CHAPTER SIX
The hallway is pristine, almost sterile even, as I walk through it. My footfalls don't make a sound against the white tiling of the floor, my gate steady. On both sides, door after door passes me. They're heavy, with thin slits at the top, almost like prison cell doors. There are no labels of any kind, nothing to denote their contents or indicate in which direction I'm going.
Why would I need them? I know this place better than anyone after all.
Finally, I come towards the end of the hallway, turning to face yet another of the many doors. These few here are special though. Most of the others had either been filled with simple furniture, usually a bookcase though they were only rarely filled. Many of them had been completely empty.
These last cells were different. They resembled a prison even more than the others in the hallway, because these actually held people. Well… sort of, at least.
Taking a deep, steadying breath, I open the cell door, stepping inside as I let it fall shut behind me. Standing in the middle of the chamber, eyes boring into mine, stands a mousy woman in unassuming clothing.
"Hello Doris." I say slowly.
For a long moment, the woman remains silent, her gaze never faltering.
"Why are you doing this?" she eventually says, in a tone that I know all too well.
How could I not? I had spent a lifetime talking in that voice. I had heard it in soft, gentle tones as she cared for me in my old age.
"Why? … I'm not entirely sure myself." I respond, falling into a heavy leather chair that has suddenly appeared behind me.
Why create all of this? The mind palace (though it didn't look nearly grand enough to be called a palace truthfully, something to work on later) was easy enough to justify. I had based it on how such mental projections were represented in the Sherlock series back in my original universe. While it had been greatly expanded and exaggerated in the show, the underlying principles had been used by people in real life for thousands of years, utilizing much simpler conceptual structures to organize their thoughts. Using Fieldwake's knowledge of Occlumency, I had pushed it beyond normal limitations, stamping an actual mental construct out of the ground within the confines of my mind. The creation of a hidden place to store my vast amounts of stolen knowledge in a safe and secure way had been a priority ever since I first used my Mind Eating Spell.
And what better hiding place than the inside of your own brain?
By organizing different memories and grouping it together based on association and common themes or skills, I could 'decouple' the actual skills I had stolen from the lives of my 'donors'. As such, the mind palace would allow me better access to the actual knowledge I had gained from my victims, instead of having it all bundled up with their life experiences, memories, and of course their traumas. They all shared one in particular: facing me in their final moments.
Having to see my own face flash in front of my eyes whenever I wanted to delve deeper into my newly acquired knowledge got old (and severely depressing) pretty fast.
In addition to helping me organize and navigate my stolen skills better, it also defended my mind in general, especially (hopefully) against enemy wizards who were capable of Legilimency. Given the deaths I was responsible for in such a short period of time, if any wizard were to peek into my brain, I'd probably get a Dementor's Kiss Order on the spot.
So yeah, pretty swell idea all around, this whole mental fortress thing. Already, I had neatly collected, organized and filed my knowledge into several separate conglomerations, each one held securely in their own vault. Language, sleight of hand, observation, driving, navigation, it all got sorted and condensed into a neat package of pure skill and information, taken from the memories that got filtered out and separated, each one assigned their own room.
Or prison cell, as it was. My mind easily fashioned its defenses into a prison-like 'building' because, somewhat depressingly, it's where I have spent most of my multiple lifetimes and it was the first thing I thought of when I envisioned "secure".
Goes to show how fucked up my mind had become without me even noticing. Most people would think of "bank" or some shit like that. For fuck's sake, I had literally visited Gringotts and yet my mind still went to 'generic prison no. 69420' without prompting.
How could I have changed so much so fast, without even realizing? Then again, how would you even know your own mind was altered, when your mind was the thing telling you what 'normal' was supposed to be in the first place.
Tricky business, memories. Even trickier to organize those that weren't yours to begin with.
In that regard, Snape had been correct, in that the mind is not like a book with easy chapters and pages to leaf through. It is complicated and relies more on association than what we'd call logic or common sense. But that did not mean that the mind could not be honed, shored up, built into your own vision for it.
