Previously in the Darklyverse: The Gryffindors' efforts to cover up Emmeline's suicide attempt failed, and Dumbledore delivered Emmeline into St. Mungo's care. Sirius regretted not trying harder to bring Emmeline back into his life. Emmeline maintained a friendship with Marlene's sister Maggie for several years, but it faded as Emmeline started trying to reintegrate into the Gryffindors' lives.

Revised version uploaded 26 January 2022.

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January 7th, 1978: Emmeline Vance

"I'm going to ask you again: who is Sirius Black?"

Emmeline is strongly tempted to bang her head on Clarke's perfectly polished mahogany desk, but she resists the urge. "I told you people days ago: he's in my house and year at Hogwarts. He used to be my best friend, but then his cousin killed my parents, and we haven't really been friends since."

"And you had feelings for him."

"Yes."

"According to your file—" Clarke brandishes a stack of parchment at her, and she wants to strangle him "—one of your motivations for your suicide attempt was a breakup with Black."

"I wouldn't call it a breakup, exactly. We were never dating—maybe we kissed a couple of times, but it wasn't like that. And that was years ago. I'm over it."

"So over it that you slit your wrists with a razor blade?"

"That wasn't about Sirius," Emmeline argues. "Were things good between us? Not really. I told him about my parents last year, but he wanted nothing to do with me anymore. Sure, that hurt, but not enough to make me want to kill myself."

"Then what did hurt enough to make you want to kill yourself? Help me understand."

"I tried to kill myself because my parents are dead and my friends barely tolerate me. The only one left who really knows me was Peter, but…"

"It sounds like you were pinning a lot of responsibility on this Peter to take care of you."

"No, I wasn't," says Emmeline. She's getting tired of fighting the same battles over and over with staff who don't listen, who misconstrue her words and then accuse her of misleading them when she calls them out on it. "He tracked me down after putting together what happened to my parents. He—he stuck around, and sort of got in the habit of inviting me places, until eventually, I felt comfortable enough to be the one to approach him. And then we just—started sticking together places. It wasn't a thing where I was crying and leaning on him all the time and he was spending all of his energy holding me up. It was mutual."

"So mutual that you didn't tell him what you were thinking of doing before you did it?"

She shrugs. "He was there for me in every way he should have been. I guess I didn't want to face how guilty I knew he would feel for finding out that his effort wasn't paying off."

"In previous therapy sessions, you said you didn't tell Peter what was going on because you weren't considering doing it until you suddenly did on an impulse."

"Yeah, maybe. Maybe it was both. Maybe I changed my mind and I don't think that was it anymore."

"Let's say it was an impulsive move. Then why say goodbye to him and Lily and Sirius days or hours before you made the attempt?"

"I told them last week that I wasn't seriously considering doing it, not that I wasn't considering it at all. I was just telling them just in case, you know? Just in case I cracked and I couldn't do it anymore. I wasn't really planning on it—I didn't pick a day in advance to do it, or whatever."

Clarke is drumming his fingers on the desk, and Emmeline seriously thinks she's going to snap if he doesn't stop treating her like everything she says is a lie. "Why do we have to go over all of this together, anyway? None of this is anything I haven't already said to other staff."

"Mr. Thompson takes off one weekend a month, and that's today and tomorrow. I just want to make sure I have a factual picture from you while we try to break down what happened."

"I've been breaking down what happened. I don't know what more you people want from me to let me go."

"Emmeline," says Clarke in an infuriatingly patronizing voice, "the goal of treatment is not to get out of treatment. The goal of treatment is to get better."

Oh, yeah? she wants to say. And how many of the people here have getting out to look forward to in the next week or even the next month? Does Clarke know? Because everyone she's talked to is stuck here being talked down to and never getting better. Clarke and Thompson and all of them should know how well their approach is working if nobody is ever making a successful recovery.

But she doesn't say that, knowing that all it will do is to add weeks to her sentence. Instead, she says, "Can I at least ask what you're looking for?"

Clarke frowns at that. "Well, the first rule of getting better is to comply with your treatment plan, which, according to your file… you haven't been doing."

Emmeline calls bullshit on that—she hasn't been noncompliant. She's been responding perfectly rationally to being constantly accused of lying and, apparently, "not complying with her treatment plan." But she bites her tongue. Again. "I've been trying," she says. "I've been honest. I've answered every question any of you has asked me about what happened and how I feel and what I want."

