. "Thank you, Professor. I know it took a lot for you to believe me, and to even go so far as to help me even when- even when things are so fucked up. I just thought- I just… I think it deserves a thank you."

"I will always be here to help you, Catherine. Always."

She nodded quietly at his words. Awkwardly. She was never good with emotion, be it hers or someone else's, and the emotion that crept into his voice was enough to leave her stunned. Words escaped her suddenly, and all she could do was hum. "That's good. I'll keep that- yeah. Thank you."

"Go. Try to relax, try to disconnect if you can. I know it's much easier said than done, but try and keep yourself busy. Explore the forest if you must."

"The forest? Really?"

"I believe the denizens that call it home are in far more danger from you than you are from them."

And her newly found comfort left her in an instant.

"Guess I am. I'll be going, Professor, and I'll see you tomorrow."

Catherine offered him a short wave, stepping out of Dumbledore's office wondering how badly the man had been shaken. How cataclysmic the knowledge of her god-given curse.

She pitied him for a moment. Pitied an old man for being far too kind for his own good. Pitied an old man for getting himself involved in something that she knew wouldn't end well for anyone, and he had to have known as well - because no man lives through so much to look on such a thing with naivety.

No, Catherine knew this wouldn't end well for anyone. Least of all herself.