Surprise, surprise, once again Snape's excellence at a subject got horribly transferred to his students due to him being an absolute shit teacher.
So yeah, me sitting here in my own mind palace, built with decades of experience with Occlumency, was a safe bet and perfectly normal if you wanted to hide your stapled-together mind from the rest of the world.
But why keep these people here? Or my, their memories of them in here? Initially I had thought of it as an extra layer of defense, a personal army of mind ghosts to help me drive out any potential invaders. But now, sitting in front of one of said mind ghosts, I realized that wasn't really it.
"Because you shouldn't be let go. Because… you at least deserve to be remembered by someone. Even if that someone is me." I eventually say out loud to this self-constructed apparition.
She wasn't alive. Not really. I had built her from my own memories. But since those memories were her memories, her entire life even, this representation of her was as accurate as the real thing. Whenever I ate the memories of my victims, the persons they were before had essentially been 'killed'. Everything that made them them had been taken away from them, with no chance of ever returning.
An amnesia so severe they were, for all intents and purposes, dead already, regardless of whether or not I actually killed them afterwards. Lights were on, but nobody was home type of situation.
The body I had left in Fieldwake's house had not been Doris. Doris had been dead from the moment I stole her mind. The body that remained afterwards was just a breathing corpse, until I shot her and she stopped doing that as well. To the outside world, Doris had died in June 1981, having lived an unassuming and unfulfilling life as someone caught between two worlds, yet being part of neither.
Someone unnoticed. Unmourned. Soon to be forgotten by those few who even knew she had existed on this Earth to begin with.
Except in here. Within the debts of my mind palace, she had been reassembled, created from the memories and experiences I had directly lifted from the original's mind. She thought like Doris did, felt what she would have, because she had the woman's entire life to draw from.
Essentially, I was merely talking to myself in a weird way, it was just that I was a superb ventriloquist.
"Gilderoy Lockhart, finally moved by guilt, then?" Doris concludes, her voice small but strong as she sits down in a chair of her own.
It's a ridiculously ugly thing, brown and lumpy all over, but it was the one she had sat in most nights as she and her uncle spent the evening lounging by the big hearth in the living room. It had been held together mostly by Reparo's and hopes and dreams, but it had been hers.
Squibs didn't often get to call things theirs in magical USA during the '80s.
"What makes you assume it's guilt? Could just be scientific curiosity." I reply as I attempt to sound nonchalant, still trying to dodge the conversation even as I force myself to work through it.
"When you just killed me, took in my memories and took my skills for yourself, your intention was to 'bury my bloodied face in the deepest depths of your Mind Palace', no? That's what you told yourself at night, wasn't it, sir?" Doris shoots back, a severe frown on her unassuming face.
She briefly indicates it, turning it back and forth in a clear demonstration: no blood. She was perfectly recreated as she was before I ever set foot in her and her uncle's life.
"Something changed, I take it?" she presses.
"In a way." I concede, glancing at the mousy woman from the corner of my eye.
"What did? Why show any semblance of remorse now?"
She knows why. Of course she does, in a way she's a part of me, I built her after all. But this whole fucked up pseudo-psychiatric self-analyzing bullshit exercise won't work if I take the easy way out and don't treat her as if she is real.
Can you already tell I'm uncomfortable with all this?
"Because now I can, with the knowledge I took from Floris."
"That's how, not why." She says, unyielding.
She knows as well as I do that I need this. I need to do this, right now. If I don't, I'll change even further into something unrecognizable. How far gone do I have to be, in order to look back at the road I've taken and realize I've ended up in Hell? How much deeper can I sink before there's no coming back at all?