"Yes, during one-on-one talk sessions with our staff, you have," says Clarke. "But you've been skipping groups. You get caught every night making Floo calls for more than the allotted half an hour. And frankly, Mr. Thompson has indicated that you've indicated a pattern of compulsive lying during your sessions with him."

"Compulsive lying," her arse—but Emmeline doesn't say so. Like always.

God, what Emmeline wouldn't give to be out of this hospital and back at Hogwarts. If she'd known it was going to land her here, she never, ever would have smuggled out that razor blade and used it to split her veins in two. That's one of the weird bright sides of being here, though, she guesses: by comparison, it's made her miss Hogwarts so much that she thinks she sort of actually wants to be there, rather than just wanting to be dead. And that's progress, right?

If only she could get her wand back. If she could do an Accio or an Alohomora or even a simple Lumos, she would feel so much calmer and in control. But patients lose the right to their wands when they're admitted, and even if Emmeline knew where they stashed hers, she wouldn't risk getting trapped in here forever just to try to find hers and break out. Because if she broke out, where could she even go without somebody tracking her down and sending her back?

Instead of voicing any of this, Emmeline simply says, "I'll make an effort to go to more groups." Honestly, it's not like she minds them too much. Unlike in the one-on-one sessions, nobody has to talk if they don't want to in group, and sometimes it can be sort of nice to remind herself that she's not alone, that other people are here and struggling with the same problems—suicidal ideation and grief and frustration at the floor staff—that Emmeline is. She's mostly been skipping them because playing here-or-dead ranks being alone in her room above dead and getting out of bed below it.

Maybe she should stop playing here-or-dead and start playing dead-or-Hogwarts, she thinks, and then she realizes that maybe that's progress in and of itself.

When Clarke leaves, she occupies herself for the next several hours by reading. She's allowed a few personal effects, and she had her sister bring over some books and clean pairs of robes and pajamas. How she misses being in the Gryffindor common room, eating food James nicked from the kitchens and listening to Peter's terrible guitar playing to pass the time. What she wouldn't give right now to go back.

And then—her favorite part of the day arrives in the form of Taylor, who is smiling when she pushes on the door (no need to unlatch it—these doors can't shut properly). "Floo for you," she trills.

Emmeline obediently follows Taylor out of her room, down two long corridors, and into the fireplace room, where a staffer sits monitoring three fireplaces. Two of them are occupied by strangers talking to other patients that Emmeline has seen around, and the third—hers—holds Sirius.

She thanks Taylor and takes a shaky seat across from Sirius. "Hey," she says quietly.

"Hey," says Sirius. "How are you doing? They treating you okay in there?"

"Everything's fine. I don't know how much longer I'm going to be in here, though." She doesn't dare say anything about the hospital or the staff or her boiling anger at all of them: everything she's saying is being watched, and she'd better start complying with her treatment plan if she wants to ever, ever get out. "How's Hogwarts?"

"The same. Classes started back up for the year on Tuesday, but you knew that already. James stayed with me and Lily for the holiday, but you probably knew that already, too."

"Peter mentioned it, yeah."

"Of course," says Sirius. "Look, Emmeline…" She hasn't really got any idea what he wants to say to her, but it's not what comes out of his mouth. "I still love you. I do. I swear. I just don't think we remember how to talk to each other."

"For what it's worth, I don't really remember how to talk to anyone," says Emmeline with a smile.

"I don't know about that. You seem to get on with Peter remarkably well for somebody who can't hold a conversation."

"It's different with Peter. He doesn't expect anything out of me."

"And I do? Em, I would be happy to just sit with you while we—study, or watch Mary and Peter play wizard's chess, or something. It's okay with me if you don't remember how to—talk to people."

"It's more than that," Emmeline admits. "It's like I don't remember how to be me anymore. I mean, how do I go back from here?"

"Maybe you don't go back. Maybe you go forward."

"That sounds like a platitude dreamed up by someone who never sabotaged all of their friendships and then got themselves landed in an institution."

Sirius smiles faintly. "Fair enough."

"Can you do something for me?" Emmeline asks after a short, awkward pause.

"Yeah, you name it."

"Can you just talk to me? About anything other than St. Mungo's? While I listen?"

"Yeah, of course," he says, and he begins to carry on about James's parents' sickness and Peter's guitar playing and Alice's not-so-secret jealousy of Lily. He pointedly leaves out any information about the Order—even the fact that the Gryffindor seventh years meet up with Dorcas Meadowes sometimes, or the existence of War Stories—but with conversations being monitored, that's to be expected.

The staffer on duty in the fireplace room, Williams, gives Emmeline a gentle reprimand when her visit with Sirius apparently surpasses thirty minutes. "I've got to go," she tells him. "Say hi to everyone for me, okay?"

"Of course," says Sirius earnestly. "Maggie's coming later tonight, so look forward to that."

"Maggie? You mean Margaret McKinnon?"

"Yeah. She set up a time with Marlene—she'll be Flooing in from the Ravenclaw common room."

Emmeline isn't quite sure what to feel as she eats a slow dinner in the common area. She used to take her meals into her room, but the staff didn't like that, and she doesn't want to mess up her chances of getting out of this place, even though it seems unlikely. God, she hopes she'll get out sooner rather than later—or never.

She hasn't spoken to Margaret since their disastrous conversation about Elisabeth and Millie a few months ago. It's not like Emmeline forgot about her, exactly, but she sort of—it was so nice to feel seen by Peter, and that wasn't necessarily something she ever got from Margaret, who for all Emmeline knew would blab her secret to the entire castle if Emmeline confided in her—after all, Margaret has already done the same thing to Lily. Still, they were friends, maybe even best friends, during a dark part of Emmeline's life, and she feels a rush of shame—if not for keeping her depression a secret from Margaret, or for confiding in Margaret about the Order, then at least for not putting Margaret on her list of people to say goodbye to.

Taylor comes to get her out of her room a couple of hours after dinner, and there Margaret is, head in the fireplace with a sad sort of smile on her mouth. "You absolute arsehole, Emmeline Vance," she says by way of greeting.

"I know," says Emmeline, because what defense does she have?

"You moron. You positive bastard. You have so many people who love you to live for, and you have so many good things in life to look forward to that just haven't arrived yet. You're seventeen years old, you've barely lived, and you were going to throw that all away without telling anyone you needed help? Without telling me?"

Emmeline holds back a wince: she really doesn't want to discuss details of how hopeless she still feels when there are staff members around. "I'm sorry I… that I went away for so long," she says instead. "Peter figured out what was going on with me, and I guess it was easier to hide behind him than it was to be honest with anyone else—with you."

"Look, I know I can be a brat, and I know I didn't fight very hard to get you back when you started spending all your time with the Gryffindors again, but I still care about you. I still don't want to see you get hurt. I'm sorry if you were suffering and I just couldn't hear it, but I'm listening now."

"Thanks. I just… thank you."

Margaret gives her a thin smile. "I don't have a ton of time to talk—professors are riding us hard now that O.W.L.s are getting closer."

"Yeah, I remember. It's the same for us with N.E.W.T.s coming up; I'm already panicking about how I'm going to get caught up when I get out of here." If she gets out of here—it doesn't look like her chances are very good. "Floo visits are capped at half an hour, though, so I couldn't take up much of your time even if I'd wanted to."

"Well, when you get out of here, you're welcome to come and study with me anytime you want. Try and focus on that, okay? I know it can't be fun being stuck in there."

But even on her worst days here, Emmeline knows that, compared to what it could be, she got off lucky here on the psych floor. There are technically two wings: the wing where Emmeline is now, with its wand-stripping and its Floo-limiting and the staff who get everything so wrong, and there's the wing that everyone is admitted into before their psych evaluation that tells the staff whether or not the patient is an active danger and needs to be dealt with accordingly. Emmeline only spent about twenty minutes in the darker wing before her eval, but it was enough. The corridors were filled with screams and moans and choking as the staff tipped sedating potions down the patients' throats against their will, and the sound of it still haunts Emmeline in her dreams, on the nights that she only pretends to take the Dreamless Sleep Potion they try to give her.

Between death and that place, Emmeline will choose death every time. But between death and this floor, Emmeline kind of wants to choose to stick it out until she gets to Hogwarts.

She wonders what all this says about her. She wonders if it matters.