"I feel guilt… because of you. And because of Floris. Because you give me… a sense of normalcy. Or a memory of what it should be like, at least. I didn't see it at first, but the bleedover from the criminals I had taken into myself was graver than expected. I didn't think like a wizard anymore, I was beginning to think like a superpowered thug. I… I shouldn't have killed you. You didn't deserve that. It was…"
I can't look at her anymore, my gaze falling towards my lap.
"… it was just convenient. Easy. It was far, far too easy." I say in a soft voice, and Doris' cell remains quiet for a long time.
I stood (or, well, sat) by what I had said though. Looking back, I had been rash and violent in the way I had dealt with Fieldwake and his niece, my flight or fight response triggered when the aged wizard held me at wand point. I reacted on sheer reflexes and the ingrained experiences of multiple lifetimes. Between Lockhart and myself, we didn't even have half a century's worth of memories. The combined years of the eight criminals in my head accounted to well over two and a half centuries. Against so much instinct, any reservations Lockhart or I would've had simply faded away into the background, but with them also went our knowledge of Magic and its uses.
There were so many different ways I could've handled Fieldwake and Doris here. Stun and Obliviate Doris the moment I had crossed the threshold, or at the very least before I tried absorbing Fieldwake so I didn't give her the opportunity to go for the rifle. Erase any traces of my existence simply by Vanishing any evidence whatsoever, or even have Fughly clean up the place so my Magic signature couldn't be tracked by any MACUSA agents. When leaving I could have just relocked the door, ensuring that Fieldwake wouldn't be found for potentially months, instead of making it look like a B&E I was so familiar with, thus drawing the attention of the neighbours and authorities.
Using magic, I could have been in and out of that place like a ghost.
Instead, I had almost shot an old man's arm and leg clean off and killed an innocent woman who realistically didn't even have the resources to point an accusing finger in my direction in a world that would much rather pretend she didn't even exist in the first place.
I could only let out a hollow, bitter laugh when I realized that the reasoning of the thugs in my mind, so accustomed to situations like these, had one glaring flaw: while I justified shooting Doris as way to have both Muggle and Wizarding authorities dismiss the case as just another B&E gone wrong, I had shot her with my gun.
My magically enhanced, special calibre firing gun.
Naturally, one of the first things I did was race to the precinct which was investigating Fieldwake's murder (thankfully it seemed as if they were already wrapping up the case, due to a lack of witnesses and evidence) under a Disillusionment Charm. Sneaking my way towards the evidence room, I Vanished the ballistics rapport (worriedly noting someone had scribbled a '?' in the margins) before leaving the station again, none of the coppers any the wiser to my brief presence.
It was only after I began excising the memories of my victims from my own memories, dissecting and ordering them neatly in my Mind Palace, that I could truly reflect on my actions of the past three days and more importantly the ease with which I had done them without even realizing just how fucked up they really were.
That had been a… difficult day for me. Fuck, it still was difficult to come to terms with. Which is why I was having this pseudo-therapeutic talk with 'Doris' in the first place. The hardest part was still to come though. Because it was easy to blame everything on the criminals that had been living rent-free in my head for these past two weeks. But at the core of it all…
"Odd. You say you did this, created me, because you can now feel guilt. Realize what your actions meant, not just to others, but to yourself. And yet…" Doris speaks up, her voice soft but her tone hard as she stands up from her lumpy brown chair, stepping closer towards me.
Sitting on her haunches right next to me, she takes one of my hands into hers, holding it until I finally glance up and look towards her. She isn't a particularly pretty woman (though by no means ugly), with a plain face and brown, somewhat listless hair tied back in a tight bun.
But her eyes almost seem to blaze with an inner light due to the intensity with which she's staring at me.
"Are you going to stop? Stop all… this?"
I open and close my mouth several times, finding myself unable to look away. My answer comes as nothing more than a hushed whisper.
"No."
Doris' eyes become tearful, though her expression remains unchanging.
"Why? Have you not hurt enough people? Why would you want to continue? Who would ever want to become this?"
"I have to-"
"Do you?" she immediately cuts in, my voice dying in my throat.
"If I don't… Wizarding Britain is fucked up. It's only going to get worse from here. Voldemort-"
"Won't be back for almost ten years."
"That's not enough time to rival someone like him in power."
"Why would you need to? You're a wizard, Gilderoy. You can use a wand! You could travel to any corner of the world that you want, live like a king in the No-Maj world! Do you know how long I-…!"
Doris catches herself, taking a deep, steadying breath.
"You have so much power, Gilderoy, so much freedom compared to the rest of us. To those who were denied the gift of magic. You were given so much… yet you still wish to take more from others, from those less fortunate."
"I'm doing this to protect others! I can run, but my sisters are Squibs like you! My dad is a Muggle, my Mom a race-traitor in the eyes of Purebloods-!" I try, my emotions flaring.
"Then take them with you."
"They built their life in Edinburgh. They wouldn't want to uproot everything at the drop of a hat or just my say so."
"So the great Gilderoy Lockhart is powerful enough to prey upon No-Maj and wizard alike, but can't convince his own family to move abroad to escape a deranged terrorist?" Doris shoots back with a challenging look, and once again I feel like someone pulled the rug right from underneath me.
She leans closer towards me, her expression earnest as her grip on my hand tightens.
"Why can't you just run away? Hide in some corner of the world where the War will never touch you or your family? Why continue down this path, when you know what awaits you at the end?"
"… because I like it." I am eventually forced to admit to the facsimile of the woman I had killed.
The other reasons I had given were all true in a way. Voldemort might have been an entertaining villain on screen, but the knowledge that I now had to share a country with a man who was uncontested by the entirety of Wizarding Britain, a man who just would not die unless you were Harry Potter himself, that was terrifying. That realization was hardly helped by the knowledge that it wasn't just an isolated madman: he had followers in even the highest elechons of Lockhart's government.
Nowhere in Britain was safe once he returned in Harry's fourth year. And while young Gilderoy had had difficulty connecting to the non-magical side of his family due to his vanity and desperate need to feel special, I had no such barriers. In a world not my own, I had clamped onto the sense of familiarity they gave me, despite essentially being strangers.
As such, I would much rather not have them suffer under the regime of Riddle and his mad followers if I could help it.
But these problems could be avoided, as Doris had pointed out. There was no real way to be sure what would happen to me if I tried to run though: as I had been forced to consider when I stood inside Flourish&Blotts, holding a book detailing the story of the second most well-known infant in the world, this was not my universe. It was not my story. It had been Lockhart's destiny to wipe his own mind in the Chamber of Secrets.
What would happen if I tried to run from that destiny?
The fear of both the known and unknown in this strange world from my original self, combined with the desire for fame and prestige from Gilderoy, meant that we had been put on the path to power from the start.
And now that we had a taste for it… how could we ever stop?
I knew how to clean and strip a gun with my eyes closed, could navigate both New York and Edinburgh by sent and the feel of feet on pavement alone, knew how to pick a lock and disassemble a car in under half an hour until only nuts and bolts remained.
I was even fluent in French now! (courtesy of Doris, ironically)
All of that in a little under two weeks. Ten lifetimes worth of knowledge, all readily available inside my mind, with just a flick of my wand. What else could I learn in two months? Two years? The human species was amazing due to the feats they could accomplish when pooling their knowledge, a process called Collective Learning by anthropologists and claimed to be just as important to our species' success as the development of an opposable thumb.
I could Collective Learn all on my own. Combine the near-infinite knowledge and potential of humankind into myself. And that was just the normal humans: there were entire societies of reality-warpers hidden amongst them! Men who could fancy themselves akin to gods, just by waving a wooden stick in silly gestures!
No… No, I could not stop. To save myself from Destiny, yes. To save my family from the cruel Wizarding society and the threat of the Death Eaters, certainly. Additionally, restoring Lockhart castle satisfied my desire for a strong, defensible position and Lockhart's fancy of being the lord of his own manor, which naturally pushed us in that direction. Not necessarily a problem on its own, but it would certainly make waves among my fellow wizards, further underscoring my need to actually become a decent a wizard as Gilderoy only ever managed to pretend to be.
But at the core of it all, I could no longer lie to myself. Rationalize it away, or merely blame it on the criminals currently locked away in my Mind Palace.
I had gotten a taste of power… and it had only made me hungrier for more.
Doris can tell when I finally reach that conclusion, seeing how I try to grapple and come to terms with it, and she draws away from me with an utterly crushed expression. As she moves away, I follow, rising from my chair which immediately disappears from this mental space. Doris doesn't shrink away from me, either because she knows I would never hurt her, or because she's not exactly alive in the strictest sense.
"I'll be more careful, in the future. No innocents. Only those that should be removed from society. And perhaps those that deserve to be carried on in some way. Maybe I could become a vessel of sorts, for those society has forgotten about. It would go a long way in countering the scumbags I'll undoubtedly come across." I promise her, though Doris remains silent, arms clasped around her middle in a protective gesture, staring at me with large eyes.
"I'll perfect the Spell. Floris' memories and understanding of Occlumency and Legilimency tell me that I can only edit another's mind once I myself am a full-fledged Legilimens. Once I have that skill, I might be able to only take parts of another's mind."
I step closer to Doris, placing a hand on her narrow shoulder. Despite her mousy appearance, she still looks me dead in the eye, showing that for all her impeccable acting, she's still only a construct and not the real-life Doris: she lacks that fear in her eyes.
"I do know where that road ends. I've seen friends die under overpasses, foaming at the mouth and with vomit filling up there lungs. Seen family covered in their blood and holding onto their own guts after another shoot-out with the cops or another gang. I know where monsters end up. And so I know how to not end up like that. I can become so much more than just a monster." I try to impress on her, and thus, on myself.
Doris merely lifts her chin, her voice small but icy cold.
"So many lives in your head. Tell me, how many told themselves the same thing, thinking that they were the ones to make it out of the game alive? How many told themselves that… before meeting you?"
For a moment, I don't have response, as I let go of her shoulder.
"Goodbye Doris." I say lowly, and the room fades away into non-focus and hard mist as I move out of my Mind Palace and back into a conscious state.
I slowly open my eyes, blinking a few times as I'm greeted by a dark brown panelling. A thick woolly carpet springs back underneath my impeccably polished shoes as I lean back further in the lounge chair placed against the side of the hallway. I glance down to my right, where a large suitcase sits innocently at my side.
Almost as if on cue, the moment I settle in, the large double glass doors to my other side open up, a middle-aged man in a fine suit stepping into the hallway as his eyes land on me. I can see them flit over my outfit, which is supernaturally well-fitting and of impossibly good quality, a testament to Gilderoy's and Doris' grooming and household skills respectively. His eyes shoot up to study my face, taking in the perfectly square jaw, the high cheekbones, the wavey golden hair. Immediately his demeanour shifts, a large, slimy smile broadening on his face.
"Ah, Mr. Oxlong! Please, please, do come in!" he calls out, stepping to the side as he holds the door open to me.
I easily rise as I move into his office, passing a nameplate stating "J.P. Morgan, Senior Executive" as I take a seat across from him as he takes his place behind his desk. The entire office is lavishly furnished… by 80s standards at least. I'm sure he thinks the Columbia MPC sitting on his desk is highly impressive, with all of its 20MB of hard drive memory.
Meanwhile, I'm mostly just wondering how he keeps his office from bursting into flames whenever he tries to type in 2+2 on the ancient, clunky-looking brick of machinery. The thing looks heavy enough I'm half-expecting the ornate mahogany desk to begin groaning underneath the strain.
"Now, Mr. Oxlong, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co are usually quite selective in who we take on as clients – prestige being everything in this business of course, you understand- but I must say my secretary was quite insistent that I should agree to a meet with you." the stockbroker opens up, still smiling widely, even as I see his eyes shooting towards the briefcase at my side.
"Good call from your secretary then, Mr. Morgan. I have found myself in possession of a quite significant sum, and thus subsequently also in need of a man I can trust to, not only safeguard said sum, but add to it as well." I say with a leisurely, charming smile.
"Well, I must say that if those are your concerns, you have come to the right partners! Our reputations is sterling, and only matched by our results. That said, as you already indicated, it takes money to make money: there is a certain… buy-in of sorts, that we require before we approve the PIV package deal that you indicated you were interested in…" the broker says with a sly grin as he trails off, his tone questioning.
"Naturally, naturally." I concede with an easy nod as I straighten, taking a hold of the briefcase.
I place it on his desk, undoing the clasps with a simple flick of my fingers before I twirl it around, Morgan's eyes nearly bugging out. The thing is bulging with cash and the broker slowly traces his hands around the fat stacks of bills as I lean back, hands in my pockets.
"I know it's not much, but I trust this little advance should suffice?" I say, my tone leading and it takes Morgan a few seconds to register I was even speaking as he tears his eyes away from the suitcase and back to me.
Now, if he was a good man, an honest man, he'd question why a kid barely into his twenties can just walk into one of the biggest stockbroker agencies with a suitcase full of hard, cold cash, which is immaculately ordered and kept inside said suitcase to the point they look as if I had snatched them right out from underneath the printing press itself.
But… well.
"I think this will be an excellent partnership, Mr. Oxlong! Rest assured, JP Morgan Chase & Co will make absolutely certain you will be well compensated for your splendid investments!" He says excitedly, quickly rising to his feet, enthusiastically extending a hand towards me.
As said, I'm dealing with a stockbroker. Morals are a poor man's commodity.
"Call me Michael." I respond with a grin equally as wide and predatory as the broker in front of me, before leaning in closer as my eyes light up with a mischievous glint.
"Though, if I may, I do have some suggestions for stocks I would wish to buy up as soon as possible…"
Fun Fact: Stephen King thought Dolores Umbridge was a great villain. When he reviewed Order of the Phoenix he called "The gently smiling Dolores Umbridge [….] the greatest make-believe villain to come along since Hannibal Lecter". High praise indeed from the King of Horror.
AN: Please forgive me if the final bit with the stockbroker comes across as a bit clunky: I don't really know what they do, how their job works, or even really what stocks are, beyond the fact that buying into Apple and stuff is a standard time-traveller big-brain move.
I mentioned in the previous chapter that I wanted to lighten the tone of the fic as a whole by introducing more lighthearted arcs and characters down the line. I ended up really grappling with how Lockhart should deal with the actions in the last chapter though, so instead I'm cutting it off here. I want to hear your ideas on how the aftermath was dealt with and if you think this is a change in the right direction. I feel like I have a bit to go yet before I can make Lockhart more interesting and engaging by giving him a more relatable motivation. Maybe that'll only come further into the story as he meets more and new people. But yeah, this chapter is almost a tester of sorts, see what meshes with you all and what doesn't so I can have a better view of how to finish up this first arc (as Lockhart indicated, he'll need a Legilimens' mind before his spell is perfected), before we dive into the adventure arcs.
I have plans for him to be a treasure hunter-bestseller author-superspy-criminal underworld broker-movie and rock star by the time that canon rolls around. The general idea is that he has several personae as he moves through both the intelligence and criminal worlds in both magical and muggle society, stealing skills and artefacts as he builds up a powerbase. I definitely want him to get hired to catch himself at some point, a la The Departed. I also tried to show the first hints of people cottoning on the existence of a supercriminal or a new sort of predator, such as one cop who noted down the irregularities in the ballistics report.
If a strange calibre caught their eye, you can bet they will certainly notice once the entire report detailing said calibre goes missing without a trace or explanation.